The Meaning of Human Existence (13 page)

The great religions are inspired by belief in an incorruptible deity—or multiple kinds of deities, who may also constitute an all-powerful family. They perform services invaluable to civilization. Their priests bring solemnity to the rites of passage through the cycle of life and death. They sacralize the basic tenets of civil and moral law, comfort the afflicted, and take care of the desperately poor. Inspired by their example, followers strive to be righteous in the sight of man and God. The churches over which they preside are centers of community life. When all else fails, these sacred places, where God dwells immanent on Earth, become ultimate refuges against the iniquities and tragedies of secular life. They and their ministers make more bearable tyranny, war, starvation, and the worst of natural catastrophes.

The great religions are also, and tragically, sources of ceaseless and unnecessary suffering. They are impediments to the grasp of reality needed to solve most social problems in the real world. Their exquisitely human flaw is tribalism. The instinctual force of tribalism in the genesis of religiosity is far stronger than the yearning for spirituality. People deeply need membership in a group, whether religious or secular. From a lifetime of emotional experience, they know that happiness, and indeed
survival itself, require that they bond with others who share some amount of genetic kinship, language, moral beliefs, geographical location, social purpose, and dress code—preferably all of these but at least two or three for most purposes. It is tribalism, not the moral tenets and humanitarian thought of pure religion, that makes good people do bad things.

Unfortunately a religious group defines itself foremost by its creation story, the supernatural narrative that explains how humans came into existence. And this story is also the heart of tribalism. No matter how gentle and high-minded, or subtly explained, the core belief assures its members that God favors them above all others. It teaches that members of other religions worship the wrong gods, use wrong rituals, follow false prophets, and believe fantastic creation stories. There is no way around the soul-satisfying but cruel discrimination that organized religions by definition must practice among themselves. I doubt there ever has been an imam who suggested that his followers try Roman Catholicism or a priest who urged the reverse.

Acceptance of a particular creation story, and of accounts of miracles vouchsafed by it, is called the faith of the believer. Faith is biologically understandable as a Darwinian device for survival and increased reproduction. It is forged by the success of the tribe, the tribe is
united by it when competing with other tribes, and it can be a key to success within the tribe for those members most effective in manipulating the faith to gain internal support. The unending conflicts that generated this powerful social practice were widespread through the Paleolithic Era and have continued unabated to the present time. In more secular societies faith tends to be transmuted into religionlike political ideologies. Sometimes the two great belief categories are combined. Hence, “God favors my political principles over yours, and my principles, not yours, favor God.”

Religious faith offers enormous psychological benefit to the believers. It gives them an explanation for their existence. It makes them feel loved and protected above the members of every other tribal group. The price imposed by the gods and their priests in more primitive societies is unquestioning belief and submission. Throughout evolutionary time this bargain for the human soul was the only bond with the strength to hold the tribe together in both peace and war. It invested its members with a proud identity, legitimized rules of conduct, and explained the mysterious cycle of life and death.

For ages no tribe could survive unless the meaning of its existence was defined by a creation story. The price of the loss of faith was a hemorrhage of commitment, a
weakening and dissipation of common purpose. In the early history of each tribe—late Iron Age for Judaeo-Christianity, and seventh century
CE
for Islam—the myth had to be set in stone in order to work. Once set, no part of it could be discarded. No doubts must be heard by the tribe. The only solution to an outmoded dogma was to finesse or conveniently forget it. Or, in the extreme, break away with a new, competing dogma.

Obviously no two creation stories can both be true. All of those invented by the many known thousands of religions and sects in fact have certainly been false. A great many educated citizens have realized that their own faiths are indeed false, or at least questionable in details. But they understand the rule attributed to the Roman stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger that religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

Scientists by nature tend to be cautious in anything they say about religion, even when expressing skepticism. The distinguished physiologist Anton (Ajax) J. Carlson, when asked what he thought of the 1950 ex cathedra (that is, infallible) pronouncement by Pius XII that the Virgin Mary ascended bodily into heaven, is reported to have responded that he couldn’t be sure because he wasn’t there, but of one thing he was certain, that she passed out at thirty thousand feet.

Might it be better just to leave this vexatious matter alone? Not deny, just forget? After all, the great majority of people in the world are sort of getting along, more or less. However, negligence in the matter is dangerous, both short-term and long-term. National wars may have subsided, obviously due to the fear of their possibly catastrophic outcomes to both sides. But insurgencies, civil wars, and terrorism have not. The principal driving force of mass murders committed during them is tribalism, and the central rationale for lethal tribalism is sectarian religion—in particular the conflict between those faithful to different myths. At the time of writing the civilized world flinches before the brutal struggles between Shiites and Sunnis, the murder of Ahmadiyya Muslims in Pakistan’s cities by other Muslims, and the slaughter of Muslims by Buddhist-led “extremists” in Myanmar. Even the blocking by ultra-Orthodox Jews of liberal Jewish women from the Western Wall is a menacing early symptom of the same social pathology.

Religious warriors are not an anomaly. It is a mistake to classify believers of particular religious and dogmatic religionlike ideologies into two groups, moderate versus extremist. The true cause of hatred and violence is faith versus faith, an outward expression of the ancient instinct of tribalism. Faith is the one thing that makes otherwise good people do bad things. Nowhere do people
tolerate attacks on their person, their family, their country—or their creation myth. In America, for example, it is possible in most places to openly debate different views on religious spirituality—including the nature and even the existence of God, providing it is in the context of theology and philosophy. But it is forbidden to question closely, if at all, the creation myth—the faith—of another person or group, no matter how absurd. To disparage anything in someone else’s sacred creation myth is “religious bigotry.” It is taken as the equivalent of a personal threat.

Another way of expressing the history of religion is that faith has hijacked religious spirituality. The prophets and leaders of organized religions, consciously or not, have put spirituality in the service of groups defined by their creation myths. Awe-inspiring ceremonies and sacred rites and rituals and sacrifices are given the deity in return for worldly security and the promise of immortality. As part of the exchange the deity must also make correct moral decisions. Within the Christian faith, among most of the denominational tribes, God is obliged to be against one or more of the following: homosexuality, artificial contraception, female bishops, and evolution.

The Founding Fathers of the United States understood the risk of tribal religious conflict very well.
George Washington observed, “Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing and ought most to be deprecated.” James Madison agreed, noting the “torrents of blood” that result from religious competition. John Adams insisted that “the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” America has slipped a bit since then. It has become almost mandatory for political leaders to assure the electorate that they have a faith, even, as for the Mormonism of Mitt Romney, if it looks ridiculous to the great majority. Presidents often listen to the counsel of Christian advisers. The phrase “under God” was introduced into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and today no major political candidate would dare suggest it be removed.

Most serious writers on religion conflate the transcendent quest for meaning with the tribalistic defense of creation myths. They accept, or fear to deny, the existence of a personal deity. They read into the creation myths humanity’s effort to communicate with the deity, as part of the search for an uncorrupted life now and beyond death. Intellectual compromisers one and all, they include liberal theologians of the Niebuhr school, philosophers battening on learned ambiguity, literary
admirers of C. S. Lewis, and others persuaded, after deep thought, that there must be Something Out There. They tend to be unconscious of prehistory and the biological evolution of human instinct, both of which beg to shed light on this very important subject.

The compromisers face an insoluble problem, which the great, conflicted nineteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called the Absolute Paradox. Dogmas forced on believers, he said, are not just impossible but incomprehensible—hence absurd. What Kierkegaard had in mind in particular was the core of the Christian creation myth. “The Absurd is that the eternal truth has come to exist, that God has come to exist, is born, has grown up and so on, and has become just like a person, impossible to tell apart from another person.” It was incomprehensible, even if declared true, Kierkegaard continued, that God as Christ entered into the physical world in order to suffer, leaving martyrs to suffer for real.

The Absolute Paradox tears at all in every religion who seek an honest resolution of body and soul. It is the inability to conceive of an all-knowing divinity who created a hundred billion galaxies, yet whose humanlike emotions include feelings of pleasure, love, generosity, vindictiveness, and a consistent and puzzling lack of concern for the horrific things Earth-dwellers endure under
the deity’s rule. To explain that “God is testing our faith” and “God moves in mysterious ways” doesn’t cut it.

As Carl Jung once said, some problems can never be solved, only outgrown. And so it must be for the Absolute Paradox. There is no solution because there is nothing to solve. The problem is not in the nature or even in the existence of God. It is in the biological origins of human existence and in the nature of the human mind, and what made us the evolutionary pinnacle of the biosphere. The best way to live in this real world is to free ourselves of demons and tribal gods.

14

Free Will

N
euroscientists who work on the human brain seldom mention free will. Most consider it a subject better left, at least for the time being, to philosophers. “We will attend to it when we’re ready and have time,” they seem to say. Meanwhile, their sights are set on the brighter and more realistically conceived grail of science, the physical basis of consciousness, of which free will is a part. No scientific quest is more important to humanity than to nail the phantom of conscious thought. Everyone, scientists, philosophers, and religious believers alike, can agree with the neurobiologist Gerald Edelman that “consciousness is the guarantor of all we hold to be human and precious. Its permanent loss is considered to be the equivalent of death, even if the body persists in its vital signs.”

The physical basis of consciousness won’t be an easy phenomenon to grasp. The human brain is the most complex system known in the Universe, either organic
or inorganic. Each of the billions of nerve cells (neurons) composing its functional part forms synapses and communicates with an average of ten thousand others. Each launches messages along its own axon pathway, using an individual digital code of membrane firing patterns. The brain is organized into regions, nuclei, and staging centers that divide functions among them. The parts respond in different ways to hormones and sensory stimuli originating from outside the brain, while sensory and motor neurons all over the body communicate so intimately with the brain as to be virtually a part of it.

Half of the twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand genes of the entire human genetic code participate in one manner or other in the prescription of the brain-mind system. This amount of commitment has resulted from one of the most rapid evolutionary changes known in any advanced organ system of the biosphere. It entailed a more than twofold increase in brain size across three million years, from at or below 600cc in the australopith prehuman ancestor to 680cc in
Homo habilis
, thence to about 1,400cc in modern
Homo sapiens
.

Philosophers have labored off and on for over two thousand years to explain consciousness. Of course they have, it’s their job. Innocent of biology, however, they have for the most part understandably gotten nowhere. I don’t believe it too harsh to say that the history of
philosophy when boiled down consists mostly of failed models of the brain. A few of the modern neurophilosophers such as Patricia Churchland and Daniel Dennett have made a splendid effort to interpret the findings of neuroscience research as these become available. They have helped others to understand, for example, the ancillary nature of morality and rational thought. Others, especially those of poststructuralist bent, are more retrograde. They doubt that the “reductionist” or “objectivist” program of the brain researchers will ever succeed in explaining the core of consciousness. Even if it has a material basis, subjectivity in this view is beyond the reach of science. To make their argument, the mysterians (as they are sometimes called) point to the qualia, the subtle, almost inexpressible feelings we experience about sensory input. For example, “red” we know from physics, but what are the deeper sensations of “redness”? So what can the scientists ever hope to tell us in larger scale about free will, or about the soul, which for religious thinkers at least is the ultimate of ineffability?