An Introduction

 It seems that something exists.

Therefore, something must have existed without being generated by something else: there must be some thing that is self-existent: which just is.

There is a whole lot of stuff that is visible to our senses, which appears to stretch out for a long way in space and time. I call this the ‘universe’ with a small ‘u’. Once upon a time, it was common to think of this as the self-existent thing. But nowadays, since Fred Hoyle is dead, I can’t think of anyone well known who would say this; it looks like the universe is finite in space, and that it had a beginning in time. It also seems finely-tuned – to have properties that if they were a very very little different we would not be here to observe it, which makes sense if it is one of a gazillion other similar things with a range of properties but not if it is the one self-existent thing which happens to be just so.

Thus, I assert that the observable universe is not the self-existent thing. 

I base this assertion on three things:

1) The finitude mentioned above

2) The ‘fine tuning’ mentioned above

3) Historical humility. As new information has come in, the ‘universe’ keeps getting bigger than we suppose; around the stars orbit worlds like ours, and there is not just one galaxy, but a whole lot of them. It does not seem credible that the limits of our knowledge are the actual limits of all that exists.

Cosmologists agree with me and embed the universe in something larger- a ‘multiverse’, or some greater reality of gebits or branes where some sort of mathematical law applies, that somehow spawned the universe. This postulated ‘universe + 1’ in turn may or may not be the end of the story; the true nature of ‘all that exists which is not self-existent’ – which I like to call the ‘Universe’ may be many more levels removed from ‘universe + 1’.

Thus, my second assertion: There is no way for us to reason our way from our position within the universe to an understanding of the Universe. 

And my third assertion: There is no way for us to reason our way from our position within the universe to an understanding of the nature of the ultimate self-existent thing.

So, the only way we could know anything about the ultimate self-existent thing would be, hypothetically, if it could communicate with us.

We cannot discount this possibility on a priori grounds because we do not, and cannot, know anything scientifically about what the self-existent thing is like.

Where we cannot assess hypotheses on the basis of their utility in predicting the results of experiments in the universe (what I call ‘primary utility’) we should judge between them on the basis of their utility in other matters (what I call ‘secondary utility’). 

We have two hypotheses before us:

(1) The self-existent thing interacts with us like the God described by Thomas Aquinas, Ibn Khaldun, and Maimonides, and has communicated to us information about His nature;

(2) The self-existent thing does not interact with us in such a manner.

Which of these two hypotheses has the greater utility? 

Cry Havoc etc., Part Two

One of the traditional strategies for getting people to assent to things that are dumb is the strategy of the False Dichotomy. It works like this:

1. Formulate a problem in terms of two ‘opposite’ answers (e.g., Faith vs Works; Capitalism vs Communism; XTC vs Adam Ant)

2. Disprove the bejesus out of one answer

3. Wait for your target to embrace the other answer warts and all, hoping they are not imaginative enough to realise there are other options.

For example:

Darth Sophus: “This hairy creature must be an Ewok, or a Wookiee.  While fully grown, it only reaches to mid-thigh, which is very short for a Wookiee. When beaten in games, it does not tear your arms off, which Wookiees have been known to do.  ... [nine pages of argument omitted] ... therefore, this creature must be an Ewok.”

Hairy creature: “Woof! Woof!”

It is usually less obvious than this.

So, I had been writing about Prof Lennox's book 'God's Undertaker' and had gotten up to the anthropic principle. I don't know how likely my two hand-waving explanations-away of the anthropic principle are to be borne out by events. Probably not very. My prejudice against being in a peculiarly unusual universe might just be an irrational prejudice.

But this doesn't mean that the only two possibilities for the origin of the universe are a multiverse or creation by the God of the Judaeo-Christo-Islamic tradition. There are lots of other possibilities, as the orcs are discussing about 70 seconds into this short film.

As I said in Part One, in Chapter 6 Prof Lennox loses me. He makes a very typical Creationist distinction between microevolution and macroevolution and implies, without explicitly saying so, that 'macroevolution' cannot occur by natural means. (Losing me at this point by ignoring all the suggestions that have been made in terms of natural alternatives to simple natural selection on random variation) To me, this supernatural intervention is inconsistent with the behaviour of the Creator(s) postulated in Lennox's discussion of the anthropic principle: a Creator or Creators that would make a universe so exquisitely poised on the values of a few constants to allow life to one day appear would surely allow its progress to unfold according to very unlikely, but natural, events. It does not seem in character for Him/Them to come in with a miracle every time a new genus of beetle is needed. This degree of micromanagement just seems psychologically implausible. And no matter how much Prof Lennox claims it isn't, this is the 'God of the Gaps' pure and simple.

The psychological implausibility of supernatural intervention struck me even more so in Chapter 7, which is about the origin of Life. A universe dependent on one chance in 10⁴⁰ for the conditions to allow life to exist at all would surely be a universe where the specific conditions for the beginning of life were also incredibly unlikely - happening perhaps just once in the universe, in one pond, or deep in the interior of one comet. But by natural means, not supernatural.

I am confident that the origin of life is a soluble problem. I think its solution is far away, and that it will not be found by working backwards from the incredible complexity of life 'as we know it' - which is no more complex biochemically than the very earliest life we have ever found traces of on our planet.  I don't discount the possibility that life 'as we know it' was intelligently designed - but by creatures inside the universe.

Rather than working backwards, a solution will be found by working forward from physical chemistry. Simultaneously we should be broadening our knowledge of what life is and what raw materials are available for it to get started. Here are some things we should be finding out:

What sort of life exists elsewhere in our solar system? 
If the answer is none, we know we need to keep looking (working forward) for a mechanism by which life could have gotten started on Earth. If we find things that are based different chemistry in different places, we need to look for intelligent designers. If we find things based on broadly similar chemistry (my hunch) we need to look for the cradle of life further away.

What is the maximum lifetime of molecular clouds?
These are the places stars get started. If matter can hang around in them for reasonably long times, in reasonably large lumps, accumulating molecular complexity, and ideally get transferred from one molecular cloud to another, we have a reservoir of time and space for life to get started in.

The sorts of molecules we can observe spectroscopically from molecular clouds in general are not likely to reflect the molecular complexity available, since space is a pretty destructive environment, so we should be investigating the remnants of molecular clouds closer to home by drilling into the middle of comets: What sort of molecules exist in the interior of 'dirty snowballs', relatively safe from ionising radiation? Of course, if there is life there already, the distribution of molecules we find won't help...


 As far as the later chapters go:

I sort of glazed over in the probability chapter. I think this is what most undergraduate students do when people are talking about probability so I don't feel too bad about it. But I have read these kind of 'making a 747 by throwing bits of scrap metal together' arguments before. They are superficially appealing but are just another demonstration of how daunting the task is when you are looking backwards from the very complicated thing. You build up to complexity by walling off bits of the universe so there is a system and a surroundings. Compartmentalisation is the key. More later once I hear what other people think about the second half of the book. P'raps.

The idea of 'information being conserved' doesn't hold in biology. One airborne seed lands on Anak Krakatau. It grows into a plant, and in six months releases ten thousand airborne seeds, all of which are genetically different. Information increases. Sex = Lack of conservation of information.

And, I agree completely with Lennox on Hume and miracles: Hume's 'disproof' is just a classic example of begging the question.

October's Factoid

From wikipedia (PBUI):

"By 1838, open hostility was peaking again. Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issued Missouri Executive Order 44, which encouraged Missourians to expel Mormons by all means possible or exterminate them if they would not leave. ...  In 1976 Missouri officially revoked the extermination order."

I think it would have said in the article if in say, 1975, some enterprising Missourian had beaten a Mormon extermination rap by citing Executive Order 44. So well done to the government of 1970s Missouri for seeing this potential loophole and closing it before it caused trouble!

***

I wanted to link to this as part of my Seven Year Anniversary linkfest. I don't really have anything to add, I just felt like linking to it again. The two pillars of optimism discussed in that link are visited again here.

***

The other day I had a look at my blogger profile to see how many bloggers had registered the same interests. I think you will agree that the blogosphere's priorities are sadly out of whack.

       Politics  :  119 000

       History  :  104 000

       Literature  :  94 000

       Science  :  78 200

       Philosophy  :  74 000

       Religion  :  58 100

       Ethics  :  13 100

       Buffy the Vampire Slayer  :  3 500

       Turanga Leela  :  3

       Photoshopped pictures of LOTRO Hobbits in Skimpy Lingerie  :  1

***

Finally, here is a picture of that shirt that Marco wouldn't make for me:

I don't believe I have ever owned anything made in Haiti. Or seen anything owned by someone else made in Haiti. It fills me with a wild enthusiastic glee to think that Haiti might actually now be a place where people make things to sell me.

Spero: All the Other Bits

Well, not quite all the other bits. I have gotten cold feet and left something out.

"I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s” - William Blake

Or should that be:

"He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through Pragmatism, and thence through Logical Positivism, and out at last into the complete void." – From That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis. (Is that Wither? Or Frost? I can’t find the passage in my copy.)

I think I had reached as far as ‘What to do next?’ on my originally foreshadowed plan. This is of course *the* big question of Life the Universe and Everything.

And I’ve said that before, so I’m repeating myself.

I shall therefore sum up my Spero document, with a few extra things that have occurred to me along the way.

I. “I have entrusted the writing of these words to a common man;
they will never be what I want to say but only their shadow.” – Jorge Luis Borges

Science is the faith that the universe is rational and comprehensible.

Why should we hold this irrational faith rather than an irrational faith in magic, Scientology, astrology, or fundamentalist Christianity? Ultimately, we have to point at the fruits of this faith. What has holding this faith enabled us to do? What has it produced? How does this compare with the fruits of other faiths? Here the scientific worldview easily stomps over all the others as far as its ability to materially improve the well-being of real human beings and other creatures in a measurable way.

‘Think of the worm Bilharzia, which is one of the plagues of Egypt. It bores its way into the urinary bladder or the rectum, and there often sets up a peculiarly unpleasant form of cancer. For thousands of years men and women had prayed to Osiris, to Jesus, and to Allah, for deliverance from this agony. Bilharzia carried on. In 1917 Christopherson discovered that this disease, provided cancer had not developed, can invariably be cured with antimony tartrate.’ – J. B. S. Haldane

Religion is the faith that the universe is good.

We have a duty to be optimistic. We should not believe that the universe is, in its essence, just a mass of suffering and futility. We should hold an irrational faith that the criminal horrors of the universe can be harmonised into a system in which the universe is in essence a good thing. Why should we hold this irrational faith? Again, the only real excuse is that it is justified by its fruits. How much of lasting value has been created by people who held the faith that the universe was basically bad? That nothing was worth doing? I assert, not very much.



II. ‘The more the universe seems comprehensible the more it seems pointless.’ – Steven Weinberg

If this were true, would it be so bad? Wouldn’t it be much worse if the universe had a point, and it was a point that we didn’t think much of? A point that sucked. I can’t think of anything that would crush our spirits more.

My discussion of absolute morality in terms of ‘upness’ might have suggested that there is ultimately just one outcome that is ‘most good’, one ‘point’ for the universe. But this is an accident arising from my use of an insufficiently good metaphor. Similarly, my analogy of the history of life as a role-playing game with God as the GM might have suggested, to those more familiar with campaigns in the style of ‘DM of the Rings’ than ‘Darth and Droids’, that God is hustling us along towards one ideal universe. But this is not really what I believe. Someone (probably Chesterton) has observed that all tyrants are boringly the same, while the Saints are gloriously different: and the more saintly, the more different. There are an infinite number of ‘best’ universes. Which one we end up in depends on what we do. In metagame theodicy, as its pretentious name suggests, the actions of the players in playing the game not only create the universe, but determine the point of the game.

This suggests three new definitions of Good:

Good¹ is the ability of an entity to play the game. The more freedom an entity has, the greater capacity it has to act and influence its environment, the better.

Good² is the aggregate ability of all entities in the universe to play the game. We should not trample on Good² to increase Good¹. Maybe we need to strive towards a Loftingesque universe where everything is a player, where everything is sentient, and somehow come up with an ethics that will work in this universe.

Good³ is whatever contributes to the point which the players and God eventually come up with.

Maybe we are late in the game, and the universe does have a point. But I think we are early, and it doesn’t. But maybe one day, it will. Glory be to God, Lord of the Worlds!

Spero: Question Eight, Extra Bonus Bit

This is that observation of Mark Twain’s from The Innocents Abroad which I was going to get on to:

I state as my simple deduction from the things I have seen and the things I have
heard, that the Holy Personages rank thus in Rome:
First- “The Mother of God” – otherwise the Virgin Mary.
Second- The Deity.
Third- Peter.
Fourth- Some twelve or fifteen canonized popes and martyrs.
Fifth- Jesus Christ the Saviour- (but always as an infant in arms)

My thesis is that this ranking is entirely proper. This ranking is a useful and appropriate order to list the Holy Personages. This is how things ought to be, for any theology which defines ‘Jesus Christ the Saviour’ as ‘God from God, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father.’

Let’s say I wanted to take the train from Mombasa to Kampala. Ultimately, and trivially, this is only possible because somebody built a railway line from Mombasa to Kampala. This was a tremendously expensive engineering project. It was technically very impressive. I understand many of the workers were eaten by lions. It was an uneconomic move in the imperialist Great Game, where Britain needed to control Egypt to guard the sea-route to India, and needed to control the sources of the Nile so no one else could use them to put pressure on Egypt, and needed some decent way to get to the sources of the Nile in less than a long time. But do I need to know any of this stuff? No. I just need to know where to buy my ticket, and have enough cash and the appropriate stamps in my passport. It would be a petty and bizarre bureaucracy that forced me to pass a test on the history of the railway before letting me ride on it.

In the same way: let’s say we grant that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ was a vitally important and necessary part of God reaching out to man that has transformed the relation between us and made it possible for us to reach God. Does this mean we have to know the name of Jesus? Or pay any attention to him at all? I think, no. No, in direct proportion to how worthy God is actually worthy of our worship. If He is outside of time and space, if He is omnibenevolent and omniscient with respect to the universe, He will make it possible for us to reach out to Him wherever and whoever we are. God’s reaching out to us is a fait accompli: what matters now is our reaching out to God.

Now, if you accept an orthodox Christology, you cannot possibly use the life of Jesus Christ as a model for your own response to God. Sure, we can listen to what he said, and we can throw ourselves on his mercy, but imitate him? All of our discussion here so far about the nature of God, all of C. S. Lewis’ metaphors about oysters and Mark Twain’s metaphors about microbes, all the careful refinements of the definition of the Incarnation in which any common-sense simplification we try to make invariably dumps us into heresy- and I endorse all of those refinements, I see why they are there, I agree with their purpose- all of these things raise an insurmountable barrier between our understanding of Jesus the man and our understanding of ourselves. I don’t think there is any way to think ourselves through that barrier.

The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus may be the ultimate myth and symbol and case study of God reaching out to man, but the people we ought to remember most, the ones that ought to appear to rank highly in any ranking of ‘Holy Personages’, should be those who have responded heroically in reaching out to God. These are people we can be expected to imitate, whose lives will have lessons for us.

The first and greatest exemplar of man reaching out to God in the Christian story is obviously the maid Mary, saying ‘thy will be done’ and casting her whole life on the mercy of a divine messenger only she could see. There were no other Christians for her to imitate. There was no Christ she could see. It was a pure leap of faith. So, why not put her first?

The proper study of man is man, so Mary ought to be first. But it is entirely proper that after this first and greatest example of man reaching out to God, we should fix our attention next on the God revealed to us, who is not only Spinoza’s creator and sustainer of the universe, but a person, described to us as a Father.

Then, we come to other important exemplars of man reaching out to God:

The rash disciple who was the first to recognise Jesus as the Christ, and was crucified upside down.

Those twelve or fifteen Popes and Martyrs who also spent their lives in reaching out to God.


And then, only then, Jesus Christ the Saviour, at an age when his humanity is not overwhelmed and made incomprehensible by his divinity.

Here's that article by celebrity rabbi Shmuley Boteach that I couldn't find before. The important bit is this bit:

Yishayahu Leibowitz once said that the quintessential symbol of Christianity
is God dying on a cross for the sake of man, thereby making humans the center of
the faith. But the essential symbol of Judaism is Abraham being prepared to sacrifice his son for God, thereby establishing God at the epicenter of human endeavor to which all action must be directed.

Man must be prepared to give up his life for God, not the reverse.

Spero: Question Eight

There is a Baha’i metaphor of ‘Progressive Revelation’ as a sort of relay race with fire.
The lamp of revelation is passed from one runner to another, as one revealed religion succeeds another in its proper time. So Isa was a true prophet for his time, but passed the lamp on to Muhammad, and likewise Muhammad was a true prophet for his time, but it came to an end when he in turn passed the lamp of revelation on to Baha’ullah, bearer of the proper revelation for his time (which is ours).

Needless to say, when I first encountered this metaphor I recoiled from it strongly.
It is somewhat disingenuous to claim to cleave root and branch to the essential unity of all religions, but have this picture of one ineluctably and properly giving way to the next. Any Jew-slaughtering Crusader in the Rhineland, up to his knees in gore back in 1096, would surely agree. ‘Aye, the revelation of Moses was good enough then, but times have moved on, eh?’ (Hack, slash, pitiful cry for mercy, stomp, splat)

I think most any observer of history would agree that the vast majority of the achievements of Christianity, for good and ill, and the most complete and self-consistent expositions of Christian thought., were after the life of Muhammad. Most observers of history would probably agree with me that the greatest achievements of Judaism, and the most complete and self-consistent expositions of Jewish thought, were after the life of Christ. It did not seem credible that these religions would persist and develop and achieve things, if the light of revelation had ‘moved on’. There’s that bit of Acts I quote all the time: ‘If their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men, you will only find yourselves fighting against God.’

My counter-metaphor was of plants in a garden. Actually, I think my first metaphor was of a glove, but that did not turn out so well. No religion owns the light. It is not passed from one to another. They are all down here, striving toward the light, which is up there. Each revealed religion is not meant to stay the same. Each revealed religion is planted like a seed, and is meant to grow and develop. Each religion is nourished by and grows towards the same sun; each religion is composed of many parts, most of which are useful and necessary, some of which may be diseased or superfluous. They are, all of them, clearly still a long way from the sun. It will be valid to say that some of them are, on average, closer to the source of light; it will be valid to say that parts of each one are closer or further away from the source of light. It will be probable that bits of different plants will actually be closer to one another than they are to different parts of the same plant. These are all bits of the metaphor that are meant to be there.

Does that sound dreadfully relativist and wishy-washy? Maybe it is, a bit. But implicit in it is the idea that there is an objective scale by which we can say one religion is on average better than another, even if we don't have access to that objective scale. And that some bits of each religion are objectively functional and good, and others are dysfunctional and bad.

Spero: Question Seven

If the universe was created by an omniscient God, it was created for some reason.
And as we are part of that universe, we were also created for some reason. Are we here to be something? To do something? If so, what?

Maybe, because of the collaborative live-role-playing aspects of how we were created, we are too flawed ever to be or to do what it is we were created for. Maybe it will be our descendants- be they genetically human, giant robots, uplifted gila monsters, or virtual intelligences living in carpets of intelligent polysaccharides- who will be or do this thing.

Whatever it is, being Good is a precondition. Being reasonable is another precondition, or we will never be able to Do anything.

One thing I have often thought of is that maybe our role is to start to untangle the flaws of creation. We should be able to make a natural world where each thing can be fully itself, can seek and participate in truth and beauty, where carnivory and the other appalling horrors of the ‘natural’ world are removed. We can start with humanity, like Lord Ivywood prophesies in The Flying Inn:

‘If we come at last to live on light, as men said of the chameleon, if some
cosmic magic closed to us now, as radium was but recently closed, allows us to
transmute the very metals into flesh without breaking into the bloody house of
life, we shall know these things when we achieve them. It is enough for us now
if we have reached a spiritual station, in which at least the living head we lop
has not eyes to reproach us; and the herbs we gather cannot cry against our
cruelty like the mandrake.’

Then, we can move on to the rest. I have argued before that the individual is more important than the group, so if no individual tigers are harmed, and their genetic material is preserved as part of a thousand new varieties of Neo-tiger, I can see no downside to making them into autotrophs. This sort of endeavour- to remake the natural world as a place of more justice and mercy- would I think be a major goal of many ideologies in a real Greg Egan or Charles Stross future society. Of course it is a goal of incredible hubris, requiring megayears for its realization even in a tiny corner of the universe. And if the point of the universe does not lie inside it, but in the Universe, and we are all here- microbes, curlews, humans, and sentient galaxies- to be made into fit instruments for eternity, then maybe it is a waste of time. Possibly.

But then? Once we have reconstructed the living world, what is the point?
A problem with the popular virtues of our present civilization is that they are essentially negative. ‘Peace’- what does it mean, beyond ‘absence of violence’? ‘Justice’ means ‘equitable distribution of misery’; ‘mercy’ means ‘protection from the bad consequences of one’s actions’. In the Earthly Paradise, none of those virtues will have any meaning. We need some motivating virtues for life in the Earthly Paradise. If not, what can we do but go backwards?

As Paul tells us in Alpha Ralpha Boulevard:

We were drunk with happiness in those early years. Everyone was, especially the
young people. These were the first years of the Rediscovery of Man, when the Instrumentality dug deep in the treasury, reconstructing the old cultures, the old languages, and even the old troubles. The nightmare of perfection had taken our forefathers to the edge of suicide. ...
I myself was the first man to put a postage stamp on a letter, after fourteen thousand years. I took Virginia to see the first piano recital. We watched at the eye-machine when cholera was released in Tasmania, and we saw the Tasmanians dancing in the streets, now that they did not have to be protected anymore. Everywhere, things became exciting. Everywhere, men and women worked with a wild will to build a more imperfect world.

Of course, we will be very different creatures by that time. We should have a much clearer idea of God and a much clearer idea of the universe. Maybe the way forward will be clear. But maybe, as so often happens, our capabilities will have outstripped our moral sense. We will need strong medicine for that time. I suggest the following:

We should never be satisfied with the ideal we can imagine;
We should strive for the ideal we cannot yet imagine.

Spero: Question Six

Q.6. Can this universe be reconciled with the hypothesis of a benevolent God?

The expression ‘law of nature’ is as old as Pindar in Greek, as Lucretius in Latin. But until modern times, it was used, as ‘law’ ought to be, of something that can be broken but ought not to be. – C. S. Peirce

Because of the disjointed way I have approached this Spero document, this is a question I have already answered.

The universe, animate and inanimate, certainly seems to contain evil.

My position is that this seeming evil is not just something to do with our perception of the universe, but something that is really there.

I reject the pantheist position that, seen from the appropriate angle, all seeming evil will turn out to really be good.

And I reject the Holmes Rolston III position that good and evil are only concepts applicable to our human world.

Thus, as the universe contains evil, it would seem that the universe could not have been created by an omnibenevolent God.

But…

We observe that the evil in human society is easily explained by the freedom of humans to accept or reject the good. The easiest way to explain the evil in the rest of the universe is that it also arises from the freedom of free-willed entities to accept or reject the good. My hope is that the rules of the universe we live in were not created, by fiat, by God, but are at least in part the product of the choices of beings much more fundamental than us. The universe is a game, a game in which making up the rules is part of the game.

‘Original sin’ is the fact that we can do nothing that is perfectly good, because of how the game has panned up until now. The cumulative errors of All Decisions Antecedent to Mankind have limited our freedom of action so that we can do nothing that is not flawed. That does not mean that there is not always a best action, just that the best action is frequently very bad.

Holmes Rolston III

I find that the bit in my original Spero document where I mention this fellow, he is only tenuously connected with the question I claim to be answering, so I will talk about him here instead.

He did me the valuable service, in 1996 or 1997, of stating clearly an untenable philosophy for me to react against. This was valuable because, in reacting against this untenable philosophy, I had for the first time to state clearly what I believed in opposition to it. This means that I need to apologise for inevitably misrepresenting his true position. I am not claiming the opinions I am going to attribute to him are a correct picture of what he really believed 1996/1997, or what he believes now. They are only what I perceived his opinions to be when he came to talk to us.

HR3 seemed to be saying that the universe may be split into two domains: the domain of culture, and the domain of nature. Morality, as we understand it, is restricted to the domain of culture. It is here that we should apply ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you, or ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’, or whatever. Where the domain of nature is concerned, we have one duty and one duty only: to leave it alone. Our ‘moral’ responsibility is to ensure that the parasitic wasps keep gnawing away at the entrails of their hosts, that a bison calf who falls through thin ice is left to drown, that beached whales stay beached, that wildfires started by natural means are allowed to burn unchecked, no matter what animal suffering results.

I asked HR3 a question about what determines whether a being is under culture, or under nature, and his answer was- I think- in terms of technology. We have the power to alter our environment, and this places us in the realm of culture: animals do not, and live under nature.

This seemed to me most unsatisfactory. What about most of the people who have ever lived, whose abilities to alter their environment were crude compared to ours? What about the representatives of those people today, leading ‘primitive’ lives in the wilds of South America or Africa? Do they belong to nature, or to culture? It seemed to me that, in the absence of anything like a ‘soul’ to identify who belonged to nature and who to culture, these unfortunate brothers and sisters of ours were condemned to nature.

I decided a while afterwards that the ‘technology’ answer would not be sufficient for the disciples of HR3, centuries from now, and that they would seek out and find some empirical touchstone for belonging to culture, some quantifiable ‘soul’ that they would all turn out to have. I decide it would be more interesting if not everyone we now consider human had this experimentally detectable soul, and ran a game where the player characters were un-souled low-technology dwellers on an Earth which had been lovingly restored as a nature preserve. The followers of HR3, who I called the ‘Zephron’, lived in high-tech orbital colonies and left the surface strictly alone according to their interpretation of HR3’s principles.

Against the Zephron, and in reaction against my (mis)understanding of HR3’s position, I therefore state:
The moral laws that are to be obeyed by humans are a manifestation of the same moral laws that are to be obeyed by bison, by electrons, and by sentient galaxies. We might not recognize them as such, but they are all rules that emerge from the same moral equation, the same ethical Theory of Everything.

Another thing HR3 seemed to be saying was that we had did not just have duties toward individuals; we had duties toward species; we had duties towards ecosystems; we had duties towards the Earth. These sound like trivial, innocuous statements. Yet, because- perhaps- I was in the mood to be contrary after the first bit of HR3’s talk, I reacted against these statements too. What happens, in practice, when ‘duties to an ecosystem’ conflict with ‘duties to the individual’? It is usually the individual that suffers. It is the individual who is poisoned, who is shot, who is uprooted, who is intentionally infected with disease. We all accept this as perfectly normal and praiseworthy. Yet it is wrong.

Only an individual can suffer. Only an individual can know joy. Only an individual can, in whatever small way, make choices that bring it nearer to or farther from perfection. It is wrong to make individuals suffer in order to protect an ecosystem. Our primary responsibility towards an ecosystem, and towards the Earth, is towards them as collections of individuals. We have real secondary responsibilities to preserve diversity, and to preserve beauty, but it is the duties towards individuals that are paramount. If we have an opportunity to replace an ecosystem where individual lives are nasty, brutish, and short with an ecosystem that is more pleasant for the individuals comprising it, we have a moral duty to do so. If we can only save the last five Neeble beasts by exterminating a thousand Meeble beasts, we have a moral duty not to do so.

Against the Zephron, and in agreement with Margaret Thatcher, I therefore state: ‘There is no such thing as a species.’

Spero: Question 5

[The notes on this point in my ‘Spero’ document are not the most coherent. I am not entirely sure what my pre-blogging self intended to say from the fragmentary notes they made, so I may be going off on a complete tangent here and misrepresenting their opinions.]

What is the universe like?

When we compare our concept of God and our concept of the universe, it would be good if they did not contradict one another. If they seem to do so, we must either adjust our concept of God, or adjust our concept of the universe, or adjust our concept of how they are linked one to another. I am using my definition of ‘universe’ which was something like ‘everything that exists which is potentially knowable to us’ as opposed to ‘Universe’ which was simply ‘everything that exists’.

Thus my implacable opposition to what is called Creationism owes a great deal, as I have said before, to the assertion that to create the universe ex nihilo as we see it- with all its pointless suffering and such a lot of excellent indirect evidence that it was not created ex nihilo like it is now- is absolutely unworthy of any God worth worshipping.

What do we see, when we look at the universe?

We see that it is physically rather hostile to creatures like us. It seems to be governed primarily by impersonal laws that make no distinctions between us: it does not matter whether we are nice or nasty, it does not matter what our name is or where we went to school, we will all obey G = m₁m₂/r² if we should trip and fall.

On the other hand, the universe is psychically congenial. These implacable laws seems to be within our capacity to figure out. This is pretty amazing.

The universe is rather big.

The universe is also prodigal. It is inexplicably full of vast numbers of very similar things. If it was created ex nihilo, it was created by someone with a child’s joy in repeating very similar things over and over and over again. Look at all of those stars! Look at all of those insects! Look at all of those organic compounds!

The universe does not have one story at one scale, but a bewildering hierarchy of stories at different scales. Things that are very very small are interesting, and obey certain rules. These rules acting on these small things give rise to systems that are larger, and can be largely understood in terms of different rules which do not explicitly refer to the set of rules operating on the smaller scale. And these systems give rise to higher order systems, etc. The universe has all these layers of nested hierarchies emerging out of each other. But, there is no indication that one level of the hierarchy is more important than any other: if it was created ex nihilo, it was created by someone who lavished equal attention on all levels of the hierarchy.

The laws we have discovered suggest that there is no need to postulate that there is anything called ‘mind’ separate from ‘matter’ in the universe. But matter is incredibly interesting and behaves in bizarre ways. We can explain all of the hoped-for phenomena that we used to postulate a ‘soul’ for without there being anything in the universe besides matter. This is the point my pre-blogging self spent most of their time nattering about in the fragmentary notes.

I suggest that the universe also seems to be very pretty, at any scale we happen to look at.


Thus, the universe appears to be:

So darn mean.
Yet largely explicable.
Inexplicably large.
Inordinately fond of beetles.
In agreement with the statement ‘size doesn’t matter’.
Full of matter.
Purty.

I am not sure what my pre-blogging self was aiming at- but I think my aim now is that all of these features of the universe should sit comfortably within a self-consistent worldview incorporating God as defined previously. There are certainly other features of the universe that will impress you, that ought to be fit into this self-consistent worldview as well...

Spero: Question 4, take 2

Q: What do we mean by God?



A: At some level of the Universe more fundamental than our own, there exists an entity which is omniscient and omnibenevolent with regard to our universe. That is, it knows everything there is to know about our universe and wills what is good, without exception, for everything in our universe. This entity is God.

Omniscience, and therefore omnibenevolence, will be limited by the amount of information coming from yet more fundamental levels of the Universe, unless it is also true that God is the fundamental self-existent uncreated thing upon which everything else is dependent.

God can interact with us as a person, although what God is really like is as unknowable to us. This person is not a face put on by God, but is a valid ‘cross section’ of God, like the Sphere in Flatland being able to interact with A. Square as a circle.

This is the point that winstoninabox said he wanted to hear more about- in those happy days of long ago when the world was young- the intersection between God and Man.

I hold two ideas which sit somewhat uncomfortably together and make it hard for me to get hold of how this works.

The first idea is that we obtain all our information about the Universe through sense impressions, so that God must interact with us through the universe. In every instance of God interacting with us there will be material causes in the universe that make material changes in our brains.

The second idea is that the universe as we see it has the properties it has because of interactions between God and free-willed entities more fundamental than we are. God would not by fiat alter the properties that have arisen because of the free decisions of these entities, because that would make a mockery of their free will.

Thus, God acts only through the rules of the universe He has constructed, and can only interact with us- transient emergent phenomena emerging from the interactions between more fundamental beings- when the freely willed actions of those more fundamental beings allow. So I am stuck saying on the one hand that we cannot tell what God is like by observing how the universe is, but on the other hand that we do not have any other means of obtaining information.

I think the only way out is not to restrict ourselves to the means of knowledge that are ‘at our disposal’, but to consider also the means of knowledge that are not at our disposal: our observations of how the universe ‘ought to be’ are just as much part of the universe, even if they are not verifiable, as our observations of how the universe ‘is’. Hence the importance of the unwieldy term ‘physico-psychical’ in the quote below:

“Just as long acquaintance with a man of great character may greatly influence one’s whole manner of conduct ... so if contemplation and study of the physico-psychical universe can imbue a man with principles of conduct analogous to the influence of a great man’s works or conversation, then that analogue of a mind- for it is impossible to say that any human attribute is literally applicable- is what he means by God.” (C. S. Peirce, ‘The Concept of God’)

I first read this a while ago and did not agree with it, but after thrashing around unsuccessfully looking for a better explanation I have read it again more carefully and think that I do. Though this contemplation of the universe will always be looking ‘through a glass darkly’, we should still see features in the universe which point us towards God. I think these are:

* The morality, C. S. Lewis’s ‘Tao’, which we seem to share.

* Our sense of the numinous which William James made so much of.

* The fact that science actually works, which ought to keep us all in a state of continuous total amazement.

Beyond this, I would suggest that God communicates with us through apparently chance combinations of events. God can hold the whole universe in His mind the way we can hold an equilateral triangle, and see that if these uncountable trillions of fundamental particles here, and here, and here can be persuaded to take various actions {N₁, N₂ ... N_lots}, it will present a particular set of circumstances to a particular transient being such as you or me. Since God is continually active in the universe in this way, maybe it would be true to say that all our experiences are experiences of God, if we chose to interpret them in this way. If these experiences make us feel like we ought to behave as though God exists, then we ought to.

How can we have an idea of God which is consistent with the reality of God? Putting things in terms of Peirce’s four ways of making our ideas clear:

* We could just stick to whatever ideas we happen to have, come what may.
* We could try to conform with the ideas of the people around us.
* We could define some a priori rules.
* We could make a study of our own and other people’s experiences.

I think in this particular case authority and experiment are uniquely conflated as ways of knowing. If we try to abstract the things that are common to human experience of God, it is hard to get anything much except the ‘Tao’. Therefore I am going to propose only one a priori rule, that we should respect this largely common moral teaching of humanity, and seek to hold an image of God that conforms with it.

In the absence of evidence outside our own experience of God, we have a duty to hope for the Best God Possible. We know (or think we know, or hope) that there is such a thing as Good. The Best Possible God will therefore be perfectly Good, and that is the God we should seek.

I hold that this omnibenevolence is the critical characteristic of God. (Omniscience is only necessary because in order to act towards the optimal outcome in a system, you need perfect knowledge about that system. Omnipotence is incapable of definition.)

An Omnibenevolent God will desire us to do any small thing that is good, but will not be satisfied until we are perfect.

“What father is not pleased with the first tottering attempt of his little one to walk? What father would be satisfied with anything but the manly step of the full-grown son?” (George MacDonald)

So if anyone tells us either that God will reject our first tentative moves towards good, or will ultimately be content for us to remain as something less than perfectly good, we should ignore what they say.

I worked with a Mormon once who was quite scandalized by the idea of deathbed conversions.

‘You have these Mafia people who spend their whole lives doing horrible things, then on their deathbed they repent, and that’s okay, they go to Heaven? Where’s the justice in that?’

This opinion is to be rejected because it is in conflict with omnibenevolence.

If the authority of very many Saints and Prophets tells us something is wrong, while our conscience can see nothing wrong with it, then the omnibenevolence of God suggests that we ought to swallow our pride and accept that ‘the white we see is black’, because progress in goodness can only mean becoming more good.

If on the other hand we voluntarily wish to reject something that our Saints and Prophets have historically had no problem with- e.g., owning slaves, or eating dead animals- we may possibly be right: Ignatius Loyola never said that we had to accept that ‘the black we see is white’.

If there is anything in our inherited idea of God that suggests He is not omnibenevolent- such as, for example, the idea that non-believers will be subjected to eternal torture;
or the idea that He just happened to create a world full of pointless animal suffering-
then we must reject these ideas and try to interpret our observations of the universe, or the probable reality behind what authority has told us, in a way which does not call God’s omnibenevolence into question. We must cut away from our idea of God anything that we would consider unworthy behaviour in a human. How much more would such behaviour be unworthy of an omnibenevolent God?

Following the principle of omnibenevolence is one way that reason can give us a clearer picture of God. Ultimately, experience of God is the only way to know God. Here, reason can also help us to form a clearer picture of God by considering the experience of other people, since as individuals we are such a tiny sample of humanity.

If our idea of God is in conflict with our personal experience of God, either our idea of God is flawed or we have misinterpreted our experience of God. Authority- the cumulative experience of God and the ideas about God developed by those who have gone before us- can help us to judge whether we have interpreted our experience of God correctly. Finding out what other humans think about God, and their experience of God, will always be valuable. Do we behave in a similar way because of our experience of God as other people who have had experience of God? Is there something obvious we have missed? If we maintain a respect for Authority, and are very very reluctant to contradict any of the Prophets, we will be most unlikely to end up like Thomas Müntzer or Jim Jones.

Spero: Question 4, the bare bones

The bit below is what I have in my old not-so-very-analytical Spero document. I will expand the points into sentences, and paragraphs, but this is the plan of what I mean to say:

point 4 : God - what do we mean by God?

1. Reason
In the absence of evidence outside our own experience of God, we have a duty to hope for the Best God Possible
* Omnibenevolent - only thing that is required
* Omniscient - required for true omnibenevolence * Personal - a thing cannot be benevolent - “2D slice through 3D Superperson”
We must rigourously cut away from our idea of God anything that is unworthy of a human, since how much more would it be unworthy in God? reductio ad malum

2. Faith
Our ideas of God must not conflict with our personal experience of God. If they do, either our hypotheses or our experience are lacking. The cup and the ocean. Authority is of use in that we can see -
i) where our experience of God overlaps with others
ii) more exact/challenging ways to express the God we have experienced

Spero: Question 3

What is Good?

Every definition of good that I can think of at the moment is circular. The imperfection of the universe points towards ways that it could be more perfect. Ways that the beings in it could know more truth and create more beauty, could operate with fewer restrictions and become more truly what they are. That direction is, generally, the direction toward 'good'.

There are two possible interpretations of what is “good” in the universe. Good may be related to:
(i) The potential for each living being to reach their fullest capacity to be what they are, in this world.
(ii) The fitting of each being into a “thing fit for eternity” like the pots of the poem Rabbi-ben-Ezra.

For both of these cases, many things remain the same: Hence, the prohibitions against killing, against taking what is not ours, against activities that disfigure the soul, are required in both. Food, shelter, education, clean water and clean air, true freedom of thought and expression; these all work towards them both. There are a few practical differences between the two definitions of good; merely removing a source of temptation will work towards (i), by minimising the hazards that must be avoided in a finite time, but will not help towards (ii). We do not really know which ‘good’ is more important. But we should imagine the best good we can, and work towards that. If we cannot imagine what is good, how can we ever achieve it?

Axiom : Optimism is the first duty of Mankind

As I said before, the importance of God is that God is good. It is not important that God is powerful, or that God has done great things for us, or will do great things for us, or that God created the universe. Worshipping God for any of those reasons is idolatry.

Spero: Question 2

I recommend the definition of belief that appears in the forward to “Essays in the Philosophy of Science by Charles S. Peirce” (viii, Vincent Tomas)

A belief is a habit, i.e., a readiness or disposition to respond in certain kind of ways on certain kinds of occasions.

It follows that a so-called belief that has no practical consequence for the believer’s behaviour can be nothing more than the readiness or disposition to respond “yes” when asked “do you believe in belief X?” I feel that a great quantity of the things that are argued about are of this kind. Their significance to the believer lies in the fact that they have come bundled together with other beliefs that do make a practical difference to the believer’s behaviour, and have been accepted as necessary corollaries on the recommendation of authority.
Rather than ‘believe’, we ought to say either :

“The application of reason to the evidence available to me suggests that such-a-thing may be true true”, or

“I hope such-a-thing is true”.

I ‘believe’ in the ideas contained in this document in that I hope that they are true and I attempt to behave in the way I would behave if I had empirical evidence that these ideas were true.

Spero: Question 1 Part 2

I actually don’t have a part two. The document I am battering into form here for you goes back to before my ideas had been refined in the blogging crucible, and is not as complete or consistent an explanation of the Universe as I remembered. This is one of the lacunae:

I know what kind of experiments to do to figure out natural laws, but I don’t know what kind of ‘experiments’ to do to figure out moral laws or understand God. I hope we do have some capacity, some sense, to do these things, but I don’t really have a theory. I think we can make a good start on moral law with what Lewis called the ‘Tao’. We can work out the ramifications of this as well as we can in specific cases, and in most circumstances get a pretty good idea of what the right thing to do is. Of course the ‘Tao’ has obviously developed with the evolutionary restrictions on humanity setting the boundary conditions, so we won’t have a really good idea of what the moral ‘differential equations’ are until we find some other sentient species to compare ‘Tao’s with.

Spero: Question 1 Part 1

1. How can we find out about the universe?

‘Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.’
- Max Planck

I agree with this statement. I happen to like poetry, so I do not feel that it is a pejorative one. I think that there are some things that can only be said with poetry. As the ideas in this work are beyond experimental verification, they too are poetry.

I think with Peirce that science is the natural and original mode of human thinking, with which we all begin. I do not have any specialist knowledge of the very young; I have only been very young once myself, and have been the parent of someone who is very young. I have kept fish, and listened to anecdotes about fish. This leads me to believe that the capacity to put together sense impressions in order to obtain a model of the environment is present in the so-called “lower” animals, as well as of human beings well before birth. I have clear memories of myself back to the age of two (still very old for the purposes of this discussion) and can never remember my reasoning processes being substantially different from the ones I now employ; the main feature of my intellectual life has been the waxing and waning of the hormonal irruptions that have periodically derailed these reasoning processes. When you are very young, you make observations of your environment. You manufacture a model of your environment based on these observations, and make predictions of the effect your actions will have on your environment. To the extent that you are capable, you act on your predictions and observe the effects. If they are not what you expected, you modify your model. Once you have made the inference that the large creatures around you are trying to communicate information which accords - as far as you can tell - tolerably well with the model you have already determined, you will increasingly abandon the method you have been employing thus far - known as science - for the method of authority. (vide Peirce)

Axiom: The universe we see is really there.

Axiom: There is such a thing as truth.

The assertion that the universe is really there, and that there is one true model for it, does not imply that we can know what the universe is really like. We can make hypotheses, and test them, and get an answer which appears to be a good approximation to reality, but there is no short cut which will give us certainty.

I suggest that the only two ways of fitting behaviour to reality are science and natural selection. Natural selection is slow, and unpleasant for the individuals involved. Science is much better. It seems to me highly probable that the more our personal theory of everything is consistent with the rules that apply in the external world, the better we are equipped for survival. It follows that the platitude ‘everyone is entitled to their opinion’ is nonsense. People are entitled to their opinions to the extent that they are based on a knowledge of the external world, are constructed in a logical and self-consistent manner, and do not contradict any experimentally verified datum. If certain axioms are assumed in the formulation of their opinions, they should as far as possible take pains to state them at the outset. I am aware that in saying this I set myself up to be hoist by my own petard! I urge you to seek out where I might fall short of my own criteria, and I will endeavour to bear them constantly in mind. I hope this will help me to maintain a proper spirit of humility in this undertaking.

Given that science is the only means of knowledge at our disposal, how can we know anything about God? Moving from one 19th century American Pragmatist (Peirce) to another (James) I would argue that only personal experience of God can give us any knowledge about Him. Apprehension of this personal experience as a real interaction with a person is Faith. I cannot disprove any other person’s Faith, nor can I test my own. There is no point beating anyone about the head for not having this, or to expect them to “believe” in God if they don’t.

Spero: Introduction

[As winstoninabox seems quite keen, here is the introduction to that document I mentioned a little while ago. ;)]

The question I ask myself is a simple one: what to do next? What should I do?

Whatever the universe is really like - whether there is a God or not, whether we are truly finite beings or can in some way be unbounded in time- I will not need to stop asking myself that question.

This document is an attempt to answer it. It is a statement of my own personal religion. It is called ‘spero’, ‘I hope’ rather than ‘credo’, ‘I believe’, since it is not intended to be any kind of dogmatic statement about how the world is. It makes no experimentally verifiable claims, and it demands that no experimentally verified datum be denied. The axiom that my hope is based on is that such a thing as good exists, in the same way that some numbers are prime and some are not, no matter what the culture or species of the mathematician. I acknowledge that many of my fellow human beings manage to exist accepting ethics as a purely human, cultural construct, and accept that to them my view will seem ludicrous and incomprehensible. I can only plead, firstly, that I am personally incapable of accepting this view of ethics - partly from a lifelong contempt of mere “rules made up by men”. “Because it is the law” is for me the best and finest reason to disobey it, whatever it is. Secondly, I feel that relative morality, while capable of maintaining a reasonable standard of behaviour in a stable, well-ordered society, has proven to be of no use in crisis situations. Relative morality is incapable of eliciting saintliness; and saintliness is vital for the survival of the human spirit.

This is intended, above all, to be a positive document, designed to build up a clear and useful picture of my own hopes. I hope that it will never be an instrument for the destruction of anyone else’s faith, and that it will never degenerate into a mere assault on the ideas of someone else. Polemics are easy, but in the end are deadly poison to the arguments and spirit of the polemicist.

These are the questions I will consider:

1. How can we find out about the universe?
2. Does the word ‘believe’ have a meaning?
3. What is Good?
4. What do I mean by God?
5. What is the universe like?
6. Can this universe be reconciled with the hypothesis of a benevolent God?
7. What is the role of intelligent life in the universe?
8. What is the significance of the ‘revealed religions’?
10. What should we do next?

Prelude to a Prose Poem

Over in the wild and wooly world of Marco’s Blog, winstoninabox said he was not getting a clear idea of what Marco and I meant by God from our comments on his comments on Marco’s comments on Richard Dawkins’ comments on what other people have said about God, i.e.:.

In all of these comments I'm yet to get any idea of what God is.

In my own ramblings about Dawkins I offered an alternative definition of God to the one he proposed, namely:

1. At some level of the Universe more fundamental than our own, there exists an entity which is omniscient and omnibenevolent with regard to our universe.

This is the first essential feature of the God I believe in.

I have been thinking that ‘omnibenevolent’ and ‘omniscient’ might not mean what I want them to mean unless it is also true that:

0. This entity is the fundamental self-existent uncreated thing upon which everything else is dependent.

The next essential feature about the God I believe in is that, although what God is really like is as unknowable to us as what we are really like is unknowable to, say, an electron, in the same way that we can interact with an electron by setting up a particular distribution of electric charge,

2. God can interact with us as a person.

I thought I had a document around here that was a summary of what I thought about God, the universe, and everything , but the latest revision (c.2000 A.D.) appears to have an introduction, a table of contents, a hodgepodge of dot points, and lots of notes to myself to look things up. It strikes me that this might be as good a time as any to get it in order, change things I feel like changing, and set it loose upon an unsuspecting world.

Metagame Theodicy

At the still point of destruction
At the centre of the fury
All the angels all the devils
All around us can’t you see
-Sting

There is a very old, very robust argument reconciling the goodness of God with the existence of evil, which states that evil arises from the fact that moral agents have free will, and are free to make a choice to accept or reject what is good.
This was a full and complete argument in the days when everyone believed there were moral agents other than humans that took an active role in the universe. But if you want to make your religion more progressive and up-to-date, and cast the upper half of the hierarchy of created beings in the dustbin, your theodicy immediately runs into problems.

The first one is the ichneumon wasp, laying its eggs in living caterpillars so they hatch into little wasplings and slowly devour the caterpillars bit by bit to make them good and religious, as Mark Twain pointed out. And all those other nasty immoral things in the ‘all things bright and beautiful’created world.

The solution to this problem is easy. Accept evolution, and give all living things some free will. They don’t need a lot, just a tiny bit. Allow ‘bad’ decisions to accumulate over billions of years. The natural world becomes locked-in to a morally sub-optimal state. These bad decisions of our ancestors also lock us in to a morally sub-optimal state, which maps exactly onto ‘original sin’ as understood in the 13th century.

The second one is harder, and was demonstrated forcibly last week. The rules by which the universe works are so damn mean. Frequently, because of the way the universe is put together, a perfectly decent person, city, or (presumably) planet will be destroyed by an ‘Act of God’. Which term is a slap in the face for all those glib theodicists out there.

There is only one solution I can think of to this problem, a solution which is obviously derived from wide reading in the works of Stanislaw Lem. The laws of our universe were not made by God alone, but are a collaborative work between God and created entities. I like to think of a big free-form role-playing game with God as the GM and 10¹⁸⁰ free-willed players. The rules that arise in this metagame, and are adhered to of their own free-will by these entities, eventually give rise to emergent phenomena like atoms and stars and us. The created world was not corrupted by a fallen Melkor, but was created flawed to begin with, because it was made by committee. This is deep anthropomorphism, I know, but I am not supposing that these entities have any attributes that we would recognise as human, except for the ability to reject good or embrace it.
This solution has the feature (good in philosophy, bad in science) of being unfalsifiable. At least until leptonic confabulators come along...