Coming Clean

Many of you know of my desire to learn and understand the world we live in. Inevitably this leads to questions about things beyond our physical world and into the realm of the collective human imagination. Within this realm lies our belief in a supreme being that created our universe, which, coincidentally, filled the gaps in our knowledge of the physical with the supernatural. Over time our understanding of what surrounds us grows through the careful study of the physical. These intellectual breakthroughs slowly beat back the stagnant doctrines of fundamentalism. As we continue to grow in our knowledge of the physical universe, we can only expect that religious leaders will find ever smaller gaps in which to fit god. Lightening, thunder, rain-- each of these used to be intimately tied to long-dead deities. Most religions will still claim their god has the power over these purely physical weather patterns, though few claim he commands every precipitated drop of water into action, forcing the excited gasses to condense at his will and through his command of gravity, allow the drop to fall once again back to earth. What we are looking at is religion as a whole grasping at the ever receding waves of ignorance and only finding evidence for disbelief in a personal god.

God is love.
Emotions are interesting. They are what tie humans together, drive them apart, fuel the fires of war, seed the deepest desires for compassion, etc. What we achieve through human interaction is stunning. To build the greatest structures on earth or even the lowliest of shelters we thrive through cooperation. Love is cooperation. Western religions, especially Christianity, would have us believe that without god, humans could only live in sin. Without an understanding of what Christ has done in our lives, we are utterly incapable upholding the law. I do not believe that belief in a god is what causes people to behave in such a manner that is pleasing to or displeasing to others. That the law is brought to us by god is a matter that is entirely dispelled by an understanding of where a cooperative nature comes from. Like our physical makeup, our cognitive abilities and social mechanisms evolve through time. We cooperate because our ancestors that formed cooperative habits succeeded. If nature favored selfish individuals, propagating themselves by brute force as is seen in many animals, the survivors would continue to be bigger and nastier. The same is true for color, song, dance and so forth. There is no accident that many insects look like the trees they sit on, or fish like the corral they live in. There was a greater chance that they would survive given a slightly darker shade. Likewise human emotion evolved as a cooperative mechanism. More food was found for groups of our ancestors that searched together and healthier babies for those that developed those skills. We see evidence for all of these when we study our closest ancestors, the great apes. On a separate evolutionary branch, troops of monkeys survive quite well from a variety of predators by emitting different calls for birds in the air, snakes in the trees and lions in the grass. The social structure goes far enough that young monkeys caught lying are ignored. The monkey who cried wolf is never trusted without affirmation from other individuals in the group. The evidence does not suggest that a god has given us divine laws, but that these laws which we institutionalize are handed down to each succeeding generation because they help us survive.

Evolutionary steps do not happen by chance.
There seems a common misconception about the process of evolutionary change exists for a large number of individuals. For those who hold fast to young earth theory, it may be hard to come to grips with the idea that evolutionary processes-- from the cooling of the earth, the primordial soup, to self replicating proto-DNA, to single-celled self-replicating DNA fragments, to single celled organisms, to multi-cellular cooperative organisms, to self-replicating multi-cellular animals... then eventually to us, humans-- could lead to beautiful world we see around us.
The misunderstanding seems stem from the idea that mutations happen by chance (which is true) and that there is only a chance that the mutations will be present in the next generation (which is also true, to an extent). However; the solution to this problem lies in the world of probabilities. If we look at any particular organism by itself and calculate odds of its next generation, or even 1,000th generation to say, change color from black to white, (what some would call "micro evolution"), we can without a doubt say the odds against the particular genes for color to change such that a perfect hue of white emerges are astronomical. We could safely assume no such transformation would ever take place. However, as I stated above, evolution does not happen by chance, it needs a reason. We cannot look only at the organism and watch it change itself, we have to look at the whole of its environment. Does it have predators, where does it live? All we need is a slight chance that a normal variation in hue or pattern will be more successful in allowing the organism to hide from predators, even if it is not entirely perfect. Given that a few more of the new shade will survive, eventually the changes become the norm.

There is no one that disputes the above, for we see this variation in every domestic and wild animal alike. We can breed white cats, black cats, dogs that are easy going, dogs that are hyper, and beef that ripple with perfectly sculpted muscle. Most people's problem lies in two areas of evolution, speciation and the appendage problem. A common argument is that you could never get a cat to turn into a dog. Another is that you cannot get a completely working machine starting from little to nothing (as noted by the eye and flagella problems). In this essay I will work with the eye. The problem with the eye is that it does not seem to work without all of the pieces precisely arranged such that vision is achieved. The odds against the eye forming accidentally are astronomical, no one disagrees, not even Darwin or Dawkins or Sagan. The accident argument is wrought from ignorance of evolutionary process however; like any other sense the eye is a series of nerves that send signals to the brain to be interpreted. We have a nose that detects the shape of particles in the air, much like the children's game of placing the pegs into the holes. The whole of our skin senses touch as well as heat and our hearing detects the tiniest fluctuations of pressure in the air. Much as you can cup your hand near a fire and feel the heat emanating off of it with your eyes closed, so to did the first eye detect light. Most of our skin reacts much the same way with light now as this original eye did, not much more than a flicker of sensation, in no way representing a visual construct of the world. Through a series of mutations, our small critter, like the slowly color changing bugs above, survived though a tiny percentage of increased awareness about its world at a slightly greater chance than did each generation's peers. From generation to generation this creature survived. Its light sensitive cells "seeing" only flickers of light and dark grew slightly more sensitive in a series of random mutations that through no coincidence allowed our small friend to have a greater chance of survival. Hundreds and thousands of generations later it is capable of only slightly more than flickers of light and dark, he could perhaps "see" in the same way that we can see with our eyes shut, the subtle difference between a lit room and a dark room. A predator crosses the sun casting a shadow over our tiny hero allowing him just that nearly insignificant chance to continue the chain of existence. A thousand, perhaps tens of thousands of generations later, we again peer upon our hero's great ancestors. A tiny mutation has put a small dimple of just where the light sensitive cells reside. This casts a slight shadow across them, hindering its sight ever so slightly, but with this tiny inconvenience, comes a tiny blessing, there is a small sense of direction in where light is falling from. No longer is the world light or dark, but light to his left or dark to his right. This gives our critter just that much more chance to escape from prey, survive to pass on his wonderful genes. As before the tiny variation was no more than a chance, but one that survives because it helps. A dimple formed in another location would not be helpful for survival necessarily so it would have equal chance to fall away from genetic memory altogether. But this one is more likely to stay, who can say how many generations went dimpleless after the first critter had a moment of increased sight before it came a second time, then the third, it matters not how many, but that it did eventually persist until all newborns had a similar dimple. From generation to generation the size of the dimple grows because of the increased perception from a greater angular range allows greater chance of survival. The higher chance of survival from increased sight causes better dimple genes to persist. At the same time, the light sensitive cells are getting stronger for the same reason, the tiny mutations that cause perhaps a slightly higher resolution to the light/dark images are allowing the critters with the better genes to survive. This is the stage of most gastropods.

We come back to our friends another ten thousand generations later, the sweat glands near the eye have started to form droplets of water in the heat. The eye, being little more than a dimple, collects the water in a tiny pool. The sensitive cells beneath receive a slightly focused beam from the light now. No longer being randomly blasted by light at any angle, the droplet of water creates a wildly out of focus image perhaps akin to looking through a 10mil sheet of plastic. The faint world beyond now haw vague shapes moving around, other small, nearly sightless critters marauding the planet earth, each struggling for survival. The droplet evaporates. Another droplet forms the following afternoon. This time he escape a hungry predator, its sensitive antennae twitching, sensing the changes in the air. The sweat glands have helped our friend survive.

Another hundred thousand generations. The sweat glands operate constantly, collecting water in the ever deeper cavern of the eye, the now super sensitive photo cells achieve unprecedented vision of our planet. We are now at the stage of the nautilus. Underwater, the nautilus has evolved exactly such an eye. No more than a hole, at the bottom of which are crammed millions of light sensitive cells. A pin hole at the aperture allows a blurry, yet perfectly suitable eye for this armored creature.

To achieve the vertebrate eye there are several more stages of evolution that need to happen: the solidification of the lens, the creation of the retina for perfect focus and then the eyelid for protection much later. Each stage is carried out as before as a chance mutation that persists because it helps the performance of the eye and thus the continued survival of the organism. The creation of the eye itself happened in many different ways for many different animals. Insects for example co-evolved with the vertebrate eye, many insects, like cockroaches and ants, while they have eyes, use them primarily to detect differences in light and dark and use antennae to do most of their "seeing" which is really more akin to smelling.

The Divine Hand
The above is not evidence that denounces the existence of a god. It is not so simple a proposition to disprove any such notion. I intended to write clearly about evolutionary process in order to show that ignorance of scientific process does not bring to light any new understanding about our world. We cannot simply ignore new evidence for evolution and continue to fight against a 19th century understanding of how the world works. Unschooled individuals continue to claim that single-celled organism locomotion and the formation of the eye must be the hand of a god, because no process exists to create them otherwise. To claim such is ignorance an folly, as processes for the evolution of both the eye and flagella have long been discovered and divine intervention rejected as a requirement for their existence. To claim that a creator must exist because these complex systems exist is both ignorant and false.

I'll spell it out
I do not believe in a divine creator. Perhaps, as some of you might believe, this is to my own destruction, but I cannot abide any longer in the deception of Pascal's wager or the ignorance of the church. For those who are not familiar with Pascal's wager, it is the decision to believe in a god because the alternative to belief is, in the Christian understanding, eternal suffering. The wager is a deception, of course, because if there exists a divine creator, then choosing adherence based upon the idea that to disbelieve would mean eternal suffering, is not belief, it is fear. It is tantamount to telling everyone you are a Christian but disbelieving that Christ is the son of God. If god exists, you would not be able to lie to his so easily. So, you are still left with true faith or you must accept that the world is a purely physical place and this life is the only thing we have. Christians seem to think that life without god is a dark, sad life. Without purpose, what is there to live for if not the creator of the universe?

Life is worth living without god. I am willing to accept good evidence for god's existence if it can be found. But frankly, it is hard to come by evidence for a phantom and a ghost. If given the chance, life seems to have more purpose now. The knowledge that this is all we have does not make we want to waste my life on all the material offerings of this world, it provides the opportunity for deeper reflection into what it really means to be human, what it really means to have the opportunity to have life, to look out upon the world and try and figure out all the hows and whys that really only science can offer us. Applying god to all the unknowns about our world is not making the world seem a better place. "God did it" is not the way to express how wonderful our mountainside looks, how the blooming fireweed blazes against the darking sky. I love life now. Losing god does not create less meaning for my life.