Tails of Evolution: Unnatural Selections, a story collection by Stan Rice, story one.

Stan Rice has published a collection of short stories, Tails of Evolution. Rice is also the author of the Encyclopedia of Evolution, Life of Earth, and popular articles about evolution. Here is Rice’s summary from Kindle:

             What you don’t know about evolution can kill you.

In these stories, Stan Rice introduces us to people who would never have imagined that evolution had any impact on their lives. A young fundamentalist Christian woman, out of place at a university, discovers that love can evolve. A creationist discovers half-fish half-amphibians in a swamp in Oklahoma. Two young Englishmen find themselves actors on the stage of Darwinian sexual selection. A fundamentalist bases his faith on hearing a devil bird. A young preacher finds a hidden city that is based on Darwinism. A food scientist discovers a tribe of Homo ergaster pre-humans in the cliffs of Madagascar. Darwin meets Lincoln, who was born on the same day in 1809. And a young man discovers that love is the most combustible thing in the universe.

Every writer who deals with evolution should have a short story titled The Descent of Man, which is the title of Darwin’s famous book specifically about human evolution. This was the first story in the collection by the artist formerly known as T. Coraghessan Boyle.

Everyone has heard about the combat between creationists and evolutionary scientists. Many people vaguely sympathize with one or the other, but may also think, what difference does it make?

And Rice does not use this story as a way of attacking your beliefs, one way or the other. Even if he did, this story would probably not change your mind. Instead, he uses the story as an opportunity to look empathetically into the lives of a young fundamentalist woman (Naomi) and a young man (Hunter). Naomi’s extreme fundamentalist viewpoint really bothers, but also fascinates, Hunter. She even uses scripture to “prove” that women have one more rib than men, because God made Eve out of Adam’s rib. (Even if this were true, why would the missing rib have been transmitted genetically through all of human history?) This belief is surprisingly common even among educators.

But it is not just Naomi’s beliefs that puzzle him. Hunter also finds her attractive, something he tries to resist. Naomi keeps reality out of her mind by constantly muttering prayers under her breath. She refuses to make friends when she goes to the big university because she is convinced they are all out to destroy her faith. But she is amazed to discover that Hunter treats her with serious respect. When he proposes that she subject her belief to experimental confirmation—by counting ribs on male bodies—she finds herself trapped by honesty; she has to say yes. She has thereby allowed Hunter into an intimacy of friendship. Hunter also discombobulates her beliefs about non-believers when he shows totally unnecessary kindness to her.

Naomi also knows that small religious groups like hers have genetic mutations show up frequently in their bodies, not just because the professor said so, but based on the people she knows in her church.

When Naomi discovers that the male students in the sample have the same number of ribs as she, Hunter makes an astonishing discovery by working his way into her clothes. What is it? Let’s just say that this is the explanation for the title of the book.

 

Billy Stormfield’s Visit to Hell: A Novel by Stan Rice, part four. Even in Hell, They Know Racism is Stupid

Stan Rice as just published another novel, Billy Stormfield’s Visit to Hell. It is based on Mark Twain’s classic book about Captain Stormfield’s visit to Heaven. Here is the author’s description from Amazon:

Billy Stormfield, descendant of Captain Stormfield in Mark Twain’s book, wakes up in Hell. He meets Mark Twain, who takes him on a tour. All the interesting people are in Hell: Moses, Karl Marx (who is funny only when he quotes Groucho), Joe the Cherokee, the Apostle Andrew, and Pope Francis, because they were all what the fundamentalists called communists; Noah, because he was an environmentalist; General Douglas McArthur, because he forgave the Japanese rather than slaughtering them as the Old Testament commanded; and of course Charles Darwin. Thomas Jefferson, united at last with Sally Hemings, tells them how biologically stupid racism and oppression are. The only people in Heaven are the white supremacists and the jihadists, who spend all their time killing each other over and over forever. The young white supremacist Stonewall escapes to Hell, where he meets and loves the Black history teacher Philomena.

Between Heaven and Hell, Jesus eternally suffers the way Job did, dogs licking his wounds. With His friend the Prophet Mo, He watched His mother Mary helping people sneak into Heaven. Together with the crew from Hell, and led by the school girl Malala, Jesus and Mo storm the assembly in Heaven, kicking Henry VIII and Donald Trump (who look almost alike) down to Earth. Stonewall and Philomena celebrate their wedding feast.

In the Billy Stormfield novel, the only people who were in Heaven were the Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, who spent all day every day killing each other, and then they would resurrect and do it again the next day. War is the ultimate good and pleasure for godly people at least according to the fundamentalists of these two monotheistic religions. And the Christian fundamentalists were racists, who required that schools teach that Black slavery was a good thing for everyone, including the Black slaves themselves. (This is not too different from the history requirements that almost got adopted in Oklahoma in 2025.)

In Rice’s novel, one racist (Stonewall) got tired of this and slipped off to find some peace and quiet. He found it in Hell. He also found a former history teacher from Oklahoma, a Black woman named Philomena. As is nearly inevitable in novels (Rice’s novel is clever but is more of a fable than a novel), they realize how stupid it is for the white (and Black) leaders to teach that they should hate the other race, and they fall in love. The climax of the novel is when they get married.

Given what Twain thought about slavery, he could have put a similar scene into his book about the original Captain Stormfield. For whatever reason, he did not.

"The Bible says..." about Slavery

Fundamentalist Christians universally claim, “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.” But this statement is, even from a literalistic view of the Bible, incorrect. What they really mean is, “The Bible says it, I interpret it, and that settles it.” The fundamentalist, therefore, puts Himself or Herself blasphemously into the line of authority. They expect us to believe their interpretation as if it were the very words of God. Literalist Bible believers should not do this. Many of them do, which is why I turn away whenever I hear them preaching.

Examples abound and I have written about many of them, both here (about their attacks on science) and in my religion blog. But the example I am thinking of now is slavery; in particular, black slavery before the Civil War in the United States. I have just finished reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the novel that, according to Lincoln, was one of the major causes of the Civil War. In addition, Harriet Beecher Stowe was the brother of Henry Ward Beecher, a famous preacher who stirred up great audiences in the north, and in England, against slavery. Some historians have said that Henry Ward Beecher’s message was an important reason that England supported the north instead of the south, which was a profitable source of cotton, sugar, etc. The southern states had ample reason to hate both of the Beechers.

This novel was written in the hortatory, preachy style found in so many novels of that period. Some of my liberal friends will roll their eyes at it. But it was the novel that captured the attention of most Americans to show that slavery was a complex system of evil that pervaded the economy. This was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s challenge: So, you don’t own slaves? Fine. But you may have invested in businesses that get their money from slavery. And your national laws require you to betray runaway slaves to federal authorities. Slavery was an evil deeply intertwined with the American economy. Many northerners, who could not own their own slaves, supported policies that maintained slavery in the south. These people, Stowe made it clear, were as cruel in their thinking as the slave owners themselves, even the slave catchers.

Many people think that the federal government could not have stopped slavery. The constitution did not delegate that authority to the federal government. It was a state’s right to have, or not have, slavery. This is stupid and evil. Of course the federal government could have done it, via the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution. That is, unless slave owners and sellers could prove that slaves did not cross state lines. As soon as a slave was transported from, say, Alabama into Georgia, the feds could have said, federal anti-slavery laws now apply.

And now consider how slavery relates to fundamentalism. The Golden Rule, as stated in the New Testament, is do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You wouldn’t want someone to whip you, or to steal your wages, or to take your child or wife or husband from you; so don’t do that to anyone else. Seems pretty clear.

But antebellum fundamentalists had some contorted arguments that they considered to be absolutely Biblical. Stowe mentions three, and I have added a fourth:

• One is that Paul told the escaped slave Onesimus to return to his owner, Philemon. This is explained in the Book of Philemon. Never heard of it? Prepare to be surprised.
• Another is, in Genesis, God said, “Cursed be Canaan,” and said his descendants, whom the fundamentalist preacher in the novel said were African, would be slaves.
• Paul also told Christians to be content in whatever state they find themselves. The Southern preachers used this to tell slaves that God wants them to be contented with being slaves.
• Finally, some Biblical scholars came up with a theory that the black race was not really human and found some way or other to justify it with the Bible. This one was not in the novel. But I have known people, within recent decades, who believed this. Of course, this would mean that the black race had to be housed with the animals on the Ark. Fundamentalists don’t have an answer to this. As an evolutionary biologist, I am particularly bothered by this argument, which contradicts all we know about human biology.

To fundamentalist preachers in the antebellum South, these fragile arguments were enough to negate the Golden Rule.

Yes, twisting scripture to make it say what you wish, in utter contradiction to what the God of Love would want, has a long history within fundamentalism. It continues today. I will have more to say about this very soon.

Precision, Accuracy, and Fundamentalism

Fundamentalists believe the Bible is absolutely true in every possible way. This includes both precision and accuracy. In so doing, they have utterly sunk the Bible as a reliable source of information about anything. It’s their fault, not the Bible’s fault.

Every sample of observations, and therefore every statement, has a margin of error associated with it. Statisticians assume that, somewhere out there in the universe, there is a true value for everything, whether it is the population of the Earth or the value of pi. (I am, of course, excluding things about which we can be absolutely sure, such as 2 + 2 = 4.) The population of the Earth is constantly increasing, and its true value at any moment can only be estimated. The value of pi is an irrational number; it is 3.14, followed by a literally infinite number of digits. We can never know what all of those digits are. Using computers, mathematicians have figured out the value of pi to trillions of digits—and they are still exactly zero percent of the way to the end. Other examples are endless—the length of a day, for example. Not only is it impossible to calculate the exact length of a day down to infinite fractions of a second, but it is constantly changing. The Earth, hundreds of millions of years ago, used to spin faster. A day, a billion years ago, was about six of our hours long.

Not that you would notice, of course. These “constant” values change very slowly.

Which brings up precision and accuracy. Precision is the narrowness of the estimate. Accuracy is how close the estimate is to the true value, which can often not be known. Scientific notation gets around this problem. Scientific notation is a number multiplied by 10 raised to a certain (positive or negative) power. If we say that pi is 3.14, what we mean is that pi is 3.14 x 10⁰. It is precise to three significant figures. This is more precise than saying that pi is 3.1 (which is 3.1 x 10⁰, precise to two significant figures) or that pi is 3 (which is 3 x 10⁰, precise to one significant figure), though all three statements are accurate. The circumference of a circle is pi x the diameter.

This opens up a funny story in the history of Bible-science conflict. Somewhere in the historical portion of the old testament, the Bible says that Solomon’s temple had a big bowl near the entrance; its diameter was one cubit, and its circumference was three cubits. No problem. This statement is accurate, though not precise. For one thing, there has never been a perfectly standardized cubit. But to one significant figure, pi is 3. What’s the problem?

Apparently some fundamentalists got hold of this and claimed that, based on the Bible, the value of pi must be 3.33, with the threes continuing forever; this is the value of 10 divided by 3. Therefore, they claimed, 3.14 was the wrong value of pi, according to God’s word. Critics of the Bible said that this proved the Bible was wrong. Whatever. The Bible is correct that pi is 3, to a first, and only a first, approximation.

The above story sounds apocryphal to me. But there are some very real examples, with serious consequences, that come from fundamentalists taking Biblical statements that are accurate to a first approximation and forcing them into a precision that was never intended.

The major example I can think of right now is the statement in Genesis 1 that when God created humans, “male and female created he them.” This is a generally accurate statement, as true of humans as of most (but not all) other animal species. In Bible times, nobody knew about genes and chromosomes, but a genetically accurate statement would be that males are XY and females are XX, regarding the sex chromosomes. Accurate as a first approximation, that is. The Y chromosome is important because it has the SRY gene that switches on a cascade of genetic events, resulting in maleness.

But everyone who has taken a genetics course knows that there are a lot of exceptions. There are lots of kinds of alternative genetic arrangements, of which Klinefelter’s and Turner’s syndromes are just two examples. In many cases, the people with these syndromes are not completely male or completely female. But, all told, people with these syndromes make up less than one percent of the species. Klinefelter’s, for example, affects one out of 660 people.

Then there is the story of the guevedoche, which is a Dominican Spanish word for penis at twelve. To be a male, you need functional juvenile testosterone and adult testosterone genes. If an XY individual has a defective testosterone gene, the male characteristics will not develop, and this person may identify all her life as female. But what happens if the juvenile testosterone gene is defective, but the adult testosterone gene works just fine? This person, genetically XY, grows up as a little girl and then, at puberty, turns into a man. The guevedoche man is not completely male, because a great deal of female development has already started before the adult testosterone kicks in. The Dominicans have grown accustomed to these “third gender” people. A similar event independently occurred in New Guinea, where the third gender people are called turnim-men in pidgin.

And then there is the story of the man who had a completely functional SRY gene. But, in one of his parents or ancestors, this SRY gene had translocated (along with its promoter) onto his X chromosome. He was XX, but was entirely male, and did not suspect there was any problem, until he found out he was sterile. Can you imagine being the doctor who, after genetic tests, had to tell him, You are a woman?

Guevedoche, turnin-men, and male women with a translocated SRY gene are very rare, compared even to the sex chromosome syndromes. Let us use one percent as an estimate for all of them.

The Bible is accurate that the human species consist of males and females—that is, it is correct 99 percent of the time. This makes it accurate, though only precise to two significant figures (9.9 x 10¹ percent). But fundamentalists assume that the statement is one hundred percent precise (1.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 x 10² percent). Therefore, anyone who identifies with a gender that is not completely male or completely female must be lying, or evil, or perhaps a product of the Devil’s genetic engineering. This is not simply some curiosity. These fundamentalists want to control our government and our education and base it on Biblical fundamentalism—that is, fundamentalism with specious assumptions of precision. They hate this one percent of humankind, and all the rest of us who wish to welcome this one percent—and all the rest of the nonbinaries—into the fold of our friendship.

Fundamentalists make this assumption, that truth consists of an infinite number of significant figures, for nothing else in their lives. They do not say that if a jar of mayonnaise, labeled at 32 fluid ounces, contains only 31.9 fluid ounces, it is a lie. Their male-female belief is only one example of their dangerously wrong ways of thinking. God—and pi—save us from this, especially in places, such as Oklahoma where I live, where they have a great deal of political power.

Evangelical Religion and Hypnosis, part two.

 

The following is a creepy story about religion and implanted memories. It makes me shudder because I used to be in a fundamentalist church that did not do anything like this, but could have. I cringe to think how close I came to a fundamentalist psychological hell, the way Paul Ingram did.

In 1988, Paul Ingram, a local Republican leader in Washington state, was accused by his daughters of sexual abuse, including ritual satanic abuse, over the course of several years. No evidence has ever been found that these acts of abuse ever happened. Despite this, the daughters’ testimony was accepted as evidence, and Ingram was convicted and given a twenty-year sentence. Ingram pled guilty to the charges. Subsequent research makes it clear that these events never occurred. The memories were implanted, through deliberate or inadvertent hypnotism, by the fundamentalist church to which the family belonged. An implanted memory can seem just as real as a true memory. A church seminar leader apparently asked one daughter, Ericka, to try to remember if she had been abused. This was enough for her to “remember” that it had happened. Then the memory was implanted in Paul.

This is what religion can do, especially the fundamentalist variety that believes that Satan is everywhere and can trick you into doing things that you would normally not even want to do—that is, unless you join and give money to a fundamentalist church. The Satan hypothesis was enough to send an accusation that would have gone nowhere in a mainstream church over the edge into an ever growing series of accusations in a fundamentalist church.

It kept growing. Paul Ingram was accused of killing 65 babies in satanic rituals. And he believed that he had done so. Needless to say, no evidence was ever found. No graves. Of course, the fundamentalist church could always claim that Satan had erased the evidence. By the time Ingram was released from prison, before the end of his term, he may not have been entirely convinced of his own innocence.

Fundamentalist churches use psychological manipulation which can go to absurd lengths and destroy people’s lives. They can do this because the churches believe in a Satan who can manufacture or erase evidence. This is another example of trance logic, which is a characteristic (as explained in the previous essay) of hypnotism.

In addition, psychoanalysts were happy to use three-quarters of a million dollars of taxpayer money to “recover” these “hidden” memories. Fundamentalism uses psychological manipulation and implanted memories to oppress people and destroy their lives, and some unethical psychologists are willing to make money off of this phenomenon.

Conservative Hatred of Science Even at Its Most Basic Level

We all know that conservatives hate science. Conservatives want you to get all your truth straight from Donald Trump, without questioning it. Even the Bible has given way to Trump as the authority for all knowledge among conservatives.

One reason conservatives hate science is that science forces you to question your assumptions, your definitions, and it forces you to seek information to test your beliefs.

But they hate science at an even more basic level than this. For centuries, all scientific research and communication has used the metric system. This system is very logical, and is based on the Earth, water, and powers of 10. Scientists have universally, even in America, adopted this system to avoid miscommunications. When two different entities use two different systems of measurement, the result can be disastrous and costly, as happened in 1999. A Mars probe got all the way to Mars then crashed, because the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) used the metric system while Lockheed Martin, a contractor, used the “English” system, which the English no longer use.

Only three countries in the world reject the metric system: Liberia, Myanmar, and the United States.

Conservatives hate science all the way back to the very basics of measurement. They hate the metric system. At least Tucker Carlson, who represents the extreme right wing of Republicans who hold sway under Donald Trump, hates it. On June 5, 2019, Carlson said, “Almost every nation on Earth has fallen under the yoke of tyranny—the metric system...The United States is the only major country that has resisted...Esperanto died, but the metric system continues, this weird, utopian, inelegant creepy system that we alone have resisted.”

Actually, it is not we alone. Standing with us are the other two most wealthy, stable, and free nations on Earth: Liberia and Myanmar.

Carlson’s guest, James Panero, went further. He called the metric system “the original system of global revolution and new world orders.” Now there he has a point. The metric system was born out of the French Revolution. Carlson’s response was, “God bless you.”

What next? Maybe Trump can slap tariffs on imports from any country that uses the metric system.

If Carlson intended this as a joke, I have seen no indication of it.

But here is a fundamental(ist) point that the conservatives have missed. I wonder what fundamentalist Mike Pence would say about this. Fox and Friends seems to think that God wants us to use feet, inches, pounds, etc. But the Bible uses no such measures! The Bible uses the cubit as the basic measure of length. Any nation that does not base its measurements on cubits has fallen under the condemnation of the Almighty.

I’m not going to touch that one with a 25-cubit pole!

How Religion "Advances"

Today it is relatively rare to find racist Christianity. Nowadays, fundamentalist megachurches proclaim that members of any race are equally invited to donate money to their coffers. But it wasn’t so long ago that many white fundamentalist Christian groups did not want to associate with members of other races.

It is even rarer to find Christians who insist that the Earth is the center of the universe. The only example of which I know is http://www.fixedearth.com. But it was not very far in the past that churches all insisted on geocentrism as a fundamental belief.

In these and in many other cases, the advances in belief—advances toward racial harmony and a scientific understanding of the universe—were the result of forces and processes that were not inherently religious. After slavery was abolished, people began to gradually realize that people of other races were fully human and deserved the same rights as one’s own race. Partly this was due to the utter failure of supremacists to find scientific verification for their beliefs, but mainly, I believe, because more and more people became acquainted with members of other races and discovered, usually pleasantly, that people they might once have disdained were actually nice, ordinary people. In many cases it was devout people who led the push toward racial harmony—and there is hardly a better example than Martin Luther King Jr.—but it was not religion itself that led these advances. None of the leaders, or followers, of racial integration re-read their Bibles and discovered, “Holy Moley! Right there is a verse that we’ve been overlooking for two thousand years.” The Bible did not change. There were, or so the fundamentalists claim, no new revelations from God. The advances in racial harmony, inside and outside of churches, came from accumulated experience which most religious groups have now acknowledged. Reason and experience led the way; religion followed.

It is clear that the conversion of religious people to heliocentrism occurred because science advanced, and religion followed.

Science, experience, and reason are the head of the animal of society; religion is the tail, sometimes wagging, sometimes dragging.

Against Creationism, Part One: Bare-Bones Argument

For those of you in a hurry, here is a bare-bones argument against creationism.

·         Creationists say that God created a perfect world (Genesis 1).

·         Creationists say that God created a world that could not evolve.

·         If species cannot evolve, then they will become extinct as the world changes.

·         Therefore God created a world that was not built to last.

·         But this contradicts Genesis 1, in which God said his creation was “very good.”

Some creationists will respond that God did not intend the world to last very long. I have had some of them tell me this. But this contradicts the Bible.

·         If the world was not built to last, it was not “very good.”

·         Genesis does not say that God intended the world to be temporary. The creationists just made that up.

Many creationists will say that God cursed the world in Genesis 3, which means that it is NOW no longer very good. But this does not change the fact that Genesis 1 does not say God intended the world to be temporary.

Creationism is incompatible with a belief that a competent Creator made a perfectly-functioning world.

I have now concluded—for this reason and for another I will present in the next essay—that it is a total waste of time to present evidence against creationism. I used to spend a lot of time trying to disprove creationism using evidence from fossils, DNA, etc. I now see it is a waste of time because creationism is incompatible even with the Bible.

Why Do Some Creationists Hate God’s Creation?

I know I have written about this topic previously, but I have a new story to relate to you about it.

There is a certain state senator in Oklahoma, whose name some of you know but which I will not here publish, who is infamous for being an extreme creationist. (He represents me in the state senate.) Every year he introduces legislation that supposedly protects the rights of creationist students, rights that are already protected. He insists on a top-down, big-government solution to a nonexistent problem, something you would not expect from a Republican. He gets little support even from fellow Republicans.

But it appears that he has open disdain for God’s creation, if that is what nature is.

One of our best undergraduate students presented a poster at the state capitol during a research symposium. State representatives and senators were free to roam around and see the exciting scientific research being done by undergraduates in Oklahoma. Our student’s poster was about stream reclamation and the reduction of water pollution. She won a prize for the quality of her work.

The state senator referred to above was one of the ones who went around looking at the posters. He asked the student whether her research was directly related to human health. She indicated that it was indirectly related to human health, through the promotion of environmental quality. The senator derisively wondered who would possibly fund scientific research that was not directly related to human health. The student indicated that it was sponsored, in part, by a federal grant. The senator responded that wasting money was typical of the federal government.

This senator openly sneered at one of the best undergrad students at the university in his own district. And he did so by openly stating that anything having to do with the natural world was not worth studying. He was openly dismissive of both science education and God’s creation.

This is not always the way Republicans behave. Our local state representative, also a Republican, visited with the student and was respectful of the quality of the work.

I suspect that, for this senator, creationism is merely a political tool. When he campaigns, he can say that he is defending God against the evil worshippers of Satan, which apparently includes many or most of his fellow Republicans who do not support his extremism. This senator apparently thinks that God was stupid for having created anything in the world other than humans and those things that humans directly use. God created many species that we not only do not use but do not even know; what kind of stupid God would have created all these species without asking this senator’s permission first? Or, more likely, this senator doesn’t really believe in God at all and just uses God as a political tool.

I could respect environmentalist creationists. I’m still waiting to find one.

Religion and Good Ideas

Once again I am writing about a book years after it was published. Steven Johnson is one of those thinkers who can apply concepts across many different fields of thought. Perhaps the best example of this is his book Where Good Ideas Come From.

He contrasts the creativity of liquids as opposed to gases and solids. Stay with me on the development of this idea. Consider the origin of life, which occurred in water on Earth and probably must occur in liquids anywhere in the universe. In gases, molecules bounce off of one another chaotically, causing each new association to instantly fall apart; and in solids, the molecules do not move relative to one another and form new associations. Only in liquids can new associations form and last long enough to prosper. Johnson says that the same thing is true of ideas. New ideas cannot readily form in societies with rigid structures of thought. Nor can they persist, even if they form, under chaotic conditions. The chaotic conditions of thought that came immediately to my mind when I read Johnson’s ideas were the kinds of random “creativity” found in the early to middle twentieth century: the random music of composers such as John Cage and the more general randomness of Dadaism. Not much has come from these ideas. I’ve talked with people whose minds bounce from one idea to another: just when they have an insight that I think might yield fruit, they have moved on so that I cannot even talk with them about their own good ideas. Life, and good ideas, cannot form in either rocks or nebulae. (Johnson had many memorable phrases, but I think I made that one up myself.)

You can, of course, guess where I am going with this. Solid, rocklike thought cannot create new insights or solve problems. Perhaps the premier example of this is religion. When you force your thinking to be built upon a solid rock, which most religions insist you must do, you cannot solve problems. This is how religion kills creativity. Religious leaders, furthermore, offer chaos as the only alternative to their rock-hard religions. If you disbelieve what they say, then you might as well just live in an “Eat, drink, for tomorrow we die” mentality—this is what Paul said, and what religious leaders since him have said. Either you should believe everything the preacher says, or you might as well go on a crazy binge of rape and pillage, they imply. But gas is not the only alternative to rock. There is the liquid alternative, which has just the right amount of stability. Formal religion says that its truths are unvarying; stereotyped liberalism says that there is no truth. (I actually do not know any people who are of this kind of liberal.) A liquid way of thinking allows new ideas to form, and the ones that are closer to truth can persist, while the ones that do not work can be washed away.

Sometimes circumstances force rocklike religion to dissolve a little. The Black Death shook up the power of the Catholic Church, opening the minds of many Europeans to various reformation movements, as well as to the Renaissance and the beginning of science. The official doctrines of the Catholic Church are not, in fact, the same as they were in 1350 or 1600, even though it took centuries for them to finally admit Galileo was right. Today, a similar dissolution may be going on with regard to gay rights (a subject to which I have not given enough thought to have any intelligent opinions). There is not necessarily a point in time when everyone admits the error of their previous rocklike thinking; but after a while they come to accept new realities. Racism has declined slowly among conservatives. Could even George Wallace say that he stopped being a racist on such-and-such a particular date? People may never actually admit the error of previously unassailable beliefs; they may simply ignore them after a while.

Fundamentalism is not just the rocklike perpetuation of old ideas. Fundamentalists invent new ideas, then ossify them. For example, prior to Oral Roberts, there was no doctrine about the special quasi-divine status of Oral Roberts. But he turned this idea into rock, and even in death he still has followers who accept this status. A more liquid way of thinking not only allows new ideas to form but can allow followers of charismatic religious leaders to recognize the artificiality of the rock to which they had once anchored.

How Far Can You Trust Religious People?

Pretty far, but not far enough.

I now present a second reason why orthodox religion (as opposed to religious sensibility or mysticism) is really bad for the human species. This is part two of my previous essay.

Fundamentalist religious conservatives believe that God has given them absolute truth; they are God’s chosen, and the rest of us are God’s enemies; they are saved, we are damned.

In the past, religious conservatives took this belief to mean that they have the right to torture and kill anyone who disagreed with them, whether brown-skinned pagans or white-skinned heretics. Today, of course, they do not do this. They will lie about us in order to get their followers to hate us, but they will not torture or kill us.

But why not? If in fact they are God’s chosen, why shouldn’t they kill us? After all, Joshua killed the Canaanites, putting entire cities to the sword. Religious conservatives say this was right. But they will not put us to the sword, because…why? Perhaps, that’s just not done anymore. Or perhaps it is because they recognize the authority of human governments, which declare murder to be illegal, even if it is done in the name of God. But if God is the same for all time, then if he commanded genocide in the past, he could do so again.

So they will not kill us. But the basis for their refusal to kill us is operational, not fundamental. Read that again. They have operational, not fundamental, reasons to not kill us. They believe God gives them the right to, but has indicated that this is not the right time or place to do so.

But even recent history shows how quickly an operational restraint can change. Just a few years after the fall of Yugoslavian communism, genocide was raging across the Balkan states.

However, science provides a fundamental reason to not kill people who disagree with you. And that fundamental reason is that all of our conclusions, about what to believe and how to live, are tentative. Scientists cannot (without no longer being scientists) kill heretics because there are no heretics in science; there are only people who are wrong. We never say “God has proclaimed that…” but can only say “The evidence clearly indicates that…” In science, there always remains a slight margin of possibility that we are wrong, even about the most obvious things. Maybe the Sun really does go around the Earth, and God just makes it look like it’s the other way around. Therefore scientists cannot pass summary, lethal judgment on anybody on account of their beliefs. But religious conservatives believe that there is no slight margin of possibility of error.

Murderous religious zeal, so common in the past and still so pervasive in large parts of the world, remains within American religious conservatives like a tiny population of bacteria, so tiny that most conservatives refuse to believe it is there, just waiting to emerge and cause a deadly disease when the conditions are right. We can only hope that those conditions never occur.

I have deliberately made this essay very stark in its evaluation of conservative religion. Please understand that if you are a religious person but believe that killing people in the name of God has always been wrong, then my comments do not apply to you. These comments do not apply to most people who are religious in the broad sense of the word.

What Would You Do About…

Note: I am posting a new Darwin video on my YouTube channel StanEvolve. It is not showing up on the main channel page, but if you click on videos, you will find it. It is called Charles Darwin and airplanes. It is about the difference between science and religion.

Note: I am now on Twitter @StanEvolve.

In the previous post, I asked for your input of ideas for this blog. Due to a Blogger website error, you may have missed that posting. If you missed it, take a look at it. I really want to know your input.

But I will also be asking your advice about specific situations. To start: please let me know what you think I should do in the situation I describe below.

I wrote a book review for the National Center for Science Education, which was read by a long-term prisoner in California. He wrote a letter to me, laboriously and carefully and intelligently. We began exchanging letters about evolution. He shared some of his questions and observations, and told me about some conversations he had with his fellow prisoners. I could not send any of my books—prisoners cannot receive hardcover books—but I printed out my summary of the Origin of Species for him, as well as the PDF file of Life of Earth.

I began to notice in his letters that he was dedicated to communism. I suggested to him that communism failed in part because it made incorrect assumptions about human nature (capitalism also makes mistakes, but not the same ones). He wrote back and said he was familiar with the Lysenko story (click here for the Wikipedia summary), but that The Great Stalin and The Great Mao were not responsible for the collapse of communism: it was the fault of infiltrators. He was not angry at anything I said, nor am I at anything he said, and our correspondence will probably continue.

But it is clear to me that he is a fundamentalist communist as unaffected by evidence as any fundamentalist creationist. Fundamentalist faith deflects all contrary evidence by making special accommodations; for example, creationists may say that God nudged the organisms around in the Flood to make the fossils end up in an evolutionary order.

So, what would you suggest that I do? Should I mention to my correspondent that he is using the same patterns of thought that fundamentalist creationists use? My inclination is to simply not discuss such matters any further with my correspondent; I am sure other topics will come up from time to time. But if you think I should write to him about it, let me know—and let me know how—in the comment box.

I look forward to your input on this and other things, and your responses to one another, rather than just waiting for it to happen. I have learned much of what I know by simply listening to others. I have the habit of walking right up to clusters of colleagues and just listening. Sometimes I tell them that I just want to listen and learn. Sometimes it is gossip (which, according to some studies, is nearly always good gossip rather than malicious gossip), sometimes it is major scientific or political insights. In fact, I have learned some things from the intelligent prisoner with whom I correspond.

The Evolution of Religion: What is Next?

Religion is not a single thing. It is a complex set of things. What form it will take in the human future depends on which of its components come to dominate it.

Religion consists of a set of doctrines, as well as spiritual feelings and experiences. Spirituality, based directly on human experiences, will probably continue forever. Our brains have experiences such as the following, which I listed in Chapter 7 of my forthcoming book, Life of Earth: ecstasy; loss of awareness of having a defined body; altruism; need for an authority figure; awareness of death; and belief that phenomena are caused by invisible persons. It is likely that each of these is caused by a particular brain function. They will never go away, except perhaps over a longer period of time than human civilization has yet existed; and we will probably always interpret them as spiritual experiences.

But the doctrines are memes. They are culturally transmitted. However unlikely it seems at the moment, these memes can die away quickly, over a very few generations. I do not expect many of them to die away, but I can at least hope that the more oppressive and destructive of them will become extinct. For example, the idea that God will send most people who have ever lived to a hell in which they will experience conscious eternal torture. This doctrinal belief makes people comfortable with the idea that it is acceptable to torture or harm other people. Another example: the idea that God has given our religious group the unique truth, and has not given it to anyone else. This doctrinal belief makes people comfortable with the idea that they can sweep aside other religious groups by whatever means necessary. The time for belief in God as Supreme Torturer and Dispenser of Unique Truth to Fundamentalists Who Can Enforce It (whether in Christian or Muslim garb) must end as speedily as possible. We should oppose these ideas vigorously and without interruption for as long as it takes to ensure their memetic extinction. One of the best ways to do this is just to educate people—about evolution and about the brain chemistry basis of our thoughts, for example.

And when we do so, should we happen to succeed at some point long after my life is over, what will we have? Perhaps, primarily, we will have spirituality—people who worship God by feeling the inspiration of nature and by living by the Golden Rule. People who think and act the way Jesus did when he was out in the hills. The component of religion that makes people better, not worse. This may be impossible, but it is a future worth working for.