If evolution is true, how can you trust your monkey brain?

Several times now commentors have put forward a challenge that I found rather novel (or, rather, it wasn’t among the many witnessing tricks I had learned at the evangelical school I went to for 10 years). I’m writing this post so that when I am asked this question in the future I can just direct the commentor to this post rather than typing it all out again.  The question goes something like this:

If you believe that humans evolved by chance, how can you really trust your brain and your ability to rationalize? What if your brain evolved to trick you? What if your brain is flawed? If our brains evolved from the brains of more primitive animals, if we have the brains of monkeys, why should we put faith in our intellect?

We can put “faith” in our ability to reason because we can test our brain’s ability to reason and see the results. We learn from using our brains how reliable they are. Take the example of physics. You have a physics, say Newton, sitting around and using his brain to reason. He comes up with a theory and an equation, using his brain coupled with basic observations of the physical world: F = ma (force equals mass times acceleration). It seems to make logical sense to him, but how can he find out if it is true? He can test it. And then thousands of scientists after him can test it. They all found out that F does equal ma, that his reasoning was correct.

A second clause of this argument is basically the “brain in a vat” argument, also known as, “What if the Matrix is real?” What if our brains are engaging in some sort of mass delusion? How can we confirm that our brains are reliably judging the world and not just being tricked by aliens or demons? How can we tell that our brains are perceiving the real world and not a false construction?

It’s basically a moot question. Now, either the brain is indeed capable of making such accurate predictions about the physical world as F=ma, or we’re all living in some sort of delusion where F does not equal ma, but we somehow still see it as a correct equation. In that case it doesn’t really matter, because we are all engaging in a shared delusion. If all of our observations of the physical world are incorrect but exactly the same then we will never have a way to discover the “truth,” and thus the delusion, if perfectly shared, becomes a sort of truth itself – or at least the only truth we can ascertain.

In my opinion, the weakest point of this argument is the false assumption that evolution could somehow result in a brain of a large and complex animal that lacks the ability to reason accurately. What would be the evolutionary benefit to having such a faulty brain? How could an animal that lacks the ability to rationalize be able to evolve to the point that humans and other primates have reached? Reason is key to survival. A reasoning brain allows an animal to observe its environment and respond to it correctly.

Let’s say we have a primitive primate whose brain causes him to come to the wrong conclusions about the physical world. He sees a large cat coming at him and him brain tricks it into thinking it is a harmless mouse. That monkey is dead. Dead monkeys can’t pass on their genes. He sees a stagnant pool of water and his brain tricks it into thinking it is a crystal clear stream. That monkey gets a parasite and is dead. Let’s make it simple and say that the monkey’s brain is just really bad at connecting two events. Let’s say he sees his brother get caught and eaten by a big cat. If the next time he sees the same type of cat and doesn’t make the logical connection that “big cats equal dead monkeys” and thus doesn’t run away, he is going to be eaten. Dead monkey. To make it even more simple, let’s say you have a monkey whose brain doesn’t cause a grand delusion, but is just not very good at logically analyzing its situation in relation to the physical world. Let’s say the monkey has poor depth perception. He looks at the natural world and is unable to accurately reach conclusions about it. He is sitting in a tree and sees a piece of big fruit in another tree nearby. He looks out, but because of his brain that lacks the cognitive ability to perceive depth (a basic form of reasoning), he thinks that the branch of that other tree over there isn’t really that far away, so it makes a jump for it. But it was very far away indeed, and now: splat. Dead monkey.

Here I go using my rational brain again, but it doesn’t make logical sense for a complex animal to have evolved a brain that is unable to reason. But don’t worry, I can trust my brain on this because it hasn’t lead me astray so far. I’ve been doing a really good job of observing my surroundings and making inferences. I’m able to reason that rotten meat could make me sick, so I don’t eat it. I’m able to reason that it wouldn’t be a very good idea to step out in front of that speeding bus, so I wait for it to pass before crossing the street. I’m able to reason that five apples is more than two apples. I’m able to reason that five apples plus two apples equals seven apples. Every time I draw a conclusion or make a decision that conforms with reality, I’m demonstrating the fact that I have a brain capable of reason and rationality, even if it is just a monkey brain.

Oprah and Anti-Vaccination

Of all of the pseudosciences plaguing us today, the one that scares me the most is the anti-vaccination movement.

It’s old news in the skeptical community, but Oprah has signed “vaccine skeptic” Jenny McCarthy to her media franchise and is giving her a show. Oprah’s website has a form, asking viewers to submit questions for Jenny and suggests topics for her to talk about.

Sometimes the world seems so overran with irrationality and superstition. It can feel like we’re fighting a losing battle. It isn’t very often that lay skeptics like myself are given a platform where we can speak out. I would encourage everyone to take advantage of this opportunity and let Oprah know exactly how you feel about Jenny McCarthy and the rampantly ignorant lies she peddles.
This is what I wrote to Oprah:

I want Jenny McCarthy to interview by the multitude of scientists who disagree with her beliefs about vaccines, autism, and “toxins.” I want to see her taken to task for spreading such awful, dangerous, deadly misinformation. I want her to have to confront the mountains of evidence that vaccines do not cause autism, the kind of evidence she is so great at ignoring. I want to see the TRUTH discussed.

But most of all, I would like to see Jenny interview the parents of Dana McCaffrey, the four-week old baby who died of whooping cough. She was perfectly healthy, just too young to be vaccinated against the terrible virus. The area in Australia where she lived has very low vaccination rates, thanks to fear-mongers like Jenny who falsely tell people that vaccines are toxic and can damage their babies. Because of the low rate of vaccination, there were outbreaks of whooping cough. Dana contracted the virus and died a terribly painful and premature death. She died from a preventable disease. If parents in her town had vaccinated their children, preventing them from getting the disease, they would have also protected poor little Dana, who was too young to be vaccinated. Vaccinations do not only project a parent’s own children, but everyone’s children. They especially protect newborn babies and children who have compromised immune systems from these terrible diseases.

(For more info on Dana McCaffrey: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/04/26/the-australian-antivax-movement-takes-its-toll/)

Unless Oprah is interested in seeing babies die, I would suggest that she not allow Jenny to spread her lies about toxins and vaccines on the air. We know that Jenny doesn’t care if a few babies die. In the interview in Time Magazine she said as much, “I do believe sadly it’s going to take some diseases coming back to realize that we need to change and develop vaccines that are safe.” What Jenny is willfully  ignorant of is the fact that vaccines ARE safe. They are one of the safest treatments in all of scientific medicine. They do not cause autism, and this has been demonstrated in countless studies. Jenny doesn’t care if a few babies die in order to “further” her fake cause, but I’d hope that Oprah does.

Sandbox Revelations

The only paradox [of theory of relativity] is the one between the reality that we think is true when we were little kids and the one we find out is true when we take relativity class. I think that it makes sense that the human mind can’t discover all the truth there is out there to know simply through the interaction with the sand in the playground. - Dr. Pamela L. Gay

One of the most popular form of evidence for God is the Argument from Design. To put it simply, it’s the argument people make when they say, “When I look at the world – the beauty of a sunset and the miracle of a newborn baby – I see design. I see order and purpose. Someone must be behind that, someone powerful and loving. There must be a Creator.” The argument was written by William Paley in his 1802 work Natural Theology. He suggested that any person coming across an object of complexity, like a discarded watch, would automatically assume that its order and intricacy necessitates a creator. He expands his analogy from a watch found on the ground to the natural world in its entirety.

Paley and others who favor this argument are encouraging simplistic, intuitive thinking.  Our brains, ever so fond of finding patterns and assigning meaning, look at the natural world and see, based on childlike observations, what we believe to be evidence for order and thus design in the universe. Creationists insist that this deduction is glaringly self-evident. Anyone can simply look out their window and see evidence for God’s existence all around them. A child taking a trip to the local neighborhood park could figure this out.

Because of the obviousness of this revelation through nature, because of the fact that a young child can reach this important conclusion, Creationists are absolutely dumbfound when scientists ask them to believe not in the manifest realization that God created the world as we see it today. Instead they are asked to believe that the universe was created during a great cosmic event tens of billions of years ago, and that all the structure they see has been gradually assembling itself over such a vast amount of time. A child playing in the park could not ever come up with this convoluted Big Bang theory on their own. It is completely counter intuitive and flies in the face of our most basic daily observations and experience. This leads Creationists to believe not only that theories like the Big Bang theory and evolution via natural selection are untrue, but they are completely incredulous that anyone could believe in them at all, because they simply sound so absurd and do not conform to the observations of nature we made while playing in the sandbox.

The situation leads to Creationists like this one writing,

It never ceases to amaze me how intellectually condescending evolutionary naturalists can be.  Keep in mind, these are folks who believe that an indescribably tiny wad of nothingness exploded into a fully functional, structured, and ordered universe of orbiting planets and complex creatures without any supernatural agency involved.

In other words he’s saying, “Materialists are the ones being condescending, but common! They are asking us to believe in the most ridiculous things! They want me to ignore all of these valid observations I’ve been making about nature since I was a child. They want me to ignore the truth of design right in front of my eyes and submit to this crazy theory. It boggles the mind!” Well yes, it does boggle the mind.

Many scientific observations are completely baffling. Take the example of the theory of relativity. When I was taking a descriptive physics course at Berkeley the professor began his lecture on relativity by stating, “The main problem with relativity is overcoming your prejudices…Most of what relativity is is really quite simple, but it goes against what your parents taught you when you were ten and that is why it is hard.” In his textbook he wrote, “Nothing about time is obvious…we know that if two twins are exactly the same age and one travels while the other stays at home, then when they are brought back together, the moving twin will have experienced less time than the other twin!” After explaining that time is dependent on velocity he continues, “It sounds absurd. It goes against intuition. It goes against everything we experience…[as a child] you were trained to watch clocks and to ‘be on time,’ and you finally learned that there is a ‘universal’ time that you can follow.” What we figured out as children, what seemed intuitively true, is actually false. Time is not this monumental fixed entity that ticks away at exactly the same rate all of the time, as the evidence of the physics of relatively attests.

What the lesson of relativity can teach us is that our everyday observations of nature do not always accurately explain it. This is just one reason why the Argument from Design is so flawed. It relies on the sorts of intuitive perceptions that science is constantly rendering bankrupt. The universe is far more complex that it seems, and to truly understand it we need to rely on more than simply “the interaction with the sand in the playground.”

Although the theory of relativity is every bit as counter intuitive as the Big Bang and evolution, I’ve yet to hear of a Christian who denies it for religious reasons. Obviously there are some (less threatening) areas of science where Christians understand that the observations they made as children are not able to accurately explain the physical world. They are swayed by the evidence, even though it contradicts previously held beliefs and personal observations. The evidence for evolution and the big bang is solid, just like the evidence for relativity. It should be more than enough to convince even the most ardent skeptic, and yet there is still active opposition to the theories found in defenses like the Argument from Design. This line of reasoning relies on the faulty supposition that our facile observations of the natural world are enough to explain its workings.

I’m not asking for religious people to give up their belief in God, but when considering the Big Bang and evolution to simply give up their intuitive sandbox revelations and embrace the truth of the evidence, even if it contradicts their personal observations.

Dealing with Death, Part 2

A few months ago I wrote a post about Dealing with Death. It was inspired by another blog I had read that suggested not telling small children that there is an afterlife was tantamount to abuse, even if the parents are atheists or agnostics and do not believe heaven is a real place. I questioned whether heaven actually provided real comfort or not, suggesting that death is always incredibly painful, no matter your worldview. I also questioned whether heaven could be considered a healthy delusion, considering the fact that believing in heaven almost always means believe in hell, and there is no real way to be sure that your loved ones are suffering eternal torment. Now another negative aspect of belief in heaven has come to my attention: it can make it very difficult for grieving people to accept the loss of a loved one.

I was listening to the This American Life podcast today, and episode called “Return to the Scene of the Crime.” The last story was told by Daniel Savage, an author best known for his sex-advice column Savage Love. He shared a very emotional story about his upbringing as a young Catholic interested in the Priesthood who realized in high school that he was gay. Around the same time he also realized he did not believe in God. Despite the fact that his mother was a “good Catholic,” she embraced his sexuality and new worldview immediately and supported him in every possible way. When she died suddenly in Tuscon several years later during a visit to her sisters, Savage found himself drawn back to the old comforts of religious ritual and delusion in an unhealthy way. I’ll quote the last part of his narrative and let it speak for itself:

Being brought up in a faith built around a guy jumping out of his tomb, that makes it difficult to reconcile onesself to the permanence of death. Who knew? The afterlife – it’s cruel really, when you think about it – criminal – telling children that the people they love don’t die, that there’s some other life, some better place, a place without pulmonary fibrosis or Tuscon, Arizona. And maybe that lie is a comfort for some, but it’s made death more painful for me, not less, which is the opposite of religion’s intended effect, is it not? The voice of unreason in my head, the voice of nuns back at St. Ignatius says, “She lives! She is in heaven.” And the voice of reason, which sounds a lot like Christopher Hitchens, barks back, “No she doesn’t. She’s dead. Get over it already.” This inability to reconcile myself to death has not been good for me. I visit St. James like an addict drops by a crack house. For a fix. To deaden the pain by losing myself momentarily in the fantasy that she lives and that we will be together again…If I were the kind of person who could believe, I would believe. But I’m not that kind of person. Shit.

It’s easy being an atheist…

Today at the entrance of campus, just past a group of picketing demonstrators, one wearing a large papier-mâché pigs head, stood a man in a hat with a very large sign that read: “It’s easy to be an atheist when you don’t think about where things came from.” The back side of the sign said that he could convince me that Jesus was my savior in 5 minutes.

The first retort that came to mind was, “It’s easy to be a Christian when you don’t understand anything about science.”

I was a happy, carefree Christian before I learned about the basics of evolution, geology, physics, and cosmology. Even into my later teen years, long after I should have acquired at least a small amount of basic scientific understanding, I remained happily oblivious. I wasn’t curious about how the world worked, because I already knew the answer: God made it all. I wasn’t worried about exploring the claims of evolution, because my teachers, parents, and pastors had already told me everything I need to know about it: Evolution is complete bunk with zero evidence to support it. Christians who dismiss or reject evolution show again and again through their fallacious, twisted arguments that they simply don’t understand the first thing about it.

The second retort was, “Hey, wait a minute! It isn’t easy to be an atheist at all.”

Few American atheists were raised without religion. Most of us embarked on a long and difficult journey of deep and critical philosophical reflection before we made the decision to reject the concept of God. Religious belief is considered a sacred right, and most people go through their entire lives without ever having their faith question or challenged. Atheists, on the other hand, are constantly called upon by the religious to give an account of our position. It is never enough in coversation to just say, “I’m an atheist.” We must give a detailed reason for holding our beliefs. How often do you think the average American Christian is asked “Why?” when they announce they believe in God? Atheists are also consistently found to be the least trusted social group and the least likely to be elected president. We are a group in the vast minority and are routnely considered everything from amoral to evil by those in the religious majority.

Contrary to the popular Christian belief that atheists only reject God because it is easier to pretend that he does not exist than to submit to his will, becoming an atheist takes a great deal of though, introspection, and personal responsibility, not to mention the willingness to exist without an extended communal group and outside of the parameters of conventional society. Plus we have to deal with guys like this one pestering us with signs all the time.

Maybe I should make my own sign…

What Most Apologists Don’t Seem to Get

I see it again and again. Apologists insist that religion is a good force in the world, encouraging morality and kindness. Apologists are upset about the “Militant Atheists” who don’t “respect” their worldview and dismiss all religion. Apologists insist that all people have sinned and that all people require the love of Christ to be saved from eternal damnation.

I get it. I get the arguments. I’ve heard them a million times.

Here is what Apologists don’t seem to get: WE ARE ASKING FOR EVIDENCE.

Don’t tell me about how much Christ loves me, give me evidence that Christ was God and rose from the dead. REAL EVIDENCE. Don’t tell me what the Bible says, give me evidence that proves the Bible is the word of God. Don’t tell me that the love of God makes us all kind, give me evidence, REAL EVIDENCE, that God exists at all.

Day of Silence Protested by Illinois Family Institute

April 17th had been a Day of Silence, a student-led protest to draw attention to the harassment of the LGBT community.

The Day of Silence is a student-led national event that brings attention to anti-LGBT name-calling, bullying and harassment in schools. Students from middle school to college take some form of a vow of silence in an effort to encourage schools and classmates to address the problem of anti-LGBT behavior. The event is designed to illustrate the silencing effect of this bullying and harassment on LGBT students and those perceived to be LGBT.

Several Christian groups are protesting the event, most vocally the Illinois Family Institute, who are encouraging parents to keep their kids home from school on the 17th. They posted a list (pdf) of why Christians should not participate in the event. First, they claim that the event “politicizes the classroom for ideological purposes,” and that this violates, somehow, separation of church and state clauses, which I suppose they interpret as “separation of church and personal morality.” They insist again and again that the Day of Silence interrupts the school day, taking time and attention away from instruction and focusing it instead on a political issue. I will put aside the fact that I completely disagree with their assertion that Day of Silence is politicizing (this is about ending violence and harassment, not about allowing gay marriage), but assuming that it is a politically charged event, which is more disruptive to a child’s learning process: having them witness a few silent students engaging in a peaceful form of protest while still attending class, or pulling them out altogether?

Another reason they say that the classroom should not be “politicized” is because “DOS participants have a captive audience, many of whom disagree with and are made uncomfortable by the politicization of their classroom.” Ugh. Oh no. We might make some people uncomfortable. Those kids who harass and bully gay students or use derogatory slang words for “homosexual” as hate speech are going to feel exceptionally uncomfortable, and we don’t want to hurt their feelings, right? They are obviously referring to Christian students who disagree with the premise that homosexuality is a acceptable lifestyle, but I fail to see how an even that seeks to end harassment would affect those students. Regardless of how they view the morality of homosexuality, everyone, including Christians, should agree that there is no excuse for bullying and name-calling.

The second paragraph of their publication reads: “The explicit purpose of DOS is to encourage sympathy and support for students involved in homosexual and cross-dressing behaviors whose voices have been allegedly silenced by the disapproval of society. The implicit purpose is to undermine the belief that homosexuality and cross-dressing is immoral. Parents should no longer passively countenance the political usurpation of public school classrooms through student silence.” It is disturbing the way they assert that the LGBT community have only been “allegedly silenced,” and yet they are actively worked to silence this demonstration, isn’t it?

They go on to claim that a fundamental problem with Day of Silence is how the organizers define “safety” and “discrimination.” The write that “the problematic rhetoric of ’safety’… substitutes speciously for the more accurate term of ‘comfort.’ To suggest that in order for those who self-identify as homosexual or ‘transgender’ to be ’safe,’ no one may disapprove of homosexual conduct is both absurd and dangerous.” Right. This is all about comfort. This isn’t about Matthew Shepard. This isn’t about Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover either, an 11 year-old boy who hanged himself on April 9th of this year after enduring anti-gay bullying, despite the fact that he did not self-identify as gay. To suggest that this is a matter of nothing more than personal “comfort” ignores the terrible deaths of the many victims of anti-LGBT harassment, and glosses over the violence faced by those in the LGBT community, treating it as if it is non-existent. According to GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network), “Nearly 9 out of 10 LGBT youth (86.2%) reported being verbally harassed at school in the past year because of their sexual orientation, nearly half (44.1%) reported being physically harassed and about a quarter (22.1%) reported being physically assaulted, according to GLSEN’s 2007 National School Climate Survey of more than 6,000 LGBT students.” Regardless of how the IFI wants to spin this, anti-gay harassment is a serious problem.

On the topic of tolerance, the IFI writes, “Day of Silence participants claim they seek to end discrimination. There is, however, a problem with the way ‘discrimination’ is defined in public discourse today. Groups like GLSEN believe that statements of moral conviction with which they disagree constitute prejudice or discrimination.” This is not about agreeing or disagreeing. This is about ending the physical and mental abuse inflicted on GLBT students. If a group of people frequently suffer harassment and attacks, that is discrimination. You can disagree with them all you want, just as long as the disagreement doesn’t take the form of derogatory slurs and physical violence, as it so often does.

They continue, “While relentlessly promoting this view [that GLBT students should not be discriminated against], administrators are never asked to provide evidence for the dubious presuppositions on which claims of discrimination are based. They are never asked to provide evidence for the arguable claim that homosexuality is equivalent to race; or that disapproval of homosexual conduct is equivalent to racism; or that homosexual impulses are biologically determined; or that the presence of biological influences in shaping desire renders a behavior automatically moral. The time is long past that parents demand justification for those claims.”

So discrimination only counts if it is regarding something biological? Several studies and lines of research have already proven the evidence they are asking for. But then again, even if that evidence wasn’t there, even if homosexuality was a personal choice and nothing else, should they still endure discrimination? It might not be perfectly appropriate to compare anti-gay discrimination to racism if it is indeed an issue of choice, but since when it is alright to discriminate against a group based on their personal convictions? Surely Christians would say that it is not okay to discriminate against them just because their biology did not determine their Christianity.

Just in case you weren’t completely sure by now what the IFI stands for and how they feel about anti-GLBT harassment and bullying, they’ve put together a lovely little video to demonstrate their opinions. In the video, a Christian child goes to school on April 17th and, against his will, has a piece of duct tape slapped over his mouth by his dominatrix-like teacher, forcing him to comply with the Day of Silence. The students of his class are then forced to give “Presentations on Tolerance,” where they hold up posters that read, “Make the world a safe place for gay people.” The narrator says that homosexuals only “claim to be a victim” as part of their master-engineered “homosexual agenda” that seeks to normalize the reprehensible behavior. He then quotes from a “gay marketing firm,” obviously the geniuses behind the homosexual agenda, that suggest to increase tolerance by creating homosexual TV characters who are “the best dresses, the person who offers the best advice, never the drunk or the scoundrel.” The narrator claims that the portrayal of homosexuals on TV is a “glossy veneer” hiding the real truth that homosexuals are more likely to use drugs and alcohol, accept abusive relationships, and commit suicide. Huh. Interesting. I wonder why homosexuals are so miserable and depressed? Could it be because of bigots like the ITI, who seek to institutionalize discrimination against them? Then they make a giant logical fallacy (the argument from antiquity, to be exact), claiming that some old traditions (i.e. “traditional” marriage) have remained “because they are right.” At the end of the video all of the Christian students band together and rip their posters from the tolerance presentations, tearing up the words “Make the world a safe place for gay people.” A very telling vignette.

Rather than positioning themselves in oppostion to love, peace, tolerance, and acceptance (the values taught by Christ), the Chrisitan community should be embracing this event, encouraging their children to take part. They should truly follow in the footsteps of Christ by taking a stand against violence and harassment in all its forms, regadlress of the target of abuse.

No God, No Value?

In my last post I pointed out an often said but little defended theistic, particularly Christian, argument: one must simply have faith in God. I asked why putting faith in anything unseen and unproven would be considered a virtue. Today I want to look at another one of these default theistic arguments that seems to be unthinkingly accepted by those who put it forward: the notion that the existence of a Creator automatically grants created entities intrinsic value.

It is one of the biggest philosophical problems theists have with the atheist worldview. If there is no Creator, how can we say life has value? If value is not objectively assigned by an outside force, what is to stop us from assigning value as we see fit, and therefore devaluing certain life and increasing the value of our own? This problem seems to be a particular favorite among the deist sorts, those who feel the need to believe in a First Cause or a Creator, but do not specifically adhere to any one sect of organized religion. It is to these loose theists or deists that I posit my own philosophical question: why does having a creator grant something objective value?

It seems obvious that a created thing would only have value if the Creator himself valued it. If I, exercising my creative capacities, sketch a picture, does that automatically mean that my picture is good or valuable, simply because it came from my hand? What if I think the drawing is terrible and I throw it in the trash. Does it still maintain some sort of value simply because it is a created object? Or is its value only contingent upon my subjective opinion of it?

Christians have an answer. They believe, based on certain cherry-picked Bible verses, that the Creator does indeed value his creation. God loves us all and thinks all of us are equally valuable, so we defer to his superior authority and accept that we have value because God says we do. But is this objective? No. It is incredibly subjective, based completely on the opinion of God, who has a personality, characteristics, and enough traits to be called an individual. Now if you believe that God is completely benevolent, then that means his opinion is bound to be good and therefore truthful, but that brings us back to Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma: does God chose good because it is independently good, or is good “good” because God chooses it? It is very difficult to break out of this cycle of questioning subjectivity. You either have to trust, based on little actual evidence, that God is good and will choose what is objectively good, or you have to accept that what God considers good is his subjective opinion that we submit to. This basically has us back to square one. (And we can only get this far by ignoring several dozen Bible verses that either explicitly state or strongly suggest that God does not value all of creation, especially since it has been damaged by sin.) We have yet to establish objective value. We are merely deferring to a higher authority, and how is that any different than deffering to the higher authority of the human law, the general consensus, or a document like the US Constitution?

This problem must be even more difficult for theists who claim not to know the nature or will of God, and even more difficult still for those who believe that God created the world but is ambivalent toward us lowly beings. If our value as created things only comes from the opinion of our Creator, then there is as good of a chance that he simply does not care about us as there is the chance that he loves us unconditionally. Yet if the will of God is unknown or unrevealed, how can we know which way God is leaning? All we can do is hazard a guess, which does not establish any truth whatsoever.

We also have to consider the possibility that God does not find us valuable. Then what? If our basis of value is wrapped up in the opinion of the Creator, and not based on more objective qualifications, then regardless of how valuable we feel personally or how much we may value other beings, we actually do not have any value at all. I wonder if theists would be willing to admit that beings have no value because God does not really care about us as quickly as they say that we have value because he does. Given all available evidence, the former scenario seems much more likely.

To me, it seems much better to find another system with which to establish value, rather than leaving it all up to the opinion of a mysterious being who refuses to make his existence known or his will understood. It is going to be a subjective system, but I believe I have shown that even if we left it up to the unknown God, we still would not achieve complete objectivity. Of course the suggestion that the value of human life be decided subjectively is a scary thought. All you have to do is consider the instances of mass murder and genocide to decide that we are incapable of handling such a great responsibility. I would hope, however, that a few bad apples would not spoil the bushel of humanity. We do not have the best track record when it comes to establishing equality and guaranteeing basic human rights for all individuals, but we are getting better at it all the time. Just consider the progress made in the United States alone in the last 150 years. The strength of our legal systems and the ever-increasing amount of tolerance displayed by each succeeding generation tells me that we are well on our way to achieving a consensus among individuals that all life is equally valuable, and that is as close to objectivity as we can ever hope to get.

Even if we were not progressing in such a promising way, I find myself wondering if adopting a religious viewpoint would help the situation at all. It is very interesting that belief in God has not correlated with true respect for the value of human life. In reality, even those who believe in a Creator God do not act as if all life has equal intrinsic value. I am sure that I do not need to mention all of the wars fought and lives lost in the name of religious dogma, but one other example stands out in my mind. Why is it that the death penalty is not only legal, but most often carried out in the states that have the highest percentages of religious believers, like Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, and Georgia? If belief in God really established the notion that all human life has value, we should see the opposite trend. Atheists should be the ones dolling out the death sentence, since we are the ones who supposedly believe that we can subjectively assign whatever value we see fit to human life, not those who claim to believe that their God created every person and values every person equally. If God loves the murderer just as much as he loves the devoted pastor, who has the right to say which person’s life is more valuable, or to say that one deserves to die while the other deserves to live? The religious seem much more comfortable making that sort of decision than the secular do.

You gotta have faith?

Just a quick post to assure any regular readers I might have that I am not dead and have not lost interested in blogging. I’m currently buried under a stack of exhibition catalogs and bound volumes of Artforum while I work on writing up all of the research I’ve done in the past year in order to complete my thesis. It’s slow going and is taking up what little time I used to use for blogging. Anyway, that’s my excuse.

Last night my husband and I watched Religulous, the investigative documentary about religion made by Bill Maher. There was one question he asked several times, and none of those he interviewed gave a real, clear answer: Why is it a virtue to have faith? Maher would ask people why they believed in God or the Bible or the Koran or whatever else, and the most common answer was, “I just have faith. You have to have faith.” Okay. But why? Why is faith a good thing? Why should we have faith in anything at all?

I was reminded of a very awkward conversation I had with my father a few years ago regarding the US government engaging in torture. My father, a devout Christian, devout conservative, and devout Republican told me that I simply had to trust that the government was doing what is best for its people, and that it knows more about any given situation than we do. In other words, he told me that I just had to have faith that my government was always in the right, and not question their actions or motives. If that notion doesn’t set alarm bells off in your head, something is wrong. It is the people’s responsibility to keep their government in check, to always question and challenge. If we give up our ability to investigate and dissent, we might as well be living under a king, a patriarch who knows what’s best, or worse, under a fascist dictator who knows what’s best.

This attitude that we must trust our government and have faith that it is working for the greater good is exactly how the religious say we must react to God. Just as my father assumed that the government was engaging in torture because they had good reason — they knew something that the lay person doesn’t know — the religious tell us that we must trust God because of his ultimate knowledge, so far above our own, and the belief that he is making plans to prosper us rather than to harm us (God works in mysterious ways! God’s ways are not our own!). But what evidence do we have to support these claims? History shows that government, our own included, does not always work for the greater good. And as for the evidence for the benevolence of God, there is nothing outside of the Bible (and even that does a very poor job of establishing God as completely good), which means there is nothing outside of a weak circular argument. If you want a counter-argument, just consider the random and destructive harshness of nature.

Why should I have faith in the government, or anything else for that matter? Should I? Probably not. Faith is something which should be earned. It should be based on a foundation of evidence. If you give it away for free you are naive, foolish, and frankly, a sucker.

Is it a virtue to  put your faith freely (without sufficient evidence) in a bank that hands out an impossible too-good-to-be-true loan, and promises that you will be able to make your mortgage payments, even if you are pretty sure they are wrong? No. We learned that lesson the hard way.

Is it a virtue to put your faith freely in a wealthy Nigerian businessman who randomly emails you, promising you a large sum of money if you simply give him your bank account information? No. It’s a good way to flush your savings account down the toilette, though.

Is it a virtue to put your faith (and money) in a psychic who promises to help you find your missing child? Not if you want to learn the truth.

Where is there an instance, outside of religion, where it is considered virtuous to grant total faith without first establishing that the faith should be given, and is appropriate? I can’t think of a single instance. So why is it a virture to give faith to God when he has failed repeatedly to meet the minimal requirement, to provide sufficient evidence to assure us that he is worthy of faith?

Sacred and Profane

Caracciolo's The Young Saint John in the Wilderness (this image is significantly darker than the actual painting and is cut off at the bottom excluding the staff)

Caracciolo’s The Young Saint John in the Wilderness (1610) presents the youthful Baptist reclining against a rocky outcropping. The dark background consists of a rock wall, a large boulder behind the figure, and one that he leans against. In the darkness a few vine-like plants can be discerned, sparsely curling around the rocky landscape. John is nude, a vibrant red cloth is draped over the rock against which he leans, and curves down over his loins. He gazes out at the viewer with his head tilted slightly back, almost as if he is nodding at to us to come closer. The backward leaning position of his head causes the left side of his face to fall into shadow, while highlighting the crescent shape of his right side from his small, delicate chin to his smooth cheek and curving brow with a slightly arched eyebrow, which seems to convey another invitation. His right arm rests against the large rock, his bare shoulder and forearm accented by the light streaming in from a source at the upper left of the canvas, and also by the contrast between his white flesh and the shock of red drapery caught by the same light. Our eye follows the horizontal line of his right arm to his delicately curved wrist and extended index finger that point inward toward his chest, as if yet another invitation to draw near. The diagonal of his pointing finger leads our eye across his chest, molded by shadow, to the crook of the elbow in his left arm, down the forearm highlighted by the source of streaming light, to the hand that gingerly clasps his right thigh. His left leg rests gently on his bent right, the diagonals of both echoed by his attributive staff lying on the ground in front of him, around which curls the white scroll proclaiming the coming of the Lamb.

The composition is unified through its single source of light which serves to highlight John’s luminous flesh and mold his light, yet muscular, physique through shadow.  Also unifying the composition is the pervasive sense of touch. This sense is drawn to our attention through the dramatic juxtaposition of cold, dark stone and warm, glowing skin, and radiant drapery, as well as through John’s sensual pose, with the contact between his hand and thigh specifically. He is rendered so sensually that his identity is at first difficult to ascertain. He seems closer to an amorous cupid figure than to the stoic, ascetic character of John.

This emphasis on sensuality and physical touch problematizes the sacred context of the image by inserting the profane. In this sense, “sacred” refers to the higher spiritual attributes of saintly figures conveyed through their disavowal of the physical, while “profane” relates to the physicality of the body exemplified through secular themes of the body’s most basic needs and drives. For example, a saint became sacred when their bodies displayed such holy perfection and triumphed so completely over the physical that they did not decompose in death. Likewise, saintly characteristics often include a casting off of the physical in the context of material comforts, sensuality, and sex drive, exemplified by figures like Mary Magdalene, who threw away her jewels and lived a life of pious poverty, the ascetic St. Jerome who isolated himself in a cell with only his writings and a skull, caring not for clothing or even food, and the virginity of the Madonna, who was able to conceive Christ without the physical act of copulation. In contrast, the profane body is concerned with materiality and the drives of the flesh, ranging from hunger to sexuality.

In contrast to these models of humans whose spirituality triumphed over their physicality, Caracciolo presents us with a holy figure that seems every bit as physical as he does spiritual, inserting an erotic tone into devotional imagery. The purpose of a devotional image, a painting of a saint, was to aid prayer and meditation by giving the devotee a poignant and detailed image to focus on and a holy life to contemplate. John can be considered a devotional image here because he is positioned in the wilderness, referring to the period of his early life when he cast off all of his physical comforts, including his clothing, to live an ascetic life in spiritual preparation of his coming mission to preach the arrival of the Messiah. His spirituality and saintliness is thus accented by his isolated location, as well as his nudity, which both reflect his rejection of earthly things, and his staff with its Latin phrase proclaiming his holy mission.

Set against these signs of spirituality and contradicting the contemplation of the piety of an acetic saint are the visual cues that direct our attention to his bodiliness. His overtly erotic pose echoing the reclining Venuses of the Venetian Renaissance, his suggestive look and gesture, and his hand grasping his inner thigh function to establish John as a sexual being, in direct contrast with the supposed acetic character we are confronting, who was said to have given up every comfort of the flesh, including, like Christ’s other close followers, the possibility of a family and thus the expression of sexuality. Further heightening the eroticism of the image is the brilliant red drapery which curls sensually over his young naked body. The painted texture of the drapery is smooth and its undulating angles are gentle, suggesting the cloth is a soft and luxuriant material. The drapery lies across the large boulder which John reclines upon, shielding his body from its coldness and imparting a sense of comfort in an uncomfortable local. This softness and comfort are in direct opposition to the typical garment associated with John: his camel hair tunic, which he adopted during his sojourn in the wilderness. The purpose of the hairy garment was to fulfill his basic need to cover his nudity, but to mortify his flesh instead of giving it warmth and comfort through its itchiness and coarseness. While covering his nudity, this red drapery posits an antithesis of the camel hair tunic by imparting bodily comfort and heightening John’s sensuality through the juxtaposition of the soft cloth and his supple body. Although the red drapery is not a foreign attribute of John—it refers symbolically to the love of God and the blood sacrifice of Christ—and is found in both of the young Saint John paintings by Caravaggio (Saint John the Baptist c. 1602, Saint John the Baptist c. 1603-05) as well as his depiction of the beheading of Saint John (1608), included by Caravaggio but curiously lacking in Caracciolo’s painting is the John’s fur garment. Caracciolo seems to suppress this characteristic reference to the mortification of John’s flesh that would detract from the erotic and sensual quality of the painting by causing us to consider the contempt John had for his physical body instead of causing us to absorb the pleasure of touch he expresses in pressing his hand against his inner thigh.

Caravaggio's Saint John the Baptist

Caracciolo’s conflation of the sacred and the profane is similar to the conflation of the two traits by Caravaggio in his controversial painting Death of the Virgin (c. 1601-03). Aesthetically, Caravaggio and Caracciolo both use a palette of deep reds and earthy browns, and cast their subjects in deep shadow with a single source of light entering from the upper left of the canvas. Thematically, both emphasize the bodily qualities of saints over the spiritual, and both contain a conspicuous red drapery that takes the place of a holy attribute.

Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin

In Death of the Virgin, the incorruptible body of the Madonna is not seen gracefully alighting to heaven to join her son, but instead lays heavily upon an awkwardly positioned plank-like bed. Gravity pulls her left hand limply downward, lolls her head backward, and tugs her ankles down over the edge of the bed, emphasizing her death and grounding her firmly to the earth while also drawing attention to the physicality of her supposedly holy body. Just as the sensual John presents and antithesis of the acetic John by highlighting the physical body of a being who by definition of his saintly status overcame the body, the gravity-bound Virgin presents the antithesis of the ascending triumphant Queen of Heaven. Her pale sickly flesh and slightly bloated face and hands insert the profanity of decay into a sacred image of the undecayable, just as the touch of John’s thigh inserted the profanity of sexuality into the image of an asexual being.  Her heaviness and decay depict her as a bodily human at odds with her spiritual, transcendent title.

Furthering the downward pull of Caravaggio’s composition, emphasizing the force of gravity rather than the miracle of ascension, is the red drapery that singularly occupies the upper third of the canvas. The drapery is attached at an unseen point to the ceiling, and then drops down from either side. On the right side it curves down and is attached to the wall, sagging in the middle, while on the left side it drops straight down, dangling lifelessly, at the mercy of its own weight. This drapery occupies the area of the canvas where one would typically find a grouping of heralding angels, puffy weightless clouds, and the outstretched hand of Christ drawing the Virgin up toward heaven.  The heavenly attributes of angles and clouds are replaced by the heavy physicality of the drapery which, accented by its downward angles and sagging folds, negates the possibility of the upward movement of the ascension. Thus the drapery plays a role similar to that of the drapery in Caracciolo’s painting by standing in for a saintly attribute and insisting upon the opposite of the attribute.

Both Caracciolo and Caravaggio conflate the sacred and the profane by depicting and highlighting the physical, bodily aspects of their holy subjects. They present problematic images at odds with orthodox traditions that show saints as human figures rather than spiritual beings through both what they include and what they explicitly leave out. The reason Caracciolo inserted the profane into sacred imagery is unclear, but what results from the conflation of dichotomous terms, even to the eye of the 21st century, is an arresting and captivating work which holds our attention through its ambiguity and aesthetic appeal.