The 2 faces of IS: avenger of Muslims and genocidal ideologues

I apologise in advance to overseas readers (outside Australia) who can’t view this, but this interview on ABC’s Lateline current affairs programme on Thursday (8 Oct) was a standout. Emma Alberici, a well respected television journalist and previous foreign correspondent with ABC’s European bureau, interviews, or attempts to interview, Wassim Doureihi, member of Hizb ut-Tahir; an organisation which has been banned in many countries, but not Australia or the UK. This link gives a good summary of that interview, but it’s also ABC, so maybe unavailable outside Oz.

A lecture was held by the group’s Arabic spokesperson, Ismail Al-Wahwah, at Lakemba, Sydney last night, which, according to the SMH and Guardian (links), was not much different in rhetoric to Doureihi’s diatribe a few days earlier. Basically, they claim the current situation in Iraq is a direct consequence of America’s, and its allies’, involvement in that conflict, as well as earlier conflicts involving Muslims. And that, apparently, justifies everything that IS does. Though Doureihi never actually condones IS, he went to extraordinary lengths to avoid discussing their actions and/or strategy when talking to Alberici, which frustrated her enormously.

There are a couple of issues I wish to address: firstly, the sheer distortion in Dourheihi’s argument that doesn’t match the evidence; and secondly, the possible motivation behind people’s desire to join this ‘fight’ and how they manage to justify its atrocities.

Doureihi repeatedly asserted that the current conflict in Iraq is all about foreign occupation. But there is no foreign occupation in Iraq at present – the current Western forces have been invited by the Iraqi democratically elected government (as Alberici pointed out) – and IS arose in Syria, where there is no Western intervention at all, and moved into Iraq before the West got involved. Besides, IS are not attacking a foreign occupation in Iraq (the Westerners they behead are not military personnel); they are attacking people who have lived there for generations, mainly Kurds and Yazidi. In fact, they are committing genocide against these people, which has nothing to do with any foreign occupation.

One can argue about the wisdom of the West’s intervention in Iraq under Bush, especially considering the legerdemain of the so-called WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction) that never existed, and its woefully poor execution under Cheney and Rumsfeld. But you have to draw a very long bow to argue that IS have entered Iraq to right the wrongs of that misadventure, when they kill all males who won’t convert to Islam and sell all their women into slavery.

A few years back, I read The Islamist by Ed Hussain, who was radicalised in Great Britain, as a student, before becoming disillusioned and returning to a more moderate position on Islam. It’s an insightful book in that it distinguishes between the religion of Islam as practiced by many Muslims living in secular societies and the political ideology of extremists who want to reshape the world into a totalitarian Islamic state. Hussain believed, at the time, the entire world would inevitably become a ‘Caliphate’, not least because it was ‘God’s Will’. What turned Hussain around was when a student was stabbed to death by a member of his own group. Hussain suddenly realised he wanted no part of an organisation that saw killing non-adherents as part of its creed.

When IS first declared itself a caliphate, an Australian academic (I can’t recall his name or his department) made the observation, in regard to Muslims in Indonesia, that just the idea of a caliphate would have enormous appeal that many would find hard to resist. In other words, many see this as some sort of Islamic nirvana, a new ‘world order’, where all wrongs will be made right and all peoples will be made to see and understand God’s wisdom and be guided by it through Sharia law. Naturally, this is anathema to anyone living in a Western democratic secular society, and is seen as turning back the clock centuries, before the Enlightenment and before the European renaissance and before modern scientific relevations, not to mention undoing generations of women’s independence of men, whether sexually, financially or educationally.

And this is the nexus of this conflict: it’s a collision of ideas and ideals that has no compromise. IS and its ilk, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Boko Haram in Africa, are fighting against the 21st Century. They know as well as we do, that there is no place for them, politically, in the world’s global future, and they can only rail against this by killing anyone who does not agree with their vision, and committing all women to marital slavery.

Finally, there is a comment by an Australian Islamist fighting in Syria, who believes that IS’s tactics of beheading journalists and aid workers is justified because their deaths are insignificant compared to the hundreds of innocent people (including children) killed by Western sponsored air raids. If these deaths can ‘blackmail’ America and its allies into not killing innocents then it is worth it, according to him.

David Kilcullen, an Australian expert on Afghanistan and a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice during the Bush administration, is one of the few who argued against drone strikes in Pakistan because they would ‘recruit’ jihadists. The abovementioned apologist for IS would suggest that such a belief was justified.

However, IS don’t just behead Westerners; it’s one of their psychological tactics against anyone who doesn’t convert to their specific brand of Islam. It’s meant to horrify and terrorise all their enemies, whoever they might be, and it succeeds.

Contrary to popular belief and popular crime thrillers, most people who perform evil acts, as perceived by most societies, don’t believe that what they are doing is evil and can always find a way to justify it. No where is this more acute than when the perpetrators believe that they have ‘God on their side’.

Don’t judge all Muslims the same

In Philosophy Now (Issue 102, May/June 2014), Terri Murray (Master of Theology, Heythrop College, London) wrote an essay titled, Is Judging Islamic Culture Possible? Now I’ve touched on this topic before in various guises, but it’s perhaps more relevant than ever with the rise of ISIS or IS (Islamic State) with its self-appointed Caliphate and its barbaric treatment of anyone who won’t follow its dictates.

Murray’s article is lengthy and well-argued, so it’s a bit unfair to distill her arguments into succinct sound-bytes, as I’m about to do. Basically, Murray delineates between what she calls ‘liberal multiculturalism’ and ‘pluralist multiculturalism’: where she contends the former (of which she claims to belong) puts the rights of the individual above cultural identity; and the latter where cultural identity holds sway over individual liberty. That’s the gist of her argument, but, in particular, she compares this with feminism and LBGT rights, both of which she’s been an outspoken advocate of, or so she tells us, and I have no reason to disbelieve her.

But she also refers to the ‘pluralist multiculturalists’ as ‘relativists’, and much of her argument revolves around this, contextually. In effect, the moral or cultural relativists argue that we in the West are not in a position to criticise other cultures and Islamic culture in particular – political correctness gone mad, is how many conservatives and some liberals would put it.

Murray lives in England and I live in Australia, where cultural sensitivities are not dissimilar but not exactly the same. I both work and socialise with Muslims, some of whom I consider very good friends, which naturally colours my own perceptions and opinions, but that’s not the issue. In a post last year (Aug. 2013), I argued that there was no such thing as moral relativism, whereas Murray’s argument effectively hinges on that idea. I argued that no one can hold a moral standpoint on an issue that covers every perceived view – it’s impossible – so what she’s talking about is tolerance, as she acknowledges herself. But I’ve also argued elsewhere that the limit of tolerance is intolerance by others. Like many so-called liberals, I’m intolerant of intolerance, and that is the guiding criterion when it comes to judging Islam or variants of Islam or any other cultural practice.

Moral values, as practiced, are invariably subjective, and arise from cultural or social norms that we are exposed to from our earliest cognitive years. But in our teens and early twenties, our so-called ‘formative’ years, we can undergo changes in attitudes and beliefs and often challenge the views we were brought up with. It is my belief that many members of IS, especially those from a Western background, fall into this category. Why they are attracted to this ideology, I can neither imagine nor understand, but we know it’s happening. The point is that while many of us find their behaviour abhorrent in the worst possible way, they believe the opposite and claim that it is our lifestyle that is sinful and against the laws of ‘God’, which is how they justify what they do. As I’ve said before, when you take your morals from ‘God’ you can justify any atrocity.

The danger, as I see it, is in taking a polarised view. Murray is arguing against one of those polarised views: that we must accept and tolerate all manifestations of Islam irrespective of its consequences on individuals. Even forgetting about IS for the moment (Murray’s article was written prior to IS’s rise to dominance in Syria and Iraq), issues like female genitalia mutilation and honour killings are examples where the rights of individuals trump cultural tolerance and sensitivity, as Murray points out. But there is another form of polarisation that is equally dangerous and far more likely, which is to brand all Muslims with the same brush. We already see this with religious commentators like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, both of whom attack all kinds of religion and argue that moderate religious believers somehow support fundamentalism, which is simplistic, divisive and plain wrong. No one suffers under militant Islam more than moderate Muslims as we are currently witnessing in Iraq, but also Indonesia and other countries. To alienate moderate Muslims in a ‘war’ against Islamic extremists is a huge mistake. In Australia, at least, politicians and strategists seem to be very aware of this dimension to the issue, at least, locally.

Afterlife belief – a unique human condition

Recently I’ve been dreaming about having philosophical discussions, which is very strange, to say the least. And one of these was on the topic of the afterlife. My particular insight, from my dream, was that humans have the unique capacity to imagine a life and a world beyond death. It’s hard to imagine that any other creature, no matter its cognitive capacity, would be able to make the same leap. This is not a new insight for me; it’s one my dream reminded me of rather than initiated. Nevertheless, it’s a good starting point for a discussion on the afterlife.

It’s also, I believe, the reason humans came up with religion – it’s hard to dissociate one from the other.  Humans are more than capable of imagining fictional worlds – I’ve created a few myself as a sometime sci-fi writer. But imagining a life after death is to project oneself into an eternal continuity, a form of immortality. Someone once pointed out that death is the ultimate letting go of the ego, and I believe this is a major reason we find it so difficult to confront. The Buddhists talk about the ‘no-self’ and ‘no attachments’, and I believe this is what they’re referring to. We all form attachments during life, be it material or ideological or aspirational or through personal relationships, and I think that this is natural, even psychologically necessary for the most part. But death requires us to give all these up. In some cases people make sacrifices, where an ideal or another’s life takes precedent over one’s own ego. In effect, we may substitute someone else’s ego for our own.

Do I believe in an afterlife? Actually, I’m agnostic on that point, but I have no expectation, and, from what we know, it seems unlikely. I have no problem with people believing in an afterlife – as I say, it’s part of the human condition – but I have a problem when people place more emphasis on it than the current life they’re actually living. There are numerous stories of people ostracizing their children, on religious grounds, because seeking eternal paradise is more important than familial relationships. I find this perverse, as I do the idea of killing people with the promise of reaching heaven as a reward.

Personally, I think it’s more healthy to have no expectation when one dies. It’s no different to going to sleep or any other form of losing consciousness, only one never regains it. No one knows when they fall asleep or when they lose consciousness, and the same applies when one dies. It leaves no memory, so we don’t know when it happens. There is an oft asked question: why is there something rather than nothing? Well, consciousness plays a big role in that question, because, without consciousness, there might as well be nothing. ‘Something’ only exists for ‘you’ while you are alive.

Consciousness exists in a continuous present, and, in fact, without consciousness, the concepts of past present and future would have no meaning. But more than that, without memory, you would not even know you have consciousness. In fact, it is possible to be conscious or act conscious, whilst believing, in retrospect, that you were unconscious. It can happen when you come out of anaesthetic (it’s happened to me) or when you’re extremely intoxicated with alcohol or when you’ve been knocked unconscious by a blow. In these admittedly rare and unusual circumstances, one can be conscious and behave consciously, yet create no memories, so effectively be unconscious. In other words, without memory (short term memory) we would all be subjectively unconscious.

So, even if there is the possibility that one’s consciousness can leave behind the body that created it, after corporeal death, it would also leave behind all the memories that give us our sense of self. It’s only our memories that give us our sense of continuity, and hence our sense of self.

Then there is the issue of afterlife and infinity. Only mathematicians and cosmologists truly appreciate what infinity means. The point is that if you have an infinite amount of time and space than anything that can happen once can happen an infinite number of times. This means that, with infinity, in this world or any other, there would be an infinite number of you and me. But, not only am I not interested in an infinite number of me, I don’t believe anyone would want to live for infinity if they really thought about it.

At the start, I mentioned that I believe religion arose from a belief in the afterlife. Having said that, I think religion comes from a natural tendency to look for meaning beyond the life we live. I’ve made the point before, that if there is a purpose beyond the here and now, it’s not ours to know. And, if there is a purpose, we find it in the lives we live and not in an imagined reward beyond the grave.

Moral relativism – a much abused and misconstrued term

The latest issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 97; July/August 2013) has as its theme ‘The Self’ but there are a couple of articles that touch on ethics and morality, including one that looks at moral relativism (Julien Beillard, pp. 23-4). In a nutshell, Beillard claims that moral relativism is ‘unintelligible’, because, to the moral relativist, all moral stances are equally true and equally false, which is patently ‘absurd’. I know it’s unfair to reduce a 2 page argument to a one-liner, but it’s not the direction I wish to take, albeit I think he has a point.

In another article, Joel Marks (p.52) expounds on 3 books he’s written on the subject of Ethics without Morals (one of the titles) without actually arguing his case, so I can’t comment, let alone analyse his position, without reading at least one of them. The reason I raise it at all is because he briefly discusses the idea of ‘morality [being] independent of religion’. Marks calls himself an ‘amoralist’, but again, this is not the direction I wish to take.

Moral relativism is one of the most abused terms one finds on blogs like mine, especially by religious fundamentalists. It’s a reflex action for many of them when faced with an atheist or a non-theist. (I make the distinction, because non-theists don’t particularly care, whereas atheists tend to take a much harder stance towards religion in general.) The point is that fundamentalists take immediate refuge in the belief that all atheists must be moral relativists, which is just nonsense. To paraphrase Marks (out of context) they believe that ‘secular moralists …are on much less secure ground than traditional theism, because it purports to issue commands… without a commander (God).’ (parentheses in the original.)

The point I’d make, in response to this, is that people project their morality onto their God rather than the other way round. For example, homophobes have a homophobic God, and they will find the relevant text to support this view, disregarding the obvious point that the text was written by a human, just as mortal as themselves. Others of the same faith, but a different disposition towards homosexuality, will find relevant texts to support the exact opposite point of view. This was recently demonstrated on this TV panel discussion, involving opposing theologians from the Catholic Church, Judaism and Islam (some were audience members and one was video-linked from California). And one has to ask the obvious question, given the context of this discussion: is this moral relativism in action?

The point is that most moral attitudes and beliefs are cultural, and that includes all the religious ones as well. And like all cultural phenomena, morality evolves, so what was taboo generations ago, can become the social norm, and gay marriage is a good example of a social norm in transition. It also highlights the point that conservative voices like to keep the status quo (some even want to turn the clock back) while radical voices tend to advocate change, which we all recognise, politically, as being right and left. But over generations the radical becomes the status quo, and eventually conservatives defend what was once considered radical, which is how morality evolves.

I would argue that no one ever practices moral relativism – I’ve never met one and I never expect to. Why? Because everyone has a moral stance on virtually every moral question. In effect, this is exactly the point that Beillard makes, albeit in a more roundabout way. The real question is where do they get that stance? For conservatives, the answer is tradition and often religion. But there are liberal theologians as well, so religion is very flexible, completely dependent on the subjective perspective of its adherents. In a secular pluralist society, like the one I live in, there are many diverse moral views (on topics like gay marriage) as the abovementioned TV discussion demonstrates. Abortion is another example that can be delineated pretty much between conservatives and liberals. Are these examples of moral relativism? No, they are examples of diverse cultural norms and topics of debate, as they should be. Some of these issues are decided, for the society as a whole, in Parliaments, where democratically elected members can discuss and argue, sometimes being allowed a conscience vote. In other words, they don’t have to follow party lines. Gay marriage is an issue that should be allowed a conscience vote, though one conservative party, in our country, still refuses. As Penny Wong, a gay member of parliament and a mother, says in the above debate: the issue will only be resolved when both major parties allow a conscience vote. This is democracy in action.

So moral relativism has to be looked at in the context of an evolving culture where mores of the past, like abolition and women’s right to vote, have become the accepted norm, even for conservatives. The same will eventually occur for gay marriage, as we are seeing the transition occurring all over the world. There really is no such thing as moral relativism, except as a catch-phrase for religious conservatives to attempt to sideline their philosophical opponents. No one is a moral relativist for as long as they hold a philosophical position on a moral issue, and that includes most of us.

Addendum: This is Penny Wong's speech to parliament that effectively demonstrates the evolvement of social norms. It says a lot about Australian politics that she's effectively talking to an empty chamber.

Scientology – a 20th century science fiction religion

I’ve just read 2 books: Beyond Belief; My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape, by the current leader’s niece, Jenna Miscavige Hill (co-written with Lisa Pulitzer); and Going Clear; Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief by Pulitzer Prize winning author, Lawrence Wright. I bought both these books after reading reviews in Rupert Murdoch’s paper, The Weekend Australian Review (Rupert’s Australian publications are a lot more left-leaning than his American counterparts I suspect). Previously, I had just finished reading a Scottish crime thriller, but both of these books were a lot harder to put down.

I should disclose that I had my own brush with Scientology a few years before Jenna Miscavige Hill was born, when I was around 30 (sometime between 1978 and 1983) when I was solicited in a Sydney street, along with a friend, and invited to take part in a ‘session’, but I’ll talk about that later.

There are many different ways one can define religion – to me it’s part of a personal internal journey: very introspective, self-examining and impossible to share. But the public face of religion(s) is often something different: judgemental, proselytising and mentally claustrophobic. I suspect that many followers of Scientology see themselves in the first category, but the institution itself falls squarely into the second.

Religion, in the context of historical Western civilization, has been predominantly about mind control, and it was largely successful up until the Enlightenment, when novels, new scientific discoveries (in all fields) and Western philosophy all made inroads into the educated Western psyche. In the 20^th Century, mind control appeared to be the principal political tool of totalitarian regimes like the former USSR and China. It’s not something one would expect to find in an American institution, especially one tied to the celebration of celebrity, but that’s exactly what Scientology is if one believes the accounts revealed in these 2 books.

I defy any normal sane person to read Micavige Hill’s book without getting angry. I imagine a lot of high-level people with the Scientology Church would also get angry, but for different reasons. Of all the events that she recounts from when she signed her ‘billion year contract’ at the age of 7 (she tried to run away a year later) to when she finally left under enormous duress as a married adult (after threatening to jump off a 5 storey ledge), what made me most angry was something that was at once petty and unbelievably controlling and intrusive. As a teen she received letters sent by her estranged mother, but she could read them only after they were already opened and she was never allowed to keep them. At the age of 10 she had to fill out a form so she could visit her parents for her 10^th birthday. Yet this is nothing compared to the alleged abuses by the organisation that Lawrence Wright documents in his carefully researched and fully referenced book.

Stalin was infamous for creating a culture where people reported on their neighbours thus creating fear and mistrust in everyday interactions. China had a similar policy under Mao and during the cultural revolution families were split up and sent to opposite sides of the country. According to Miscavige Hill, both these policies were adopted by Scientology, as it happened to her own family. According to her, all her friends were estranged from her, especially in her teens, and the Church even attempted to separate her from her recently wedded husband (also a ‘Sea Org’ member in the organisation) which culminated in her threatening suicide and eventually leaving, totally disillusioned with her lifetime religion but with her marriage intact.

The Catholic Church has the confessional and Scientology has ‘auditing’ and ‘sec-check’, both using their famous ‘E-Meter’. In the comprehensive glossary at the back of her book, Miscavige Hill defines ‘Sec Check’ as “A confessional given while on the E-Meter. Sec-checks can take anywhere from three weeks to a year or longer.” But unlike the Catholic Church confessions, the Scientology equivalent are not confidential, according to those who claim to have been blackmailed by them, but are according to the Church. According to Scientology’s doctrine the e-meter never lies so people being audited, including Miscavige Hill, quickly learn to confess what the auditor wants to hear so they can get it over with. Later, if they try and leave the Church, as she did, these confessions can be held over them to stop them publicly denouncing the Church. Some of these confessions are of a highly personal nature, like the intimate details of sexual relations.

Naturally, the Church denies any of these allegations, along with the practice of ‘disconnection’ (denying access to family members) and child labour, which Miscavige Hill experienced first hand from the age of 7. Allegations of basic human rights abuse are predominant in both books, yet all legal proceedings against the Church seem to eventually be settled out of court (according to Wright’s account).

Miscavige Hill also provides insight into the conditioning of both receiving and giving instructions without question. In principle, this is one of the biggest philosophical issues I have with a number of religious educations, including my own, whereby one doesn’t question or one is discouraged from thinking for oneself. Part of an education I believe, should be the opposite: to be exposed to a variety of cultural ideas and to be encouraged to argue and discuss beliefs. Teenagers are at an age where they tend to do this anyway, as I did. Reading Albert Camus at the age of 16 was life-changing at an intellectual level, and deepened my doubts about the religion I had grown up with.

Wright’s book is a good complementary read to Jenna’s autobiography, as he provides a history lesson of the whole Church, albeit not one the Church would endorse. The book contains a number of footnotes that declare the Church’s outright disagreement on a number of issues as well as numerous disclaimers from Tom Cruise’s attorney, Bertram Fields. Wright is an acclaimed author, with a number of awards to his name, and is staff writer for The New Yorker. His book arose from a feature story he wrote on Paul Haggis (a disillusioned Scientologist) for that magazine. The book starts and ends with Haggis, but, in between, attempts to cover every aspect of the religion, including a biography of its founder, testimony from many of its disaffected members, and its connection to Hollywood celebrity.

Paul Haggis is a successful screenwriter and his credits include some of the best films I’ve seen: Million Dollar Baby, The Valley of Elah (which he also directed) and Casino Royale. His career-changing movie was Crash, which I’m sorry to say I haven’t seen. I remember when it came out, it was on my must-see list, but it never happened. He also wrote Flags of Our Fathers, which Eastwood directed following Million Dollar Baby. In The Valley of Elah is a little known movie starring Charlize Theron (I believe it’s one of her best roles) and Tommy Lee Jones; part crime thriller, part commentary on the Iraq war. I saw it around midnight in a Melbourne arthouse cinema, such was its low profile. He also made The Next 3 Days with Russell Crowe, which I haven’t seen. We never know screenwriters - they are at the bottom of the pecking order in Hollywood - unless they are writer-directors (like Woody Allen or Oliver Stone) so no one would say I’d go and see a Paul Haggis film, but I would.

Haggis campaigned against Proposition 8 in California (a bill to ban same-sex marriage) which I’ve written about myself on this blog. His disillusionment with Scientology was complete when he failed to get the Church to support him.

Scientology promotes itself as a science, and, in particular, is strongly opposed to psychiatry. But at best, it’s a pseudo-science; a combination of Freudian psychoanalysis and Buddhist philosophy. The e-meter auditing, which supposedly gives it its scientific credibility has never been accepted by mainstream science or psychology. L Ron Hubbard, before he started Dianetics, which became Scientology, was a highly prolific pulp sci-fi writer and best friend of Robert Heinlein (a famous sci-fi author with right-wing politics). But while Hubbard lived and wrote during the so-called ‘golden era’ of science fiction, his name is never mentioned in the same company as those who are lauded today, like Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke or Ursula Le Guin (still alive, so possibly later) and I’ve never seen or heard his name referenced at any Sci-Fi convention I’ve attended.

When it comes to psychological manipulation, Scientology excels. In particular, the so-called ‘Bridge to Total Freedom’, aka ‘the Bridge’, which is effectively a sequence of stages of spiritual enlightenment one achieves as a result of courses and ‘sessions’ one completes. At the end of this process, usually taking many years and costing thousands of dollars, one is given access to ‘OT III’ material, the end of the journey and one’s ultimate spiritual reward. According to Miscavige Hill, people ‘on the Bridge’ are told that given early access to OT III would cause serious injury, either mental or physical, such is its power. Now, common sense says that information alone is unlikely to have such a consequence, nevertheless this was both the carrot, and indirectly, the stick, for staying with the course. As revealed, in both of these books, OT III is in fact a fantastical science fiction story that beggars credulity on any scale. It’s effectively an origins story that could find a place in Ridley Scott’s movie, Prometheus, which is better rendered, one has to say, in its proper context of fiction.

In my introduction, I mentioned my own very brief experience with Scientology in Sydney (either late 1970s or early 1980s) when I was interviewed and offered an ‘e-meter’ session. Something about the whole setup made me more than suspicious, even angry, and I rebelled. What I saw were basically insecure people ‘auditing’ other insecure people and it made me angry. I had grown up in a church (though my parents were not the least religious) where once we were called to stand up and declare ourselves to Jesus in writing. I remember refusing as a teenager, mainly because I knew my father opposed it, but also the sense of being pressured against my will. This feeling returned when I was in the Scientology centre in Sydney, or whatever it was called. Interestingly, they took me upstairs where I met some people about my own age who were very laid back and surrounded by a library of philosophical books. I said I would prefer to explore their ideas at my own leisure and so I bought a copy of Dianetics and had nothing more to do with them. I never read Dianetics, though I’ve read the complete works of Jung and books by Daisetz Suzuki on Zen Buddhism, so I was very open to religious and philosophical ideas at that age. Likewise, I’ve never read any of Hubbard’s fiction, though I once tried and gave up.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Jim Holt has written an entire book on this subject, titled Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story. Holt is a philosopher and frequent contributor to The New Yorker, the New York Times and the London Review of Books, according to the blurb on the inner title page. He’s also very knowledgeable in mathematics and physics, and has the intellectual credentials to gain access to some of the world’s most eminent thinkers, like David Deutsch, Richard Swinburne, Steven Weinberg, Roger Penrose and the late John Updike, amongst others. I’m stating the obvious when I say that he is both cleverer and better read than me.

The above-referenced, often-quoted existential question is generally attributed to Gottfried Leibniz, in the early 18^th Century and towards the end of his life, in his treatise on the “Principle of Sufficient Reason”, which, according to Holt, ‘…says, in essence, that there is an explanation for every fact, an answer to every question.’ Given the time in which he lived, it’s not surprising that Leibniz’s answer was ‘God’.  Whilst Leibniz acknowledged the physical world is contingent, God, on the other hand, is a ‘necessary being’.

For some people (like Richard Swinburne), this is still the only relevant and pertinent answer, but considering Holt makes this point on page 21 of a 280 page book, it’s obviously an historical starting point and not a conclusion. He goes on to discuss Hume’s and Kant’s responses but I’ll digress. In Feb. 2011, I wrote a post on metaphysics, where I point out that there is no reason for God to exist if we didn’t exist, so I think the logic is back to front. As I’ve argued elsewhere (March 2012), the argument for a God existing independently of humanity is a non sequitur. This is not something I’ll dwell on – I’m just putting the argument for God into perspective and don’t intend to reference it again.

Sorry, I’ll take that back. In Nov 2011, I got into an argument with Emanuel Rutten on his blog, after he claimed that he had proven that God ‘necessarily exists’ using modal logic. Interestingly, Holt, who understands modal logic better than me, raises this same issue. Holt references Alvin Platinga’s argument, which he describes as ‘dauntingly technical’. In a nutshell: because of God’s ‘maximal greatness’, if one concedes he can exist in one possible world, he must necessarily exist in all possible worlds because ‘maximal greatness’ must exist in all possible worlds. Apparently, this was the basis of Godel’s argument (by logic) for the existence of God. But Holt contends that the argument can just as easily be reversed by claiming that there exists a possible world where ‘maximal greatness’ is absent’. And ‘if God is absent from any possible world, he is absent from all possible worlds…’ (italics in the original). Rutten, by the way, tried to have it both ways: a personal God necessarily exists, but a non-personal God must necessarily not exist. If you don’t believe me, check out the argument thread on his own blog which I link from my own post, Trying to define God (Nov. 2011).

Holt starts off with a brief history lesson, and just when you think: what else can he possibly say on the subject? he takes us on a globe-trotting journey, engaging some truly Olympian intellects. As the book progressed I found the topic more engaging and more thought-provoking. At the very least, Holt makes you think, as all good philosophy should. Holt acknowledges an influence and respect for Thomas Nagel, whom he didn’t speak with, but ‘…a philosopher I have always revered for his originality, depth and integrity.’

I found the most interesting person Holt interviewed to be David Deutsch, who is best known as an advocate for Hugh Everett’s ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics. Holt had expected a frosty response from Deutsch, based on a review he’d written on Deutsch’s book, The Fabric of Reality, for the Wall Street Journal where he’d used the famous description given to Lord Byron: “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. But he left Deutsch’s company with quite a different impression, where ‘…he had revealed a real sweetness of character and intellectual generosity.’

I didn’t know this, but Deutsch had extended Turing’s proof of a universal computer to a quantum version, whereby  ‘…in principle, it could simulate any physically possible environment. It was the ultimate “virtual reality” machine.’ In fact, Deutsch had presented his proof to Richard Feynman just before his death in 1988, who got up, as Deutsch was writing it on a blackboard, took the chalk off him and finished it off. Holt found out, from his conversation with Deutsch, that he didn’t believe we live in a ‘quantum computer simulation’.

Deutsch outlined his philosophy in The Fabric of Reality, according to Holt (I haven’t read it):

Life and thought, [Deutsch] declared, determine the very warp and woof of the quantum multiverse… knowledge-bearing structures – embodied in physical minds – arise from evolutionary processes that ensure they are nearly identical across different universes. From the perspective of the quantum multiverse as a whole, mind is a pervasive ordering principle, like a giant crystal.

When Holt asked Deutsch ‘Why is there a “fabric of reality” at all?’ he said “[it] could only be answered by finding a more encompassing fabric of which the physical multiverse was a part. But there is no ultimate answer.” He said “I would start with the principle of comprehensibility.”

He gave the example of a quasar in the universe and a model of the quasar in someone’s brain “…yet they embody the same mathematical relationships.” For Deutsch, it’s the comprehensibility of the universe (in particular, its mathematical comprehensibility) that provides a basis for the ‘fabric of reality’. I’ll return to this point later.

The most insightful aspect of Holt’s discourse with Deutsch was his differentiation between explanation by laws and explanation of specifics. For example, Newton’s theory of gravitation gave laws to explain what Kepler could only explain by specifics: the orbits of planets in the solar system. Likewise, Darwin and Wallace’s theory of natural selection gave a law for evolutionary speciation rather than an explanation for every individual species. Despite his affinity for ‘comprehensibility’, Deutsch also claimed: “No, none of the laws of physics can possibly answer the question of why the multiverse is there.”

It needs to be pointed out that Deutsch’s quantum multiverse is not the same as the multiverse propagated by an ‘eternally-inflating universe’. Apparently, Leonard Susskind has argued that “the two may really be the same thing”, but Steven Weinberg, in conversation with Holt, thinks they’re “completely perpendicular”.

Holt’s conversation with Penrose held few surprises for me. In particular, Penrose described his 3 worlds philosophy: the Platonic (mathematical) world, the physical world and the mental world. I’ve expounded on this in previous posts, including the one on metaphysics I mentioned earlier but also when I reviewed Mario Livio’s book, Is God a Mathematician? (March 2009).

Penrose argues that mathematics is part of our mental world (in fact, the most complex and advanced part) whilst our mental world is produced by the most advanced and complex part of the physical world (our brains). But Penrose is a mathematical Platonist, and conjectures that the universe is effectively a product of the Platonic world, which creates an existential circle when you contemplate all three. Holt found Penrose’s ideas too ‘mystical’ and suggests that he was perhaps more Pythagorean than Platonist. However, I couldn’t help but see a connection with Deutsch’s ‘comprehensibility’ philosophy. The mathematical model in the brain (of a quasar, for example) having the same ‘mathematical relationships’ as the quasar itself. Epistemologically, mathematics is the bridge between our comprehensibility and the machinations of the universe.

One thing that struck me right from the start of Holt’s book, yet he doesn’t address till the very end, is the fact that without consciousness there might as well be nothing. Nothingness is what happens when we die, and what existed before we were born. It’s consciousness that determines the difference between ‘something’ and ‘nothing’. Schrodinger, in What is Life? made the observation that consciousness exists in a continuous present. Possibly, it’s the only thing that does. After all, we know that photons don’t. As Raymond Tallis keeps reminding us, without consciousness, there is no past, present or future. It also means that without memory we would not experience consciousness. So some states of unconsciousness could simply mean that we are not creating any memories.

Another interesting personality in Holt’s engagements was Derek Parfit, who contemplated a hypothetical ‘selector’ to choose a universe. Both Holt and Parfit concluded, through pure logic, using ‘simplicity’ as the criterion, that there would be no selector and ‘lots of generic possibilities’ which would lead to a ‘thoroughly mediocre universe’. I’ve short-circuited the argument for brevity, but, contrary to Holt’s and Parfit’s conclusion, I would contend that it doesn’t fit the evidence. Our universe is far from mediocre if it’s produced life and consciousness. The ‘selector’, it should be pointed out, could be a condition like ‘goodness’ or ‘fullness’. But, after reading their discussion, I concluded that the logical ‘selector’ is the anthropic principle, because that’s what we’ve got: a universe that’s comprehensible containing conscious entities that comprehend it.

P.S. I wrote a post on The Anthropic Principle last month.

Addendum 1: In reference to the anthropic principle, the abovementioned post specifies a ‘weak’ version and a ‘strong’ version, but it’s perhaps best understood as a ‘passive’ version and an ‘active’ version. To combine both posts, I would argue that the fundamental ontological question in my title, raises an obvious, fundamental ontological fact that I expound upon in the second last paragraph: ‘without consciousness, there might as well be nothing.’ This leads me to be an advocate for the ‘strong’ version of the anthropic principle. I’m not saying that something can’t exist without consciousness, as it obviously can and has, but, without consciousness, it’s irrelevant.

Addendum 2 (18 Nov. 2012): Four months ago I wrote a comment in response to someone recommending Robert Amneus's book, The Origin of the Universe; Case Closed (only available as an e-book, apparently).

In particular, Amneus is correct in asserting that if you have an infinitely large universe with infinite time, then anything that could happen will happen an infinite number of times, which explains how the most improbable events can become, not only possible, but actual. So mathematically, given enough space and time, anything that can happen will happen. I would contend that this is as good an answer to the question in my heading as you are likely to get.

It’s time the Catholic Church came out of the Closet

This programme was aired a couple of weeks ago on ABC’s 4 Corners, but it demonstrates how out-of-touch the Catholic Church is, not only with reality, but with community expectations. More than anything else, the Church lets down its own followers, betrays them in fact.

This deals specifically with a couple of cases in Australia, and it’s amazing that it takes investigative journalism to shine a light on them. Most damning for the Church, is evidence that protecting their pedophilic clergy and their own reputation was more important than protecting members of their congregation.

The most significant problem, highlighted by the programme, is the implicit belief, held by the Church and evidenced by their actions, that they are literally above the law that applies to everyone else.

This is an institution that claims to have the high moral ground on issues like abortion, therapeutic cloning, gay marriage, euthanasia, to nominate the most controversial ones, when it so clearly lacks any moral credibility. Most people in the West simply ignore the Catholic Church’s more inane teachings regarding contraception, but in developing countries, the Church has real clout. In countries where protection against AIDS and birth control are important issues, both for health and economic reasons, the Church’s attitude is morally irresponsible. The Catholic Church tries to pretend that it should be respected and taken seriously, and perhaps one day it will, when it enters the 21^st Century and actually commits to the same laws as the people it supposedly preaches to.

Prometheus, the movie

Everyone is comparing Ridley Scott’s new film with his original Alien, and there are parallels, not just the fact that it’s meant to be a prequel. The crew include an android, a corporate nasty and a gutsy heroine, just like the first two movies. There are also encounters with unpleasant creatures. Alien was a seminal movie, which spawned its own sequels, albeit under different directors, yet it was more horror movie than Sci-Fi. But SF often combines genres and is invariably expected to be a thriller. Prometheus is not as graphically or viscerally scary as Alien, but it’s more a true Sci-Fi than a horror flick. In that respect I think it’s a better movie, though most reviewers I’ve read disagree with me.

Prometheus is a good title because it’s the Greek story about the Gods giving some of their abilities to humankind. Scott’s tale is a 21^st Century creation myth, whereby mankind goes in search of the ‘people’ who supposedly ‘engineered’ us. One of the characters in the film quips in response to this claim: ‘There goes 3 centuries of Darwinism.’ From a purely scientific perspective, it’s possible that DNA originally came from somewhere else, either as spores or in meteorites or an icy comet, but it would have been very simple life forms at the start of evolution not the end of it. The idea that someone engineered our DNA so it would be compatible with Earthbound DNA destroys the suspension of disbelief required for the story, so it’s best to ignore that point.

But lots of Sci-Fi stories overlook this fundamental point when aliens meet Earthlings and interbreed for example (Avatar). And I’ve done it myself (in my fiction) though only to the extent that humans could eat food found on another planet. I suspect we could only do that, in reality, if the food contained DNA with the same chirality as ours. The universal unidirectional chirality of DNA is one of the strongest evidential factors that all life on Earth had a common origin.

But I have to admit that Ridley has me intrigued and I’m looking forward to the sequel, as the final scenes effectively promise us one. One of the major differences with Alien and its spinoffs is that there is a mystery in this story and the heroine is bent on finding the answer to it. She wants to find out who made us and where they came from and why they did it. There is an obvious religious allusion here, but this is closer to the Greek gods, suggested by the title rather than the Biblical god. Having said that, our heroine wears a cross and this is emphasised. I expect Ridley wants us to make a religious connection.

Good Sci-Fi in my view should contain a bit of philosophy – make us think about stuff. In this case, stuff includes the possibility of life on other worlds and the possibility that there may exist civilizations greater than ours, to the extent that they could have created us. We find it hard to imagine that we are the end result of a process that started from stardust; that something as complex and intelligent as us could not have been created by a greater intelligence. Ridley brings that point home when the android asks someone how would they feel about meeting their maker, as he has had to. So I’m happy to see where Ridley is going with this – it’s a question that most people have asked and not been satisfied with the answer. I don’t think Ridley is going to give us a metaphysical answer. I expect he’s going to challenge what it means to be human and what responsibilities that entails in the universe’s creation. 

Why the argument for the existence of God (as an independent entity) is a non sequitur

This has been a point of discussion on Stephen Law’s blog recently, following Law’s debate with William Lane Craig last year. My contention is that people argue as if God is something objective, when, clearly it isn’t: God is totally subjective.

God is a feeling, not an entity or a being. God is something that people find within themselves, which is neither good nor bad; it’s completely dependent on the individual. Religiosity is a totally subjective phenomenon, but it has cultural references, which determine to a lesser or greater extent what one ‘believes’. Arguing over the objective validity of such subjective perspectives is epistemologically a non sequitur.

Craig’s argument takes two predominant strands. One is that atheists can’t explain the where-with-all from whence the universe arose and theists can. It’s like playing a trump card: what’s your explanation? Nil. Well, here’s mine, God: game over. If Craig wants to argue for an abstract, Platonic, non-personal God that represents the laws of the universe prior to its physical existence, then he may have an argument. But to equate a Platonic set of mathematical laws with the Biblical God is a stretch, to say the least, especially since the Bible has nothing to say on the matter.

The other strand to his argument is the Holy Spirit that apparently is available to us all. As I said earlier, God is a feeling that some people experience, but I think it’s more a projection based on one’s core beliefs. I don’t dismiss this out of hand, partly because it’s so common, and partly because I see it as a personal aspiration. It represents the ideal that an individual aspires to, and that can be good or bad, depending on the individual, as I said above, but it’s also entirely subjective.

Craig loves the so-called ‘cosmological’ argument based on ‘first cause’, but it should be pointed out that there are numerous speculative scientific theories about the origin of the universe (refer John D. Barrow’s The Book of Universes, which I discussed May 2011). Also Paul Davies’ The Goldilocks Enigma gives a synopsis on all the current ‘flavours’ of the universe, from the ridiculous to the more scientifically acceptable. Wherever science meets philosophy or where there are scientific ‘gaps’ in our knowledge, especially concerning cosmology or life, evangelists like Craig try to get a foothold, reinterpreting an ancient text of mythologies to explain what science can’t.

In other posts on his blog, Stephen Law discusses the issue, ‘Why is there something instead of nothing?’ Quite frankly, I don’t think this question can ever be answered. Science has no problem with the universe coming from nothing – Alan Guth, who gave us inflationary theory also claimed that ‘the universe is the ultimate free lunch’ (Davies, God and the New Physics, 1983). The laws of quantum mechanics appear to be the substrate for the entire universe, and it’s feasible that a purely quantum mechanical universe existed prior to ours and possibly without time. In fact, this is the Hartle-Hawking model of the universe (one of many) where the time dimension was once a fourth dimension of space. Highly speculative, but not impossible based on what we currently know.

But when philosophers and scientists suggest that the ‘why something’ question is an epistemological dead end, evangelists like Craig see this is as a capitulation to their theistic point of view. I’ve said in a previous post (on Chaos theory, Mar. 2012) that the universe has purpose but is not teleological, which is not the oxymoron it appears to be when one appreciates that ‘chaos’, which drives the universe’s creations, including life, is deterministic but not predictable. In other words, the universe’s purpose is not predetermined but has evolved.

Some people, many in fact, see the universe’s purposefulness as evidence that there is something behind it all. This probably lies at the heart of the religious-science debate, but, as I expounded in a post on metaphysics (Feb. 2011): between chaos theory, the second law of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, a teleological universe is difficult to defend. I tend to agree with Stephen Jay Gould that if the universe was re-run it would be completely different.

Addendum 1: Just one small point that I’ve raised before: without consciousness, there might as well be nothing. It’s only consciousness that allows meaning to even arise. This has been addressed in a later post.

Addendum 2: I've added a caveat to the title, which is explained in the opening of the post. If humans are the only link between the Universe and a 'creator' God (as all monotheistic religions believe) then God has no purpose without humanity.

How chaos drives the evolution of the universe and life

The Cosmic Blueprint is the very first book of Paul Davies I ever read nearly a quarter of a century ago, and I’ve read many others since. I heard him being interviewed about it on a car trip from Melbourne to Mulwala (on the Victorian, New South Wales border) and that was the first time I’d heard of him. The book was published in 1987, so it was probably 1988.

Davies received the Templeton Foundation Prize in 1995, though not the wrath of Dawkins for accepting it. He’s also received the 2002 Michael Faraday Prize from the Royal Society and the 2001 Kelvin Medal and Prize from the UK Institute of Physics. He was resident in Australia for a couple of decades but now resides in the US where he’s an astro-biologist at the University of Arizona.

In America, Davies has been accused of being a ‘creationist in disguise’ by people whose ignorance is only out-weighed by their narrow-mindedness (they think there are atheists and there are creationists with nothing in between). The 2004 edition of this book is published by the Templeton Foundation and the first word in the opening chapter is ‘God’ as part of a quote by Ilya Prigogine, who features prominently in the book. But anyone who thinks this is a thesis for Intelligent Design will be disappointed; it’s anything but. In fact, one of the book’s great virtues is its attempt to explain complexity in the universe and evolution as a natural occurrence and not a Divine one.

I’ve long believed that Davies writes about science and philosophy better than anyone else, not least because he seems to be equally erudite in the disciplines of physics, cosmology, biology and philosophy. He’s not a member of the ‘strong atheist’ brigade, which puts him offside with many philosophers and commentators, but his argument against ID in The Goldilocks Enigma (2006) was so compelling that Stephen Law borrowed it for himself.

I remember The Cosmic Blueprint primarily as introducing me to chaos theory; it was the new kid on the block in popular consciousness with fractals and Mandelbroit’s set just becoming conspicuous in pop culture. Reading it now, I’m surprised at how much better it is than I remember it, but that’s partly due to what I’ve learnt in between. A lot of it would have gone over my head, which is not to say it still doesn’t, but less so than before.

More than any other writer on science, Davies demonstrates how much we don’t know and he doesn’t shy away from awkward questions. In particular, he is critical of reductionism as the only method of explanation, especially when it explains things away rather than explicating them; consciousness and life’s emergence being good examples.

I like Davies because his ideas reflect some of my own ruminations, for example that natural selection and mutations can’t possibly explain the whole story of evolution. We think we are on the edge of knowing everything, yet future generations will look back and marvel at our ignorance just as we do with our forebears.

There is an overriding thesis in The Cosmic Blueprint that is obvious once it’s formulated yet is largely ignored in popular writing. It’s fundamentally that there are two arrows of time: one being the well known 2^nd law of thermodynamics or entropy; and the other being equally obvious but less understood as the increase in complexity at all levels in the universe from the formation of galaxies, stars and planets to the evolution of life on Earth, and possibly elsewhere. Both of which demonstrate irreversibility as a key attribute.  And whilst many see them as contradictory and therefore evidence of Divine intervention, Davies sees them as complementary and part of the universe’s overall evolvement.

Davies explains how complexity and self-organisation can occur when dynamic systems are pushed beyond equilibrium with an open source of energy. Entropy, on the other hand, is a natural consequence of systems in equilibrium.

In the early pages, Davies explains chaotic behaviour with a simple-to-follow example that’s purely mathematical. In particular, he demonstrates how the system is completely deterministic yet totally unpredictable because the initial conditions are mathematically impossible to define. This occurs in nature all the time, like coin tosses, so that the outcome is totally random but only because the initial conditions are impossible to determine, not because the coin follows non-deterministic laws. This is a subtle but significant distinction.

A commonly cited example is cellular automata that can be generated by a computer programme. Stephen Wolfram of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, has done a detailed study of one-dimensional automata that could give an insight into evolution. Davies quotes Wolfram:

“…the cellular automaton evolution concentrates the probabilities for particular configurations, thereby reducing entropy. This phenomenon allows for the possibility of self-organization by enhancing the probabilities of organized configurations and suppressing disorganized configurations.”

Wolfram is cited by Gregory Chaitin, in Thinking about Godel and Turing, as speculating that the universe may be pseudo-random and chaos theory provides an innate mechanism: deterministic laws that can’t be predicted. However, it seems that the universe’s innate chaotic laws provide opportunities for a diverse range of evolutionary possibilities, and the sheer magnitude of the universe in space and time, along with a propensity for self-organisation, in direct opposition to entropy, may be enough to ensure intelligent life as an outcome. The truth is that we don’t know. (Btw, Davies wrote the forward to Chaitin’s book.)

Davies calls this position ‘predestiny’ but he’s quick to qualify it thus: ‘Predestiny is a way of thinking about the world. It is not a scientific theory. It receives support, however, from those experiments that show how complexity and organization arise spontaneously and naturally under a wide range of conditions.’

This view is mirrored in the anthropic principle, which Davies also briefly discusses, but there are two version, as expounded by Frank Tipler and John Barrow in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle: the weak anthropic principle and the strong anthropic principle; and ‘predestiny’ is effectively the strong anthropic principle.

Roughly twenty years later, in The Goldilocks Enigma, Davies elaborates on this philosophical viewpoint when he argues for the ‘self-explaining universe’ amongst a critique of all the current ‘flavours’ of universe explanations: ‘I have suggested that only self-consistent loops capable of understanding themselves can create themselves, so that only universes with (at least the potential for) life and mind really exist.’ This is effectively a description of John Wheeler’s speculative cosmic quantum loop explanation of the universe’s existence – it exists because we’re in it. Davies argues that such a universe is ‘self-activating’ to avoid religious connotations: ‘…perhaps existence isn’t something that gets bestowed from outside…’

Teleological is a word that most scientists avoid, but Davies points out that the development of every organism is teleological because it follows a ‘blueprint’ or ‘plan’ entailed in its DNA. How this occurs is not entirely understood, but Davies makes an analogy with software which is apposite, as DNA provides coded instructions that ultimately result in fully developed organisms like us. He explores a concept called ‘downward causation’ whereby information can actually ‘cause’ materialistic events and software in computers provide the best example. In fact, as Davies hypothesises, one could imagine a software programme that makes physical changes to the computer that it’s operating on. Perhaps this is how the ‘mind’ works, which is similar to Douglas Hofstadter’s idea of a ‘strange loop’ that he introduced in Godel Escher Bach (which I reviewed in Feb. 2009) and later explored in another tome called I am a Strange Loop (which I haven’t read).

Davies introduces the concept of ‘downward causation’ in his discussion on quantum mechanics because it’s the measurement or observation that crystallises the quantum phenomenon into the real world. According to Davies, Wheeler speculated that ‘downward causation’ in quantum mechanics is ‘backwards in time’ and suggested a ‘delayed-choice’ thought experiment. To quote Davies: ‘The experiment has recently been conducted, and accords entirely with Wheeler’s expectations. It must be understood, however, that no actual communication with the past is involved.’

It’s impossible to discuss every aspect of this book, covering as it does: chaos theory, fractals, cosmological evolution, biological evolution, quantum mechanics and mind and matter.

Towards the end, Davies reveals some of his own philosophical prejudices, which, unsurprisingly, are mirrored in The Goldilocks Enigma twenty years on.

The very fact that the universe is creative, and that the laws have permitted complex structures to emerge and develop to the point of consciousness – in other words, that the universe has organized its own self-awareness – is for me powerful evidence that there is ‘something going on’ behind it all.

This last phrase elicits the ‘design’ word, many years before Intelligent Design was introduced as a ‘wedge’ tactic for creationists, but Davies has been an outspoken critic of both creationism and ID, as I explained above. Davies strongly believes the universe has a purpose and the evidence supports that point of view. But it’s a philosophical point of view, not a scientific one.

This leads to the logical question: is the universe teleological? I think chaos theory provides an answer. In the same way that chaotic phenomena, which includes all complex dynamics in the universe (like evolution) are deterministic yet unpredictable, the universe could be purposeful yet not teleological. In other words, the purpose is not predetermined but the universe’s dynamics allow purpose to evolve.

Trying to define God

This post arose from a lengthy discussion I had with Emanuel Rutten, who claims he has a ‘proof’, using modal logic, that God ‘necessarily exists’. The discussion started on Rust Belt Philosophy and then transferred to Rutten’s own blog. I’m naturally wary of anyone who claims they can prove God exists with nothing but logic, because it defies all epistemological sense. You can prove mathematical conjectures or solve puzzles using logic but everything else requires evidence.

For example, string theory is the latest contender for a so-called ‘theory of everything’ (really a theory of quantum gravity) which makes some extraordinary predictions, like the universe exists in 11 dimensions, of which all but 3 of space and 1 of time are ‘rolled up’ so as to be undetectable. Now, while no one challenges the mathematics behind the theory, no one claims it’s ‘necessarily true’ because there is no evidence to date to support it.

And, whilst I admit that Rutten is much cleverer than me, I think his proof is more sophistry than philosophy, and I’ve told him so on his own blog. Rutten’s argument should really be an argument about logic not religion. If his argument didn’t contain the word ‘God’, no one would give it a second thought and, certainly, no one would take it seriously. But because his argument in logic is an argument for the existence of God, it becomes a religious argument, especially since as a result of his own defence, it becomes clear that his ‘proof’ is critically dependent on how one defines God.

Rutten defines God as both ‘personal’ (meaning sentient) and ‘first cause’. Change this definition and his proof becomes one of negation instead of necessity. In particular, if one defines God as being non-sentient (but still first cause) then God goes from being necessarily existent to impossible to exist (according to Rutten’s own defence). The reason being that a sentient God ‘knows that God exists’ in ‘some possible world’ and a non-sentient God can’t possibly know. So the difference between God necessarily existing in all possible worlds (including ours) and impossibly non-existing is whether God knows that God exists (is sentient) or not. This is the corollary from the 2 conclusions of his own argument: one saying God must necessarily exist and one saying God can’t possibly exist, depending on how God is defined. Therefore God exists but only if God knows that God exists (is sentient). This is circular.

One of the reasons that no one has ever proved that God exists is because, by definition, God is immaterial and, according to most accounts, exists outside our universe. This means that God is not amenable to the scientific method. If God exists then he, she or it, only engages with the universe through the human brain, which is why God is totally subjective, just like colour. I’ve explained this before in an earlier post (God with no ego, May 2011). Colour is purely a psychological phenomenon that only exists in some creature’s mind, but it has an external cause, which is light reflected off objects. Now some may argue that the ‘experience’ of God may also have an external cause, but the difference is that colour can be tested (even for other species) whilst there is no test for God.

An essential part of Rutten’s argument is ‘first cause’, but so-called ‘personal first cause’ can only be found in mythology. As far as science goes, the only thing we can say about first cause is that it was a quantum phenomenon and quantum phenomena are amongst the greatest mysteries of the universe. I’ve written posts expounding on cosmological theories that contend the universe is ‘something from nothing’, including Alan Guth’s inflationary model, the Hartle-Hawking model and Roger Penrose’s cyclic universe. Paul Davies in his book, God and the New Physics, expounds on Alan Guth’s ‘free lunch scenario’, explaining that ‘….all you need are the laws [of nature] – the universe can take care of itself, including its own creation.’

And this seems to be the only pre-requisite for the universe to exist: that the laws of nature, that we understand through the universal language of mathematics, must be either imminent or necessarily entailed in the universe’s own birth. Without an intelligence like ours to comprehend them, nothing in the universe would even know they exist. This leads to the possible contemplation of the ‘anthropic principle’, but that’s a topic for a future post.

In Mar. 2009, I reviewed Mario Livio’s book, Is God a Mathematician? in which Livio suggests that the Pythagoreans would have said that God is the mathematics, and that probably makes more sense than the notion of personal first cause.

Mathematics fulfills 3 of the criteria we normally assign to God: infinity, truth and independent universality. Infinity only makes sense in mathematics and, in fact, is unavoidable at every level; mathematics is the only realm where infinity appears to be at home. Mathematical truths are arguably the only objective truths that are both universal and dependable. And mathematics gives the impression of a universal independence to human thought and possibly the universe itself.

The dawn of the human mind

It’s an extravagant statement to make, bordering on hyperbole, yet, after seeing Werner Herzog’s documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the Chauvet cave, discovered in 1994, one struggles to find words befitting the discovery. The first thing that strikes you as soon as you see the images (in 3D) is how modern they look. You can understand why the first reaction from academia was that they were a hoax, not 34,000 years old as has been verified by carbon dating.

The significance of this film is that it will probably be the only one ever made. The caves are closed to the public, only selected scientists and academics can gain access and only at certain times of the year. The caves were hermetically sealed off by a landslide and that’s the only reason we have this preservation of ancient rock art executed during the ice age when we co-inhabited Europe with Neanderthals. I say ‘we’ because they are the common ancestors to most of the peoples in the world today. The human genome project has revealed that we all came out of Africa, including all indigenous tribal people, and Asians as well as Europeans.

One of the archaeologists, a young man with a science background, who spent 4 continuous days in the cave, tells of the emotional impact they had on him beyond his expectations. In particular, they filled his dreams with the animals he saw. He said he dreamt of lions, both depicted and real-life forms. He remarked upon the emotional and subliminal connection that they could still make with humans living over 30,000 years after they had been created. When I was a child (pre-adolescent) I used to draw animals all the time – they were my favourite subject – concordant with a fascination with animal life in general. I was fortunate enough to live near the bush (as we call it in Oz) with a creek running alongside our house that plummeted into a deep gorge, not that far from where we lived.

This connection and this fascination with wild animals is something that we’ve lost. For these people, one feels it was spiritual, and that’s not just a projection. Herzog went to a lot of trouble to place this particular artwork into a much broader context. Talking with a number of academics, it became clear that 30-40,000 years ago in ice-gripped Europe, art, in all its manifestations that we know today, flourished. In particular, there are numerous figurines, especially of the female form, and bone flutes from the same age. So we know that both graphic and sculptural art flourished as well as music, and we can assume that so did storytelling, mythmaking and religion. Many people make a connection between art and religion, and I think one can safely say that they were born at the same time. They both deal with the subconscious and our dreamworld. An archaeologist at another site, produced a bone flute made from the radius bone of a vulture with 4 holes drilled in it. He played The Star Spangled Banner (though he was obviously not American) to demonstrate that these ice-age humans used the same musical scale that we use today.

The same archaeologist, whom we met earlier in the film discussing his dreams, tells of an incident he saw in northern Australia (probably in a documentary) of an Aboriginal Elder showing someone some rock art from thousands of years earlier and explaining how it used to be maintained but now it’s not. He then proceeded to ‘touch it up’ or restore it. When the white man asked him if he was an artist. He said, no, he wasn’t the artist, the ‘spirit’ was. And this is something that all artists can identify with, like we are a medium for something beyond us, out there. This is the exact same sense that people have with religion. They were born at the same time in humanity: the dawn of the human mind.

Of Gods and Men

This is a French film by Xavier Beauvois with numerous awards to its name, including the Grand Prix at Cannes, 2010. The French title is Des homes et des dieux. ‘A powerful film’ is a well-worn cliché but in this case the accolade is totally apposite.

In Australia, we are very lucky because art house cinema still flourishes (we have art house multiplexes as well as the mainstream variety) and they largely cater for foreign language cinema and so-called independents. When I was in America 10 years ago, I noticed that art house cinema was on the verge of extinction and David Lynch even commented on its dire state at a press conference. I expect that a movie like this would only be seen in American cinema, at a film festival, despite the awards it has already received. More’s the pity because Beauvois’ film deserves a wider audience, especially when he tackles stereotypical perceptions on religion.

The film is based on real events, set in early 90s Algeria following the assassination of President Mohamed Boudiaf in 1992. The militant entity, Groupe Islamique Armee, took advantage of the vacuum to wage a Taliban-like war against ordinary Muslims. The film’s narrative, however, centres on a group of Cistercian Trappist monks, known as the Monks of Tibherine, living and working in a monastery in the Atlas Mountains, 90k south of Algiers. They live an almost Franciscan lifestyle and they are an organic part of the community, which is entirely Muslim, from what we see.

It’s obvious, from the rise of Islamique Armee, that the monks are at grave risk – an early scene shows Croatians at a nearby construction site being massacred. It’s the only scene of violence in the movie, the remainder happens off-screen, but it sets the scene, juxtaposing a violent jihad against the monastic life of the monks and the ordinary village life of their neighbours. At first they are offered armed protection, but the leader, Brother Christian, refuses on the grounds that the monastery can never harbour weapons, even for protection. They are requested in very strong terms to leave by the government, but this they also refuse to comply with, believing that to leave would be a betrayal to their community. As one woman says: ‘We are the birds and you are the branch; if you leave we fall’.

This is a deeply psychological film, whereby each member of the monastery undergoes their own journey as to how they deal with the prospect of an imminent and violent death, and how it challenges their faith and their principles. This is a film where each and everyone of us can step into their shoes and ask ourselves the same questions – it’s a bloody good film.

But there is a wider message here that is very pertinent to the current climate on religion, and Islamic religion in particular. This movie is a very relevant and powerful antidote to the simplistic black-and-white view of religion espoused by people like Dawkins and Harris, who really get up my nose. From what I’ve seen of Hitchens, he exhibits a more flexible and informed point of view, despite having the most acerbic tongue. Harris and Dawkins talk exactly like politicians, who know their constituency and their agenda; Hitchens, less so.

This movie is about courage, both physical and moral, and the beliefs that people draw on when they are really tested. This is a movie that depicts religion at its worst and at its best. It completely annihilates the black-and-white view of religion that we are currently being asked to consider.

God with no ego

An unusual oxymoron, I know, but, like anything delivered tongue-in-cheek, it contains an element of serious conjecture. Many years ago (quarter of a century), I read a book on anthropology, which left no great impression on me except that the author said that there were 2 types of culture world wide. One cultural type had a religion based on a ‘creator’ or creation myth, and the other had a religion based on ancestor worship.

I would possibly add a third, which is religion based on the projection of the human psyche. In a historical context, religion has arisen primarily from an attempt to project our imagination beyond the grave. Fascination in the afterlife started early for humans, if ritual burials are anything to go by. By extension, the God of humans, in all the forms that we have, is largely manifest in the afterlife. The only ‘Earthly’ experiences of God or Gods occur in mythology.

Karen Armstrong, in her book, The History of God demonstrates how God has evolved over time as a reflection of the human psyche. I know that Armstrong is criticised on both sides of the religious divide, but The History of God is still one of the best books on religion I have read. It’s one of her earliest publications when she was still disillusioned by her experience as a Carmelite nun. A common theme in Armstrong’s writing is the connection between religion and myth.

I’ve referred to Ludwig Feuerbach in previous posts for his famous quote: God is the outward projection of the human psyche (I think he said ‘man’s inner nature’), so I’ve taken a bit of licence; but I think that’s as good a definition of God as you’re going to get. Feuerbach also said that ‘God is in man’s image’ not the other way round. He apparently claimed he wasn’t an atheist, yet I expect most people today would call him an atheist.

For most people, who have God as part of their existential belief, it is manifest as an internal mental experience yet is ‘sensed’ as external. Neurologist, Andrew Newberg of University of Pennsylvania, has demonstrated via brain imaging experiments that people’s experience of ‘religious feelings [God] do seem to be quite literally self-less’. This is why I claim that God is purely subjective, because everyone’s idea of God is different. I’ve long argued that a person’s idea of God says more about them than it says about God.

I would make an analogy with colour, because colour only occurs in some sentient creature’s mind, even though it is experienced as being external to the observer. There is, of course, an external cause for this experience, which is light reflected off objects. People can equally argue that there is an external cause for one’s experience of God, but I would argue that that experience is unique to that person. Colour can be tested, whereas God cannot.

Contrary to what people might think, I’m not judgemental about people’s belief in God – it’s not a litmus test for anything. But if God is a reflection of an individual’s ideal then judge the person and not their God.

When I was 16, I read Albert Camus’ La Peste (The Plague) and it challenged my idea of God. At the time, I knew nothing about Camus or his philosophy, or even his history with the French resistance during WWII. I also read L’Etranger (The Outsider) and, in both books, Camus, through his protagonists, challenges the Catholic Church. In La Peste, there is a scene where the 2 lead characters take a swim at night (if my memory serves me correctly) and, during a conversation, one of them conjectures that it would possibly be better for God if we didn’t believe in God. Now, this may seem the ultimate cynicism but it actually touched a chord with me at that time and at that age. A God who didn’t want you to believe in God would be a God with no ego. That is my ideal.

Why we shouldn’t take religion too seriously

This arose from an article in last week’s New Scientist titled Thou shalt believe – or not by Jonathan Lanman (26 March 2011, pp.38-9). Lanman lectures at the school of anthropology and Keble College, Oxford University. He’s giving a talk, entitled Atheism Explained, at St. Mary’s University College Twickenham, UK on 5 April (a couple of days away).

Lanman spent 2008 studying atheism in US, UK, Denmark and online. As a result of his research, Lanman made a distinction between what he calls ‘non-theism’ and ‘strong atheism’, whereby non-theists are effectively agnostic – they don’t really care – and strong atheists vigorously oppose religious belief on moral and political grounds. He found a curious correlation. In countries that are strongly and overtly religious, strong atheism is more predominate, whereas in countries like Sweden, where religion is not so strong, the converse is true. In his own words, there is a negative correlation between strong atheism and non-theism.

I live in Australia where there is a pervasive I-don’t-care attitude towards religious belief, so we are closer to the Swedish model than the American one. In fact, when I visited America a decade ago (both pre and post 911, as well as during) I would say the biggest difference between Australian and American culture is in religion. I spent a lot of time in Texas, where it was almost a culture shock. My experience with the blogosphere has only reinforced that impression.

What is obvious is that where religion takes on a political face then opposition is inevitable. In Australian politics there are all sorts of religious flavours amongst individual politicians, but they rarely become an issue. This wasn’t the case a couple of generations ago when there was a Protestant/Catholic divide through the entire country that started with education and permeated every community, including the small country town where I grew up. That all changed in the 1960s, and, with few exceptions, no one who remembers it wants to revisit it.

Now there is a greater mix of religions than ever, and the philosophy is largely live and let live. Even as a child, religion was seen as something deeply personal and intimate that wasn’t invaded or even shared, and that’s an attitude I’ve kept to this day. Religion, to me, is part of someone’s inner world, totally subjective, influenced by culture, yes, but ultimately personal and unique to the individual.

If people can’t joke about religion in the same way we joke about nationality, or if they feel the need to defend their beliefs in blood, then they are taking their religion too seriously. Even some atheists, in my view, take religion too seriously, when they fail, or refuse, to distinguish between secular adherents to a faith and fundamentalists. If we want to live together, then we can’t take religion too seriously no matter what one’s personal beliefs may be.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s story

I’ve just completed reading Aayan Hirsi Ali’s autobiography, Infidel. It’s the latest book in my book club (refer my blog roll) following on from another autobiography from another refugee, Anh Do, The Happiest Refugee. Do is a stand-up comic and television celebrity in Australia, and his brother, Khoa, is a successful filmmaker and former Young Australian of the Year. They are ‘boat people’, who are stigmatised in this country, and Khoa was actually dangled over the side of a boat by pirates when he was only 2 years old. It has to be said that our major political parties show a clear deficit in moral and political courage on the issue of ‘boat people’.

But I’ve detoured before I’ve even got started. We, in the West, live in a bubble, though, occasionally, through television, films and books, like Hirsi Ali’s, we get a glimpse into another world that the rest of us would call hell. And this hell is not transient or momentary for these people, but relentless, unforgiving and even normal for those who grow up in it. Hirsi Ali is one of the few people who has straddled these 2 worlds, and that makes her book all the more compelling. As Aminata Forna wrote in the Evening Standard: “Hirsi Ali has invited [us] to walk a mile in her shoes. Most wouldn’t last a hundred yards.”

There are many issues touched on in her story, none perhaps more pertinent than identity, but I won’t start there. I will start with the apparent historical gap between some Islamic cultures and the modern Western world – a clash of civilisations, if you like. I remember the years between my teens and mid twenties were the most transformational, conflicted and depressing in my life. Like many of my generation, it was a time when I rejected my parents’ and society’s values, not to mention the religion I had grown up with, and sought a world view that I could call my own. To some extent that’s exactly what Hirsi Ali has done, only she had to jump from a culture still imbued with 6th Century social mores into the birth of the second millennium. I can fully understand what drove her, but, looking back on my own coming-of-age experience, I doubt that I could emulate her. What she achieved is a monumental leap compared to my short jump. For me, it was generational; for her, it was trans-cultural and it spanned millennia.

Much of her book deals with the treatment of women in traditional Muslim societies, treated, in her own words, as ‘minors’ not adults. One should not forget that the emancipation of women from vassals to independent, autonomous beings with their own rights has been a very lengthy process in Western society. Most societies have been historically patriarchal in both the East and West. The perception and treatment of women as second-class citizens is not confined to Islamic societies by any means. But it does appear that many Islamic cultures have the most barbaric treatment of women (enshrined in law in many countries) and are the most tardy in giving women the social status they deserve, which is equality to men.

This attitude, supported by quotes from the Qur’an, demonstrates how dangerous and misguided it is to take one’s morals from God. Because a morality supposedly given by God, in scripture, can’t be challenged and takes no account of individual circumstances, evolution of cultural norms, progress in scientific knowledge or empathy for ‘others’. And this last criterion is possibly the most important, because it is the ability to treat people outside one’s religion as ‘others’ that permits bigotry, violence and genocide, all in the name of one’s God. This is so apparent in the violence that swept through Hirsi Ali’s home country, Somalia, and became the second most salient factor, I believe, in the rejection of her own religion.

When I first saw Hirsi Ali interviewed on TV (7.30 Report, ABC Australia) after she left Holland for America, she made the statement that Islam could never coexist in a Western secular society, logically based on her experience in Holland. In an interview I heard on the radio last year (also in Australia, with Margaret Throsby) I felt she had softened her stance and she argued that Muslims could live in a secular society. She was careful to make a distinction between Islam as a religion and Islam as political ideology (refer my post Dec. 2010). My personal experience of Muslims is that they are as varied in their political views as any other group of people. I know of liberal Muslims possibly because I hold liberal views, so that should not be surprising. But it gives me a different view to those who think that all Muslims are fundamental Islamists, or potentially so. One of Hirsi Ali’s messages is that an over-dependence on tolerance in a secular society can cause its own backlash.

I’ve written elsewhere (The problems with fundamentalism, Jan. 2008) that the limits of tolerance is intolerance of others. In other words, I am intolerant of intolerance. When Muslims, or anyone else of political persuasion, start to preach intolerance towards any other group then the opposition towards that intolerance in a healthy secular society can be immense. Australia has experienced that on a national level about a decade ago and it was ugly. Xenophobia is very easily aroused in almost any nation it would appear. People who preach hatred and bigotry, no matter who they are or which group they represent, and no matter how cleverly they disguise their rhetoric, should all be treated the same – they should be refuted and denounced in the loudest voices at the highest levels of authority.

But, as the events in Somalia demonstrate, it’s not just religion that can inflame or justify violence. Clan differences are enough to justify the most heinous crimes. All through her story, Hirsi Ali describes how everyone could find fault with every other group they came in contact with. Muslims and Africans are not alone in this prejudicial bias – I grew up with it in a Western secular society. The more insular a society is, the more bigoted they are. This is why I agree with Hirsi Ali that children should not be segregated in their education. The more children mix with other ethnicities the less insular they become in their attitudes towards other groups.

In a post I wrote on Evil (one of my earliest posts, Oct. 2007) I expounded on the idea that most of the atrocities committed in the last century, and every century beforehand for that matter, were based on some form of tribalism or an ingroup-outgroup mentality. This tribalism could be familial, religious, political, ethnic or national, but it revolves around the idea of identity. We underestimate how powerful this is because it’s almost subconscious.

Hirsi Ali’s book is almost entirely about identity and her struggle to overcome its strangulation on her life. All the role models in her young life, both female and male, were imbued with the importance and necessity of identity with her clan and her religion. In her life, religion and culture were inseparable. Her grandmother made her learn her ancestry off by heart because it might one day save her life, and, in fact, it did when she was only 20 years old and a man held a knife to her throat. By reciting her ancestry back far enough she was able to claim she was his ‘sister’ and he let her go.

People often mistakenly believe that their conscience is God whispering in their mind’s ear, when, in fact, it’s almost entirely socially and culturally formed, especially when we are children. It’s only as adults that we begin to question the norms we are brought up with, and then only when we are exposed to other social norms. A way that societies tend to overcome this ‘questioning’ is to imbue a sense of their cultural ‘superiority’ over everyone else’s. This comes across so strongly in Hirsi Ali’s book, and I recognised it as part of my own upbringing. To me, it’s a sign of immaturity that someone can only justify their own position, morally, intellectually or socially, by ridiculing everyone else’s.

One of the strongest influences on Hirsi Ali and her sister, Haweya, were the Western novels that they were exposed to: not just literary standards but pulp fiction romances. It reinforced my view that storytelling, and art in general, is the best medium to transmit ideas. It was this exposure to novels that led them to believe that there were other cultures and other ways of living, especially for women. Stories are what-ifs – they put us in someone else’s shoes and challenge our view of the world. It’s not surprising that some of the world’s greatest writers have been persecuted for their subversiveness.

But this leads to the almost heretical notion that only a society open to new ideas can progress out of ossification. If there is one singular message from Hirsi Ali’s book it’s that fundamentalism (of any stripe) does not only have to be challenged, but overcome, if societies want to move forward and evolve for the betterment for everyone, and not just for those who want to hold the reigns of power.

The real gulf that Hirsi Ali jumped was not religious but educational. I’ve argued many times that ignorance is the greatest enemy facing the 21st Century. Religious fundamentalism is arguably the greatest obstacle to genuine knowledge and rational thinking in the world today. Somewhat surprisingly, this is just as relevant to America as it is to any Islamic nation. The major difference between Islamic fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism is geography, not beliefs.

Hirsi Ali is foremost a feminist. She once argued that Islam and the West can’t coexist, but she has since softened that stance. Perhaps, like me, she has met Muslim feminists who have found a way to reconcile their religious beliefs with their sense of independence and self-belief. Arguably, self-belief is the most important attribute a human being can foster. The corollary to this is that any culture that erodes that self-belief is toxic to itself.

I’ve written elsewhere (care of Don Cupitt, Sep. 09) that the only religion worth having is the one that you have hammered out for yourself. You don’t have to be an atheist to agree with Hirsi Ali’s basic philosophy of female emancipation, but you may have to challenge some aspects of scripture, both Christian and Islamic, if you want to live what you believe, which is what she has done.