Scientific theology: a new history of creation
Chapter 8: From theology to action: Religion
1: Doing a job properly
2: Application: from science to technology
3: Humans red in tooth and claw?
4: The ethical principle in the network model
5: The ethical implications of evolution
6: We are all children of god
7: The rule of law
8: Truth
9: Prediction and prudence: Joseph in Egypt
10: Private life and public life
11: Deficiencies in Catholicism
12: From violence to peace — building layers of complexity
13: Trust in God: the truth will make you free
14: The meaning of life
15: A new covenant with god
1: Doing a job properly
The Genesis story of the Fall tells us that the need to work was one of the punishments that God meted out to our naive ancestors who believed the words of a talking snake. Before that, apparently, work was unnecessary in paradise. We read:
“God said: "Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.” (Genesis 3:17-19)
Genesis: 'Cursed is the ground because of you'
God was wrong. Work, that is action designed to achieve some valuable result, is not a punishment, it is part of the structure of the Universe. Jesus said:
Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. If then God so clothes the grass, which is today in the field, and to morrow is cast into the oven; how much more will he clothe you, O ye of little faith? Luke 12:27-28: Consider the lilies
Jesus could not know, as we now do, how extraordinarily complex molecular nanomachinery does the work necessary for the life of a flower. This work is driven by solar energy. Plant physiology - Wikipedia
Writing computer software is not a particularly easy task, but it does have the advantage of working in a deterministic environment. The handwritten code is translated into machine language and the machine will do exactly what it is asked to do, even if this may not have been the writer's intention. Sometimes there is a bug in the code. Because the system is deterministic, it is ultimately possible to find the bug by stepping slowly through the code until we come to the place where the thing runs off its tracks.
Despite this determinism, computers codes have grown so large that it is hard for anybody to understand and avoid all the ways that things can go wrong. Bugs are inevitable. Add to this the rather large community of people trying to gain unfair advantage by finding and exploiting weaknesses in deployed code.
Doing a good job in the coding business means producing software that does what it is supposed to do and is reliable and an efficient user of computing resources.
Writing software is a form of engineering which is isolated from the complexity introduced when we work with physical rather than logical materials. Mechanical engineers would like to make the gas turbines that propel aeroplanes as reliable as computer chips, but it cannot be done. There are too many unpredictable or unpredicted things to go wrong. The evolution of engineering is built on the history of engineering failures, like decorating residential high rise with inflammable cladding. Each one of our failures opens our eyes to something we should look out for in the future. Anne Davies, Debbie Whitmont & Patricia Drum: Australian high-rises swathed in flammable cladding despite suppliers knowing of risks
In this complex world, doing a good job means following some form of best practice. Best practices develop when a community gets together to find ways to avoid the repetition of past failures. So it was that the regular boiler explosions led to the development of standards for safe boilers and pressure vessels. Given an adequate standard, we can equate a good job to 'done according to the standard'. American Society of Mechanical Engineers: Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code
Of course, not everybody appreciates good standards because they would prefer to charge high prices for cheap and shoddy work. The only way to prevent this is by establishing a legislative framework that requires adequate inspection and testing of products offered for sale to discover whether they really are safe and do what they are claimed to do.
A methodology for quality control has developed to ensure the safety of large and complex systems such as nuclear power stations, space vehicles and chemical factories. In general these efforts are bearing fruit. They usually only fail when ignorant and corrupt operators ignore the proper protocols. IAEA: Safety of nuclear power plants
Our biggest failures are political: they lead to war, famines, epidemics and the destruction of people and societies. Historically, the close relationship between religion and politics has meant that the principal lines of politics have been laid down by theologians. The theory of just war developed by Aquinas is still relevant today. Just war theory - Wikipedia, Jeff McMahan: Rethinking Just War
It is up to the theologians to do a good job, guided by scientific principles, just as it is up to boilermakers. The development of consumer law means that producers must take care to make their products fit for purpose. This duty is incumbent on theologians, the producers of the theories of everything that religions use to guide their adherents. A particular question for Christianity: is it true that we do not really die?
2: Application: from science to technology
The aim of work is to get things right, preferably the first time. Every error has a cost. First we must repair the damage. Then repeat the procedure. Those who deal with the physical world know that it is very unforgiving. It does what it does. Hit the nail crooked, it bends.
Successful action requires both truth in assessing the situation and truth in doing what needs to be done to take the next step forward. Every catastrophic failure in the world of engineering can usually be traced to failures in theory, failures in execution, or both. Tay Bridge disaster - Wikipedia
We publicly explore catastrophic failures because there is a lot at stake, and the information revealed is well worth the expense. Truth applies at every scale however. If we spill the milk while making the tea, we have to clean up the spill and then milk the tea. Better to get it right the first time.
Technology is the practical application of science. Much of physics is applied mathematics, engineering is applied physics, biology is applied chemistry, medicine is applied biology and, of particular interest here, religion is applied theology. Since we understand scientific theology to be the theory of everything, and therefore embrace all the other sciences, we may consider religion to embrace all the other technologies. Most important for us is the social technology built on the human layer, This technology exploits human symmetry to construct families, tribes, nations, and united nations, human corporations at every scale.
Although many value science for the excitement of discovery and the enormous and intricate beauty that is continually revealed by scientific work, the investment in science often pays for itself in the resulting technology. One of the problems with governments that think that a nation can be run simply as a business is that they will only fund the science that seems to have an immediate benefit. Long term investment in fundamental science is seen as a waste of money. Since the main interest of many politicians lies in re-election they require investment that produces visible results within the few years of an electoral cycle. Otherwise its political value for them is wasted.
This might also suggest a reason for theological and religious enterprises to be based on voluntary labour and philanthropy. Among the intellectual powerhouses of medieval Christianity were the mendicant orders of clergy who worked voluntarily and removed all distractions from their lives through vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. The modern version of this is to be found in the support of pure research, but governments are always chipping away at such investment, to our collective detriment. We often rely for long term progress on people who work for love of their discipline rather than money.
The discovery that transmissible disease are caused by microbes opened a whole new world for the prevention of infection and the treatment of infectious diseases. Daniel Bernoulli's discoveries in fluid dynamics in the eighteen century opened the way for heavier than air flight and many other developments in fluid dynamics. Germ theory of disease - Wikipedia, Bernoulli's principle - Wikipedia
Evolution suggests that knowledge is keyed to action and action to survival. On the whole, living creatures are motivated by three tasks: avoid injury and sudden death; obtain the resources for life; and reproduce. The success of each of these activities is made more probable by knowledge.
Since we are all edible, we must be aware of the predators that would eat us, raging from lions to bacteria, know their habits and how to avoid them. Plants tend to make themselves physically and chemically repulsive, by developing thorns, stings, poisons, bad taste or growing too tall to reach. Those that succeed in not being eaten get a chance to grow and reproduce. Animals defend themselves by learning to hide from their predators, by being able to outrun them or by being able to fight them off. They develop protective horns, hooves and thick hides, and learn to travel in schools, mobs, flocks and swarms.
As well as predators, there are the physical dangers of excessive, heat and cold, cliffs to fall over, lakes and rivers to drown in, storms, floods, droughts, and fires. When we are first born and helpless, there is little we can do to endanger ourselves and we rely completely on the adults and older children in our lives to look after us. Once we begin to crawl and walk, we begin to learn to deal with gravity, falling, and heights. Later we have to learn about heat and cold, water and traffic. In the social sphere we have to deal with violence and bullying. At work there are problems of occupational health and safety, particularly on the roads, on building sites and in heavy industry. Finally we have to cope with diseases and hygiene.
All of these dangers have both personal and social dimensions. The development of society helps individuals to both avoid the dangers of life and to recover from disaster. These technologies are built on reliable knowledge of the world, and result from the creative efforts of those who have to deal with trouble in all its forms from difficult childbirth to war.
Religion is the technology corresponding to theology. Theology is the traditional theory of everything, and so religion is the technology of dealing with the whole of reality which we traditionally call god. Religions in the past have been hampered by the fact that their gods are usually invisible, difficult to communicate with and understand. Sometimes the gods reveal themselves through chosen people. Sometimes these chosen people turn out to be confidence tricksters. In most cases there is no evidence based knowledge of god: it is a creature of fiction. Mormons - Wikipedia
Here we solve the problem of knowing god by identifying god and the observable world. Every experience thus becomes experience of god, and theology can become scientific, based on evidence like the other sciences. We have dealt with the technical side of this idea in previous chapters. Here we apply some of these ideas in the context of human social and spiritual evolution.
3: Humans red in tooth and claw
We are apt to contrast wilderness and civilization. Wilderness is often imagined as violent and dangerous. This idea is expressed forcefully by Tennyson's line 'nature red in tooth and claw', in his poem expressing grief at the sudden death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. It is a struggle for most of us to accept the reality of death. One of the great consolations of Christianity is the belief death that is illusory, and Tennyson concludes his poem with an echo of the Christian dream:
O living will that shalt endure
When all that seems shall suffer shock
Rise in the spiritual rock,
Flow thro' our deeds and make them pure,
That we may lift from out of dust
A voice as unto him that hears,
A cry above the conquered years
To one that with us works, and trust,
With faith that comes of self-control,
The truths that never can be proved
Until we close with all we loved,
And all we flow from, soul in soul.
In Memoriam A.H.H. - Wikipedia
For some, the violence of wilderness was reinforced with the publication of Darwin's origin of species, which many interpreted as expression a continuous and violent struggle for existence, to be contrasted to the supposedly peaceful lives of civilized societies.
Much of this view was based on the delusions of the upper and literate classes who were blind to the suffering and exploitation of poor people, to slavery and to the systematic violence exercised by the colonizing armies of Empire builders. They felt justified in their conquest, exploitation and destruction of communities that they saw as primitive. In the period that Tennyson was writing, the colonists of Australia were practicing silent systematic genocide against the original inhabitants of the country. Adam Hochschild: King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Lyndal Ryan, Jennifer Debenham, Mark Brown and William Pascoe: Colonial Frontier Massacres In eastern Australia 1788-1872
Humans appear to be the only species which engages in large scale systematic killing. Wild animals kill to eat. The conflicts involved in mating may occasionally result in deaths, but the weaker party generally concedes before death. Not only do we engage in the systematic killing of other species ("culling") but we have been been frequently involved in murderous wars and large scale genocide. From this perspective, wildness is much more peaceful than civilization. Genocides in history - Wikipedia
This suggests that civilization is in some way the cause of genocide. Further, since organized religion is considered to one of the sources of civilization, we may feel that religion is itself implicated in murder on a large scale. There is perhaps no clearer example of this than the attempt by the Nazis, predominantly Christians, to eliminate the Jews. The Christian hatred of Jews, where it occurs, often arises from idea that the Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, the founder of Christianity. The Holocaust - Wikipedia
Why do these things happen? We might attribute it to our sheeplike nature which serves both for good and evil. There is no doubt that our success as a species is closely tied to our ability to communicate very complex mental states through language, and the ability to carry our complex cooperative activities as a result. The holocaust was a triumph of bureaucratic staffwork. According to the Wikipedia article, 42 500 facilities were used to carry out the genocide. Advanced data processing machinery from the German IBM subsidiary Dehomag was used to identify the Jews and others to be murdered. From the point of view many of these people, the Holocaust was just business as usual. Hannah Arendt captured this idea in her book The Banality of Evil about the trial of Adoplph Eichmann, a senior manager of the Holocaust. Majid Yar: Hannah Arendt, Adolf Eichmann - Wikipedia
At the same time, it is very hard for an individual to swim against the tide. Dirty looks, ostracism, sacking and violence are all means to control individuals. Often our safety, survival and self esteem depends on being part of a group. In our days of large and diverse populations where there is effective social security, ostracism may not be so bad, but we can imagine circumstances where being expelled from ones the group is a death sentence. Edward Hagen: Era of Evolutionary Adaptedness
It is easy to be led astray without some firm points of navigational guidance. The Catholic Church is built on the hypothesis that we are naturally inclined to evil, led astray by Satan in the Garden of Eden. That Original Sin, they say, has marked us as sinners forever. The Church promotes itself as the only way out of this disastrous situation. Without the Church we are doomed. And without its doctrine of sin and redemption, the Church is rather meaningless. Catholic Catechism: Where sin abounded, grace abounded all the more
It should be clear by now that this book is founded on the view that the Catholic Church is an exceedingly hypocritical organization, denying most of the deeper beliefs of modern society, human rights, democracy, science and freedom. It is true that we need guidance, but not the false guidance of an organization that covers up child abuse, denies the fully humanity of women, holds the ancient doctrine of the divine right of kings, believes that is omnipotent and infallible, and denies that humans have inalienable rights. Here we propose a new scientific foundation for human guidance, based on the hypothesis that the universe is divine so that all human experience is divine revelation.
4: On deriving ethics from the network model
The Thomistic model of god, since it proposes that god is absolutely simple, can give us no direct information about how we should behave with respect to god. For this we have to rely on a combination of the Bible and the collective wisdom derived and preserved by hundreds of thousands of years of human experience in the world.
The network model, on the other hand, describes the emanation of the structure of the divine universe within the initial singularity. We use the scale invariant nature of networks to derive clues from the behaviour of physical particles to arrive at a picture of the best way for us to behave toward one another and the lower layers of the network upon which we rely for our existence. By best we mean the most productive of human happiness.
The fundamental ethical principle in a layered network system is that the higher layers must respect the lower layers upon which they depend for their existence. If they do not, they will no longer be supported, and so collapse. The clearest expression of this idea can be seen in human affairs. Governments that excessively exploit their subjects are apt to be faced by revolution, the political situation that arises when conditions are so bad that people are prepared to lose their lives rather than continue to endure the status quo. United States Congress: Declaration of Independence
It applies in all the other interfaces between higher and lower layers in the network. If the phone company does not maintain its copper wires, they will cease to function and it will lose its business. If the human race does not respect the needs of the global biosphere, the conditions for life will eventually deteriorate to the point where we will suffer.
5: The ethical implications of evolution
In our exploration of the mechanism of creation, we have evoked Darwin's notion of variation and selection. We see it working everywhere, in the automobile industry, for instance. The manufacturers develop new designs. After all sorts of engineering work, of market research and whatnot they decide on the production model. Billions of dollars are then invested tooling up, testing, marketing and getting the new vehicle on the road.
In our model of the world, the variation is a consequence of the mathematical limitations on determinism. Variations are random. Selection on the other hand requires the existence of deterministic processes which maintain the integrity of the selected system in its environment. To survive an organism must overcome all hostile inputs, collect the resources for maintaining life and reproduce a variation of itself.
There are many ideas about the role on religion in human life. At one extreme we have those who think that it is an archaic mistake and should be done away with. For many this view is motivated by the mythical and inspirational foundations of most religions. They might prefer religion to be more directly connected to reality via science.
At the other extreme are those who feel that their religion is everything. I fell into the second category during my monastic days. What I learned in the Order of Preachers ultimately led me to abandon much of the Catholic religion, but not religion itself. The underlying Christian message love God, love your neighbour seems to be the obvious foundation for the peace and prosperity which I see as the goal of all religions. The principal defect of religions is that by binding people into groups they have the effect of separating the chosen ones from the rest, laying foundation for conflict. The modern world is not short of violent and often lethal friction between the more extreme sectors of the multitude of religions we have on earth.
From my point of view, theology relates to religion as science does to technology. In the old days, science and technology went hand in hand. The art of blacksmithing has been passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years. Each new apprentice learns the techniques by both instruction and practice. Observations made on the job add to technical ability until the apprentice graduates as a tradesperson.
We employ a large number of religious professionals to execute the religious tasks in our society. In the front line are the local clerics who act as pastors or carers for a group of the faithful, counselling, supporting and guiding them and helping them in their dealings with government. Behind the pastors lies an administrative hierarchy to maintain the social and financial integrity of the local religious groups and their property, schools, places of worship, nursing homes and so on. In modern secular societies many of the roles of pastoral care are now supported by government funded social security programs. Pastoral care - Wikipedia
In the modern world, the roles of scientist and technologist are still intermingled. Technical ability is required to design and execute experiments and the limits of science are usually delineated by the limits of the technical systems available. A recent scientific discovery, depending on meticulous technology, is the detection of gravitational waves. Gravitational-wave observatory - Wikipedia
We have understood theology as a navigational aid to enable us to fit in with the ways of god in order to avoid adverse divine judgements and the associated losses. Reality is our judge, and if we try to achieve results without an adequate understanding of the realities we face, our efforts are doomed to fail. It is the role of religion to take the insights of theology and use them to construct peaceful and wealthy societies. Like all successful technology, this must be based on evidence and testing.
Since the creative process that forms the Universe is evolution, we must learn how evolution works and encourage it, rather than repress it. The ancient doxology: 'as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be' must be tempered by the knowledge that the beginning was not an absolute eternal divinity, but a creative process that continues to this day. Doxology - Wikipedia
6: We are all children of God
A major problem with the ancient religions is their parochial nature. This is an inevitable consequence of their evolutionary development. All the species of life on earth since the beginning can be organized into the tree of life. If we had full knowledge we could trace each species back though its development from the first living creatures to emerge.
Cultures and religions also evolve and speciate. We can imagine that the original community of Homo sapiens in Africa shared quite similar theological and religious views. As time went by and our species spread around the globe, variation and selection set in the create thousands of distinct languages and cultures. Because human expansion was very slow and contact between distant tribes weak, these theologies and religions became relatively independent. History of religions - Wikipedia
This situation was changed when empire builders began their work, bringing isolated communities into contact with one another, forcing then to adapt to the ways of others. We can imagine that this caused conflict then, as it does now, and the imperial powers were moved to standardize theology and religion in the pursuit of social harmony. Christianity received an enormous boost when Constantine decided to make it the established religion of his empire. Similar unification has brought us to the point where about three quarters of the world's population is to be found in four major religions, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. Major religious groups - WikipediaSome of the oldest religious ideas are developed by analogy to the family. The first person of the Trinity is called God the Father. Jesus taught his followers to pray Our Father who is in heaven . . . . Matthew 7:13.
The Father sent his Son to Earth to become a human sacrifice on behalf of everybody to make amends for an ancient act of disobedience by the first humans. This is clearly not a good example of family behaviour, but something which appears to have made sense to billions of people over thousands of years. This punishment is reminiscent of the view, still widely common in the world, that the male parent has power of life and death over the family. The family analogy is further developed by casting Jesus' mother Mary as the mother of us all.
We are elements of the gigantic universal system, a system so big and wonderful that we do not hesitate to call it divine. It plays all the roles anciently attributed to a wide variety of gods.
Our study of the system as a whole is theology. Theology gives us the understanding necessary to play our roles as parts of the whole. Good theology, that is scientific theology, is the best way to peace and happiness. It draws inspiration from the creative power of the Universe which has made us what we are. Theology, through religion, guides our behaviour, for better or worse.
'United we stand divided we fall' is the practical reality which motivates us to cooperate both to defend and to advance ourselves. From a practical point of view, cooperation is based on shared language and culture which enables us work together on tasks that are beyond the power of an individual. Much of this sharing is the work of religion, indoctrinating children from birth with stories that emphasize their reliance on their own community.
In the international scene, we generally understand strong and weak in terms of military force, like gang warfare, and history suggests that this is a very good first approximation. There are also trade, diplomacy, sport, education and tourism however, which are peacemaking forces, tending to share knowledge and understanding. Cooperation increases the circle of allies, so proportionally reducing the boundaries facing enemies. Soldiers, weapons manufacturers and politicians who depend upon fear for their power have a vested interest in promoting conflict. Business people more generally and all 'people of good will' are more likely to promote peace.
Adam Smith was onto something when he saw that the advancement of human economic communities was coupled to the increases in productivity which results from wisely investing capital in improved methods. These methods are not just technical machinery and intellectual property, but the social networks of skilled workers that make an increasingly diverse society coherent. The increasing complexity of society makes it both wealthier and creates more niches for skilled artisans. With search technologies, we can search the world for the product we want.
Harmonious cooperation is not easy, but it is greatly simplified where people share the same culture and religion. So we see religion as an important force in the formation of large cooperative societies. We also see it as a source of friction at the interfaces between different religious groups.
The world is one, and God is one, so that we can expect scientific theology to eventually become unified as the other sciences have done. A universal theology can serve as a foundation for universal religion that unites us as one species depending for our existence on the life of one planet. We have evolved within this planet, which is one of the many inhabited planets that we imagine in the divine universe. Like all species on all planets, we are all literally children of god, born out of divinity.
7: The rule of law
Somewhere in our evolution there arose a transition from instinct to intention. If a crocodile eats a tourist who gets too close, we are inclined to say that's just a crocodile being a crocodile: we cannot blame it. It is instinct. As far as I know, you cannot train crocodiles not to eat people as you can to some extent with dogs, lions and other carnivorous animals. All we can do to be safe with a crocodile is kill it or avoid it.
Some human communities have practised cannibalism, and we might ask if this is instinctual or intentional, and be inclined to come down on the intentional side of the scale. Apart from seeking nutrition in desperate times, there are many other cultural and spiritual motivations for cannibalism, including the idea that one might acquire a person's qualities by eating them. This may be the motivation for the Christian Eucharist, that people hope to become Christlike by eating their saviour. The Church insists that Jesus is really present within the appearances of bread and wine which requires that the laws of physics are in some way mysteriously abrogated in this case, a hard thing to believe which tends to throw doubt on the credibility of their theology. Cannibalism - Wikipedia, Council of Trent (1545-1563): Session XIII Chapter IV: On Transubstantiation
All our knowledge of the future comes from the past, and we assume here that this is true of theology and religion as for everything else. Each of us has a reputation, a public history (right or wrong) by which other people assess our trustworthiness, skill and other qualities to guide their relationships with us. And of course we do the same for them. Here we take business to mean any transaction involving a transfer of value. This idea applies at all scales, from atoms to nations and beyond in both directions.
The Europeans who colonised Australia committed as much genocide as they thought necessary to guarantee their secure tenure of the new country. This appears to be an age old trait of forces taking possession of inhabited territory. Conquest and occupation are very common in human history, and continue to be so. Nevertheless, we now have an international treaty outlawing the acquisition of territory by military conquest. In Christian history, this sort of behaviour is reflected in the conquest and occupation of the Promised Land. This tradition informed the Crusades, whose principal justification was spreading the faith by military violence. Kellogg-Briand Pact - Wikipedia, Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro: Outlawing War? It Actually Worked, Christopher Tyerman: The World of the Crusades
My generation learnt in school that the principal determinant of human history is war. Each war that we studied was caused by tensions in the status quo that led to the fracture of diplomacy and the commencement of hostilities. The British Empire, of which Australia was then a part, often explained its depredations in religions terms as 'bringing the gospel to the pagans'. Realistically, of course, most empire builders are like the Crusaders, after power and property.
Perhaps the most important law in Christian history is the Ten Commandments. Exodus explains how these Commandments were given by to Moses by his Yahweh while the Hebrews were on their way from Egypt to the Promised Land. They are thus part of the doctrine that the Catholic Church inherited from the Jewish religion. Exodus 20:1-17, Ten Commandments - Wikipedia
The commandments dictated by God to Moses are 'divine law'. We also recognise the existence of human law and natural law. Here we weaken these distinctions somewhat. First, because the universe is divine, we see divine law and natural law as identical. Second, because human beings have evolved to fit the world and are part of it, we expect close parallels between human law and natural law. Insofar as we make our own human laws, we do well to be guided by natural examples. Nature has solved most of the problems of large communities of organisms living together. I am a relatively harmonious community cells working together for their common good. Order within my body is maintained by an immune system which is designed to prevent invaders and deviant cancerous cells from destroying me. Immune system - Wikipedia
The New Testament lays down the broad ideals of Christian behaviour, beginning with the commandment of love and extending through parables and other discourses to particular instances of good and bad behaviour. On the one hand, we have the Good Samaritan who helped a social enemy. On the other hand, Jesus has only hard words for the Scribes and Pharisees: Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whitened sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. (Matthew 23:27) Their offence was to promote the letter of the Law over the spirit. One would not be surprised if a returning Jesus did not express similar sentiments about the Vatican Curia which rules the Roman Catholic Church.
8: Truth
Prophets and people in general would like us to believe them. On the other hand, we are all pretty well aware that politicians, used car salespersons, criminals, confidence tricksters and, indeed, most of us are inclined to bend the truth at least a little to suit ourselves. This is why the search for truth must be a community affair, each of us checking the opinions of others. Hannah Rosin: Fake News: It's as American as George Washington's Cherry Tree
In the science community, checks and balances take the form of peer review. The idea is to let people well established in any field check out new ideas to see whether they are plausible and add to the our collective understanding. Peer review helps to keep the lunatic fringe under control while hopefully maintaining the quality of what is actually published. Peer review - Wikipedia
The criterion for truth is consistency. We detect lies and liars by finding that their stories neither fit together nor fit what we already know. To be effective, liars must remember all the lies they have told so that they can maintain the illusion of consistency by making sure that their new lies fit their old ones. The scientific method takes the view that the real world does not lie. A statement that does not fit reality must be changed, or if it cannot be fixed, rejected.
Many of us consider ourselves superior to animals and to the inanimate world. This attitude is reflected in the name we have given to our species, Homo sapiens, 'wise man'. One feature which we attribute to ourselves but deny to many animals is consciousness.
We see consciousness as self-awareness. It applies to each of us as individuals, but communities, by talking about themselves, also become self aware. We can be sure that every living thing is aware of its environment and responds to it in ways necessary to its survival, seeking food, avoiding dangerous situations and enemies, looking for mates. Consciousness adds the idea of self-awareness, of seeing yourself as part of you environment. Somewhere in every perception is a selfie.
With the origin of consciousness came our ability to reflect on our personal thoughts and actions. With reflection, we had a new survival tool: the ability to look at personal performance and so increase the probability of success in eating, mating, childrearing, defence and the other operations necessary for continued life. From a cybernetic point of view, consciousness introduced a new channel of feedback into our activities. It is also a new channel for testing truth and outing inconsistency.
When I was a Catholic child, a lot of emphasis was placed on confession and examining one's conscience. The idea was that we all had a god given consciousness and could use it to detect whether we were guilty of sin or not. Conscience required that we tell the truth, or suffer the cognitive dissonance that arises from trying to believe two contradictory things at once.
The Book of Genesis suggests that one of the first things to enter human consciousness was that life involves work, pain and death. The snake in Genesis told the humans that if they ate the forbidden fruit their eyes would be opened and they would be as gods, knowing good and evil. In the Christian world, this disobedient act came to be known as the original sin. They claim that God introduced work, pain and death as punishment for this disobedience. In fact they are and have always been a reality for every living thing.
Christians also claim that God destroyed the inner harmony of human nature, so that there was enmity between the 'spirit' and the 'flesh'. This conflict was heavily emphasized by the writer Paul of Tarsus in his letter to the Galatians and elsewhere:
So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want.Paul represented the Gnostic element that entered Christianity from the Platonic Tradition. Paul the Apostle - Wikipedia, Paul, Galatians, Robert Crotty (2016): Jesus, His Mother, Her Sister Mary and Mary Magdalene: The Gnostic Background to the Gospel of John
Christianity sees the world as defective, right to the heart of our conscious personalities. We are sinners through and through. We may speculate how this point of view came about. The Christian world view acts as a self fulfilling prophecy, making a virtue of pain and adding considerably to the difficulties of human life. The basic idea is that the more we suffer in this life, the richer will be our reward in the next.
Christianity has been a very durable religion because it seems to explain many features of human life. This does not necessarily mean that it is true. While is has been profitable for the churches to claim that we are all sinners, many so-called sins are simply actions that some people do not agree with, like same sex marriage or masturbation rather than crimes against our common humanity.
9: Prediction and prudence: Joseph in Egypt
Everything that we know about the future is derived from the past. This knowledge has various levels of certainty, ranging from 1, complete certainty, to 0, complete randomness. The operation of deterministic logical machines demonstrates certainty. The spin of a coin or roulette wheel demonstrates uncertainty. The probability of all events in the world fall on the spectrum from 0 to 1. For a fair coin, the probabilities of heads and tails are equal - one half.
We are quite used to probabilistic estimates of the likelihood of events through the work of the world's weather bureaux. For an agricultural community, the probability of rain is of supreme importance. Weather bureaux tend to use technical means to make their prediction these days, but people who have lived on one place for a long time also get pretty good at predicting rains and droughts. Weather forecasting - Wikipedia
One such person, at least subconsciously, was the Egyptian Pharoah during the time when the Hebrews were in Egypt. Here is the story:
1 And it came to pass at the end of two full years, that Pharaoh dreamed: and, behold, he stood by the river.
2 And, behold, there came up out of the river seven well favoured kine and fatfleshed; and they fed in a meadow.
3 And, behold, seven other kine came up after them out of the river, ill favoured and leanfleshed; and stood by the other kine upon the brink of the river. . . .
8 And it came to pass in the morning that his spirit was troubled; and he sent and called for all the magicians of Egypt, and all the wise men thereof: and Pharaoh told them his dream; but there was none that could interpret them unto Pharaoh. . . .
14 Then Pharaoh sent and called Joseph, and they brought him hastily out of the dungeon: and he shaved himself, and changed his raiment, and came in unto Pharaoh.
15 And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, I have dreamed a dream, and there is none that can interpret it: and I have heard say of thee, that thou canst understand a dream to interpret it.
16 And Joseph answered Pharaoh, saying, It is not in me: God shall give Pharaoh an answer of peace. . . .
25 And Joseph said unto Pharaoh, The dream of Pharaoh is one: God hath shewed Pharaoh what he is about to do.
26 The seven good kine are seven years; and the seven good ears are seven years: the dream is one.
27 And the seven thin and ill favoured kine that came up after them are seven years; and the seven empty ears blasted with the east wind shall be seven years of famine. . . .
39 And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, Forasmuch as God hath shewed thee all this, there is none so discreet and wise as thou art:
40 Thou shalt be over my house, and according unto thy word shall all my people be ruled: only in the throne will I be greater than thou. . . .
47 And in the seven plenteous years the earth brought forth by handfuls.
48 And he gathered up all the food of the seven years, which were in the land of Egypt, and laid up the food in the cities: the food of the field, which was round about every city, laid he up in the same. . . .
53 And the seven years of plenteousness, that was in the land of Egypt, were ended.
54 And the seven years of dearth began to come, according as Joseph had said: and the dearth was in all lands; but in all the land of Egypt there was bread.
55 And when all the land of Egypt was famished, the people cried to Pharaoh for bread: and Pharaoh said unto all the Egyptians, Go unto Joseph; what he saith to you, do.
56 And the famine was over all the face of the earth: and Joseph opened all the storehouses, and sold unto the Egyptians; and the famine waxed sore in the land of Egypt.
57 And all countries came into Egypt to Joseph for to buy corn; because that the famine was so sore in all lands.
Genesis 41: Pharoah's Dreams'
With a bit of foresight, disaster was averted. Joseph explained to Pharoah that his dream was a message from God telling him how to save his people. Since that time, many religions have had a firm belief in divine providence. God is perceived as a loving father who will look after us, forgive us our transgressions and repair the damage that we do.
If the universe is divine, this dream retains a semblance of truth, but the responsibility for foresight and prudence now devolves onto us. In particular, we have solid scientific knowledge that we are compromising the ability of the Earth to support us. We must act to avert this danger, and all the other difficulties, dangers and benefits that our scientific knowledge of the world reveals to us.
10: Private life and public life
I was taught that god sees everything that I do, knows everything that I think, can predict my every action and will ultimately judge me as worthy of heaven or hell based on this comprehensive knowledge of my life. There was no point in lying in confession: god would see my lie and add just one more sin to my list of sins. Of course, insofar as I am divine, this is true. I am conscious of my own thoughts and behaviour, and can judge whether my activity is helping or hindering my life.
Big brothers of every sort would like to imitate this god and be able read and control all the thoughts of their subjects. Unfortunately they do not enjoy god's unobtrusive access to our minds, so they must use the more physical methods of secret police, spies, torture, and for those who are seen to be completely intractable, murder. This violent intrusion of the state onto the private lives of its people remains very common and leaves a large toll of death and injury. In many places law enforcement personnel are protected by law from responsibility for their violent actions
Although our minds are largely hidden, our communications are not. Political police go to great lengths to intercept communications, by spying, reading mail, and in modern times intercepting as many of our telephonic and telegraphic messages as possible. Their task has been made much easier by the growth of the internet. The internet also enables commercial enterprises to analyze our communications and use the results to serve personalized advertising. Martin Knobbe and Jög Schindler: Interview with Edward Snowden, Edward Snowden: Permanent Record
The traditional god, the police and commercial interests often infringe our privacy. Uninvited intrusion into anybody's personal space is an an error. It is violence which is only permissible in self defence. Of course the police will say that they are protecting us by their surveillance, but there is very little evidence that the vast intrusions that have become pubic in recent times have protected us at all. Any rational enemy will steer clear of communication channels that they know are under surveillance and convey their messages by more secure means. Invasions of privacy are a form of rape, taking by force something which is not given.
We can express this idea in terms of the layered network. Each layer of the network uses the services of the layer beneath it to execute its tasks and provides services to the layer above it. A layer that wishes to remain stable must look after its supporting layers. Human society is the layer built on human beings. It compromises its own survival if it mistreats these people. In political terms, a regime that mistreats its people is likely to incite revolt and destroy itself. In corporate life, no corporation can rely on its people for useful and creative service if it does not maintain a peaceful workplace or reward its workers adequately. They may not strike or revolt, but it is unlikely that they will do their best.
We are currently in an epoch which is revealing the historical prevalence of institutionalized sexual abuse, racism, slavery and other crimes against humanity. Such revelation is the first step toward eliminating this behaviour, but those who benefit from it, broadly classified as the "right" naturally resist this trend and must be controlled.
11: Deficiencies in Catholicism
The Catholic Church, an obsolete remnant of ancient evils, is a paradigm of our problem. Ultimately it must be forced to abandon its claims to divinely ordained infallibility and absolute power and join the trend toward social equality, democratic politics and evidence based doctrine and policy.Catholicism strongly reflects the era of its foundation, two to three thousand years ago, when people had very different ideas about our human nature and our place in the world. It is therefore open to revision in many places. Here is a short list.
First, Catholic morality is built on the premiss that we are all inherently sinful. This position derives from the account of our creation in Genesis. The first people disobeyed God's injunction not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. God punished us for this transgression by introducing pain, work and death into the world. This suggests that the authors of this story imagined that there was no pain, no work, and no death in the world as it was before the Fall. What seems more natural is that people who had been working unconsciously to maintain their lives like all the other animals began to become conscious of the more difficult features of life.
Second, the Fall is the starting point for the Catholic History of salvation. This story claims that God agreed that if his Son were to become a human sacrifice, he would forgive humanity for their sin. Jesus of Nazareth was born, both God and man. His words, recorded in the New Testament, are to be taken as God's words. Jesus' murder is to be taken as a face-saving gesture to the Father to justify his forgiveness of humanity.
There is no evidence for the Fall, although it does act as a self fulfilling prophecy, placing an enormous psychological burden on humanity. It deprives us of self esteem and authenticity and supports authorities who would classify any creative behaviour as evil. God's punishment of the first people, who had no prior experience of life, has set the tone for authoritarian repression of creativity ever since. The Fall - Catholic Catechism §§ 385-412
Third, the Church is based politically on the divine right of kings, a doctrine made explicit by the authors of Exodus. Moses went up Mount Sinai to meet Yahweh. There, Moses claimed, Yahweh commissioned him to be the voice of god on Earth. The divine right to rule the people claimed by Moses remains alive in the Papal claim to supremacy over all human thought and activity. By defining the people as defective in the first place, the monarch gives itself licence to command and punish at will. Mount Sinai - Wikipedia
Fourth, the Catholic Church believes that women are inherently inferior to men and should therefore be excluded from any roles in the Church like the priesthood that come with power and authority. Jesus appears to have led a normal social life and to have respected both his men and his women friends, but at some point early in their development the Christian churches began to exclude women from positions of power. We can guess that in an era when violence was common men were able to dominate women because they are on average physically stronger. In the spiritual realm, however, such dominance is meaningless and its propagation by the churches is an evil. Women in Christianity - Wikipedia
Male supremacy has now become a fixed position in the Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II did his best shut down any discussion of the possibility of women becoming priests in the Church. This view may ultimately derive from the fictitious story that it was the woman who succumbed to the temptation of Satan and encouraged her male mate to sin against God by eating the forbidden fruit. John Paul II: Ordinatio Sacerdotalis
Fifth, the Church's morality reflects a very ancient and perverted view of sexuality which may perhaps date from the views of the 'Desert Fathers' and notion, common among them, that the devil tried to tempt them to sin by appearing as an attractive female. The Church remains unable to comprehend the reality of homosexuality and of the biological fluidity of gender. It continues to see sexual relationships as dangerous, only to be permitted within the confines of marriage, and then only for the purpose of procreating children, never for pleasure, rarely for love. The present Pope, Francis, appears to be trying to soften this position, but we note that the Synodic consultations which gave rise to the document gave no active voice to women. Pope Francis: Amoris laetitia
Sixth, the Church, despite often talking about human dignity, does does not accept the modern view of human rights. Instead, consistent with its view that it is above the law followed by us ordinary people, it has its own view on human rights which exclude any claims that it may be subject to 'secular' law. This issue is particularly important now that it has been revealed that the Church has a long history of covering up the sexual abuse of children, a radical attack on humanity and justice. The Church has joined very few international declarations of human rights. University of Minnesota Human Rights Library
Seventh, the Church completely misunderstands the nature of pain, seeing it as punishment for sin and a means of coercing obedience. We are fortunate that the Holy Inquisition no longer burns people alive for heresy, but Christian ideas about the use of pain remain a source of unnecessary pain. The proper function of pain in living creatures is to draw attention to disease and injury and to guide individuals away from danger. It is not divine punishment but plays the cybernetic role of negative feedback, guiding systems toward health and safety. Negative feedback - Wikipedia
Finally, Catholicism motivates its moral code by denying the reality of death. This has got to be the greatest deception ever propagated. The Church divides sin into 'mortal' and 'venial'. If one dies in mortal sin, one is destined for Hell. If one dies in venial sin a period of punishment in purgatory is required before one can enter Heaven. Mortal sin - Wikipedia
Since there is no evidence for the afterlife, these sanctions have very little power over unbelievers. The Church offers a heavenly carrot and a hellish stick, but both are paper tigers based on ancient myth.
Pain is our physiological response to error in our systems. We are guided by pain insofar as it tells us where we do not want to go. Nobody wants a broken leg or even a headache, and we take precautions to avoid (where possible) these and all other painful events. Kings and old time schoolteachers create painful events to guide their charges, but this is an inefficient form of guidance.
We wish to replace the punitive approach to establishing peace and order within the human community with a more positive view. We claim that the key to peaceful society it a proper understanding of human biological and cultural history coupled with a comprehensive realization of human rights. The first step in this direction is to replace the authoritarian magisterium of the Catholic Church with the science based democracy promoted in this book.
12: From violence to peace—building layers of complexity
Conflicts are bound to arise in a system of free agents moving in a confined space. Some of them might hit the boundaries, other will hit each other. There are two ways to deal with such hits: by fighting or diplomacy. When we fight, we win by hurting each other. This solution is win-lose, basically a negative-sum outcome. When we are diplomatic we win by devising a win-win solutions. Such a solution is creative: the diplomats are wealthier than they were before they met.
The simplest physical system of free agents is a gas containing vast numbers of particles which are in continual eternal motion and collide elastically with one another. Their meetings (seen through classical physics) are strictly zero sum, perfectly conserving energy and momentum.
There is a social black hole which is simply stated: money buys power attracts more money which eventually destroys all social structure, economic equality and religious unity. We are see the formation of such black holes all over the planet, although they may on the whole be becoming fewer. The danger is always present, however. We can see a developing case in the destruction of the United States democracy by the oligarchy based on old money and new billionaires. Heather Cox Richardson: Trump sees government as a series of deals. That's because he is an oligarch
Margaret Thatcher is famous for saying that there is no such thing as society, which is a very silly thing for a capitalist to say. The most valuable capital in any society is the culture of harmonious interaction which binds it together. One of the characteristics of the social death spiral is the development of deep ideological fractures, so that communication breaks down because people no longer have a common understanding of what the community is and does.
Why is money so destructive? We can understand this by analogy with energy. Too much energy in the wrong place and time can also be destructive. The whole point of war is to concentrate as much energy as possible on targets to destroy them. This is why nuclear weapons are in such strong demand.
Pure money, like pure energy, gives power without direction. Such is the predictability of US politics that the accountants can estimate in advance how much it will cost to win the White House in the next election. The fundraisers then go out to bring in the money. Like a nuclear weapon, a large sum of money is a blunt instrument which needs to be controlled. We have learned to use nuclear reactors to use nuclear energy for more peaceful purposes. Money also needs tight control. We can understand the flow of money by analogy with the physical flow of energy.
The Universe is built by complexification. Energy is conserved, so we can assume that the universe has just as much energy now as it had at any other time. What has changed is that in the beginning all this energy is believed to have been concentrated in a structureless point. From that moment, the initial point expanded and complexified to become what we see now 14 billion years later.
What has happened? All that energy has been divided up into smaller and smaller parcels which work together to perform more and more intricate processes. The atomic step in these processes is measured by one quantum of action, an exceedingly small event by the standards of day to day life. Where once there was but one point in the Universe, now there are effectively an infinity of them, sharing all the energy of the Universe between them.
The processes of life are all built around the energy of a photon of sunlight. Photons of sunlight are harvested one by one in photosynthetic organisms like plants. We eat the plants, or the animals that eat the plants. The energy in our food goes to drive the processes that make us alive. Mass and energy are measures of processing rate. My mass is about 80 kilograms. This means that my life is the outcome of about 1052 elementary events per second, a truly astronomical number. Not all this activity occurs at the biochemical level. Much of the structure of the Universe is maintained by the intense processing that occurs in the heavy and dense nuclei of atoms.
Peacemaking in society follows the same limes as peacemaking in the evolution of the universe. The universe shares the energy. A society must share the wealth, measured by money, and so become a common wealth. Maintaining cooperation is difficult, because there is always the possibility that free-loaders will defect from any cooperative plan. Cooperation is necessary, however, confronting us with an administrative problem that must be solved. Danielle Wenner and Kevin Zollman: How to End International Tax Competititon
13: Trust in God: the truth will make you free
The gods of old were often rather fickle personalities who nevertheless, like Yahweh, demanded absolute faith and trust from their people. Very Trumplike. An asymmetrical deal, as one might expect between an omnipotent god and powerless humans. By assuming that the whole Universe is divine, we recognise that every event in our day to day life is contact with god. Locally we are equal to god. Reality can be fickle, but it has deep underlying stability that enables us to engineer stable systems in the world. Many things duplicate the same behaviour again and again without error. We depend on these dependable features of the Universe for our existence. Given our hypothesis, this is to depend on the stable behaviour of god.
God is very trustworthy, but we have to understand what they are telling us. This is the work of science. The Universe is constructed in layers, and the sciences tend to follow these layers. The lowest layer is studied by physics and the information gathered by the physicists flows to the engineers who use the properties of various materials to design their structures.
God is the creator, and to fit in with god we must fit in with creation, not just the physical reality we call creation, but the process. From the most abstract point of view, the creation of the world is the creation of entropy. Entropy is the simplest measure in the physical toolkit. It is simply a count. When we talk of the entropy of something we are talking about a count of its states.
We may think of the universe as having begun in one state, the initial singularity (what we might also call god) with zero entropy. Its entropy has increased ever since.
For the designers of heat engines, the tendency for entropy to increase is a problem. The ideal engine conserves entropy. The number of states in its cold reservoir is equal to the number of states in its hot reservoir, so that is it is reversible. The world described by quantum mechanics is also reversible, so that at the quantum mechanical level we can see the Universe as a perpetual motion machine. We see reversibility as a logical property closely related to the the lossless codecs we use to encode and decode messages. These codecs obey the cybernetic principle of requisite variety. Lossless compression - Wikipedia
The entropy of the Universe increases because the quantum conservation of states is broken by communication between quantum systems. How this happens is hinted at above and will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter.
At this point, let us say that trust in god means not blocking creative processes. The effect of power is to narrow the search for solutions to problems by reducing the entropy of the society to the entropy of an oligarchy or monarch. This is likely to reduce the probability of survival of the community. We know, for instance, that societies are more stable if the distribution of wealth is not too skewed. The wealthy, nevertheless, like this situation and will try to maintain it to the detriment of the society as a whole. This attitude is inconsistent with divine creativity as we see it here.
14: The meaning of life
Meaning comes into being by the establishment correspondences as in dictionaries, love affairs and the bonding of atoms and molecules. So the dictionary tells us that 'duck' is ''the common name for a large number of species in the waterfowl family Anatidae". Meaning is given to our lives by our correspondence to the Universe, which we have chosen here to call god.
From an abstract point of view, this is the same as the meaning attributed to human life by Christianity. We are children of the Christian god, somehow in exile, yet hoping to one day be intimately reunited with this god. From the present point of view, we are a species whose appearance in the world is made possible by the creative power of the divinity. In the software sense we are also children of god, subsystems of the divine system.
Christianity offers us an eternal life of bliss as a reward for good behaviour. Scientific theology sees eternal life as impossible, but draws attention to the fact that everything we experience in life is experience of god. Our principal difficulty is that we do not see and feel this vision clearly. For thousands of years we have been indoctrinated with the Christian view that we are born sinners. It will take a long time for the alternative view to permeate human consciousness. Nevertheless we cannot offer ourselves any greater dignity than being intimate with the divinity, seeing it, acting within it, every moment of our lives.
15: A new covenant with God
After the Flood, God promised Noah not to do it again, saying:
And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth. And god said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. Genesis 9: The Covenant of the Rainbow
The covenant with Noah covers all people. Yahweh made a number of further covenants with his Chosen People. Christianity inherited these covenants through its Hebrew ancestry and sees itself as the beneficiary of a new covenant established by the visit of its god to Earth in the form of Jesus of Nazareth. It understands this covernant to have been sealed by the crucifixion of Jesus as a human sacrifice to the Father. Covenant (biblical) - Wikipedia
Cooperation is the key to human survival. Politics is the establishment of cooperation. God, made known to us through theology, is our guide to politics. Many national constitutions express "Trust in God". Constitutional references to God - Wikipedia
The gods of the Old and New Testaments are to a large extent political, legal and literary fictions which have had the effect of establishing strong human communities. We are the beneficiaries of these communities which have nurtured the science and technology that have made our lives so different from life in the distant past. When we observe their results, we see that these fictions have led, in many places, to enormous improvements in human health and welfare.
God told Adam and Eve and Noah to increase and multiply and fill the Earth. Everything was for them to eat and to exploit in any other way they wished. This approach was appropriate in those times, when human life was precarious and had very little impact on the planet as a whole. Things are different now. We realize that god is no longer the absolute monarch of old but open to human influence. It is possible now for us to so overload our habitat that it will fail and we will be lost with it. The fundamental clause of the newest covenant is that love of god implies that the way to guarantee our own salvation is to love the planet which, with the help of the Sun, provides all our needs..