When someone suggested that we evolved a conscience for a reason, I replied…
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You’re looking at things backwards. Just because we are here does not belie a purpose. When you start the break on a game of pool, the resulting position of the balls on the table is not meaningful. Their position is simply the result of many collisions chained together. So too is our existence. You might counter this by saying, “There is no way we can be this complex and still be the result of random chance.” Well, that would also be the wrong way to look at it. The universe is such that there are infinite possibilities, infinite futures and pasts. That might sound like science fiction, but read a little about quantum physics. Our existence is indeed infinitely rare, but at the same time 100% certain.
Douglas Adams put this rather well: Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’
We exist because these are the only circumstances under which we can exist. We would never wake up to find ourselves in a universe that can’t support us and then think, “We were created for nothing? That’s nonsensical!”
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It has been tough trying to find the right words to explain existence in. I can't impart the last several years of book reading into a single blog post, but I might attempt. Modern physics establishes the following idea: Because the laws of the universe are what they are, we can extrapolate what the universe looked like at its beginning and how it came to be as it is now. That's where we come up with the big bang and the subsequent nebulae and stars that begat heavy elements that eventually turned into us. But it gets a bit more surreal when you consider the most recent findings. We know how to credibly explain the "something from nothing" problem that doubters frequently cite. The simple explanation is that universes are created all the time, but I'm not here to give a science lesson.
The goal is actually to find an elegant way of detaching our existence from the faulty premise that we somehow have a purpose or that our existence has intrinsic meaning. To belabor Douglas Adams' excellent analogy, a puddle can naturally only exist in an indentation on the ground. Thus, if you woke up as a self-aware puddle, you would have little choice but to determine that your universe was fine-tuned for your existence. As a human observer of this puddle, you would know better. Looking at the indentation on the ground, you would know that years of wear and use had warped the ground to the point where it was fit to house such a puddle. Indeed, there was no intent or purpose for the puddle, but it managed to come into existence anyways. And, it having a self-serving mentality, might surmise that it was put on this land to splash pedestrians when a car tire came speeding through.
The goal is not to be so bemused by our complexity or capability. To put it in perspective, if we were to meet another intelligent race of more capability, we would cease to be so proud of our own. I suppose the key for any honest evaluation is to step outside of the situation and look at it with different variables. Alas, this is the universe we live in. We have no commonly shareable way to experience living in any other, thus we have no way to practically dispel any myths about what makes this one so mystical. Though I am loathe to use this utterly bland turn of phrase, I think it works for this situation: it is what it is.
You are raising some interesting questions, however, you have skated around the issue you raised in your opening line. Namely, did we evolve a conscience for a reason? You seem to have a very scientific viewpoint, thus I assume you believe in evolution. If the strongest traits are the ones which are passed on, why is it that billions of people seek religion. What is the evolutionary purpose of religion? Now, you could say, people need a crutch to lean on, or desire a semblance of certainty about the afterlife. However, in a study conducted by the European Center for Social Welfare and Policy, religious people were shown to have higher life satisfaction and longer lifespan than non-religious people. If there is no purpose to being on this earth (as you say), then one could reasonably desire to be hedonistic, and simply pursue what gives one the greatest satisfaction. However, as previously stated, religious people generally have higher satisfaction than non-religious people.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, the "excellent" analogy of the puddle is really not relavent to the questions of human existence. Ask yourself this, would a puddle ever be having this conversation? Scientifically, does a puddle have the neural capacity to ponder its existence? While I admit it is a nice mind game, as an analogy it is not particularly relavant.
Anon: Evolution is not a purpose-driven process. Organisms do not develop attributes TO survive, they survive BECAUSE they developed the attributes. The attributes they develop are random, but self-refining. Then, in an evolutionary instant, the attribute that helped an organism dominate can become its worst enemy, resulting in its extinction. There is no intrinsic purpose or worth to a thumb, and eye or, if you really want to refer to it as an evolutionary trait, religion.
ReplyDeleteGeorge Bernard Shaw has a famous quote that goes like this: "The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." It doesn't matter if someone's "happier" than I am when I am not interested in following a misguided path for the sake of being happy. Now, I could go the empiricist route of doubting your statistics because it could be that non-believers suffer so much because they are literally the most despised demographic on Earth. Your argument is like saying, "Look! Gays are so depressed that they're killing themselves left and right! You should go straight." But that takes the focus off the two main rebuttals I have for you.
First, I could give a shit about statistics. I'm living a great life that I enjoy, so why should I care about averages? My life has no cosmic meaning or purpose, and I'm loving every minute of it. I have no dogma or guilt for my actions beyond the empathy I feel for others. It is a truly weightless existence.
Second, if I were to believe in god, I would not be honest with myself. You see, when you finally realize there is no deity, believing in one is completely disingenuous no matter what benefits it may have on your mentality or social life. Beyond experiencing some great enlightening (read: hallucination) there is nothing that will ever make me believe, knowing what I know. You see, the lack of belief in god is no longer a choice once you've put it all together. Once you understand that the universe is vast and uncaring and it is only our evolution-influenced pattern recognition talents and other instincts that drive us toward the belief tendency, the game is over. There are no more questions about whether god exists. He doesn't and no amount of mental incentive will make it so.
Brilliantly put, my friend.
ReplyDeleteDunno.
ReplyDeleteI maintain that since the existence of god is neither provable NOR disprovable,
to decide either way requires a leap of faith. Period.
(I know you don't want to hear that but that's a fact.)
In the universe it's all subjective. I'm not sure there even IS a 'truth'.
It's a big-ass universe. Damn near anything you can think of almost HAS to be possible, somewhere.
For my part I think we should all just forget the issue in its entirety, it's warped our thinking for centuries, and there's no possible solution to be known, anyway. So why do we all get so angry about it?
Can't we just not worry about it, and cultivate ourselves and our species, without trying to kill each other because they don't believe as you do?
I know a lot of Atheists, they tend to be every bit as unreasonable, closeminded and reactionary as any 'religious person', by and large.
NOT intended as a slight. I am aware that individuals vary. But those are the ones who are out there shouting about it like rabid evangelicals.
They hold up science as 'immutable fact' which is laughable.
Science by its nature IS change. If you'd lived a few hundred years ago, you'd have killed someone for saying the earth was not flat.
(Yes the scientists said that, they thought they had proof. They found out later they were wrong, and things changed)
I guess the upshot is that it's a dangerous philosophy to declare anything as immutable fact, religious OR scientific.
This does nothing for the human craving for absolutes, of course.
But I think we need to get over that. Nothing is absolute anyway.
Anon: It is not necessary to prove god doesn't exist. It is simply obvious to observe that the concept of god is entirely man-made. What else has the possibility of existing without ever being accounted for in any observable phenomenon? Therefore, it is not a leap of faith, rather a deduction of reason, to claim that with total certainty god does not exist. God is simply one of those silly catchy ideas that, when introduced into the conversation, is impossible to logically deny by means of its given definition. Nothing smells more man-made than that. Ok. NOW you can forget it.
ReplyDeleteAs for the rest of your response, I'm going to say that you're barking up the wrong tree. You don't really understand what science is if you look at it and go, "Well, you were wrong about the Earth being flat." That is a huge leap of misunderstanding. Quite a petty lens to see an issue through, I must say. Listen to what real scientists say about their craft instead of making that stuff up. As I've said elsewhere, 99% of science is getting it wrong, and the other 1% is finding something good enough to work with. The goal of science is not to exclude god from the equation, but it just so happens that the more we learn, the less we need god to explain. And what we learn is increasingly accurate and valid.
You'd be a fool to say that the Earth isn't round and that it revolves around the sun. Science taught us that, not god. That is absolute. I mean, in billions if years, that fact will probably change, but once again, science tells us that, not god. I really don't get at what you mean by "nothing is absolute" anyways. When you place such a statement after criticizing science, I'd like to know what exactly about science you don't think is accurate enough.