Genesis by Observership

"Does the Universe Exist if We're Not Looking?" asks this provocative article in the June 2002 issue of the science magazine Discover. Quantum physicist emeritus John Archibald Wheeler, coiner of the term "black hole," thinks perhaps not. Experiments both real and hypothetical suggest that the act of observing — or at least of recording — the outcome of any one of the quantum processes which underlie all of cosmic reality is what actually fixes it and determines its nature. Which single outcome actually occurs, of many equiprobable outcome possibilities, depends on how the quantum event is observed.

This is true even when the ambiguous quantum event in question happened in the past — even though the observation of the event is taking place in the present! Observations now determine events then.

Imagine a photon, a unit of light energy, emitted by a far off quasar. It has two possible paths between there and here on Planet Earth, each path bent towards us by the gravity of a conveniently positioned galaxy. Which of the two paths the photon actually takes, or took, depends on which way we have pointed our observational telescope!

If we point the telescope toward Path #1, the photon proves to have taken Path #1. But if we point the telescope toward Path #2, the photon proves to have taken Path #2. Yet the photon in question had to "choose" which path to take billions of years ago, before there was even life on Earth.

It gets screwier. The phenomena I just reported are consistent with there having been two photons, not one ... but when the light from the distant quasar is so weak that only one photon arrives here at a time, the same thing happens. "The measurements made now, says Wheeler, determine the [single] photon's past."

And if we don't pin the photon's path down telescopically — if we don't observe it at all — guess what? The photon acts not like a particle at all, but like a wave. Or, rather, like a pair of waves, each of which took one of the two different paths, arrived here concurrently, and set up an interference pattern consistent with ordinary multiple-wave behavior.

This thought experment can't actually be done ... but it can be transformed into a slightly different kind of experiment, also done with photons. That transformed experiment was indeed performed at the University of Maryland in 1984. The Maryland experiment confirmed that an act of observation (or complete lack thereof) in the present determines — selects among — equiprobable quantum events that happened in the past.

This mind-bending phenomenon is what Wheeler calls "genesis by observership." In a "participatory universe" like ours, there are "many possible quantum histories." "Clouds of uncertainty" turn into actualities only after the fact. "The mystery of creation may lie not in the distant past but in the living present."

Per Wheeler himself, a cloud of uncertainty can (probably) be turned into an actuality by virtue of its associated quantum event being somehow recorded by an inanimate mechanism. It doesn't have to be observed by a conscious observer. But Stanford University physicist Andrei Linde goes Wheeler one further and claims that conscious observers are indeed necessary. They cannot be replaced by inanimate objects.

"The universe and the observer exist as a pair," Linde says. "You can say that the universe is there only when there is an observer who can say, Yes, I see the universe there. These small words — it looks like it was here — for practical purposes it may not matter much, but for me as a human being, I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers. We are together, the universe and us. The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness. A recording device cannot play the role of an observer, because who will read what is written on this recording device? In order for us to see that something happens, and say to one another that something happens, you need to have a universe, you need to have a recording device, and you need to have us. It's not enough for the information to be stored somewhere, completely inaccessible to anybody. It's necessary for somebody to look at it. You need an observer who looks at the universe. In the absence of observers, our universe is dead."

If Linde is right, then Wheeler's own conjecture that "we are part of a universe that is a work in progress; we are tiny patches of the universe looking at itself — and building itself" is true in spades.

I find this interesting because of the parallels between it and my Pearlescence Principle, which says that whatever pearl of wisdom we have utmost faith in shines its "pearlescence" forth from within us, as it were, and colors the external world as we experience it, making it conform to whatever it was we believed it capable of and anticipated it to be. We make the type of world we inhabit, based on our inmost belief.

It's as if our unshakable verities of faith choose which "telescope" we observe the external cosmos through, thereby crystallizing a firm actuality — a Verum Factum — out of what would otherwise be a cloud of uncertainty.

Accommodation vs. Separatism

Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism has been a recurring preoccupation of this blogger in the last few weeks. I have finally finished reading it, and I must say that at the end of the day I seem to have stumbled over a fundamental disagreement I have with Jacoby.

The book is about "freethought" in American history: atheism, agnosticism, secularism, humanism, rationalism, naturalism, and other words of that ilk. The opposed mindset is that of conservative, orthodox, fundamentalist, evangelical religion — not at all the same, mind you, to "liberal" or "mainstream" religion.

Freethinkers is both a history and a polemic. The closer the historical record gets to the present day, the more the book turns into pure polemic. The entire last chapter, "Reason Embattled," is little more than opinionated editorializing. I must say I found that disappointing.

As a polemical argument, the book's contention is more or less this: the Framers of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights were super-wise to have left all mention of God out of their secular creation, insisting on no religious tests for public office and no "establishment" of religion whatever. Then, despite some noteworthy exceptions, American freethinkers pretty much had the best of things for the first 100 or 150 years of our country's existence. Yet beginning at about the time of the Scopes "monkey" trial in 1925 — if not a couple of decades earlier — fundamentalists began staging a huge comeback. The 1973 leagalization of abortion by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade energized religious conservatives even more. Today, freethinkers (though they are no longer called that) are afraid to open their mouths, and it looks as if the secular intent of the Framers has all but bitten the dust.

Notice the close parallel of Jacoby's contention to arguments often heard from religious conservatives. They make an almost mirror-image claim: our country's Founding Fathers were generally pious Christians who wanted America to be a Christian nation. Over the past century or so, however, secular humanists and atheists have stolen the country away from God's rule. Nowadays religion has been all but excluded from the "public square," and the country and the world are headed for hell in a handbasket.

Can it be a coincidence that each argument is identical to the other, except that all the terms have been reversed?

Meanwhile, despite whichever of the two putative declines you care to harp on, America has continued to grow in terms of prosperity, strength, liberty, and democracy. We now have more people of more categories — race, gender, religion, age, sexual preference, ideology, etc. — living the good life than ever before.

What's wrong with this picture?

The better off we get, the more certain many of us become that some deep-seated negative trend is going to end it all.

Why can't we just relax and enjoy the ride?

Jacoby notes throughout the book that there are, among freethinkers, two schools of thought about that vital secularist desideratum, the separation of church and state. On is full-blown separatism, which insists on a maximally high "wall" separating the two. The other is accommodationism, which is content to let the wall be breached under certain circumstances.

Jacoby agitates for high-wall church-state separatism. For example, when in the aftermath of Sept. 11 President Bush denied "the existence of any connection between [those events] and 'real' Islam" (p. 355), she interpreted it as a reflex of the "religious correctness" which she claims has permeated our politics. I interpreted it, on the other hand, as a gesture of tolerance for all religions that do not turn into excuses for terror and tyranny — a profoundly American idea which I'm sure Jacoby would agree the Founders wished to instill.

In other words, I think Jacoby is paranoid in her unwillingness to accommodate fundamentalists, an attitude which so clearly mirrors fundamentalists' own unwillingness to accommodate freethought. This freethinker says, "A plague o' both their houses!" America needs its accommodationists and reconcilers! That, Rodney King (remember him?), is how we all get along.

Abortion and Personhood

Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism has a section that makes as cogent an argument as I have ever heard in favor of legal abortion.

To my mind, the argument hinges on the question of what is a "person"?

In writing the majority decision in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that made abortion legal in 1973, Justice Harry Blackmun, says Jacoby

... went on to state unequivocally that 'the word "person," as used in the the Fourteenth Amendment [to the U.S. Constitution], does not include the unborn. (p. 345)

The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees "the equal protection of the laws" to "any person." No "person" may have "life, liberty, or property" taken from him or her "without due process of law."

So is an embryo/fetus a person? If it is, its life cannot legally be taken from it by an intentional abortion.

But if it is not a person, then state anti-abortion laws violate the mother's "privacy" in making her own reproductive decisions.

(Though "privacy" is not a word that expressly appears in the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court has a history of interpreting the Due Process clause that does appear there as a "privacy" guarantee. For example, the implicit "privacy" guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment was cited by the Court in striking down state laws against interracial marriage.)

So the question of the "personhood" of a fetus or embryo is paramount to the abortion debate. At least while a fetus cannot survive outside its mother's body, I would say (as would Jacoby — see pp. 344-5) that it is not a person.

And that is exactly what Justice Blackmun found: persons, at least in a legal or constitutional sense, do not include the unborn.

In a previous post, The Pearlescence Principle, I indicated that "personhood" is absolutely central to my (evolving) worldview. It is the human "person" who is capable of making his or her own reality, bridging the divide between pure, unfiltered objectivity and ordinary, unreliable subjectivity. I tried to indicate in that post, and also in another, Verum Factum, what Giambattista Vico, a Neapolitan philosopher, seems to have discovered some three centuries ago: the idea that we make our own truth or reality — for that is what verum factum means.

As a person, each of us is capable of making what he or she deeply believes in, or takes to be an axiom of faith, absolutely real, for ourselves and perhaps for others as well. This is true of Christians and other religious believers, and it is true of freethinkers like Jacoby also. "God-fearing" Christians make God real in their lives. And I have no doubt that Jacoby's naturalistic belief system, just as if it were a religious one, feeds back into her very experience of the world, coloring it, molding it, making it conform to that worldview per se. Atheism, secularism, and rationalism work for her, just as religious belief works for others.

We each have certain "pearls" of faith, belief, and wisdom buried deep within our "souls." Once activated, they cast a "pearlescence" or "opalescence" originating from within out upon the world, changing that world at least as we personally experience it. In Jacoby's case, the "pearls" of her insight are different ones that in the case of, say, an evangelical Christian. But the Pearlescence Principle works just the same. Jacoby, like everyone else, uses the light of her "inner pearlescence" to personalize her private world.

That we can do this amazing, pearlescent thing at all has to do with our being self-aware creatures, I think. Personhood and self-awareness go hand in hand. They may even be the same thing.

A fetus has yet to develop self-awareness. I say this because it is standard psychological opinion, I believe, to maintain that even a newborn baby (much less a fetus in the womb) is not yet self-aware. Only when, after birth, it learns that it is separate from its mother, and also from the world at large, does an awareness of its personal selfhood dawn upon it. Only then is it a person.

Yes, a fetus feels pain. So do my beloved pet cats, Xander (a.k.a. Mr. Pooh) and Willow (Ms. Mouse) — but they are not self-aware (or so say most experts on animal psychology; my kittycats may wish to disagree). I believe that a fetus can be no more self-aware than my Xander or Willow.

Accordingly, believing as I do in the Pearlescence Principle, and believing that it doesn't yet apply to an unborn fetus, I would have a hard time insisting that a fetus is a "person" entitled to constitutional protections.

And so I thank Susan Jacoby for laying out in a mere page or two what the crucial questions are concerning abortion's continued legality: personhood, privacy ... and moral relativism. Yes, moral relativism, which Jacoby says is not at all the bête noire cultural conservatives take it to be.

Some things are moral absolutes, she says — the proscription on murder, for example, which is the unlawful taking of a person's life.

But morality applies to other things in a relative way. What is or is not moral depends on its context ... and who better to determine the contextual morality of a contemplated abortion than the pregnant woman herself?

So, I would say, abortion must remain legal ... and if Roe happens to be struck down by a future Supreme Court, as now appears likely, then state legislatures ought to refrain from passing blanket proscriptions on it in the aftermath of the reversal.

Verum Factum

Giambattista Vico (1688-1744)

Giovanni Battista (or Giambattista) Vico, according to this Wikipedia article, was a Neapolitan philosopher, historian, and jurist who lived in the early days of the European Enlightenment. In 1725 he wrote in the book New Science of his major idea: that truth is an act. So history, in that it is made by us, is understandable to us. We truly know only that which we make or do.

Although I am frankly somewhat over my head when it comes to interpreting the nuances of such a philosophy, still it seems to pattern with what I posted before, in The Pearlescence Principle. There I tried to suggest that "we somehow manage to make our own reality." We all have certain "pearls" of incipient belief and faith within us, but only when we begin act them out do they actually become real for us. Then and only then do we find that they cast their "pearlescence" upon our supposedly objective outer world.

Strangely enough, "that pearlescence, that opalescence, actually becomes a part of the reality we survey." Our worldview or "belief per se feeds — somehow — back into our experience of the world, coloring it, molding it, making it conform to that worldview itself."

How odd. Our faith, suitably turned into action, makes itself true.

Words with Power

Literary critic Northrop Frye says something about this in his study of the Bible, Words with Power (p. 82):

The discoverer of the the principle that all verbal structures descend from mythological origins was Vico, and Vico's axiom was verum factum: what is true for us is what we have made. ... What is true for us is a creation in which we have participated, whether we have been in on the making of it or on the responding to it. We are accustomed to think, rather helplessly, of whatever presents itself to us objectively as reality. But if we wake up in the morning in a bedroom, everything we see around us that is real, in contrast to our dreams, is a human creation, and whatever human beings have made human beings can remake. I take it that this is something of what [the poet] Wallace Stevens means by his "supreme fiction," the reality which is real because it is a created fiction, and recognized to be such.

We create our world, in other words; if not literally, then simply by means of how we respond to "objective" reality.

Put another way, our response is itself a world-creative act, a personal participation in the very act of creation which in our more simpleminded moments, if we are religious, we attribute only to God. In another passage keyed to Vico's verum factum axiom (p. 135), Frye says the Incarnation of God in the man Jesus of Nazareth "presents God and man as indissolubly locked together in a common enterprise." That enterprise concerns "the reality of God," which at the end of the Bible

... is manifested in a new creation in which man is a participant [by virtue of his] being redeemed, or separated from the predatory and destructive elements acquired from his origin in nature.

The advice Jesus gives to turn the other cheek in Matthew 5:39 impresses me as a good example of what this means: "But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also."

I interpret "resist not evil" from a Tai Chi standpoint. This ancient "moving meditation" is actually a martial art. When two masters do Tai Chi together, it becomes a sort of dance, but the inner logic of this dance is that each is performing movements that will ward off or redirect the force of the other's "attack." The "blows" hurt neither party; they are merely channeled elsewhere.

So neither "combatant" achieves superiority over the other.

How does this relate to Jesus's pronouncement? A blow on the right cheek, assuming the striker is right-handed, entails striking with the back of the hand. In Jesus's day, that would have been not just a physical assault but also a demeaning, belittling gesture, since an equal would have been struck with the palm of the hand. Therefore, "turn to him the other also" — the left cheek, that is — is to, in effect, say, "I insist that you not demean or belittle me as your inferior. I'm not going to hurt you in retaliation, but I'm going to insist on being taken as your equal."

Again, neither "combatant" achieves superiority over the other.

The one being assaulted or struck (the "strikee") is, in the Bible story, (re)creating his world, his truth, his reality. He does this in such a way as to "claim his power" — without stooping to the abuse of power manifested by his assailant.

This is a specific case in which "the reality of God" can be "manifested in a new creation in which man is a participant [by virtue of his] being redeemed, or separated from the predatory and destructive elements acquired from his origin in nature."

The strikee is liberated from the worldview of the striker. Instead, his own "pearlescence" shines forth and molds his very reality "in God's image." Verum factum, indeed.

How Can We Believe in Both God and Darwin?

It would be hard to think of a question that, at a deep level, more troubles our age than that of how — or even whether — we can believe in both God and the theory of biological evolution, principally by means of "blind" natural selection, proposed by Charles Darwin.

The question has confronted us ever since Darwin published The Origin of Species almost 150 years ago. But, today, how it is answered — "conservatively" or not — helps stoke the "culutre wars" that so sorely divide America.

Firefly: The Complete Series

To sneak up on one possible answer to the question, consider a scene from a recent television series. Firefly was a short-lived show which, though quite good in this blogger’s humble opinion, got canceled partway through its first season. It was a quirky “space western” set nearly five centuries in the future. Those who are interested can buy the entire truncated series on DVD.

Imagine an oddball band of humans, smugglers running stolen cattle and the like across the vastness of the 25th-century universe. Their home is Serenity, a Firefly-class spaceship. Our heroes, when they’re not taking on booty, generally get in the hair of the tyrannical Alliance which runs the cosmos’s affairs 500 years hence. The Alliance is not only repressive of human liberty, it’s also stupid and cruel in the way that British colonials were, in film, depicted as stupid and cruel. That’s precisely why it’s OK for our heroes to be lawbreakers … though they prefer to call themselves “independents.”

Two of our unlikely band of independents are River, a girl in her late teens who has escaped from an Alliance torture prison. She’s now post-traumatic and schizoid. Yet her condition has given her preternatural insight as well, to add to her stratospheric I.Q.

Second, there’s the priestly Shepherd Book, a man of faith who acts as the conscience of Serenity. He is the only crew member old enough to have gray hair and great wisdom.

In the episode called “Jaynestown,” Book is left on Serenity in charge of River while the rest of the crew are off taking care of business elsewhere. In one scene, Book comes upon River editing his Bible: revising passages with a marking pen and ripping pages out. She says it’s full of “contradictions, false logistics — doesn’t make sense.” She intends to revise Holy Writ to eliminate the impossibilities.

From there the scene progresses:

Book: No, no. Y-You can’t.

River (ignoring him): So we’ll integrate non-progressional evolution theory with God’s creation of Eden … Eleven inherent meta-phoric parallels already there. (She mumbles something about prime numbers, then looks up at Book.) Noah’s ark is a problem.

Book (incredulous): Really?

River: We’ll have to call it “early quantum state phenomenon.” … Only way to fit 5,000 species of mammal on the same boat.

Book (angry, snatching Bible): Give me that. River, you don’t … fix the Bible.

River (as if Book were a simpleton): It’s broken. It doesn’t make sense.

Book (recovering his aplomb): It’s not about … making sense. It’s about believing in something. And letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It’s about faith. (Gaining confidence in his own words now.) You don’t fix faith, River. It fixes you.

The Bible does not have to pan out scientifically, in other words, and if it does not pan out, it does not need to be fixed. Holy Writ is fine as it is, a symbol system about a faith which can “fix” us. And we are all in some way or ways in desperate need of fixing.

This scene suggests how we can continue to believe in the God of the Bible and in what River calls “non-progressional evolution theory,” by which she presumably means a biohistory in which the driving force, natural selection, has no idea what “making progress” is. If the result of that evolutionary process looks like “progress” to us – because it has led to us – it wasn’t because evolution’s driving force “knew what it was doing.” Natural selection has only one “goal”: to weed out the least fit varieties in favor of the most fit.

That doesn’t mean there’s no God, or that the Bible is bunk. It just means we have to take God and the Bible for what they are: receptacles in which we may place our faith, if we need to be “fixed.”

More on Freethinkers

Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism impresses me more and more, the further I get into it. It is testimony to the fact that the "culture wars" of today have deep roots.

Today we see religious conservatives — fundamentalists, evangelicals, traditionalist Christians, the super-orthodox, whatever you want to call them — battling liberals, some of whom are religious liberals, and some of whom are religionless atheists, agnostics, and so on.

When we look back at the founding of the United States of America, Jacoby shows, we see the same basic thing. Only the labels have changed ... especially the ones applied to those on the left. While Jacoby uses similar terms to those we use today for the religious right of 1776 and 1789, or the first decade of the 1800s — words like "evangelical," "orthodox," "conservative," etc. — early Americans on the left were referred to as "freethinkers" (by themselves) and "infidels" (by their enemies).

Then as now, and in every period in between, some of these so-called "infidels" were actually quite religious. They were not religious, though, on the same terms as those on the religious right.

For example, during the decades of the 19th century leading up to the Civil War, religious lefties were solidly abolitionist. They hated slavery as much as most of the atheists, agnostics, deists, and other non-religious exercisers of freethought in their day. But, even outside the Old South, the much larger religious right found justification for slavery in passages they read in the Bible and did not oppose the ownership of humans as chattel in America.

The same right/left split occurred in the early days of feminism. During that same 19th century, the thrust of the anti-patriarchal movement was primarly to secure the vote for women. But the fight for women's suffrage saw agnostics like Susan B. Anthony break (to a degree) with fellow agnostics like Elizabeth Cady Stanton to join forces tactically with the likes of the religiously conservative Women's Christian Temperance Union. That alliance would one day bear fruit in female enfranchisement, via a Constitutional amendment (a good thing), and in Prohibition, also via amending the Constitution (a historical mistake).

Even though there were such occasional tactical bridges built between religious conservatives à la the WCTU and freethinkers like Anthony, for the most part the two sides were ever at war ... with, according to Jacoby, liberal Protestants and non-orthodox Jews most often aligned with agnostics, atheists, and deists against the worldview of stricter, more traditional Christians and orthodox Jews. (There were few liberal Catholics, she says, until the 20th century.)

Jacoby claims Abraham Lincoln for the freethinking side, even if he was able to fudge the distinction in his soaring rhetoric, perhaps out of political expediency, perhaps because he was such a doubter that he was unable to commit himself to any particular religious view.

And she rhapsodizes over out-and-out freethinkers like Thomas Paine, the Revolutionary pamphleteer, and Robert Ingersoll, the "Great Agnostic," who was a mover and shaker in late-19th-century, Gilded-Age America, but who has largely been forgotten. Why? Because, Jacoby says, his ideological enemies got to work after he died and pretty much expunged his memory from history books.

Emma Goldman on the cover of one of her books

Also in Jacoby's Pre-1900 Freethought Hall of Fame are leading abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison; feminists Lucretia Mott, Ernestine Rose, and Emma Goldman; all who supported Charles Darwin's theory of evolution when it was put forth in and after 1859; and such literary luminaries as Walt Whitman, whose collection Leaves of Grass was the first book "banned in Boston" because it contained poems frankly celebrating sex as well as the full equality of women.

Walt Whitman

Whitman's "To a Common Prostitute" was a particular sore spot. In it, Whitman (who was actually homosexual) calls himself "liberal and lusty as nature" and tells his hypothetical inamorata, "Not till the sun excludes you, do I exclude you."

It was upon learning of Whitman as the focus of freethinkers' oppostion to government censorship in the late 19th century that I got the point: Jacoby's book is not just a good one, it is (as one of the back-cover blurbs proclaims) a "necessary" one. It seems to me essential. "Not till the sun excludes you, do I exclude you" sounds like a mantra for my own freethinking religious liberalism, echoing the episode in which Jesus wouldn't let the religious conservatives of his day of his day stone a harlot to death.

So I can't wait to see how the constant thread of battle between fundamentalists (a term which wasn't even invented until 1910) and freethinkers (a term which was becoming an anachronism by then) is stretched forward into the 100 years or so leading up to now.

* * *

It occurred to me, after writing the above, that there may be a way to explain the rightward swing of American politics over the last 25 years in terms of freethinkers.

The "neoconservatism" we know today got its intellectual start about 50 years back with thinkers like Irving Kristol; Norman Podhoretz; the former's wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb; and the latter's wife, Midge Decter. They had at one time been communistic in their beliefs — specifically, Trotskyist. Though all were Jewish, I believe I am correct in saying they were nonobservant, secular Jews. But then, in the phrase coined by Kristol, they were "mugged by reality." Their ultra-left illusions could not stand up to the light of 1950s and '60s events. It was then that they switched to a new brand of conservatism that had many things in common with religious (and nonreligious) paleoconservatism, but that nonetheless remained predominantly secular.

It seems they also had much in common with, per Jacoby (p. 230), "the minority of freethinkers" of the early 20th century who "were social conservatives strongly influenced by Spencerian social Darwinism. Their antireligious views were coupled with a strong element of contempt for the poor and uneducated."

Social Darwinism was an application by Herbert Spencer of Darwinian "survival of the fittest" to, not nature, but society. In this view, the "unfit" deserved to be left to their fate because to coddle them with government programs would weaken the society as a whole.

It seems to me that the neoconservative tax cuts of the George W. Bush administration, in which the wealthy have gotten the biggest breaks, can trace their ideological lineage back to socially conservative, anti-Progressive freethinkers of a century ago. Then these freethinkers were in the minority among secularists. Today, at least when they form judicious electoral coalitions with members of the religious right, they seem to be running things.

In other words, the neoconservative movement was started by people who, in their former communist stance, had been oriented to economic and social justice. After being "mugged by reality," however, they seem to have adopted a slightly-mutated form of Spencerian social Darwinism. I think it is this formulation of secularist freethought which, though allied practically and politically with religious conservatives, dominates our politics today.

Or could I be wrong?

The Pearlescence Principle

What I am about to suggest sounds more than a bit mystical. Could it be the case that the worldview we uphold and the specific belief system it supports are inevitably going to be "true," for each upholder personally, because of the ways in which belief per se feeds — somehow — back into our experience of the world, coloring it, molding it, making it conform to that worldview itself?

Let me give a personal example. I recently, for whatever reason, became enamored of the idea that I'd be well-advised to take up the ancient Chinese physical art, Tai Chi. Somewhere in my repository of unconscious beliefs was one which said that Tai Chi — along with the Taoist religion or philosophy with which it is associated — is an ideal road to physical and spiritual well-being. And guess what? Within days after taking up Tai Chi, I began to experience a physical and spiritual boost from it. It's been two months now, and the boost continues — as does the belief, now quite conscious, that this is exactly what Tai Chi is supposed to do for a person.

Of course, one interpretation is to posit that there are objectively powerful capabilities for the promotion of personal health hidden within the mind-body unit — the Chinese concept of the subtle body energy or Chi being one of them — which Western medicine is blind to. Tai Chi simply unlocks them.

Another possible interpretation is to go to the opposite extreme and say, in effect, that the benefits I'm getting are "all in the mind," basically meaning phony or not real. I'm deluding myself, in other words. My spiritual/physical health isn't really any better than before.

My interpretation lies somewhere in between. I say my predisposition to believe in Tai Chi has become a "self-fulfilling worldview" that has actually borne fruit for me. I'm really better off: healthier, happier. On the other hand, if I were to take someone whose wellness is in the same limbo state as mine used to be in and somehow coerce them into doing Tai Chi, despite having no predisposition to believe in it, I'll bet he or she would report few benefits.

Take a parallel case: Christian prayer. Though I am a practicing Christian — go to church regularly, pray the Lord's Prayer often — I have never developed a strong belief in the power of prayer. (Go figure.) Nor in the value of what I consider pious devotion. As I told someone just yesterday, I consider myself a very worldly Christian.

But I know lots of people who are truly devout, who pray a lot and feel their prayers are answered, and who believe they are in direct touch with God at every moment in their lives. And by the principle I outlined above, I assume that they are. God does touch them and lead them and answer their prayers constantly, in ways that I can only long for from afar.

In other words, we somehow manage to make our own reality. I make a reality for myself in which Tai Chi, seeking the Tao, and various other pearls of personal belief radiate out from whoever I actually am and give their opalescence to my world. My devoutly religious friends do the same, except that the pearls of their worldview are different from my personal pearls.

And here's the strange thing: that pearlescence, that opalescence, actually becomes a part of the reality we survey. In my reality, Tai Chi works. In the actuality of really, really devout Christians, prayer works.

It's magic! Belief is powerful. Worldviews are self-fulfilling.

The only problem comes when we, as is our wont, become convinced that our belief, our worldview, is right for everyone — because the fact that it works for us must make it objectively so.

Then we start pushing our belief system on others. Sometimes gently. Sometimes coercively. But pushing all the same. But that doesn't work.

Oh, it works for some other people, true enough ... because they have the same pearl of positive wisdom lying dormant somewhere within their personhood. Once it begins to imbue their reality with the same opalescence it donates to ours, one and all become even more convinced of the objective truth of their vision. They work even harder to push it on the rest of the disbelieving world.

But, again, that doesn't work. Not universally.

It only works for people that have the same pearls ripe for the unveiling.

The world would be a happier place if we could just get these things through our heads. Belief is powerful. Worldviews are self-fulfilling. But only for those who are ready to invest themselves in them.


By dint of what some have labelled "synchronicity," just after I wrote the above laying out my (shall I call it) "pearlescence principle," I came across a perfect example of it. In "Hail, Mary," TIME magazine's story about how Protestant Christians are taking a fresh look at the mother of Jesus, long revered by Catholics, we hear of Mary's being called First Disciple by latter-day Protestant "reformers." To wit:

Traditional commentary saw Mary's "Let it be" primarily as a statement of obedience. But [Princeton Theological Seminary's Beverly] Gaventa, and many who followed, heard in it a thought-through acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah made long before any other believer's. In a Christianity Today article, Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., paraphrases some of the original reformers, saying, "If she had not believed, she would not have conceived."

To underscore the key concept: "If she had not believed, she would not have conceived." That's it! That's my "pearlescence principle" in action. We can conclude that Mary nurtured within her personhood, albeit unbeknownst to her, a "positive pearl of belief" in the coming Messiah-to-be. Activating it by uttering her words, "Let it be," she empowered herself to conceive and give birth to that very Messiah. Accordingly, the pearlescence of Mary's idiosyncratic belief in her Son shone out and lit what was to become all of Christendom.

In view of which, I feel I ought to amend and extend how I define the "doubt" in my world of doubt. After all, I seem here to be enshrining belief, not doubt. But what I doubt, I am beginning to see, is the notion that any personal belief system or worldview — however many others share it — is objectively true.

Nor is it simply subjectively so. It's better than both of those: it's personally true.

Which means it feeds back somehow into objective reality and colors it from that person's perspective. In a sense, we make up — or simply make — our own world. The pearlescent light we ourselves cast, based on what we truly and deeply believe, is the light we see by.

It's something like Schrödinger's Cat, a thought experiment in quantum physics. In it, a live cat is put in a closed box with a mechanism that may (or may not) indirectly cause the cat's death by at any moment releasing (or not releasing) a radioactive particle as a trigger. We let the experiment run on its own for a period of time. After a while, we open the box and see whether the cat is alive or dead.

It is only at the moment we do so, Schrödinger proved mathematically, that the outcome is decided ... even though the release of the fateful particle and the death of the cat happened (if at all) earlier in time! Inconceivable as it seems, no other understanding is consistent with the laws of quantum mechanics.

Our observation of the outcome alone makes it real. Is that any screwier than Mary's belief in the Messiahship of her Son making itself come true?

So our mental activity — our observation, our belief — fabricates the very reality we exist in. It does so neither objectively nor subjectively, but personally.

As Alice said, "Curiouser and curiouser."

Belief Systems and Worldviews

Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code

A friend of mine, knowing of my interest (like that of millions of people) in Dan Brown's bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code, sent me a booklet by RBC (Radio Bible Class) Ministries, "The Da Vinci Code: Separating Fact from Fiction."

The general thrust of the booklet is that Dan Brown's novel is a great big hoax. Not historical at all.

For those who have been living in Outer Slobovia, the novel concerns a supposed nearly 2,000-year-long conspiracy on the part of the historical Christian (mainly, Catholic) Church to suppress evidence that Jesus wed Mary Magdalene (MM) and fathered a child, born on French soil after Mary fled the post-Crucifixion Holy Land.

Putatively, certain important personages down through history — Leonardo Da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton, and many others — knew or guessed the truth. They even formed a secret society, the Priory of Sion, to preserve the hidden documentary evidence of MM's being designated by Jesus to be, disciple-wise, first among equals. Leonardo, the novel claims, put veiled references to MM's special status in his famous painting, "The Last Supper."

The evidence concerning Jesus's marriage to Mary Magdalene had to be kept hidden, saith the novel, because it was too hot to handle. Imagine: a Church which has historically derogated bodily desires, sex, the fertility of women, and the "sacred feminine" being confronted with proof that Jesus himself, in terms of his own life on this earth, did not!

Before disclosing who has actually been committing brutal murders to get his hands on this suppositious evidence, the novel suggests it may be a (again, supposedly) fanatical bunch of Catholic zealots called Opus Dei. The implication is made that the Vatican itself may be secretly complicit in keeping proof of Jesus's connubial life buried by killing those who might reveal it.

Enter the RBC booklet with the stated mission of "separating fact from fiction." It's far from the only recent publication to aim to do so.

Dan Brown's Angels & Demons

Why, I feel entitled to wonder, all the fuss? After all, the author's previous book, Angels & Demons, was a page turner, too. But its "conspiracy theory" was about the Illuminati, pretty much a dead letter today. So no one is writing a lot of books debunking it.

Why, that is, do so many people care whether Jesus was a husband and father?

Why do they care whether a woman named Mary of Magdala was not only his wife but his favored disciple?

One answer might be that Jesus can't have had conjugal relations — sex — because (as the booklet, which I'll henceforth call SFF, puts it on p. 17) he "lived a single life of devotion to His mission."

As if being in the married state robs one of one's mission-orientedness, one's "devotion." Tell that to all the Protestant ministers who are happily married today.

Well, but ... but how could God (for Jesus presumably was God) have sexual desires and potency, and be fertile for fathering children?

Well, why not? Jesus was like us in all ways but sin, was he not?

Well, but ... why don't the Gospels in the Bible's New Testament say Jesus married Mary of Magdala, or anyone else for that matter?

Well, they don't say he didn't. The best SFF can do is point out the "indirect evidence" in the Bible that Jesus remained a celibate bachelor (see pp. 16-17). For example, Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians (chapter 9) takes up the topic of Christian missionaries "taking along a believing wife." Paul lists "the other apostles, the brothers of the Lord, and Cephas" as having done so — but not the Lord Jesus himself. Says SFF, "If Jesus had married, Paul would have included him in the list."

But maybe not.

Maybe Jesus simply did not "take along" his wife during his ministry.

Or maybe the books of the New Testament were set down in an atmosphere, during the first few centuries following Christ, in which it had already become a faux pas to suggest a married, sexually active Lord and Savior. Maybe that's why "Mary is never tied to any male when she was named" in any of the four Gospels, and why "Jesus showed no special concern for Mary Magdalene at the cross" in John's Gospel.

Yes, that's all speculation on my part. But to me it's enough of an objection to the "indirect evidence" of the Bible to insist that Jesus's bachelorhood cannot be proved beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

Which brings me to my real point: this argument is about belief systems and worldviews, not facts.

Traditionally, Christians have had a belief system, a worldview, in which women have taken a backseat to men, and sexuality to celibacy, virginity, and chastity.

The SFF booklet has to do some fancy footwork to hold that the Church has not historically devalued women except to the extent that "followers of Christ have missed the spirit of their own Scriptures and Leader" (p. 14). It may have been "Paul's teaching that men should love their wives as Christ loved his Church" (p. 15), but Paul also taught that wives should defer to their husbands, and women should keep their heads covered and their mouths closed in church.

The Catholic Church won't allow either female priests (with no exceptions) or married male priests (with certain exceptions).

As for sexuality and religion, don't get me started. Suffice it to say that the Church has always placed tight strictures on sex. It has also historically looked mightily askance on — as Dan Brown put it on p. 125 of The Da Vinci Code — "female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, herb gatherers, and any women 'suspiciously attuned to the natural world'," potential witches all.

Whatever the rationale for it, there has been a devaluation of the very idea that there could even be a "sacred feminine." It's as if honoring lusty female fertility may pose an obstacle to heaven.

And, yes, it may ... depending on your worldview. It would be foolish of me to maintain that the patriarchal, paternalistic worldview hasn't made sense to millions, including millions of women, down through the centuries.

It would be equally foolish of me to imagine that the record sales of The Da Vinci Code don't betoken millions of modern women and men who now question that worldview and any belief system that goes along with it.

(I'm one of them. Though I'm a practicing Catholic, I don't agree with my Church on many matters having to do with sex: homosexuality, birth control, and the legality of abortion among them.)

And — however many liberties Dan Brown takes with the actual facts — it's thrilling to suppose that maybe, just maybe, Jesus would have rejected that sexually repressive, patriarchal view himself.

At Home in the Universe

I've been contemplating doing a blog just about the recent debate over teaching evolution vs. creationism (including Intelligent Design, or ID) in high schools. One thing that holds me back is not being sure from what angle to approach the topic. So I decided to look around at what others have done, blog-wise, with respect to the theory of evolution. I came across, among other evolution- or science-oriented blogs, Mano Singham's Web Journal, in which Professor Singham takes up many of the issues that vex me.

For example, in his "Why is evolutionary theory so upsetting to some?" post, Prof. Singham says of ID advocates that he suspects their "main concern [is] that evolution by natural selection implie[s] that human beings [have] no special status among living things."

I've had the same thought. But I wonder whether there isn't, among fundamentalists, an even greater beef with the seeming implication of Darwinism that God does not perform "mighty works" with respect to the world's biological history ... and, accordingly, perhaps not with respect to each of our individual, personal histories, either. A "personal God" who does not continually do "mighty works" in the world which he created, even though he could: Is such a God even worth speculating about, let alone worshipping?

All the same, Prof. Singham's point is well-taken, that Darwinian evolution is manifestly not goal-directed. Outcomes depend on countless (in effect) "coin tosses" strung together in arbitrary series such that where you wind up cannot be predicted:

Think of starting out on a journey by car. At each intersection, we toss a coin and if it is heads, we turn left and if it is tails we turn right. After millions of tosses, we will have ended up somewhere, but it could have been anywhere. It might be San Francisco or it might be in the middle of a cornfield in Kansas. There is no special meaning that can be attached to the end point. We can try and reconstruct our journey starting from the end and working backwards to the beginning (which is what evolutionary biologists do) but the end point of our journey was not predetermined when we began.

The important point is that, according to natural selection we were not destined to end up as we did. The many small random genetic mutations that occurred over the years are the analog of the coin tosses, and the end point could have been something quite different.

For people who believe that humans are created in God’s image, this is pretty tough to take because it is a steep drop in one’s self-image.

At Home in the Universe

How such doubts about our self-image might be allayed without calling Darwin wrong about natural selection is a theme of Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity.

Kauffman, a theoretical biologist, has done pioneering work in the field of complexity science. His work suggests that a lovely order emerges spontaneously in the natural world. The living forms which "selection chooses among," says Kauffman (p. 8), "were generated by laws of complexity." That makes "self-organization" natural selection's "handmaiden."

Organisms, Kauffman writes, are "not just tinkered-together contraptions, but expressions of deeper natural laws." Kauffman's book is about the early stages of the scientific search for the laws according to which "vast veins of spontaneous order lie at hand," ready for Darwinian evolution to locate and exploit.

Which means this, on the bottom-line: "Not we the accidental, but we the expected."

It remains true in Kauffman's view that the details of our planet's evolutionary history were and are unpredictable. Speaking in the language of computer algorithms, Kauffman affirms (p. 23) that "evolution is such an incompressible process" — meaning that there is no computer program which could replicate it with identical results but using a more compact sequence of steps.

Even though the nitty-gritty steps of evolutionary history are such an incompressible litany of coin tosses, says Kauffman,

... it does not follow that we may not find deep and beautiful laws governing that unpredictable flow. For we are not precluded from the possibility that many features of organisms and their evolution are profoundly robust and insensitive to details. If, as I believe, many such robust properties exist, then deep and beautiful laws may govern the emergence of life and the population of the biosphere. After all, what we are after here is not necessarily detailed prediction, but explanation. We can never hope to predict the exact branchings of the tree of life, but we can uncover powerful laws that predict and explain their general shape. I hope for such laws. I even dare to hope that we can begin to sketch some of them now. For want of a better general phrase, I call these efforts a search for a theory of emergence.

What if the "profoundly robust" properties that pertain to human beings in particular are the ones we mean when we say we were made "in God's image"?

What if among the human-only robust properties that emerge from "deep and beautiful" natural laws are our vaunted consciousness, our unique self-awareness?

What if there is something built into the fabric of the cosmos which pretty well guarantees that conscious, self-aware creatures will emerge, simply because the laws of self-organized complexity indeed serve as Darwinian natural selection's "handmaiden"?

Then we would be justified in calling ourselves, as Kauffman does, "we the expected."

It might even give us a basis for doing what Kauffman hopes we will (p. 5): "reinvent the sacred — this sense of our own deep worth — and reinvest it at the core of the new civilization."

But what of the problem I mentioned earlier: the idea of a "personal God" who does not continually do "mighty works" in the world which he created, even though he could? For Kauffman seems to point to a God who sits back contentedly, without intervening in nature, and lets the "deep and beautiful laws" work out nature's destiny.

Such a God may not, to many people, seem even worth speculating about, let alone worshipping — even if the "deep and beautiful laws" do produce a species such as us, "made in God's image"!

I tend to feel, as Kauffman does, that the "deep and beautiful laws" of the cosmos fully attest to God's creation of it and justify a new sense of sacredness and awe among us. But I doubt the idea of a God who does not magically intervene in the outworkings of evolution — because he doesn't need to — can ever satisfy the fundamentalists among us.

Teach Kids Self-Mastery!

Consider this a follow-on to my earlier post, Are We Too Shameless?

Conservative columnist Cal Thomas' March 7, 2005, column, "The Cucumber Curriculum," which can be read here, talks about recent trends in high-school sex education in Montgomery County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. A recently introduced curriculum will purportedly include demonstrations of how to put a condom on a cucumber. Homosexual couples will be characterized as "the newest American 'family.'" And students will be taught "to 'develop' a sexual identity." Mr. Thomas objects to all these initiatives.

He prefers that high-schoolers be taught sexual abstinence, noting that only 27 percent of 13- to 16-year-olds are sexually active. "Why, then, not focus our program on encouraging those who are abstinent to continue on that path, while trying to turn around the 27 percent who are sexually active?" asks Mr. Thomas.

In related news, Baltimore Sun features columnist Susan Reimer recently penned "In essay, Loyola professor likens coed dorms to brothels" (available until it expires here). Ms. Reimer's beat is family issues, particularly child-rearing. In this piece she bemoans gender-neutral living arrangements at colleges and universities as places where "female students ... feel pressured to participate in the casual sex that coed dorms make possible in order to prove their sexual health."

Reimer echoes Vigen Guroian, a theology professor and father of a daughter in college, who has published an essay in Christianity Today (read it here) criticizing coed dorms for making promiscuity "practically obligatory," in the words of one female student's essay which Guroian cites. Since institutions of higher learning are "taking money for this" — charging fees for dorm housing — they in Guroian's view are guilty of pandering. Colleges, says Guroian, have "forfeited the responsibilities of in loco parentis and have gone into the pimping and brothel business."

I for one doubt that's a useful comparison to make. Too heated, too overblown — as when Cal Thomas compares the Montgomery County sex-education initiative to

... a "movement" in California to create gender-neutral toilets in public places so that transsexuals and even people with "androgynous identity who do not consider themselves completely male or female," in the words of a New York Times story [available here], might feel comfortable.

But, anyway, it occurs to me that what is really needed is to teach our kids self-control: per the dictionary, restraint exercised over one's own impulses, emotions, or desires. Kids need, more than anything today, to be taught how to cultivate their capacity for self-government or self-mastery. After all, it is "peer pressure" as much as "the way things are set up" which Guroian's female informants cite as why coed dorms lead to "practically obligatory" promiscuity.

And Cal Thomas assumes the initially optional Sex Ed course in Montgomery County will soon become de facto obligatory:

Once "legitimacy" is established, pressure will be applied to make anyone who doesn't take the course feel like an outsider. Many will conform in order to avoid being "stigmatized."

Not wanting to be "stigmatized" and allowing "peer pressure" to make your decisions for you are sure signs that kids haven't been taught self-mastery sufficiently well.


There is much about self-government or self-mastery which could be likened to that old-fashioned word, chastity.

"To be chaste means to experience things, all things, respectfully and to drink them in only when we are ready for them. ... Unbridled restlessness makes us unhealthily impatient for experience ... Greed and impatience push us toward irresponsible experience," writes Ronald Rolheiser, a Catholic priest, in The Shattered Lantern.

By that definition, abstinence is indeed a major "chastity strategy" ... but not the only one. The others — even if they are restricted to married sex — could demand use of the (shall we call it) "cucumber procedure."

And we need to get real: there is going to continue to be sex pressure in coed college dorms. Our kids need to be prepared to withstand it. If we don't intend to teach them chastity because of the word's now-obsolete connotations of sexual repression, let's call it self-mastery instead and get on with the job.

Note, finally, that kids are going to develop a sexual identity, a process which Cal Thomas says he underwent "as a child in the bathtub without the help of my public school." He was lucky; for some kids the "bathtub test" isn't suffcient. For some of them, what kind of genitalia they have will turn out not to define who they will become. Budding gays, lesbians, androgynes, transsexuals, and to-be-transgendered individuals need to learn self-mastery just as badly as anyone else.

So, why can't we all agree that teaching self-mastery ought to be one of the primary responsibilities of our schools? Conservatives can think of it as teaching chastity. Liberals, as self-government. But one and all ought to be able to get behind it as an antidote to peer-pressure-induced mistakes and out-of-control teen behavior.

Freethinkers and Such

While reading Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, I came across an interesting sentence: "Men like [the Reverend William] Bentley believed as deeply in freedom of thought and of speech as they did in freedom of conscience; at the core of their religion lay not an unquestioning faith but a deep reverence for the power of the human mind and the value of human doubt" (p. 52).

Jacoby is describing one of what today would be called the "opinion leaders" of post-Revolutionary America, a Unitarian minister named William Bentley whose liberal Protestant denomination was considered by religious conservatives — whose star was in the ascendant around 1790-1800 and into the middle of the 19th century — "just another species of infidelity" (p. 51). Along with atheists and deists, Unitarians, Universalists, and certain other liberal Christians of the day were among the freethinkers about whom Jacoby writes. To the extent they had religious leanings at all, they elevated reason over blind faith.

What intrigued me about the above-cited passage is that it links reason ("the power of the human mind") with doubt. I find that curious and surprising, because (or so it would seem to me) reason holds itself forth as a strategy for dispelling doubt.

Particularly when it is yoked to scientific empiricism, reason would seem to claim the mantle of being our only legitimate method for doubt's eradication. Faith, reason's opposite, is by pure reason's light a way of ignoring or enshrining doubt, not eliminating it.

The men whom Jacoby calls freethinkers were all in love with the notion that by replacing blind faith with reason, men could master themselves and their world. Only in so doing would they be able to escape the heel of the despot. So, from the point of view of men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and others, it was imperative at the time to make sure the newly minted United States of America was not slave to anyone's blind faith.

Many of these Early American freethinkers believed religion to be a tool of tyranny — as in the newly disputed claim of the "divine right" of kings. Revolutionary hero Thomas Paine snarkily wrote (see p. 59), "One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving mankind an ass for a lion."

He also wrote in The Age of Reason that the word mystery

... cannot be applied to moral truth, any more than obscurity can be applied to light. The God in whom we believe is a God of moral truth, and not a God of mystery and obscurity. Mystery ... is a fog of human invention, that ... represents itself in distortion. Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist.

I personally doubt that truth never envelops itself in mystery. As I've laid out in this post in my Tai Chi Journal blog, I take a Taoist approach to the idea of truth. As such, it contrasts with the Platonism we all tend to be heir to in the West.

In the quote above, Paine was being a good Platonist. He posits what amounts to a Platonic Form of Truth which is pure and unadulterated by Mystery. Paine implies that it is Reason which, in dispelling Doubt and Mystery, allows us to ascertain the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth.

But Taoism affirms that the Way which lies behind all that exists cannot be spoken of, and is accordingly nameless. As such, Taoism is a philosophy resigned to the ineffability of reality and the limits of reason.

But neither does Taoist wisdom accept the dogmatic authoritarianism of mainstream Western religious orthodoxy, which would have pleased Paine.

So it seems to this observer that Paine's dichotomy between faith and reason was a false one. It is not necessary to put all of one's eggs in the basket of Reason to be free. One can embrace Liberty and Mystery at one and the same time.

Which is my fancy way of saying, "A plague on both their houses." Neither religious zealotry nor anti-religious zealotry empowers us to lead fulfilled lives, which is what it's really all about. Neither insistence on the existence of an insubstantial Supreme Authority who is powerful yet mysterious, nor refusal to believe in same, covers all of human experience and all of human need.

Why can't we stop fighting over God? Some people need God in their lives, and others don't. But why do those on either side of the question have to impose their views on the rest of us?

If you're conservative about religion, fine. If you're not, also fine. But if you turn your personal theology into an ideology with which to make war on competing ideologies, not so fine.

Ideological warfare — as in today's so-called "culture wars" — is not about what works. It's about what ought to work, given the presuppositions of the ideology in question. But ideological presuppositions tend to be wrong — or, at least, to become wrong when the culture which gave rise to them morphs into a culture in which they are maladaptive liabilities.

What this blogger doubts, when he talks of "a world of doubt," is ideological presuppositions. And not just religious ones. Political ones as well. For example, opinion columnist Clarence Page writes in a recent column, "Blacks hearing a new gospel from GOP," of the difficulty the Democratic Party is having keeping African Americans such as Page solidly in their column.

One reason is today's heightened ideological partisanship, a case in point being the left-right bickering over President Bush's so-called "faith-based initiatives." Page writes:

Out in America's real neighborhoods, citizens don't appear to care as much as the folks in Washington do about who's liberal or who's conservative; they just care about what works.

Ideological partisanship, religious or secular, is what we need a whole lot less of today. Let's get on with the project of figuring out what works in the cultural conditions which prevail today to empower individuals to "be all that they can be."

Evolution vs. Intelligent Design

An excellent piece by Paul R. Gross, University of Virginia professor of life sciences emeritus, recently graced the op-ed page of The Baltimore Sun. Titled "Strong evidence for evolution, none for creationist alternatives," it may be read here and here.

Gross's intent is to compare the strength of the scientific evidence for Darwinian evolution theory with what he says is the complete lack of evidence for intelligent design. The latter is a theory whose claim is:

... that Darwinian processes cannot account for the history and diversity of life because life shows evidence of complex design, and that Darwinian processes could not produce design without "intelligent" input. Ergo, presumably, there must be, or must have been, an intelligent designing agent. Never mind who.

But of course, the unnamed "who" is really God.

Gross calls I.D. "just an argument from incredulity" for which "there is, so far, zero evidence."

That it is an argument from incredulity is pointed up be an earlier article in The Sun, "Fact is, this theory is under attack," dated Feb. 5, 2005. (Sorry, I can't find a hotlink to it.) It said that the Board of Education in Cecil County, Maryland, is considering a new high school biology textbook, and:

... some school board members are asking whether students should be taught that the theory of evolution, a fundamental tenet of modern science, falls short of explaining how life on Earth took shape.

It comes as little surprise that some average, everyday Cecil Countians resent Darwin and support I.D.:

Doug Larson of Cecilton took umbrage at the board's "pushing the idea that evolution is a fact. It's a theory; it has not been proven. It takes more belief to believe I came from a monkey than to believe God created me."

Which suggests that I.D. is indeed an argument from incredulity!

And that's exactly what interests me about it. Though I happen to believe in God, it has always been my understanding that the mere assertion of God's existence is met with a whopping dollop of incredulity by atheists and agnostics. So we seem to have dueling incredulities here.

It all prompts me to wonder where our individual credulities and incredulities come from. Why would one person think intelligent design by an unseen God to be an explanation more credible than, in Gross's apt phrase, "the making of designs by natural processes" alone? Why would another person prefer the wholly naturalistic explanation for our species' arising by descent with modification over the eons, guided by nothing more than that "blind watchmaker," natural selection?

I don't know how to answer that question, but I know it's an important one. In fact, this particular "credibility dichotomy," if I may call it that, seems to be a microcosm of our general culture war as it is being carried out today. The people who resent Darwin and support "creationist" theories such as intelligent design are the same people who oppose gay marriage, want the Ten Commandments posted in courthouses, and so on. And the people who most uphold Darwin tend to be the same ones who take tolerant, secular-humanist stands on many other issues.

Unfortunately, the tolerance of these cultural liberals does not often extend to smiling favorably on cultural conservatives, evangelical Christians, and Bible-toting fundamentalists. There is where we find a blind spot among the left. They hate cultural conservatives as much as conservatives hate them. In a mirror image of right-wing zeal, they consider it their mission in life to thwart old-fashioned religious and cultural conservatism, thereby saving the world from some awful fate.

It's another case of ideological "bubbles." (See my post on that topic in another blog of mine.) The conservatives exist within a bubble of thought and belief which, they fear, would be popped forthwith if liberals get the upper hand. Meanwhile, the liberals inflate their own ideological bubble and fear all right-wing "pinpricks" — conservative victories — in the worst way.

It's as if the continued existence of the world depends on one's respective ideological bubble not getting popped. So it is imperative that one adopt a belief system that is pure and unpoppable ... meaning, in the case of Cecil Countian Doug Larson, that one must forget how incredible the assertion of God's existence is, or ought to be. Rather, one must take God's existence and providence as easy to believe in, and any nature-only explanation of evolutionary processes as the thing which is incredible.

Ideologues are like the proverbial "boy in the bubble": they'll (metaphorially) die if they allow in any foreign ideas.

And their world is a goner if they allow their kids to be exposed to ideological bubble-poppers in school. And so the club supporting creationism's latest incarnation, intelligent design, is intolerant of Darwin-only biology textbooks.

Are We Too Shameless?

Psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers' cover story in the Feb. 27, 2005, Parade magazine suggests to us that "Shame Might Not Be So Bad After All." (The above link to the online version of the article will become active on Mar. 7.)

Dr. Brothers believes that "maybe it's time to invite the useful aspects of shame back into our culture." This, in view of such supposedly shameful cultural phenomena as trash TV (too much sex, aggression, and acted-out personal hostility), trashy attire (too many piercings, too much skin), and a general "indecency" factor permeating our popular culture.

I doubt Dr. Brothers is right about the cure for this disease being a return to shame.

She points out, quite correctly I think, that up until the 1960s, shaming children for their "bad" behavior was a primary tool of parents and teachers. Then the '60's youth generation — my generation — declared war on an ethos which saw (in an example Dr. Brothers' herself gives) kids being made fun of by teachers in front of their class for wetting their pants.

I also think her point well taken that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction: incessant self-revelation. 24/7 self-exposure, à la celebrities like Madonna (whom Dr. Brothers quotes as saying, "I have no shame") is the order of the day.

Where I disagree with Dr. Brothers is her prescription: a return of "good" or "positive" shame to our culture.

I doubt there's such as thing as "good" shame. Yes, there is a type of shame which (as she notes) is hard-wired into Madonna and everyone else, by virtue of being human. It — in the way that fear is also — is a powerful emotional response to a particular kind of situation. When we are exposed as doing what society abhors, however we may try to cover our reaction, we feel shame.

Even Madonna, I'm sure, knows exactly what it is that she says she has none of. For shame is something we feel when the occasion is appropriate ... it is not supposed to be something we have.

In this way, again, shame is like fear. When we feel fear in appropriate circumstances, that's good. But when we continue to feel fear beyond the immediate justification for it, we call it anxiety and consider it bad.

The so-called "good" shame which Dr. Brothers calls on us to have stands in relation to actual shame as anxiety does to actual, justifiable fear.

No, there's too much danger in Dr. Brothers' prescription for having more "good" shame. It would all too easily become a rationale to go back to the cruel, repressive, counterproductive shaming ethos of an earlier era.

What's needed is not an increase in shame or shaming. It's not more humiliation, but greater personal humility.

Humbleness has all the positive attributes Dr. Brothers identifies with "good" shame. It

• gives you new insight about yourself
• encourages you to make improvements
• expands your value system
• makes you more sensitive to others, and
• makes you want to elevate the culture around you.

But humility is not (in Dr. Brothers' definition of shame) "the feeling that there's something wrong about you."

Furthermore, there's no implicit link between humility and (I might as well say it) sexual or bodily shame. As soon as you start using the word "shame," our culture, given its history, implictly prefixes "sexual" or "bodily" to it.

Whatever else you may think of Madonna, you have to admit that her career stands in staunch reproach to such prudishness. She's been embraced by the popular culture as much for that as for her talent. Now, humility is not her strong point ... which is why I can take her or leave her. But because of people like her, I seriously doubt our culture can ever go back to enshrining a "good" shame which can't help but have implicit sexual or bodily antagonisms.

So, let's focus instead on cultivating "shame light": humility. For I doubt any more draconian approach could ever work.