What Is Realism?

Michael Shermer's latest "Skeptic" column in Scientific American is a good one, as usual. Kool-Aid Psychology: Realism versus Optimism takes on the "positive psychology" movement and says of "allegedly salubrious effects of positive thinking":

Evidence is thin. Statistical significance levels are narrow. What few robust findings there are often prove to be either nonreplicable or contradicted by later research. And correlations (between, say, happiness and health) are not causations.

Hence it's no kind of realism, Shermer says, this pseudo-scientific embrace of optimism over pessimism as the royal road to happiness. Shermer does not believe in anything science and reason cannot verify.

I believe in something that science cannot grapple with: that the royal road to happiness lies in serving others.

All humans — all sentient creatures, including animals — have, to one degree or another, conscious experience. I believe that conscious experience can never be fully understood scientifically.

I believe that the mind exists, above and in addition to matter.

I believe, therefore, that there is such a thing as the soul.

And I believe that the connections we conscious beings forge between our souls and those of others are even more important than our possession of individual souls per se.


When I was about fifteen years old, my father, a police chief, was sent to the U.S. island possession of Guam to write a report on the institutions of public safety there. He was away for many months, during which time his brother Ralph was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Ralph quickly became bedridden, lingering on for many weeks in terrible pain.

One day, Dad did something unusual, considering the high cost of telephone calls in those days from Guam to Bethesda, Maryland. He phoned my mother and told her that the previous night he, Dad, had awakened from a sound sleep with the feeling of an enormous burden being lifted from his shoulders. Upon reflection, Dad had become convinced this had been a sign that Ralph had at last passed out of his long misery and died.

Dad was right. Ralph, who lived near our family in Cheverly, Maryland, had been pronounced dead at, as best we could calculate, the moment Dad had awakened on Guam.

Dad was a sound sleeper. He never woke up, once his head hit the pillow at night, until the next morning.


I believe in this odd co-occurrence. Whatever words you care to use to describe it — a disturbance in the ether perhaps, allowing whatever was happening to Uncle Ralph's soul at the moment of his death to ripple halfway around the world and cheer my father's sleep —it is something that I think really happened. It was not a coincidence or a fluke.

It could happen, I think, because there was a deep personal link between my father's soul and his brother's. No one ever wakes up from a sound sleep with a feeling of beatitude when a perfect stranger dies.

My father was not notably spiritual. He rarely was emotional. He never went to church. But I think that as he himself got older and older, knowing he had less and less time to live, he came to believe more and more that there is something beyond this life.

Those near-death experiences reported by people who ultimately got revived — walking through a tunnel of light, being greeted on the "other side" by predeceased loved ones — Dad believed in them implicitly. It always made me squirmy, to hear him talk on that subject. Now I don't know. I think the experiences may be real.

Or, at least, they tell us something important about the nature of reality: we forge links to others that survive our respective deaths.

That's why, I think, we get the most happiness from helping and serving others.

If true happiness arises from helping and serving, then that is something which might be tested. Tested, that is, not scientifically, in any ordinary sense. There is no objective meter for happiness. But tested, in a subjective sense. Help. Serve. See if it doesn't make you happy.

If it does, you have reason to believe that minds, souls, and the connections between them are not strangers to realism at all.

3-Year College Degrees: Maturity Required

In today's Washington Post: Colleges Weighing 3-Year Degrees to Save Undergrads Time, Money. The article talks about how several American colleges are considering degree programs that take just three years to complete, not the customary four. The cost of a college education might thus be slashed by 25 percent.

But Justin Guiffre, a 19-year-old sophomore at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., cautions, "A three-year program could be appropriate for students who demonstrate commitment, academic excellence and maturity."

Maturity, self-control, and the ability to put off the immediate gratification of urges are excellent predictors of academic success (even more so than I.Q. — see Don't Eat the Marshmallow!, particularly the part about the research of Angela Lee Duckworth). They are rough synonyms of commitment, since that word implies being able to keep one's eyes on the ball for extended periods, until a difficult goal is achieved. So "students who demonstrate commitment, academic excellence and maturity" is a phrase twice redundant ... which is fine, because redundancy is emphasis, and emphasis needs to be put on the need for maturity among young people today.

Shock-Trauma — Not!

In Rites of Initiation I talked about how myth guru Joseph Campbell, in his The Power of Myth interviews with Bill Moyers, decried the fact that there are no longer any puberty rites to yank young people into mature adulthood.

In my own experience, gains in personal maturity come when there is a confluence of circumstances. First, there is something which precipitates trauma; one knows one is in trouble somehow, even if one has no idea what to do about it.

For me, trouble ensued upon the death of my mother in 1985.

The trouble can be mercifully brief, or it can last and last. If it lasts, part of the reason is often that we resist any and every imaginable strategy of relief.

In my case, the trouble lasted several years, during which time I was ill both physically and psychologically.

Next, there is typically a second precipitating event. This one somehow makes clear in our mind what general path we need to take out of the chaos of whatever trouble we have found ourselves in.

In my case, while I was sick in bed in 1990 I read for the third time a book by J.I. Packer called I Want To Be a Christian. The second precipitating event came when I was part-way through: for the first time, suddenly I was able to say of the Christian belief system, "I believe this!" Before, it had always been, "I just can't believe."

Often, there follows an information-gathering phase that will allow us to choose which particular strategy to use in following that general path.

For me, I bought and read Leo Rosten's Religions of America and C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, picked the Episcopal Church, and had a friend take me to a local parish, where I prepared for baptism and was duly baptized. (I have since become a Roman Catholic.)

My overarching point is, though, that there has to be some precipitating trauma — some sort of physical or emotional scarification that brings on personal chaos for a time that can be brief or protracted. Only then can (following a second precipitating event) there be healing. As we heal, we gain in maturity.


Our culture today (as Joseph Campbell pointed out) has gone to ever greater extremes to avoid doling out trauma to the young.

We find this on the secular front: our schools bend over backward to keep from bruising kids' egos and self-images. Corporal punishment is forbidden.

On the religious front, there are no frightening rites of passage such as existed in ancient and primitive societies. There are no ritual circumcisions of pubescent males. No scarifications. Not even any old-time baptisms where someone holds your head under water long enough for your life to flash in front of your eyes.

We allow no ritual doling out of trauma to our kids in part because there is such potential for abuse. In part, though, the problem is that to do so would mandate that the whole community agree on a belief system which justifies the (secular or religious) rite. But just the opposite happens. Parents say, "No one is going to traumatize my kids but me!"

Meanwhile, few parents spank. Few mete out harsh punishment. Few insist on adult-behavior-or-else.


Is it any wonder that so many young people today move back in with Mom and Dad after high school, or college, or grad school? Any wonder that they're waiting to get married until their late twenties, waiting to have children of their own until their early thirties? (Except, of course, for the recent upsurge in unmarried high-school girls getting pregnant in bunches for all the wrong reasons?)

We live in a culture that is averse to shock-trauma, and so sees ever-more-infantile behavior from supposedly adult human beings!

Rites of Initiation

Something human culture used to do well, but doesn't do well anymore, are rites of initiation by virtue of which children at about the time of puberty are ushered into adulthood.

Mythology guru Joseph Campbell told Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth about the need for puberty rites (p. 8):

Moyers: Society has provided [young people] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind. I think of that passage in the first book of Corinthians: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

Campbell: That's exactly it. That's the significance of the puberty rites. In primal societies, there are teeth knocked out, there are scarifications, there are circumcisions, there are all kinds of things done. So you don't have your little baby body anymore, you're something else entirely.

(You can read more from the book in this MySpace blog entry; scroll down about halfway for this quote. Or, click here to search inside the book; enter "initiation" in the search field.)

Though I am not Jewish, I am, by Campbell's mention of circumcisions, put in mind of the Bar Mitzvah/Bat Mitzvah ceremony at which a 12-year-old girl or 13-year-old boy participates for the first time as an adult in the regular Sabbath service. In today's Judaism it has become a big deal, not unlike a combination of the First Holy Communion and Confirmation sacraments in the Catholic Church, but bigger still.

Jewish boys (but not girls) are ritually circumcised, not at puberty, but within a few days after birth.

Possibly (see this Wikipedia article) male circumcision originated as a rite of passage marking a boy's entrance into adulthood, though other intents have been cited as well. Campbell seems to favor the "rite of passage" interpretation. He also mentions "scarifications," the imposition of scars on the skin to signify the passage into adulthood. Modern civilization toned down the rites of passage such that by the time of Campbell's youth in some 100 years ago, the conferring of the right to wear long pants stood in for circumcisions and scarifications.

Today, in the hip hop generation, we find adult males wearing short pants in situations which would seem to demand trousers.

Campbell further tells Moyers (p. 82):

As a Catholic boy, you choose your confirmed name, the name you are going to be confirmed by. But instead of scarifying you and knocking your teeth out and all, the bishop gives you a smile and a slap on the cheek. It has been reduced to that. Nothing has happened to you. The Jewish counterpart is the bar mitzvah. Whether it actually works to effect a psychological transformation will depend on the individual case, I suppose. But in those old days there was no problem. The boy came out with a different body, and he had really gone through something.

Also (pp. 81-82):

... we know what the aborigines do in Australia. Now, when a boy gets to be a little bit ungovernable, one find day the men come in, and they are naked except for stripes of white bird down that they've stuck on their own bodies using their own blood for glue. They are swinging the bull-roarers, which are teh voices of spirits, and the men arrive as spirits.

The boy will try to take refuge with his mother, and she will pretend to try to protect him. But the men just take him away. A mother is no good from then on, you see. You can't go back to Mother, you're in another field.

Then the boys are taken out to the men's sacred ground, and they're really put through an ordeal — circumcision, subincision [a modification of the urethral opening of the penis], the drinking of men's blood, and so forth. Just as they had drunk mother's milk as children, now they drink men's blood. They're being turned into men. While this is going on, they are being shown enactments of mythological episodes from the great myths. They are instructed in the mythology of the tribe. Then, at the end of this, they are brought back to the village, and the girl whom each is to marry has already been selected. The boy has now come back as a man.

He has been removed from his childhood, and his body has been scarified, and circumcision and subincision have been enacted. Now he has a man's body. There's no chance of relapsing back to boyhood after a show like that.

Moyers: You don't go back to Mother.

Campbell: No, but in our life we don't have anything like that. You can have a man forty-five years old still trying to be obedient to his father. So he goes to a psychoanalyst, who does the job for him.

This gives us profound understanding as to why there is a "maturity gap" today.

Self-Policing Freedom

Nils Lofgren, Taking Memos From the Boss appears in today's Washington Post. It gives several quotes from that ace guitarist in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, Nils Lofgren. In answer to the question, "There's some controversy surrounding the show here. TicketsNow, the Ticketmaster-owned reseller, sold some tickets to the show that it didn't have, leaving some fans in the lurch. Do you follow that sort of news at all?", Mr. Lofgren says:

Not too much. . . . I read what Bruce commented about it, how wrong it was, and I'm obviously in total agreement. Listen, that's why the whole planet's getting run down, because of greed and freedom gone unchecked. Sadly, there's people that aren't burdened with a conscience. Greed is king. We don't police those people well enough as a society, and that obviously has to change or things are just going to keep getting worse. This is just a microcosm of what's wrong with the planet. Look at Bernie Madoff.

America to me is the greatest country in the world and the greatest experiment in freedom we'll ever have. But our forefathers, I'm sure, expected us to police freedom appropriately. In other words, you shouldn't have freedom to pipe in porn to kids' computers . . . You shouldn't have freedom to murder and pillage and get out on good behavior in seven years. What the hell is that about? That's the great challenge of society, is to police freedom appropriately. It's not happening at the moment.

An important question, policing freedom appropriately. At first, "policing freedom" sounds like an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. This blog maintains that the best way to resolve the tension between freedom and policing is self-policing.

In Rededicating This Blog I talked about words such as self-control, maturity, forbearance, and chastity. Self-policing is a good umbrella term for all of those.

To be an adult is to have the ability, ostensibly, to self-police ... which is why Mr. Lofgren bemoans the "freedom to pipe in porn to kids' computers." Adults have the right to look at porn on their computers. They also have the right to forbear looking at porn. In my earlier post, I gave "an abstaining from the enforcement of a right" as a definition of both forbearance and chastity. It could also be given as a definition of the umbrella term, self-policing.

Self-policing is impossible for the immature. For those with just a little bit of maturity, self-policing is a hit-or-miss proposition. For the truly mature, self-policing is a given.

Rededicating This Blog

This blog is being renamed and rededicated! Once named "In Search of Solidarity," it is now called "In Search of Maturity." (It also has a new look.)

The change is fitting for several reasons. One is that this blogger will turn 62 this year. Quite obviously, if he doesn't gain some sort of maturity at this point in his life, he never will.

Second, I have, finally, in fact turned a corner on my own personal maturity. The maturity I am in search of is actually more that of others in the society and culture, particularly younger people.

Third, as a result of that indefinable something finally falling into place for me personally, in the last few months — as if a capstone has at last been dropped into a waiting arch — what has come into focus for me is the idea that our culture presently suffers from a massive "maturity gap." I'd like to do what I can to help close that gap.


To close the gap is hard, in part because defining the gap and demonstrating that it exists is hard. I would like to begin by citing Don't Eat the Marshmallow!, an earlier post to this blog. The thrust of that post was that an article recently in The New Yorker, "Don't!", furnishes evidence about something I consider to be a near-synonym of maturity, self-control.

Specifically, science has found that self-control is a thing that we can develop, but often fail to. We're not stuck with however much or little we are born with.

Scientists have experimented with children as young as four and found wide disparities in their ability to delay eating a marshmallow or Oreo cookie placed before them while their adult supervisor attends to an errand outside the room. When told to ring a bell if they can't wait any longer, some do and some don't speed up the instant of gratification, with those who don't ever ring the bell and who thus duly put off eating the goodie getting the promised reward of an extra goodie, once the adult returns.

And some children not only don't wait, they don't even bother to ring the bell. They just snatch the goodie and consume it. Some even find a way to (seemingly) fool the adult: lick the cream filling out of an Oreo and reassemble it to escape detection.

Experimenters have looked into the later lives of the impatient "low delayers" (these experiments were originally conducted in the late 1960s) and found that some have become "high delayers," and that these lucky individuals have had more successful lives than the perennial snatchers and grabbers who never learned to postpone gratification.


I would argue that the ability to postpone gratification is the essence of maturity, by whatever name you wish to call it: self-control, self-discipline, self-denial, etc.

I would further suggest that another name for the same phenomenon is "chastity." Here is a word, I know, that immediately rings bells and sounds loud buzzers in the culture, for the first thing it brings to mind is sexual forbearance. Isn't that type of forbearance something the culture gratefully laid to rest in the 1960s? Isn't it the general (and proper) understanding today that sex by and between consenting adults is perfectly fine, whatever the circumstances of those adults?

My response:

First of all, chastity, properly understood, is more than sexual forbearance. It is (as is forbearance per se) a word that means "a refraining from something; patient endurance; self-control; an abstaining from the enforcement of a right." To be chaste is to be pure and virtuous, stainless and undefiled. Obviously, abstaining from the wrong sorts of sex is a big part of chastity, but it's only the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty of ways for someone who is totally celibate, sexually speaking, to offend against chastity.

Second, I may as well say this right out loud, right now, rather than tiptoe around the issue: I no longer believe in the Sexual Revolution.


In fact, I have this confession to make: the recent arrival of the capstone in my arch of maturity coincided with my giving up masturbating, a practice which the Sexual Revolution said was as natural and healthful as eating and breathing.

As I indicated in God of Chastity, Part II and earlier posts in my Theology of the Body series about an important theological outlook espoused by the late Pope John Paul II, my church preaches chastity. This past Lenten season, I began practicing it by stopping masturbating.

Specifically, I gave up looking at porn on the Internet and doing what comes naturally when one looks at porn ... a thing one also tends to do many times, as well, when not looking at porn on the Internet.

More specifically yet, the kind of dirty pictures I favored when looking at online porn were not "normal," but oriented toward a particular fetish or perversion. I'm not going to say what it was ... it's a preoccupation that a lot of men have, and not a few women as well, in which something bodily that is not intended to provoke lust does anyway. I now realize that entertaining such preoccupations, though no one is really harmed by it, is nothing if not immature.

And this is now a blog against immaturity!


I bring these personal things up because I believe a lot of the sexual behavior that goes on today without any stigma of illicitness is just the acting out of immaturity and the inability to postpone gratification. It has been so since very early in my life — I was born in 1947 — but the pace picked up with the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s. And, as the young people of my Baby Boomer generation threw off the old shackles of sexual repression, they also gave evidence of being notably less mature in other ways.

I witnessed this in my own young life in the form of the cataclysmic violence that erupted in the late 1960s as college and university students tried to "tear down the walls" and summarily enact a political revolution.

I was a junior at Georgetown University in 1968 when opposition to the war in Vietnam turned ugly. Students who were "clean for Gene" early in the year — for Senator Eugene McCarthy, who ran as an antiwar candidate against incumbent President Lyndon Johnson — watched as the hope engendered by his positive early results in the New Hampshire primary and elsewhere were doused by the killings of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. King was the crucial link between the civil rights movement and establishment politics, and Robert Francis Kennedy was the man most likely to translate McCarthy's quixotic crusade into a successful peace Presidency.

With their snuffing out, leaders of the "movement" for civil rights and peace descended on Chicago during the week of the Democratic National Convention bent on goading the police into starting a riot — which is what actually happened. Young self-styled radicals defended what they had wrought in terms of no longer being willing to wait for peace and justice.

No longer being willing to wait ... that, par excellence, is a recipe for the victory in one's soul of the precipitous and the immature.

Did their coming to prevail have anything to do with the Sexual Revolution? The question answers itself when you consider that the old order of sexual propriety was based on the notion that sex before marriage is a sin. When sex before marriage is a sin, sex outside of the duly sanctified bridal chamber is out of the question entirely. Throwing such notions aside, I believe, was manifestly a recipe for the onset of radical immaturity in other avenues of life.

Believe me, I wish it were otherwise. I wish we could have our marshmallow and eat it, too: that we could be faultlessly mature in other areas of life while not reining ourselves in sexually in the least degree. But my experience is that we are not built that way, and the world does not work that way.

I don't plan to say all that much about sex in my rededicated "In Search of Maturity" blog, though. I know of no better way to turn what I would hope to be a reasonable discussion into a food fight than to become a scold about the kind of behavior I know people want to hear nothing negative about.

Besides, there are any number of topics related to maturity and self-control that don't ask people to give up such a mainstay of their present lifestyle as "illicit sexuality" ... until they're ready to do so, that is. Lord knows, that was literally the last thing I myself wanted to give up!

* * *

Before I shut up, a few words about the quotation at the head of my blog. "Use the Force, Luke!" are words that echoed in the thoughts of new-minted Jedi Knight Luke Skywalker as he led the rebels' attack against the Death Star of Darth Vader in the original Star Wars movie in 1977. Luke had learned them from his mentor, old Ben Kenobi, when being trained in the ways of the Force.

Using the Force is, I'd say, a metaphor for the wisdom taught by all our religions, a wisdom that comes down to the values of self-control, discipline, and chastity in the broad sense in which that word is spoken of above. Luke had, or developed, such virtues as a Jedi knight-in-training, in contrast to the gruff dissolution of the lifestyle of Han Solo. Han was by no means evil like Darth Vader; he was good, but as a cynical hothead he was clearly no candidate for Jedi knighthood.

The character of Obi-wan Kenobi made manifest such wisdom and maturity as young Luke was in need of en route to his knighthood. Often, those in the presence of Ben Kenobi would automatically do as the Force would have them do, no matter how much they were customarily in thrall to the Dark Side. That's why I hereby make "Use the Force, Luke!" the epigraph to this blog.

Kathleen Parker on Francis Collins

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker's piece about Francis Collins, A Physician-Geneticist Seeks to Foster Both Faith and Science, is a must-read for anyone interested in the question of whether one can be a Christian and believe in evolution, too.

Francis Collins headed the Human Genome Project, a big part of the scientific effort that cataloged our species' genes, so he is a scientist par excellence. He is a believer in the theory of evolution. A noteworthy Christian as well, he does not see any conflict between the two.

Everybody knows that many Christians disagree on this. Of those who think evolution is anti-Christian, Parker writes, "Their objections haven't changed much since Billy Sunday first articulated them almost 100 years ago and revolve around the fear that acceptance of evolution negates God."

That, then, is the heart of the matter. If Christians could come to see that evolution does not — repeat, does not — negate God, the world would be a better place.

"To that end," writes Parker, "[Collins] created the BioLogos Foundation and last month launched a Web site — BioLogos.org — to advance an alternative to the extreme views that tend to dominate the debate ... Through the foundation and Web site, Collins is hoping to help home-schoolers and other Christian educators come to grips with their scientific doubts. Among other projects, he intends to develop curricula that combine faith and science."

To which I say, more power to him!


We Christians need to embrace evolution, I would say, because for some of us to hold out against it not only splits the church, it splits society at large along fault lines that don't really need to be there. It unnecessarily puts off people who are not yet believers. It makes all religion seem, to some, foolish and dispensable.

Plus, Parker cites Collins as arguing that:

The problem of not believing in evolution as one might not believe in, say, goblins or flying pigs has repercussions beyond the obvious — that the United States will continue to fall behind other nations in science education. Collins says that many creationist-trained young people suffer an intense identity crisis when they leave home for college, only to discover that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Talk about messing with your mind.

Collins says he hears from dozens of young people so afflicted. Most susceptible to crisis are children who have been home-schooled [as was Collins himself, until the sixth grade] or who have attended Christian schools.

I am well aware how hard it is to get evolution opponents to, so to speak, see the light. Darwin's theory (as brought up to date over the century-and-a-half since he published On the Origin of Species in 1859) is hard to grasp. It demands belief in things that seem wholly counterintuitive, like the ability of hereditary material — genes, DNA — to stay basically the same from one generation to the next, and on to the next, except of course when it does change.

That is what "mutations" are, changes in genetic material, and they happen a lot. It's just that, as there are so many genes per organism, "a lot" turns out to be an exceedingly tiny percentage of the total number of genes passed to offspring from their parents. Too, most mutations either make no tangible difference to survival chances, or if they do make for palpable change, they can get snuffed out in the offspring that bear them because they make that offspring less well adapted to the environment.

Such "survival of the fittest" is key to evolution. In a dangerous world, more offspring are produced than can possibly make it to adulthood and produce yet more offspring. Which ones produce their own posterity and which ones don't is often determined by which ones have genetically derived characteristics that fit them best to the circumstances under which they find themselves living.

Darwin's name for this reality was "natural selection." Evolutionists emphasize that it is purposeless and blind. Even so, along with the mutations that occur at random in genetic material and the "superfecundity" which ensures that there are way more offspring born than can possibly survive, it is the guarantor of evolutionary change.

If one is an evolutionist, one also has to believe that changes in the stuff of heredity, when they are not vetoed by natural selection, take uncountably long amounts of time — hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years — to make major changes in what their host organisms look like or how they function, very occasionally leading over eons and eons to the actual emergence of a brand new species.

Still, our planet's fossil record seems to show — "fossils" are remains of living organisms that have been preserved somehow — that there are bursts of "speciation" in which large numbers of new species arrive all at once. These short bursts punctuate much longer periods of stasis and equilibrium. There are also occasional "mass extinctions" in which large numbers of species rapidly perish.


To get a new species to emerge, nature first has to find a way to make sure two populations of a single ancestor species get "reproductively isolated" from each other, perhaps owing to the interposition of a geographic barrier. One branch will then start adapting to a changed environment and, typically millions of years later, Bob's your uncle (as the British say). If the barrier is then removed, the two formerly isolated groups will no longer interbreed; they are separate species.

Geologically, the Earth is something like 4.6 billion years old, and the first organisms, single-celled bacteria or the like, appeared perhaps 2.7 billion years ago. To our minds, things remained pretty dull until the seemingly rapid appearance of most of today's major groups of complex organisms around 530 million years ago, in the Cambrian explosion.

As of about 65 million years ago, dinosaurs roamed the Earth. When they went extinct, little organisms who fed their young on milk — the early mammals — began to have a field day. For the first time, the world was their oyster.

By some five to seven million years ago our closest living cousins, the chimpanzees, were well-established in Africa. From them, the first species of our own genus, Homo, split off. (See Human evolution in Wikipedia.) Our own particular species, Homo sapiens, is all that is left of that genus. Its earliest known examples, called "archaic Homo sapiens," arose less than one half million years ago. It's hard to be absolutely sure these early humans were precisely of our species, though most scientists say they were.

Roughly 250,000 years ago, in a time between two ice ages, Homo sapiens proper appeared. By 160,000 years ago, the first "anatomically modern" version of our species had arrived.


Less than 10,000 years ago, certain humans began worshiping a single God, Yahweh. The earliest known copy of the Torah dates from the 7th century B.C.E., about 9,000 years ago. From it and its Abrahamic tradition descend the Judaism, Christianity, and Islam of today.

The Torah — the most holy scripture of Judaism, revered by Christians as the first five books of their Old Testament — begins with the book of Genesis, whose first chapter describes how the Lord, the One God, in his power and might created the world and everything in it, including all living kinds and mankind itself.

Today's creationists insist that this creation story must be read literally, for it must be literally true or true not at all. If it is literally true, the theory of evolution cannot be right.

I say the creationists are dead wrong in their belief. Genesis, chapter one, was written (or written down, out of earlier oral tradition) by and for a pre-scientific people who could not have understood today's scientific evolution theory. The point of the story was, and remains, the establishment of the fact that the Lord God is a unique deity of incomprehensible power and might.

God is supernatural, and how He creates the world is beyond our categories of thought. Yet stories must be told. But why would we who believe in Him want to cage His unimaginable power and might to create the world as He sees fit within any particular story and its entirely human categories of thought?

Francis Collins, according to Kathleen Parker, puts it this way: "To Collins, Darwin is a threat only if one thinks that God is an underachiever. Collins doesn't happen to believe that. His study of genes has led him to conclude that God is both outside of nature and outside of time. He's big, in other words. The idea that God would create the mechanism of evolution makes sense."

Don't Eat the Marshmallow!

An interesting article in The New Yorker of May 18, 2009: "Don't!" by Jonah Lehrer.

The article is about the scientific investigation of self-control. Decades ago, a psychologist named Walter Mischel experimented to see whether there were meaningful differences among four-year-olds' abilities to postpone gratification. He left them alone in a room with instructions not to eat a marshmallow until he returned from an errand outside the room, at which time they could have two marshmallows, not just one. But if they couldn't wait, they could ring a bell, and he would come back in right away and give them just a single marshmallow.

Some of the kids could delay gratification for as long as fifteen minutes, the outer limit imposed by Mischel; others held out for three minutes or just 30 seconds before the bell got rung, and some stuffed a marshmallow into their mouth right away without even ringing the bell. One lad, tested with Oreo cookies rather than marshmallows, opened a cookie and licked out the cream filling before slyly re-assembling the cookie and returning it to the tray.

In short, some of the kids were "high delayers" at the age of four, while others were "low delayers." One might assume the large differences at such a young age to be genetic, but Mischel believes there is a dance between nature (genes) and nurture (upbringing; environmental factors) such that either/or questions about those two poles of behavior causation are meaningless.


My interest in this has to do with my belief that postponing gratification and the practice of self-control are crucial to traditional religious standards of morality.

We Christians pray, "Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil." For a four-year-old, temptation is being left alone in a room with a tray of marshmallows they aren't permitted to touch, and evil is stealthily consuming the filling of an Oreo cookie without letting on what one has done.

Whether it's waiting until Christmas morning to open presents or waiting until marriage to have sex, postponing gratification has always been part and parcel of the Christian experience.

Speaking just for myself as a baby boomer, my personal experience has been one of becoming a consistent "high delayer" only later in life. This seems to have been a result of becoming, in midlife, a Christian in more than name only.


Before I was 40, I was not religious. And in many ways I'd say I was a low delayer, though never one who would grab the marshmallow without ringing the bell. Accordingly, I think Mischel and the other researchers mentioned in the article ought to make a careful distinction between low delayers who nonetheless play by the rules, and those who secretly filch Oreo fillings and look innocent when the adult returns.

Another thing: in my experience there seem to be two classes of evildoing. I was never tempted to become a bully. I have always been appalled at snobbery and intolerance. I have had relatively little trouble getting on board with feminism, inclusiveness, and multiculturalism.

Consuming illicit marshmallows (or other banned substances) was more my style. Being in a big hurry about obtaining gratification was something else again ... something that waxed and waned over the course of my formative years, exactly as Mischel's research shows it might. Mischel believes high and low delayers are determined at least in part by the specific contexts in which the behavior is taking place.

Low delayers can use various tricks to make themselves high delayers in a specific context, says Mischel. For example, he successfully trained kids faced with the task of not eating a marshmallow to imagine it as a picture in a frame, or a fluffy cloud. He found the kids that were already high delayers had their own tricks, such as occupying their minds with other pursuits while they waited.


Mischel's original research has been followed up by himself and other experimenters who are interested in, among other things, how the four-year-olds from the late 1960s fared in adulthood. In general, the high-delay children have done better in several areas of life. This result has been confirmed by other research. For instance, Angela Lee Duckworth has found that "the ability to delay gratification — eighth graders were given a choice between a dollar right away or two dollars the following week — was a far better predictor of academic performance than I.Q."

Of the original "marshmallow subjects," the article says, some "failed the marshmallow task as four-year-olds but ended up becoming high-delaying adults. 'This is the group I’m most interested in,' [Mischel] says. 'They have substantially improved their lives'." For this to happen, ad hoc mental tricks are not enough; "the real challenge is turning those tricks into habits, and that requires years of diligent practice."

It is my belief that religion does precisely that. It starts out giving us tricks to delay gratification in specific circumstances and thus gradually turns waiting and postponing into a way of life.

For instance, Christians have a way of imagining that Jesus walks beside them at all times. Of course, the answer to "What would Jesus do?" is never to steal the filling from an Oreo cookie.

Jesus's counsel would ever be, "Don't eat the marshmallow!" At some point we learn not to partake too soon without always needing to have His voice in our ear, and we have the basis to begin living an "It's not all about you" life.

God of Chastity, Part II

Christopher West's book Theology of the Body for Beginners is an old topic in this blog — see the earlier entries in my Theology of the Body series about the theological outlook espoused by the late Pope John Paul II, as described in West's book — but today I think of it as, for me, new wine in new skin.

John Paul II made it clear that there is nothing profane about combining "theology" with "the body" or "the flesh" ... as in S-E-X. Indeed, the truth is quite the opposite: there is nothing more appropriate to a Christian outlook. There is nothing more important for the Christian to understand than the reason St. Paul could write, in his letter to the Ephesians:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church — for we are members of his body. "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." This is a profound mystery — but I am talking about Christ and the church. (Ephesians 6:25-32)

This makes it sound as if Christ and the church have a "one flesh," i.e., a marital, relationship — as indeed they do! Relationships of the "flesh" — sex — image or reflect the mysterious love of the three persons that make up the Holy Trinity for one another: Father, Son, and Spirit. This is the meaning of sex.

West calls this the "spousal analogy." To Catholics, as I hope to all Christians, analogies are profound tokens of truth. True, God is all spirit, and his three inner persons do not have "sex lives." But God's self-revelation in the Bible, whether Old Testament or New, uses a spousal analogy at just about every turning. Paul, for example, cites one of the earliest verses in the Bible, Genesis 2:24:

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

The idea that Christ, as the Lamb of God, is the "bridegroom" and the church is his "bride" comes to fruition in one of the last Bible verses, Revelation 19:7:

Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready.

All the way through the Bible, the deep, inner nature of the created world, and of us, is shown as being fundamentally nuptial. "Be fruitful and multiply" is not just something that would be nice for us to do. It is our most basic way of being in conformance with the contours God gave his created universe.


So, yes, I've gone over to "the other side" on some very basic things. In modern parlance, I've had a paradigm shift.

The way I know I've had a paradigm shift is that when I saw, on West's p. 14, "Make no mistake: in the final analysis the abortion debate is not about when life begins. It is about the meaning of sex," I finally got it.

The first two times I read the book, that passage did not even merit being highlighted — though I was assiduously highlighting passages all around it. This time, I thought it deserved highlighting not in my customary blue marking pen but in day-glo pink.

"The meaning of sex." Sex has a meaning? A deep, permanent, nature-of-all-things, fundamental significance, as opposed to what two consenting adults happen to be willing to accord to it, at the moment, if not tomorrow, or next week, or next year? The meaning of sex?

It was like the scene in The Blues Brothers where Jake (John Belushi) sees the light:

Jake: "The band ... the band ..."
Rev. Cleophus [James Brown]: "DO YOU SEE THE LIGHT?!"
Jake: "THE BAND!!!"
Rev. Cleophus: "DO YOU SEE THE LIGHT?!!"
Elwood [Dan Aykroyd]: "What light?!"
Rev. Cleophus: "DO YOU SEEEE THE LIGHT?!"
Jake: "YES!! YES!! JESUS H. TAP-DANCING CHRIST ... I HAVE SEEN THE LIGHT!!!"

I finally got it. I saw the light. Sex has a meaning. You can't be a serious Christian, not really, until you are willing to admit it. For years, I was unwilling to admit it.

I had all the data at my disposal: how my church wanted its members to act in accordance with that fundamental outlook; how the outlook permeates the Bible. I just didn't see it. I just didn't want to accept that such a contentious, divisive — and, to me, seemingly peripheral — facet of modern-day living as our "right to sexual freedom" should be allowed to divide people, both within the church and outside it.

But it's not peripheral. It's central. It's make-or-break. Marital fidelity, chastity outside marriage, the male-female union as "one flesh" never to be sundered by man, the time of the beginning of life as periperal to the abortion debate, the reason homosexual unions are against God's plan, the reason casual sex, pornography, and masturbation are wrong ... all these hot-button topics of the present day look different to me, post paradigm shift, than they did before.

I no longer think Christians who — such as I myself did, prior to the shift — think they are complete Christians even though they differ with their tradition on issues of sex, gender, marriage, reproduction, and family are actually finished.


Paradigm shifts are funny. Not ha-ha-funny or peculiar-funny. They are funny because you can't really argue about them, or with them. You either see the new paradigm, or you don't.

In a way, I have "understood" what is now my new paradigm for a long, long time. I just didn't get it.

I understood that the church saw issues of the flesh and the body as crucial, where I simply didn't.

I understood that the Bible uses what West calls the "spousal analogy" throughout ... but I thought of old-fashioned analogies as disposable and dispensible, in the modern world.

I understood that God's revelation of his own nature and truth to us in scripture was timeless ... while mentally striking out those ideas that didn't accord with my own way of looking at things!

So I didn't immediately snap to attention the first time or two I read West's sentence about the abortion debate and the meaning of sex. His thought went right over my head. If someone had brought it to my attention, I would have rejected it or tried to explain it away.

A paradigm shift feels like something snapping into place, something seating itself, in your mind, in just the way it is meant to be. You just know, once you have had it, that you'll never be the same. And, sure, you want to share it with everybody. At the same time, mature reflection tells you that they, too, likely have all the data at hand, and unless something just snaps into place for them, they just aren't going to agree with you. They still have that old paradigm, the one you used to have. Paradigm shifts do not lend themselves to easy solidarity.

God of Chastity, Part I

This isn't a particularly easy topic to talk about, but here goes anyway...

Let me put it this way: I believe in God. I also believe that sex should be reserved for marriage. Furthermore, I believe that the truth about God and the truth about chastity, as I'll call the latter, are tightly intertwined.

Once upon a time, it was common knowledge that sex outside marriage was a sin against God. That sex without benefit of marriage was of questionable morality was the understanding I was given as a child in the 1950s, even though I wasn't brought up religious. Then came the Sexual Revolution. Though my contemporaries began availing themselves of "carnal knowledge" at every opportunity — and I was no saint — I never got comfortable with the new idea that "anything goes."

In midlife I became religious for the first time. That was about 20 years ago. But somehow, I never particularly came to believe that being religious necessarily implied being chaste.

Instead, I was of the opinion — see many of my earlier entries in this blog — that the old rules about chastity were passé. Or, at least, they were "optional." They grew out of the same Judeo-Christian tradition that kept women from full equality with men, made abortion and homosexual acts sinful, etc., etc., etc.

Recently, though, I have woken up to the fact that, deep down, I still believe that "family values" are the best values. I never really stopped believing that. I just compartmentalized that idea away from my religious beliefs.

This, despite the fact that I am perfectly well aware, and long have been, that there is no theme more characteristic of Judeo-Christian scripture — the Old Testament and the New — than the sanctity of marriage. It is a bit difficult to detect a "through line" to the narrative of the Bible, but one does seem to be there. In the beginning, Adam and Eve's "marriage" in the Garden of Eden is tainted by Original Sin. In the end, in the Book of Revelation, there is a sacred marriage between Christ, who has come back to this world, and his Church, encompassing all people who are saved.

Along the way, between Genesis and Revelation, we keep getting clues that marriage is sacrosanct. When Abraham and his descendants are told to "be fruitful and multiply," it is within the bounds of marriage that this is to take place. The Old Testament strictures against promiscuity, homosexuality, and masturbation make most sense against this backdrop.

Jesus, with his "one flesh" dictum, took marriage to be sacrosanct. In Matthew 19, we read:

Some Pharisees came to him to test him [Jesus]. They asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?" Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate."

Though the first post-Resurrection Christians were told by Paul to eschew marriage if they could tolerate celibacy, this seems to have been under the assumption that the Second Coming was imminent and there were, meanwhile, more important things to be done, such as evangelizing the heathen world.

Once the Church began to realize Christ's return might be a long way off, it renewed the ancient Israelite emphasis on the sanctity of marriage, and Paul himself was emphatic in his Letter to the Romans that "anything goes" was not a proper way to worship the Lord. (Paul also wrote in one of his epistles of the need for wives to defer to their husbands ... one of the most resented passages of scripture these days!)

I don't personally claim to know with any certainty how to square scripture with modern-day sexuality is all its most controversial aspects. But I do now claim that it makes no sense to call oneself a Christian or a Jew and not take with the utmost seriousness the claims these religions traditionally make on us to be chaste and to hold marriage sacrosanct.

Does Evolution Contradict the Bible?

I'd like to propose a possible way of demonstrating that Darwin's theory of evolution not only does not contradict the Bible, it upholds it!

I'll lay my method of reasoning out in this and subsequent "Does Evolution Contradict the Bible?" posts to this blog. In this post I'd like to begin to sketch out my reasoning process and the worldview that goes along with it. Then I'd like to follow up in subsequent posts by going into more detail on each of the steps of reasoning involved.

In discussing my point of view about evolution and religion, I want to be as openhanded as I can. I don't want to "snow" anyone into feeling that they need to agree with a position that is fundamentally incomprehensible to them, or even downright offensive.

So let me be crystal clear right up front: my whole argument depends on analogies. The way I look at things depends on "reasoning by analogy," as I call it. I'm going to try to draw certain analogies between what science teaches us and what the Bible teaches us.

I know a great many people are uncomfortable with analogical reasoning, so let this stand as a fair early warning. If you read any further into this post and those that follow, you are apt to be confronted with ways of looking at things that you may find disturbing ... even if you can't say why they disturb you. One reason they may make you uncomfortable is that there is analogical reasoning going on here, and many people don't care much for that type of reasoning.


Science teaches us that life on earth evolved from primitive, single-celled life forms into a panoply of species, one of which is Homo sapiens: us. This happened over the course of billions of years, as the age of the earth is dated at roughly 4.6 billion years.

Many people who take the Bible seriously and want to read it in as literal a way as possible have trouble with Darwin's theory of evolution because it seems to contradict the creation story in chapter 1 of Genesis. This is the familiar story of how the Lord God created the world and everything in it — including all types of living creatures, culminating in man — in six days. Then God rested on the seventh day.

In 1859, Charles Darwin published his book On the Origin of Species and said that all species developed slowly and gradually out of the first forms of life on earth, in response to what we today understand to be genetic mutations. Mutations can be beneficial if they cause some organisms to be better equipped to win the struggle known colloquially as the "survival of the fittest." Natural selection is the name survival of the fittest is more formally called by.

In the last three or four decades, scientists have begun to augment that standard Darwinian story of evolution. They have begun to study two theories that are thought to relate closely to Darwin's: the theory of chaos and the theory of complexity. These two theories provide a way for us to explain the evolution of life on earth as an example of change that happens at the "edge of chaos."


Chaos theory tells us that, in addition to two very familiar types of orderly change, certain systems are capable of undergoing a third type of change: chaos.

Chaotic change happens when a "nonlinear dynamical system," as it is formally called, is following a path or trajectory that leads it to, as a well-known song puts it, "who knows where, who knows where." Orderly systems either never change at all or change in a cyclical, predictable way. For example, on earth day follows night in a regular, orderly fashion. Our day-night cycle is definitely not in thrall to what chaos theorists have called a "strange attractor," one whose eventual destination is "who knows where."

However, the weather on this planet is on such an attractor. The weather on our planet is unpredictable beyond a horizon of a few days into the future, because the weather is fundamentally chaotic. Scientists are wont to say that it is subject to the "butterfly effect": a butterfly beating its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas.

Here's where my penchant for analogical reasoning enters the picture. I claim that it is a valid analogy to identify chaotic behavior with what theologians and religious believers call "demonic activity."


In a later post, I'll try to better justify this analogy. At that time I'll go into greater detail than I'll go into here. But here, for what it's worth, are some samples of my reasoning.

First of all, let me suggest that there are no chaotic systems in heaven.

Summon up whatever standard images you have of heavenly life (whether we are religious or not). Are there storms? Are there tornadoes? Is there even "weather" as we know it?

True, there is air to breathe. There are perhaps gentle breezes, even fluffy white clouds for harp-plucking angels to recline on. But no storm clouds, no hurricanes, no monsoons. In fact, the weather in heaven never changes!

This tells us, I would suggest, that the strange, chaotic attractor that the weather on earth is in thrall to doesn't exist in heaven.

Another thing that doesn't exist in heaven is heart attacks. A common kind of heart attack here on earth is ventricular fibrillation, and it's always fatal if not reversed by the medical intervention called defibrillation. "V-fib," as it's called for short, is an instance of chaos. Our ordinary, endlessly repeated, regular heartbeat careens off on a strange, chaotic attractor, and then we die. That's definitely not something than can happen in heaven.

So I claim that it makes sense, at least provisionally, to think of chaotic activity as something totally out of place in God's own kingdom. Which suggests that, if you are at all inclined to believe in sin and Satan, it makes sense to think of chaos as satanic or demonic.


OK, I can hear you saying, so what? So what if we can draw some kind of analogy between chaotic behavior and demonic activity? Does such an analogy have any import, any meaning?

In order to answer that question I need to note, first of all, that Judeo-Christian religion has historically looked at certain things that occur here on earth as inspired by Satan. Satan, by whatever name you want to call that personage, has been called "Prince of This World," because he is said to reign here just as God reigns in heaven.

Now, that kind of talk today seems to us old-fashioned, even medieval. Those who are not religious believers will disparage it in exactly those terms, and a lot of those who do have religious faith will also find such talk quaint and outdated. (I count myself in that latter group, by the way.)

So why even bring it up?

I bring it up because I think granting such a notion credence and then drawing the aforementioned analogy between chaos as science studies it and satanic activity as religion envisions it gives us a way to harmonize evolution with the Bible. Along the way, it gives us a way to make sense of what philosophers and theologians call the "problem of evil," also known as the "problem of pain."

Let's look at pain. Significantly, there is no pain involved in the creation story we find in Genesis 1. Nothing in the process by which God created everything over the course of six days entails pain or suffering. God experienced no pain, even if he did see fit to rest on Day 7. Nor did any of his freshly minted creatures suffer in any way whatever.

Not so, though, in the second creation story in the Book of Genesis.

This is the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Everything was idyllic for them ... until they were tempted by a serpent to do precisely what God had instructed them not to do. Once they ate of the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, God had no choice but to evict them from Paradise, telling Eve that all of her female descendants would accordingly suffer what we today call "labor pains" whenever they do exactly what God later on was going to tell the biblical patriarchs to do: be fruitful and multiply.

So if we read between the lines just a little bit, the second creation story is as fraught with pain as the first is pain-free.

That second creation story introduces Satan (the serpent was the devil in disguise) and sin. Believers in the Judeo-Christian God call the sin of Adam and Eve "original sin" and say that it besmirches the souls of all of us descendants of Adam — with the important exception, if you are a Christian believer, of Jesus and his mother, the Virgin Mary.


Now, if you even begin to go along with my aforementioned analogy between satanic activity as religion talks of it and chaotic change here on earth — a kind of change unknown in heaven — you may be able to see why I think the "edge of chaos" that some scientists speak of is extremely important.

The "edge of chaos" is a poetic way of referring to a fourth type of behavior that dynamical systems can undergo. We have the two types of order, static and cyclical. We have a third type of behavior: chaos. And we have Type IV behavior, as what goes on at the edge of chaos is called.

Type IV behavior happens at the edge of chaos. Systems that exhibit it combine the surprise and unpredictability of chaotic behavior with the graceful stability and dogged persistence of orderly behavior.

Life on earth, as it evolves, is just such a system that exhibits the generation of surprising novelty along with graceful stability and dogged persistence.

To be precise, the earth's biosphere is a nonlinear dynamical system whose behavior — not its fundamental character, its behavior — is Type IV. Because the biosphere's behavior is Type IV, it operates at the edge of chaos and is capable of both graceful stability and unprecedented novelty. If it couldn't generate novelty, new species could never originate. If it didn't exhibit graceful stability, new species could not survive.

Nonlinear dynamical systems that exhibit Type IV behavior are said to be "complex adaptive systems." Their behavior exhibits "complexity," as distinct from "chaos." As such, their behavior is "adaptive" — meaning that a system exhibiting such behavior "evolves" in such a way as to "keep on keeping on," no matter what sorts of threats it faces to its survival.

Think of the extinction of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. At that time, reptiles ruled the planet, and our mammalian forebears were but small rodent-like critters. Then something catastrophic happened. We are not totally sure what it was, but it may have been an asteroid impact that kicked up so much dust into the atmosphere that sunlight couldn't get through to keep most plants alive. Many dinosaurs depended on plants for their diet, while others who were meat-eaters ate other plant-eating animals. Result: every last dinosaur starved to death — except for those that had evolved into birds, which survive to this day.

But, let's get back to how the biosphere responded to the chaos that it was presumably thrown into at the time of that initial catastrophe, whatever it was. Complexity theory has it that a system thrown into chaos — a system which engages in Type III behavior — can be capable of restoring itself to the edge of chaos, which is Type IV behavior. As that happens, the system generates new ways galore of keeping itself going. When such a system is a planet's biosphere, those "new ways galore" amount to the advent of new species.

In the wake of the extinction of the dinosaurs there was a rapid burst of speciation, the term scientists use to refer to the origins of species. New mammal species appeared in particular, which led to yet more new species of mammals ... which, many millions of years later, led to us.

The origin of species and the post-catastrophe return out of chaos to the fecund edge of chaos are two ways of describing the same thing. The same system — the earth's biosphere — is capable of either Type III behavior, which is chaos, or Type IV behavior, which is evolution.

Neither type of behavior is found in God's own kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven. We are talking about events here on earth. But clearly, God prefers Type IV behavior (evolution) to Type III behavior (chaos). Here is another reason to say that there is a strong analogy between chaos as science talks about it and demonic activity as religion construes it.

But Type III behavior (chaos) is something that any system which is capable of Type IV behavior (evolution) is also capable of. It is as if there is an intrinsic moral dimension to the behavior of nonlinear dynamical systems.


Notice that a complex adaptive system's seemingly magical ability to evolve new strategies of survival and thus to find its way back out of catastrophe and chaos does not imply that it has a mind or is capable of making conscious moral choices.

At the same time, we know that evolution has over the millennia generated creatures that do have minds and can make conscious moral decisions, for we ourselves are such creatures.

We also know that the tree whose forbidden fruit Adam and Eve ate of was called the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Before they ate the fruit, they were like complex adaptive systems as science studies them: unaware of the moral choices they were, willy-nilly, already making. And they experienced no pain ... just there is no reason to think that a biosphere-in-progress which suffers a catastrophe that wipes out its reigning (reptilian) forms of life undergoes any conscious suffering as a result.

Yet that same biosphere eventually produces conscious, morally aware creatures (Homo sapiens) who have definitely eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, who definitely are prone to sin and the blandishments of Satan ... and who definitely undergo suffering and experience pain.

These, then, are the lineaments of my thinking about how the theory of evolution (as augmented by the sciences of chaos and complexity) not only doesn't contradict the Bible, it upholds and reinforces the Bible! I'll have more to say in later entries in this blog ...

Heaartaches in Heaven?

I'm reading Heartaches by the Number, one of the best books out there about country music. In it, David Cantwell and Bill Friskics-Warren list what are in their opinion the best 500 country & western recordings ever and show how, taken all together, they provide us with a web of understanding about what country music really is.

On the back cover, a blurb contributed by one of the brightest stars in the C&W firmament, Loretta Lynn, reads: "If it weren't for heartaches, there'd probably not be country music!"

Reading that and what Cantwell and Friskics-Warren say inside the book about their Top 500 country records of all time set me to thinking that there must not be any country music in heaven. Why not? There can't possibly be heartaches in heaven, now can there?

It all goes to show the difference between this world and the next. And it all leads one to ask, why so much pain and heartache here?

I think there is an answer in the worldview I espouse, but it is not necessarily an answer that will please everyone ... or anyone, for that matter.

My worldview is basically a Judeo-Christian one, yet as a Christian (of the Catholic faith) I am not one to reject scientific ideas about evolution and the origin of our species. In fact, my view of the theory of evolution leans heavily on ideas contributed to it recently by the sciences of complexity.

Among these ideas is the realization that evolution takes place, mathematically speaking, at the "edge of chaos." There are mathematical regimes of order (actually, two of these, one that is static and the other that cycles endlessly), of chaos properly speaking, and of the boundary between order and chaos that has been dubbed the edge of chaos.

Chaos, recent science has shown, pervades the natural order. The weather, beyond a few days of limited forward predictability, is basically a chaotic system. Lots of stuff that goes on in the world is as unpredictable as the weather because it is so exquisitely sensitive to initial conditions and tiny perturbations as to be in thrall to a chaotic "strange attractor." These are the systems that the term "butterfly effect" applies to: it is said that a butterfly beating its wings in Brazil can wind up causing a tornado in Texas, under just the right conditions.

Of course, a tornado tearing through Texas or a hurricane wrecking New Orleans qualify as a big part of the pain we suffer, when something like it happens to us here on earth. Chaotic systems can be pain-causing to us, because they just don't care about us.

But God, we hear, does care about us. God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving, so how can it be true that there is so much pain and heartache in this world he made?

This is what philosophers call the "problem of pain," also known as the "problem of evil." How can the God we read of in the Bible allow so much pain — or evil, if you want to call it by its right name — to transpire in this world?

Another way to put it is to ask why God doesn't vanquish and banish Satan right away, instead of waiting until the end of history. It is Satan, by any of his several biblical names, that religious folk blame for the evil in the world. We know that God and Satan are at war. We know who wins the war: God. We, as Christians, know that God's victory is vouchsafed by Christ's death on the cross and resurrection. So why is there still so much pain and evil in the world? Why hasn't Jesus come again to end the tribulation once and for all?

The answer I would suggest is that evolution, which has produced our species under God's aegis, takes place at the edge of chaos, and you can't have such a boundary zone between order and chaos if chaos (the realm of Satan) has already been quenched by order (God's victory over Satan).