Dinosaurs and Darwinists
Capt. Fogg’s post about that Charlie Darwin movie’s travails leads me to offer a post of my own as an extended comment. Yes, I saw the article – the depths of ignorance on this issue are so profound as to invite comparisons to the Kantian sublime. One hears again and again from the fundamentalist crazies that eee-volushun is “only a theory.” Which statement of course proves they have no idea what the word “theory” means in a properly scientific context. They seem to think it means something like “a wild guess,” whereas by the time something sciency gets itself labelled a theory, it’s already been used to make medicines or send rocket ships to the moon. The details may be subject to revision, but in the main the theory will hold true.
What to make of the fact that despite this battle’s having been waged and won decisively by the supporters of science about a century and a half ago in Great Britain, we still see such poll numbers in our own country? Well, for one thing, they invalidate any notion of “progress” whatsoever – if in fact the notion still needed invalidating, which it really doesn’t thanks to a number of cataclysmic human events during the last century. But more interesting is that the continuing refusal to deal with the cosmic “facts of life” may stem from the inflection in uneducated minds of a struggle over one of the great human questions: how to live, or, more particularly, how to abide in this life with some purpose and at least guarded optimism. The question itself is entirely legitimate even if we reject any notions of the inner purposiveness of the cosmos, but its inflection in the minds of the ignorant is most unfortunate and has led to a decades-long pogrom against reason, science, and even sanity.
I put the matter this way because I am not sympathetic to today’s worshipers of reason and all things merely human: they reduce great questions to triviality, and miss altogether the moral eloquence and even beauty with which certain texts in Scripture address human suffering and aspirations. We have met with them before, along with our hopelessly misguided and sometimes vicious religious fanatics – the latter, I think, assisted by a fair number of tortured souls who don’t really believe in talking snakes and six-day ex nihilo creation extravaganzas but whose need to believe leads them to assert (with all the bitterness and ferocity of bad faith) the absolute and literal truth of statements they know, deep down, can’t be literally true. Comparatively few people, I suggest, are now capable of what Alfred Tennyson called the “simple faith” of their agrarian forebears, men and women who lived before the full development of modernity. Refusal to deal with the basic fact of evolution stems from an abnegation of the religious spirit as it has been articulated by intelligent people for many centuries now: was it not the devoutly Protestant John Milton who wrote, “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue” and who railed at those who would impose censorship upon the free discussion of ideas? And doesn’t the Catholic Church now profess that it’s by no means impious to accept the scientific evidence in favor of evolution?
To rely solely upon the compulsory ignorance of others as one’s best defense against anything that might threaten faith is to dishonor oneself and one’s religion. If one wants to claim that a God has imbued humanity with some measure, however limited, of the divine intelligence and integrity, the willful stupidity that would ban a science textbook or a film dealing with evolution degrades that claim beyond recognition. Augustine and Aquinas tell us we can know God best by that which he is not – and one of the things we had better hope God is not is bloody stupid.
"they reduce great questions to triviality" All things human are trivial on the scale of existence, while the Abrahamic religions share the idea that the Universe is trivial as compared with human ceremony, sexual and dietary practices and indeed all things human.
ReplyDeleteDarwin was just another step in removing us from the pedestal we put ourselves on as the purpose for all that is.
However glorious, the art, the music, the psalms in all the gorgeous glory of 17th century English, the tiny part of existence we can see and the almost unlimited vastness of dimension both visible and invisible are far more awe inspiring than the mutterings of ignorant ancients about not marrying outside the tribe or disobeying kings, prophets and slave masters.
BTW, creation by god can't be ex nihilo. That falls to the same axe as the "prime cause" fallacy.
Capt. Fogg, with regard to your description, "the mutterings of ignorant ancients about not marrying outside the tribe or disobeying kings, prophets and slave masters," this lizard offereth the following: that's not what Job is about; neither does it capture the enigmatic qualities of some other segments. Surely you don't think the description you've offered a sufficient description of the Good Book's contents?
ReplyDeleteRespecting what you say about the relative insignificance of humans and their cultural productions, yes, in the grand scheme of the universe (as Voltaire and others would remind us) suchlike must be laughably small. Science has indeed given us tantalizing glimpses -- especially in recent years! -- of just how grand this grand scale must be. We are privileged to be offered that glimpse in this "short day of frost and sun" which is ours. Still, the question is in part, "what perspective is livable?" I am suggesting that science alone is perhaps too remote from mortal individuals to be permanently satisfying or even sustainable as a perspective. That is what Wordsworth meant, I think, when in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads he referred to science as "a remote benefactor." I think poetic vision is necessary, community is necessary, and the sacred texts are at times an incitement to wonder and compassion as well. That they are subject to the interpretations of the ignorant and the wicked doesn't strip them of this potential. Verily, verily, I say unto you, the Teabaggers and Birthers ye have always with ye.
That we are capable of thinking ourselves out of the paper bag which is us and of opening our thoughts up and out to the cosmos (be it through a telescope or the poetic visions of Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, or the Gita or the Bible) is one of humanity's glories, so I think we ought to value what we are capable of creating and apprehending. Our cultural productions are not trivial to us, whatever the Alpha Centaurians may think of it. As we dinos are wont to say, "He that hath earholes, let him hear!"
Whenever I run into this confusion about the word "theory," I like to answer with a barrage of questions: "shall we stop teaching germ THEORY in medical schools? How about atomic THEORY in chemistry classes?" etc.
ReplyDeleteYour point is well-taken. The extreme views of this debate seem to fixate on Darwin as Satanic liar and atheism as the ultimate answer to all humanity's problems. Neither is true; science neither proves or disproves the question of intentions in the universe, it only examines processes.
Matt,
ReplyDeleteYes, from the scientific / materialist perspective I think the problems set in when people insist that scientific discovery means we need not bother asking the old ultimate questions anymore. Even if we grant, in a latter-day Nietzschean fashion, that such concepts as "meaning" and "purpose" are spun from human intellection and imagination rather than being inherent properties of any order of things, they don't thereby become worthless. There's no doubt, of course, that when they are handled naively, they tend to become weapons of mass destruction rather than spurs to enlightenment.
I want a theory for the opposite of evolution...
ReplyDeleteIn the beginning was Igjarjuk, Creator of all cephalopods. In fact, Igjarjuk was so Great, he became known as that being that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Since it is greater to exist in reality than in the mind alone, it follows that the Great Igjarjuk, Creator of all cephalopods, must in exist reality as well as in the mind.
ReplyDeleteHow silly of me to force such a sublime cephalopod ontology on disbelieving ears.
Captain Fogg speaks of “removing us from the pedestal we put ourselves on as the purpose for all that is.” When I think of fundamentalist Bible-thumpers, I think of them putting themselves on a pedestal, as any authoritarian oppressor would who seeks dominion over others. This is fraud, not religion.
But I don’t necessarily view religion as fraud. Although I regard myself as an atheist, I do appreciate a good mythology that captures a sense of wonder about powers in a Universe far greater than us.
There are powerful messages imbedded our mythologies worth reading. One example that comes to mind is the story of Indra in the Upanishads, about the signs and omens sent to a prideful deity. The message is simple: “Get some humility, Buster.”
In fact, most mythologies recognize this fundamental spiritual flaw that resides within the human species: The sin of pride, hubris. Even our social sciences attempt to deal with this problem; it is called “pathological narcissism.”
As a blogger who sometimes stays up at night struggling with the written word, how can one discount the allure of: “In the beginning was the word … ”
Well, I could write a book in response to all this - I'd have to in fact, but I still assert that the vaunted glories and extacies of religious feelings come from within us. For some mathematics produces much the same, for others it's LSD and who is to say one is better, more intense, more useful or more real than the other? No, Job is about something else -- a babylonian tale later Judaicized and although I've read it in many translations, God comes out as an arrogant snot who is utterly devoid of any moral value - reflecting the Babylonian origins. In fact much of it comes from other sources, other religions and is pressed into service as an apotheosis of tribal identity and an excuse for the morality of expedience.
ReplyDeleteWhy is pride a sin? Can anything be a sin if it harms no one? - I don't like the answers religion offers because again it's all derived from the risible premise that the universe is all about us and our deeds and beliefs affect the fabric of existence.
Yes, get humility, believe you're dirty, "sinful" and a nasty bag of shit and doomed to an eternity of agony. Don't dare to build the tower, don't dare to eat the fruit of knowledge: stay in your place, accept your slave master, obey the man with the beard, don't sleep with the gentiles -- and those people there? Kill them!
And oh yes, if there was a word, it couldn't be the beginning, could it? That's just another way to God is just like us and words have magic powers and all that stuff we should have left behind thousands of years ago.
ReplyDeleteet evasi ego solis ut nuntiarem tibi.
Quick comments -- better response later. Who cares whether the inspiration comes from the inside or the outside? Have you never read Blake? And what an impoverished hash you make of Job by resorting to the "context" for the book's authoring! Why interpret a text on that basis and reduce something so magnificent in stretches to utter piffle?
ReplyDeleteJob is actually one of my favorite texts, but I'm sure it's for different reasons than a believer might have. I've read it over and over again.
ReplyDeleteAm I denigrating it by not insisting that it was written all of a piece by God?
As I was trying to say, I can't do the subject justice in under a thousand pages, but what some might find magnificent in Job, I find offensive and denigrating to the better part of our nature and longing for justice. I mention it's origins for two reasons. It stems from a tradition where many of the gods hate mankind and are looking for an excuse to get rid of us intruders in their world and despite the lovely King James language, it was written by priests trying to stifle the human spirit and self respect - In my opinion, of course.
To me JOb appears like a beautiful appeal for justice to a God who has little more to say than "shut up worm, or I'll kill you."
I'm not talking about inspiration - that word, as Nietzsche would agree, contains a vorurtheil, a prejudice. I'm responding to the argument that the religious experience is so wonderful and awesome that science can't approach it and is thus wanting. Agreeing with that seems sad and seems like a disablity to me.
I feel that it isn't true and in my opinion no matter what Blake might say against the scientific experience and the awe we feel in contemplation of existence, the truth revealed by a telescope and the glory of quantum physics exceed anything to be found in ancient conjecture based on a demonstrably and fabulously false cosmology. Simply put, seeing back 13 billion years and knowing what I'm seeing and how much remains to be seen and inferred and calculated and proved exceeds the "glory" of believing for me since believing is the end and the beginning and the meaning and thus no foundation for anything further. Why should I feel guilty for finding awe in Einstein?
There were no words at the beginning of existence, no medium to transmit them, nothing for them to adhere to, no entity to speak them and no ears to hear or interpret and the beginning of life is it happened in fact is far more interesting to me for it's having occurred without magic and mystery and red clay homunculus.
Was I there when God created the "world?" No, but I could ask the same question of him. Why will he lift a finger to ruin someone's life but not to make it better? Is sending another wife recompense for murdering the first one? A god who thought me unworthy of an answer is no better than Job's God - a babylonian god and just another of Satan's gambling buddies. Perversely, Job teaches that we are the nadir of the cosmos even though it all exists just to give us a home. It's, in a way, everything I hate about the canon.
Is not religion responsible for incomparable music and architecture? Sure, but that humans are the only things that can do that and the only things that can feel emotional about them, in fact the only things that can create gods to judge us it's our story, not the product of myth and mystery.
There's nothing more I can say and the book won't be coming out any time soon.
Octo, Igjarjuk, is it? Sounds good to me.
ReplyDeleteAn extended response for Capt.Fogg's thoughtful post:
[Job is actually one of my favorite texts ….]
It seems to me inadvisable to dismiss something (mythopoetic vision) that seems to be connate with the development of humankind.
[Am I denigrating {Job} by not insisting that it was written all of a piece by God?]
I don’t hold the view that the book was written by “God.” I often invoke Blake because his dialectical understanding of religious thought was acute and not at all reducible to ordinary “belief” – he’s always building up an imaginative vision and simultaneously tearing it down, lest it become a trap. This dialectic is vital for many people who are by no means believers in talking snakes.
[As I was trying to say, I can't do the subject justice in under a thousand pages …. ]
I don’t believe it really matters except to historians why the Bible was written, nor does it matter why a text such as the Gita was written. Gandhi writes eloquently about historical interpretation, suggesting that we don’t need to anchor what we say too closely to whatever the authors may have wanted us to believe.
As for Jacobean English, I suggest that while you are yourself an excellent writer, you are underrating the power of eloquent language to transform us into something better than we were. There needs no mystical notion about divine inspiration or the Coleridgean symbol that “partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible” come from the grave of critical history to tell us this. Shelley wrote, “poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.” If we read that sentence’s latter half carefully and don’t take it as outside-to-inside inspiration theory, we will see that this formulation can be profitably applied to the reading of the world’s various scriptures.
[To me Job appears like a beautiful appeal for justice to a God who has little more to say than "shut up worm, or I'll kill you." …]
There are few words without prejudices. Science offers much along the lines you mention – it offers us a great deal that is wonderful to contemplate if we are receptive. But by many roads we may approach the same destination. I suggest only that there is a disadequation between the great knowledge and scope scientific discovery opens up to us and the limited time which we are granted to appreciate them. Other kinds of apprehension and insight may be worthwhile supplements if we are to live well. It would indeed be an error to suppose that because humanity must dwell mostly in contexts of its own making, those contexts are the ultimate measure of things.
[I feel that it isn't true and in my opinion no matter what Blake might say … ]
I don’t suppose the religious impulse need be reduced to “believing.” Why might it not rather be put in terms of ecstasy or Wordsworthian meditative “wise passiveness” in the presence of nature, etc? Reverence is the proper attitude towards such a person as Einstein.
[There were no words at the beginning of existence …]
Again, why pay so much attention to the god-figure in Job? Job is up against the feeling that human understanding and whatever lies beyond its ken are not only not compatible but that they are simply incommensurable. The text does a fine job of asking its necessarily anguished questions, only to find that in the face of such incommensurateness, silence after long speech is right.
[Is not religion responsible for incomparable music and architecture? Sure, but ….]
I agree. But it’s hardly an argument against religion, at least in the most enlightened forms. As for myth, yes, it’s our story – but if we say that too insistently, the dialectic collapses and we immolate ourselves on the altar of selfhood.
[There's nothing more I can say ….]
Nobody has ever succeeded in writing the criticism to end all criticisms on such a topic. In the main, we agree about a lot of things, but on this issue of religion’s potential, we differ sharply.
In the interests of cultural exchange and good will between species, I would like to share my heritage, but I am afraid the good Captain would sooner spear me than spare me, so I’ll graft my bricolage only under camouflage.
ReplyDeleteOcto
ReplyDelete"I’ll graft my bricolage" Not in front of the children, please.
Dino
"I agree. But it’s hardly an argument against religion, at least in the most enlightened forms."
There's another thousand page disquisition I'm not going to write, right there. I don't want to argue about where religion takes us - and where it demands we don't go and no two people will agree and what enlightenment is in that context.
I'm not arguing against religion - not this time anyway, but only my opinion that it can't legitimately lead us anywhere. Had every man from the beginning been devout and unquestioning, we'd still be living in trees and chasing jackals for carrion.
I have strong feelings about Job and what it means and they all have to do with the idea that a made-up character or not, God is not our friend, whether in his universal love aspect or in those times he hasn't the morals of a minotaur. As our creation, he generally becomes a justification rather than a leader and in any of his aspects sooner or later he leads us back to our primordial nature.
You're far more well read than I and it's too late to catch up and perhaps you see more in Blake than I do - actually I'll retract the perhaps part, but the tendency I see in Romantic poetry to wallow about in mystery and numina and conjecture doesn't annoy me as much as the insistence I see, perhaps incorrectly, that it is a window into reality rather than into an atavistic consciousness as pleasant as that might be. That's not a rejection - I love the stuff, actually.
Anyway I don't want to argue this but it just happened that Job was the door that slammed behind me when I left the building. I can only offer the fallacious excuse that I'm far from being the only one who feels God doesn't come off well in it.
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteInteresting post.... All I can add to my musings is that true enlightenment consists in accepting -- without question -- the mighty will of the Dinosaur Gods above, may they rule forever from their tranquil perch around the Celestial Watering Hole. Works for me....
Fascinating conversation, gentleman. Excellent post, Dino.
ReplyDeleteI am an historian. I am all too familiar with having to sort out the historical baggage from a text to get at its potentially universal core. The Bible is one of the most troublesome texts in existence. As a feminist I find much of it appalling. The mysogyny sometimes screams from the page.
However - throwing the baby out with the bathwater is rarely productive. The Bible is a remarkably inspirational text. I do not claim a religion as my own. Many would consider me an agnostic. bBt that is besides the point. There is much in the Bible that is insightful & inspiring for the living of one's life decently and humanely. Yes - the history of humankind is riddled with atrocities committed in the name of the Christian God - but those are humans who have chosen to narrowly interpret the bible for their own selfish ends. We liberals/atheists/agnostics must be mindful lest we do the same. We also need to rememebr that there is an Old and a New testanment. The god of the Old I can not see eye to eye with on a level that I can understand. The man who was Jesus of Nazareth - whose story and teaching are interpreted by other men in the New testament - him I can relate to. He was, by all reports, a decent enough sort of person flying in the face of a society grounded in the more brutal faith of the Old. Was he perfect? No. But he was insightful. The progression of the texts is important to remember when we start hauling out Job.
As for what constitutes "awe inspiring" in the face of scientific proof - I am remembering a time sitting atop one the highest places in this country - I could see for miles in every direction. I felt on the top of the world. I was awe struck by what nature had accomplished. in that moment I could have cared less about how mountains are really, scientifically formed. I also did not think about whether or not someone's god had been the one to create it. No. I was simply in that moment in awe of what I saw & how peaceful in spirit and mind the moment made me feel.
Is this, perhaps Dino - what you have been trying to get at?
Hello Squid,
ReplyDeleteThanks -- yes, the experience you describe is an excellent example. Seems that for you, the vexing old questions melted away in the presence of something so wonderful. It also speaks well to Fogg's point about the vistas science can open up for us since I suppose one could have the same experience out in the desert just looking up at the stars, perhaps with a fine telescope and no "noise pollution" from the city. The point of it might be that at such moments, one may feel no need to encircle everything with a concept, a term, a religious orthodoxy, or anything whatsoever. It's all well to say with Pascal, "the silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me," but that isn't the only possible response. It is the mark of a strong person (or cephalopod) not to feel crushed by the prospect of what is so much grander than oneself, one's own scale of being and temporality.
By the way, I suppose I tend to attribute something like the same power to beautiful language -- a poem by Shelley or Wordsworth or a passage in Shakespeare or the Bible, etc. It's a dangerous thought if wielded irresponsibly (one can make almost anything seem beautiful by means of fine words and carefully constructed images--one element of fascism was its aestheticization of war), but also, I think, a valuable one if treated responsibly.
And as for Jesus, yes, he would have been perfect had it not been for riding around on a dinosaur's back all the time, as our present-day Flintstonians have proven he did.... Consider the dinos on the trail, how they toil.
ReplyDelete"There is much in the Bible that is insightful & inspiring for the living of one's life decently and humanely."
ReplyDelete"No attack on Christianity is more dangerous than the infinite size and depth of the universe"
-Jerome Wolf- 1575
Much in the encyclopedia too, The Child's book of manners, the Shayt en Duad and a thousand other sources -- often far easier to separate from the godly calls to genocide, to the mutilation and murder of the innocent to justification for slavery.
It's a pastiche - a human construct and nothing in it is any better than we are or any more consistent. As it's creators, we worship our contrary, confused selves. As humans we're subject to trances and swoons and feelings of transcendence and hypnotic states signifying nothing and we're good at spreading it to others for various purposes good and not good.
"Delusion, if delusion be permitted has no certain limitation" said Doc Johnson. The contemplation of heaven leads us to do evil.
Sure religious reveries feel good, but once again the sight of the milky way, on the few occasions it's visible any more is more "inspiring" to me for knowing what it is than it would be in the Genesis account: some smears on the inside of a hard lapis dome some 200 feet up. It's meaninglessness and hostility and fathomless age in human terms is far more grand that God's little theater for passion plays.
We didn't get to that knowledge from accepting or believing or from wonderful feelings of awe over God's creation. I'm not saying feelings or states of altered awareness should be denied or ignored or ridiculed but maybe something closer to the Wittgensteinian call for silence about things words can't address?
"Consider the dinos on the trail,how they toil."
Regard the old velociraptor
each day his food he has to capture
his feathered arms
his fearsome cries
beneath the blue Gondwanan skies.
Is it safe for a mudsquiggle to come out now?
ReplyDeleteIn our pantheon, we don’t have talking snakes but we do have talking cephalopods. Should this come as a surprise to any of you?
About the Great and Almighty Igjarjuk, we don’t really know what He or She looks like so we created Igjarjuk in our own image. Should this come as a surprise to any of you?
When we tell stories, Igjarjuk is skilled in the ways of ink and camouflage … just like real cephalopods … and acts as wise and noble or as silly and vain as any real cephalopod because we can only imagine Igjarjuk in terms of real cephalopods. Should this come as a surprise to any of you? Why should we take our legends and myths literally and seriously knowing Igjarjuk is a construct of ourselves? We call this “allegory,” not scripture.
Human beings create deities in their own image. Should this come as a surprise to any of you? A tentacle-entangled aside:
Ancient Egyptians and indigenous peoples borrowed deities from other species … mighty decent of them. American Indians had a special reverence for their food and deified those creatures that sustained them, unlike later folk who held commerce and corporate logos above all else. In cephalopod mythology, we say pious words before every meal: “Come, my holy crustaceans with a side of butter. Yumm!”
In cephalopod mythology, we have a story much like Job but with slight variations. Triton is the servant and adversary of Igjarjuk who brings great misery to the analogue of your Job. In our version of the story, Igjarjuk says to Triton: “Behold my loyal subject, Octojob. Despite everything you have taken away from him, despite all suffering you have caused him, Octojob still worships me.”
Triton considers the miserable mess he made of Octojob and says to Igjarjuk: “Keep him. He’s yours.”
In our version of the story, Triton makes a jerk out of Igjarjuk … a better adaptation without the copout ending, I think.
Art, literature, music, religion, and science … these are innate to all thinking and feeling creatures. How does one experience living in an imperturbable universe without them? The rhythms of life, the succession of the seasons, high tide and low tide, breathing in and breathing out … how do we go through life without giving these at least some passing thought!
Very thoughtful comment, Octo.
ReplyDeleteWell done.