Quality of Understanding

The world is a complex place. Our ability to survive and thrive depends on our understanding of the parts of it we experience, as well as the power we have to change it, because our understanding determines how accurately we can predict the results of the actions we take. The better our understanding, the more likely our actions will have the desired results.

Understanding is an interpretation of observations that identifies what the parts of the world are, how those parts are related to each other, and how they and their relationships tend to change or stay the same. Its quality and usefulness is therefore highly dependent on the quality and amount of our observations, and our ability to correctly interpret those observations. Science is society's most successful means of building quality understanding, in large part because it uses strict rules of evidence which filter out observations that cannot be verified.

Technology has enabled a vast increase in the number and verifiability of observations, while logic and mathematics have enabled us to create and test interpretations of those observations that will have maximum accuracy and reliability. It has also, as a byproduct, enabled people to have more power, unfortunately without an associated requirement for understanding its full impact beyond its intended and very specific applications.

Alternative approaches to science for building understanding, such as religions, tend to depend heavily on hearsay, reported observations that cannot be independently verified; and their interpretations cannot be rigorously tested, if at all. That many people use the interpretations that result from them is evidence that the interpretations have enough quality to be useful in various situations, typically ones where success in surviving and thriving is not increased by having more quality.

Humanity is now at a point where our impacts on the world require a high quality of understanding to manage without extreme harm to us and other species. Those with the most influence (power) must either acquire that understanding, or reduce their power to a level they can manage safely. To do so voluntarily, they must also value the others they influence, and values are in large part a function of culture – especially religion. If our values do not motivate us to mitigate the harm we cause, and if we insist on holding onto power without adequately understanding the complex interrelationships and interactions that it can disrupt, then we will be entirely responsible for our doom as a species.

"Are Scientists Stupid?"

The last place I expected to hear that question was in the clean room of a semiconductor manufacturer, spoken by a technician whose livelihood depended on scientists being a lot smarter than he was. I soon found out that he really meant biologists were stupid for accepting evolution instead of creationism as the best explanation for the complexity of life, especially when it came to humans. That was my first exposure to the possibility that functioning members of modern society could reject, on the basis of faith, hundreds of years of painstaking observation, testing, and thought. As a trained physicist, I easily determined that for their explanation to work, various laws of physics also had to be wrong. Essentially, God was testing people's faith and their intelligence by whether they would find the ways the Universe worked that were consistent with the literal translation of his words as related in the Bible. That scientists had reached the different conclusions after hundreds of years of painstaking research, thought, and testing just proved that they lacked both faith and intelligence.

There is a parallel and oddly similar argument, which I've recently encountered as part of a belief system shared by some people in the sustainability movement. Basically, it says that the complexity of the Universe is so great that it transcends explanation in the terms used by science. Instead, we, like other creatures, already have everything we need to appreciate and be a meaningful part of the Universe, or at least that part of it that supports life. There are a small number of basic patterns in Nature, that we are already intuitively aware of, that allow us, if we want, to use minimal, non-destructive technologies to be an integral, healthy part of our planet's ecosystems. We don't need anything else, and it's pointless – and harmful to the Earth – for us to seek it. The bottom line: scientists are stupid and dangerous.

Science is fundamentally a means of describing and explaining experience in abstract form, an extension of how we humans use language to communicate information about our experiences. The invention of mathematics, writing, and computational tools has enabled science to become both explanatory and predictive, to an extent far beyond what any one mind or group of minds can comprehend. I believe it is this transcendence beyond personal, visceral experience that is at the heart of both the arguments I cited, despite the fact that science and technologies using it have resulted in a progressively more benign environment for at least some of us.

Two basic needs are not being met by the increased power over our personal environments that science, technology, and the leveraging of group effort through economies have enabled. One of those needs is for meaning in life; the other is for the ability of people to meet their basic needs through direct influence. It is no more meaningful to be a consumer and a producer in an economy than it is to be a manifestation of mathematical probabilities in a multiverse of matter and energy. Most of the time we must rely on governments and corporations to provide our safety and sustenance, often from places and using technologies we can never hope to understand or manage.

A deity such as a personal god provides an easy way to, at least in concept, meet both needs: You are special to the creator to the Universe, and because of that, you can convince him to take care of you. Alternatively, you might see yourself as an integral part of that Universe, without whom it wouldn't be the Universe; you have what it takes to survive in Nature because Nature is you – all that's needed is to create a local, more ecologically healthy environment where you can use it. Ironically, pure science does not pretend to be able to define such a subjective thing as life's meaning, nor does it rule out a more personal relationship with one's environment or any other.

When empowered with adequate technology (such as supercomputers), science can do a pretty good job of simulating large systems; and with proper translation into experiential terms, it can give us insights into the impacts of our actions that our minds and bodies are simply not capable of doing anywhere near as accurately. To be responsible, and have any hope of being true to the values that we define for ourselves, we need to match the power of our actions with our knowledge of their consequences, and science currently provides the most reliable way to do that. If we are uncomfortable with this dependence, we must find a way to scale back our influence on the world to a point we no longer need to depend on it. If we want to rely on a deity of dubious existence, we must be willing to reduce our impact on others so we won't hurt them if or when our faith is found to be misplaced (if the deity's existence wasn't dubious, we wouldn't have to depend on faith).

Ironically, science is showing that we must collectively limit our influence over other species or risk driving most of them, and us, extinct. A world closer to the one we evolved in will be a healthier world, but at the expense of much of the power we've spent centuries accruing. As the tools needed to maintain and monitor our artificial environments falter, become unusable, and are replaced with more natural ones, I expect that science will continue to occupy an important niche in human understanding, but in a form much more usable by the majority of people. Perhaps at that point we will all be scientists (most of us something closer to what we now call naturalists), and the question that opened this discussion will never be asked again.

Christianity vs. "The World"

It has now been more than a decade since I gave up my identity as a Christian. Over that time, the number of Christmas cards I receive has dropped exponentially as friends and family learned about my current views on the subject of the existence of a deity and apparently became uncomfortable with them. Ironically, I still celebrate Christmas as a holiday, but without the religious overtones.

I was reminded of one of the potential reasons for their discomfort when watching an interview with a newly-minted Catholic cardinal: the conflation of secularism (living with the absence of religion) with hedonism (seeking pleasure, as a moral imperative). Both secularism and hedonism are natural enemies of Christianity, whose worldview is that we are all born evil, and to become good we must rely on guidance from those who have communicated with the creator of the Universe (the founders and leaders of the religion). While a Catholic, and then a Lutheran, I was taught that Christianity was the only thing standing between civilization and total anarchy (the natural state of the world, or just “the world”), where people would pursue personal gratification at any cost, including the suffering and death of others. Wanting to be a “good person” and “do the right thing,” I embraced this line of thought until I became convinced that those who claim to communicate with God are either lying, delusional, or – as I was – not self-aware enough to recognize where their “received wisdom” really comes from. I took the transitional step of joining the Unitarian Universalists, who try to facilitate every person's personal pursuit of spirituality, but I was still buying into the idea that social cohesion depends on some form of religion.

It took me several years to test and tease apart the threads of reasoning and evidence that tied religion to the definition and enforcement of “good behavior.” The bottom line, for this discussion, is that values are a human invention whose main purpose is to enable us to survive and thrive as social beings with an intelligence that can just as easily kill us. Each of us has a different way of learning, maintaining, developing, and using those values, and religion is one of the most successful cultural tools for doing all of that with the most people. It does so by telling simple stories (related together as parts of a myth) that can be easily remembered and connect its values to an understanding of the world that people can identify with. The relationships between people are key to the narrative, because coordinating their behavior is the means to the ends. Mutual respect enables adherents to be happy without interfering too much with the happiness of others, and maximizing population growth is critical to assuring that the “chosen people” ultimately dominate the world.

It is an unavoidable fact that we know a lot more about how the world works than the people who crafted the stories of millennia ago. To the extent that our values derive from an incomplete or inaccurate understanding, those values will inevitably become open to question. The alternatives, unacceptable in my view, are to either enforce ignorance (as religious fundamentalists would like to do), reinterpret the new facts to preserve the values as much as possible (as “apologists” attempt to do), or argue that reality is simply another belief system (which threatens to undermine everyone's survival). That isn't to say that it's unreasonable to fear that some people will jettison their values when confronted with the flawed nature of their derivation, especially since many of our shared values keep us from harming each other. I suspect that the emergence of law-based governments was partly in response to the need for minimizing such harm as free inquiry and access to powerful technologies became more pervasive.

Another result of more (and more accurate) knowledge is the awareness that we are all animals whose biology provides pleasure and pain based on what enables us to live long enough to procreate and assure that our species will survive into the future. As far as we can objectively (that is, collectively) verify, we are not independent of Nature; we are not perfect beings trapped in imperfect bodies as our old narratives would have us believe. Any values we create must take these facts into account if they are to be at all useful and not self-destructive. Consequently, the pursuit of pleasure should not be construed as “bad” if it doesn't interfere with meeting the need to survive (note that this is a lesson of another of our myths, the Siren's song from the Odyssey).

If, as I postulated earlier, values are tools for assuring a certain outcome, then why not make the attainment of that outcome our principal value? I have explored this option extensively in my other writing, arguing that the outcome should be the maximizing of both the life satisfaction (“happiness”) of the largest number of individuals over the longest period of time; this includes, by extension, the family of organisms that we are part of, and that is part of us. Many other values may ultimately be derived from how to achieve that outcome, based on our evolving understanding; and the acceptance of other values may, in part, be determined by how much they contribute to it. Choosing this approach has the additional advantage of directly addressing the ultimate test of any value system we may create: if people do not perceive their lives getting “better” (however they individually define it) as a result of using a system, they are unlikely to voluntarily subscribe to it; and if a system results in the death of everyone, there will be no one left to use it.

I and others have argued at length that our dominant values – the ones resulting in the largest-scale consequences – are causing one of the largest mass extinctions in our planet's history, and may soon result in the demise of our own species. Simplistically, the situation amounts to maximizing the happiness of a decreasing fraction of our population (instead of the entire population), without concern for the longevity of our (or any other) species.  Our present crisis is largely due to the fact that our technology has made us so powerful that we are rapidly approaching physical limits to our planet's ability to meet our desires. In this sense, Christians may be right about the evils of “the world.”