Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
I wonder if Pope Francis was speaking ex cathedra when he figured out, as recounted in a new book for kids, what God was doing before He made the world. I have, in fact, often wondered that myself. There was eternity before there was the Earth, and unless there were an eternity of multiverses before our own Universe, God must have been terribly bored. What did he do?
Well now, according to thejournal.ie, His Holiness has the answer. It’s recounted in the Pope’s new children’s book Dear Pope Francis, to be published by Loyola University Press on March 1. In it the Pope answers letters from thirty children, one of them asking the question above. And the Pope, showing the most Sophisticated Theology™, gives his answer. It’s in the screenshot below:
HE LOVED!!!!! But that raises further questions. WHO, exactly, did he love? There wasn’t anything around to love! Maybe he loved himself? But that would make him a narcissist!
I’m sure the book is full of bromides; check out his second answer above. One thing the Pope wasn’t allowed to answer, though, was “How the hell do I know?” After all, as Archie Bunker said, the Pope is inflammable.
Okay, how much do you know about evolution? Futurity has a pop quiz comprising 7 questions. Some of them are a bit ambiguous, but take the test anyway, which should take about three minutes.
My score is below, but given that I’m a professional evolutionary biologist, I would have been chagrined had I done worse. Give your score below—and beef at some of the questions if you want.
I’ve been in long-term “discussions” (a euphemism for “arguments”) with some people who claim that the humanities—in particular art, music, and literature—constitute “ways of knowing” that tell us facts about the universe either unattainable by science, unverifiable by science, or truths first revealed by literature and later verifiable by science. Often these arguments are made by theists whose ultimate goal is to show that religion is a “way of knowing.”
Over the several years of these discussions, I haven’t been convinced that humanities are indeed “ways of knowing” distinct from science. History and archaeology are ways of knowing, but only insofar as they adopt the scientific practices of verification, replication, and as they withstand doubt and alternative hypotheses. That is, I consider disciplines that use the practices of science to establish facts as “science broadly construed.” People like Massimo Pigliucci object vehemently to that term, but it’s just a semantic issue, so I’ll not pursue it here. All I can say is that I haven’t seen a truth set forth in literature that could stand as a truth without independent empirical verification.
As I’ve always said, I don’t say this to disparage the humanities—I’m a big fan of the arts and literature—but only to say that there’s really only one way of establishing truth, and that is to adopt the practices of science. I see music, art, and literature as ways of feeling, not ways of knowing. That is, they give us emotional experiences inaccessible to us in other ways. Literature enables us to see what it might feel like to be in somebody else’s shoes, activating emotions that we didn’t know we had.
I say “might” because when you read, say, The Sun Also Rises, you don’t know what you’d feel like if you were in Jake’s shoes. What you read about is what Jake feels like, a man in love but unable to consummate it. You may empathize with him or you may not. But, more likely than not, your emotions will turn one way or another: you’ll feel something you wouldn’t have felt otherwise.
I thought about this when I was pondering one of my favorite books, Out of Africa by Isak Dinisen (a pseudonym for Karen Blixen). As a portrait of colonialist Africa and a specimen of wonderful prose, it’s incomparable. After her coffee farm in Kenya fails, and her lover Denys Finch Hatton dies in a plane crash, she takes her sad farewell from Africa. The following clip from the end of the movie gives us three emotional scenes:
She is bought a drink by her fellow Brits at the club; this was previously forbidden because the bar had a “no women allowed” policy, which they violated to honor her presence as she leaves. It is a sign that she was respected, but accepted only at the end.
She says goodbye to her beloved head servant Farah at the train station, giving him the compass that Denys Finch Hatton had given her. She then asks him to say her name. This is of a piece with her famous soliloquy, “If I know a song of Africa. . .does Africa know a song of me?” In other words, she doesn’t want her presence as a person in that vast uncaring continent, a place that meant so much to her, to have gone unnoticed.
She recounts a story of lions resting on Finch Hatton’s grave (she always inserts an incorrect apostrophe in his name), a story told her by a friend via a local official. This part, unfinished in the clip below, evokes strong emotions in me, always making me tear up. The combination of her love for the man, his death, and his association with the lions is an incomparable image and ineffably sad.
Here’s the clip. By the way, Meryl Streep has sometimes been denigrated as an actress for only being “good with an accent”, but I think you’ll see from this short video that her acting abilities, evinced in the slightest changes of facial expression, are superb. I’m a big fan.
The lion-on-grave clip ends prematurely above, but you can see whole bit here.
And here’s the relevant passage from Out of Africa. The whole thing is wonderful, but it’s made immortal by that last sentence:
After I had left Africa, Gustav Mohr wrote to me of a strange thing that had happened by Denys’ grave, the like of which I have never heard. “The Masai,” he wrote, “have reported to the District Commissioner at Ngong, that many times, at sunrise and sunset, they have seen lions on Finch-Hatton’s grave in the Hills. A lion and a lioness have come there, and stood, or lain, on the grave for a long time. Some of the Indians who have passed the place in their lorries on the way to Kajado have also seen them. After you went away, the ground round the grave was levelled out, into a sort of big terrace, I suppose that the level place makes a good site for the lions, from there they can have a view over the plain, and the cattle and game on it.”
It was fit and decorous that the lions should come to Denys’s grave and make him an African monument. “And renowned be thy grave.” Lord Nelson himself, I have reflected, in Trafalgar Square, has his lions made only out of stone.
Remember that Blixen was Danish and wrote the book in her second language, which makes it even more remarkable.
Now, what “way of knowing” do we have here? What we learn is the events of Blixen’s life, and how she told us she felt about them. This is a sort of history, although to ensure that what she says is true you’d need more empirical verification. After all, lots of people embroider their autobiographies.
But the facts of her life are not what’s important in the film and in the book. What is important is how she reacts to them, and how we react to her reaction. If you’re sufficiently empathic (and it doesn’t take much), you’ll feel her carefully concealed joy at being bought a drink by people who used to exclude her; you’ll feel her gratitude as she hears Farah say her name for the first time, knowing he’ll remember her; and, especially, you’ll feel the stir of her soul as the lions on Finch Hatton’s grave bring his memory back to her.
To me, this is all a way of feeling, an activation of emotions in situations we’d never experience. As Emily Dickinson wrote, “There is no Frigate like a book. . .” What have we learned from the passage? Not much, really, and what we did learn needs verification if we’re to take it as true. But that’s all beside the point. What stays with us is the image of Finch Hatton, loved and now gone, whose memorial is made of flesh and fur rather than marble.
In February I’m giving two talks in Canada for the Centre for Inquiry: one in Halifax and the other in Ottawa. They’ve both been announced online, but I’ll add the dates and times here.
They’ll be book talks about Faith versus Fact, but with plenty of Q&A. As far as I know, the book will be on sale at the venues, and I’ll be glad to autograph it (with a cat if you use the secret word: the Latin binomial for the Canadian lynx—look it up!).
The talks are both open to the public; there is an admission charge for the Ottawa talk, but I assure you that I get none of it as I’m speaking without a fee. The Halifax talk, though, is FREE—no admission charge! Gratis!
Halifax (Tuesday Feb 23rd, announcement here): Tuesday, February 23, 7 p.m., Halifax Central Library, Paul O’Regan Hall, Spring Garden Rd, Halifax, NS B3J 1E9, Halifax, NS, Halifax. Although it’s free, they ask for an RSVP on the site.
At last! After years of assailing our ears with the wet smacking of faith-osculation and the unbearable blather of Krista Tippett, National Public Radio (NPR) has published a piece defending atheism and dismantling one of the commonest criticisms tendered by the Unthinking Faithful: atheism sucks the meaning out of life.
And I’m proud to see that the piece, “An unkillable myth about atheists,” is by a faculty member at my alma mater William & Mary: Barbara J. King. She’s a professor of anthropology and author of several books, most recently How Animals Grieve. More good stuff: here’s her picture from her website (the caption is mine), which also includes the statement, “Together with her husband, she cares for and arranges to spay and neuter homeless cats in Virginia.”
Cats: the Official Companion Animal of Atheists
But onto King’s short piece on Cosmos & Culture (she writes there frequently), which was inspired by a new book written by accommodationist Alister McGrath. McGrath is a professor of Science & Religion (!) at Oxford, an ordained Anglican priest, and a man whose writings I’ve slogged through with great distress. According to King, McGrath says stuff like this:
“Since science discloses no meaning to the universe, the only reasonable conclusion is that there is no meaning to find.”
By now all of us can respond to this as King does:
Here, yet again, is the unkillable myth, the persistent blind spot about atheism that apparently no amount of explaining can make go away. No matter how lucidly atheists explain in books, essays and blog posts that, yes, life can and does for us have meaning without God, the tsunami of claims about atheists’ arid existence rolls on and on.
. . . First is the understanding, emergent from evolutionary theory, that neither the universe as a whole, nor we humans within it, have evolved according to some plan of design. Cosmic evolution and human evolution unfold with no guiding hand or specific goals. Most atheists do accept this, I think.
Second is to embrace as a logical next step the idea that our own individual lives have no purpose or meaning. Do you know of any atheists who believe this? I don’t.
. . . An anthropological perspective teaches us that we humans are a quintessentially meaning-making species. We create love and kindness (hate and violence, too), and also work that matters. We recognize and protect (or, too often, harm) our sense of connection to other animals, to plants and trees, to all of nature’s landscapes. What are those acts if not ones of meaning and purpose?
. . . I’m yet another atheist voice chiming in to say that my life, thanks very much, is full of meaning.
Now, how to make this unkillable myth about atheism into a moribund myth?
I’ve often agreed with King, arguing that we nonbelievers imbue our lives with our own meanings—things like satisfying work, hobbies, raising a family, communing with friends, helping others, drinking good wine, and wearing cowboy boots. But after thinking about King’s essay, I’m not sure if I could really answer the questions, “What is the meaning of your life?” or “What gives your life meaning?”
I won’t get into the tedious and perennial philosophical argument about “the meaning of meaning” here. But what I want to say is this: what nonbelievers see as the “meaning” of life is simply what we like to do and prefer to do—the things that give us satisfaction.
Thus I much prefer the question, “What gives you satisfaction in your life?” That sounds a lot less portentous than the word “meaning”, for I’m not sure what it means to say things like “studying evolution gives my life meaning.” I enjoy studying evolution, and it gives me a lot of pleasure and satisfaction to learn the diverse ways plants and animals have evolved, but I don’t walk around imbued with the feeling that those endeavors have given my life “meaning”. I’m just doing what I like to do. In fact, I’d prefer that nonbelievers entirely avoid the notion of “meaning” because of its religious overtones. Why try to ape the faithful? Saying what gives our life “meaning” is like trying to create secular churches so we can satisfy a supposed need.
Now “purpose” is a different issue, for atheists can argue more credibly that we do give our lives purpose. And that purpose is to do those things that bring us satisfaction. Usually, though, “purpose” isn’t taken to mean pleasurable activities like reading or traveling. Rather, it denotes satisfying activities that seem “higher” because they help others. But again, I’d be hard pressed to say what the “purpose” of my life is. Can you tell us what yours is?
As an example of the idea she opposes, King discusses When Breath Becomes Air, the popular new book by the late neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, diagnosed at age 36 with terminal cancer. Here’s one of the book’s passages she criticizes:
“To make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning — to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That’s not to say that if you believe in meaning, you must also believe in God. It is to say, though, that if you believe science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life doesn’t have any.”
But in some sense I agree with that. If you construe “meaning” as “something given from the outside,” then yes, for the faithful that kind of meaning comes largely from God. (Not entirely, though, because others can also imbue you with a “purpose”.) But I wonder, when Kalanithi makes the following statements (as described by King), he’s not just justifying his profession the same way nonbelievers do: it gives us satisfaction. He dresses up his words with religious overtones, but that may just be a trope:
Kalanithi describes the “sacredness” of his work as a neurosurgeon, the burdens that make medicine “holy.”
Well, you could say the same thing about many professions, especially those that help others, even when practiced by atheists. I haven’t read Kalanithi’s book, but I’m not sure he means here that God has endowed medicine—as opposed, to, say, plumbing—with sacred overtones.
By and large, though, it’s great to see such an unrepentant defense of atheism, especially on the NPR site. I’d love to see King interviewed, for instance, by Krista Tippett. Imagine Tippett squirming when she can’t get King to accept anything “spiritual” or “numinous”!
As lagniappe in her piece, King proffers this tidbit, a criticism of accommodationism (as I said, McGrath is a vociferous accommodationist.):
Let’s return to McGrath. His central theme in The Big Question revolves around “the ultimate coherence of science and faith.” I’d like to say that open dialogue about the interweaving of scientific and religious narratives that McGrath champions — dialogue asking if that interweaving is really a possible, or even a desirable, goal — is the way forward. At the same time, I find intriguing and persuasive the perspective of physicist Sean Carroll, who explains why he takes no money from the John Templeton Foundation by saying it is because its underlying goal is to further this very notion of consilience. [JAC: Add me to that no-Templeton list.]
“Intruiguing and persuasive”, indeed. For that is the underlying goal of Templeton. Yay for Carroll! Yay for King! And boo to Templeton and McGrath!
A request: keep sending in your wildlife photos. While I have about a week’s worth on hand, I’d be comfortable with a larger backlog!
Lou Jost writes in from Ecuador with a scary spider photo, and asks for an ID:
I just came back from our new reserve in northwest Ecuador where we found this monstrous tarantula on the road. Biggest spider I ever saw and very aggressive. Tarantulas have stinging hairs on their abdomen which they fling at predators with their legs, like little darts. This one has been flinging so many hairs since its last skin-shedding that its abdomen is nearly bare.
The thing was much bigger than my hand (including my spread fingers) but I have nothing more for scale. This was a quick roadside shot as we stopped our car to let it cross the road. No idea of the species. I am hoping that a reader might know. The shape of the abdomen and those iridescent purple legs might be distinctive. Your readers are pretty incredible. One of them got an ID for the ant in my “walk in the jungle” post!
Here is another tarantula, this one smaller. It came out from between the rocks of a remote, mysterious “pyramid” deep in the jungle near one of our reserves, as if it were a prop in an Indiana Jones movie. A group of government anthropologists, archaeologists, and I were investigating the “pyramid” at the request of the local people, who had just found it a few months earlier (though I knew about it from a friend a decade ago). Wild rumors were now circulating about this being the possible tomb of the last Inca king, Atahualpa, or that it hid Atahualpa’s treasure, or that it was made by extraterrestrials or an extinct race of giants, and these rumors were being spread on national television, leading the Ecuadorian government to investigate.
The “pyramid” does look very much like an Inca construction, and initially I thought it really might be one. But the anthropologists and geologists with us said it was natural. Nobody believed them, but an American geologist who saw my pictures on the internet showed convincingly that it was an example of a completely natural “tessellated pavement”.
Still, it was an exciting thing to come across. And even more exciting with a tarantula crawling out of it!!
JAC: I’m amazed that this is a natural formation, as it sure looks like the Inca stonework I’ve seen.
Diana MacPherson sent some photos from the wilds of Canada:
There have been a lot of animals around partaking of the fat & sunflower seeds in the snow. I especially hadn’t seen the tree sparrows around for a while but they showed up today. Here are their photos below.
