How could evolution "allow" the human race to believe in the existence of God, a belief that is not easy to give "scientific" or "factual" justification? And how did the belief in God per se develop over the generations, while friction - and perhaps conflict - with the development of science? Dr. Oren Hasson tries to answer these difficult questions
The article is presented courtesy of the journal "Galileo", February 2004, pp. 48-53
In the tract of impossible logic that Lewis Carroll cast for his book "Alice in Wonderland", the Red Queen tells Alice that she is one hundred and one years, five months and a day old.
"I can't believe it!" Alyssa said.
"you cant?" The queen shared in her grief. "Try again: take a long breath, and close your eyes."
Alisa laughed: "There's no point in trying," she said. "Impossible things cannot be believed."
Alisa was wrong of course. We believe in many impossible things. Sometimes it even seems to us, especially when we observe the beliefs of others, that the more impossible things are, the more easily they are tempted to believe in them. Pay attention to what humans believe or believed: according to the Paphoho Indian tribe, living in Arizona, out of the primordial chaos was born a baby whose name was "born first". He created the earth with the help of the song - a sacred motif of utmost importance for the Indians. The sun was created by the "first born" only after the express request of the humans, who wanted to see each other and live in peace with each other. The Greeks believed that the Titans created the world, that Prometheus created man and became his patron, and they also believed that the first woman, Pandora, created Hades, the god of volcanoes and the underworld. The statement about the social role of the man and the woman in our world is inherent and well engraved in this story of creation. The god Ngai, who sits at the top of Mount Kenya, promised the Promised Land, aka the highlands of Kenya, with its good agricultural lands, to the chosen people, the Kikuyu tribe.
Most of those who believe in one God, believe that his son, Jesus, the son of a mortal woman, is the Messiah who brought redemption to the world, and there is no end to him. Hundreds of millions of others believe that God changed God's covenant with Abraham's descendants in favor of his covenant with the prophet Muhammad. A negligible minority of the monotheistic believers are more optimistic, and remain hopeful that the Messiah King has not yet arrived, and that there is still room to look forward to a better world. An equally negligible minority within this minority was more precise in its expectations, and believed that the late Rebbe of Lubavitch was the Messiah, and here it is, the last days knocking on our door. Many of these believers continued to believe in this even when the Rabbi was on his deathbed, and many of them still believe in the Messiahship of the Lubavitch Rabbi even after his death. Sometimes it seems as if faith is really stronger than any reality.
This hasty overview leaves room for some puzzlement. Because for anyone who thinks, like me, that there is enough evidence that man developed and was shaped with the help of random genetic changes (mutations) that constitute raw material for processes, some of which, at least, are selective (natural selection), it is clear that these processes are supposed to leave us with traits that were useful to us, at least in the past, for survival and for reproduction. If so, natural selection should have created in us a situation in which we only relied on the facts. And this is, indeed, a fascinating biological question: how could evolution have allowed us to "believe" at all, if it is clear that a response to verified facts alone would be more accurate than a behavior that allows illusions and bad moods to rule our lives.
I will not refer here to seeing reality versus clairvoyance (ie: in the discussion, like dreams, or to differentiate, literature and art), in the eyes of evolution, which is an interesting question in itself, but to another aspect of faith, aka the evolution of God himself in the thought of Western culture. It is mainly interesting to examine the evolution of God at the points of friction of religious belief, and perhaps we should say conflict, with the accumulated knowledge. And in fact, it is an examination of the changes that have taken place in faith since the stage when human knowledge began to tail it, and cut off vital organs from it.
There are no miracles and wonders in science
Scientific research, in any field, collects facts, and looks for an explanation for them that can be confirmed, calculated, and used to create predictions along the lines of "If explanation A is true, then phenomenon B must occur" and thus, if phenomenon B does not exist, it means that - A (usually an explanation, or a hypothesis) is incorrect. No modern scientific research can claim: A is true, but I can only understand through miracles (of some superior being, that is, with tools that cannot be understood with human tools). Even if this claim is true, it still should not be claimed in science, because with such an argument any person, according to his belief and perception of God or religion, can create his own private predictions, which will be impossible to disprove or prove. Such a situation will lead to an anarchy of arguments that are doomed to dwell and accumulate side by side forever, without meaning and ability to help us understand the world.
Because of this, scientists have chosen a different philosophical path, which seeks explanations for observable and measurable phenomena, by way of causality that can be measured and refuted. Because of this, scientific research must proceed from the working assumption that "there is no God". This statement is not at all meant to claim that there is no God, and it is not hidden by the fact that many scientists are people who believe in one religion or another. But while engaged in science, believing scientists also leave their beliefs aside. Attempts to link the two, such as attempts to point to the Big Bang in the Bible, and to evolution in the Bible, are a literary effort, not a scientific one.
This can be seen for two reasons: one, that such attempts assume, as an indisputable basic premise, that the Bible is a sacred document (that is, by God). Since science cannot accept unquestionable axioms, this concept is in contradiction to the scientific way of thinking. The second reason is that such attempts are usually made by marking a goal ("There must be a way to bridge the gap!") while trying to reach it at any cost. When the price is, usually, a distortion of both the data (facts and explanations) and the scriptures.
Either way, it is clear to everyone that if God did not invent man, then man invented God. Indeed, hundreds, if not thousands, of different gods, idols and holy spirits, possessing superior powers, are described in detail in the various and numerous cultures of man in the present and in the past. These descriptions are so different from each other that they cannot all be correct. It is clear, therefore, that at least the second part of the opening sentence of this paragraph is true - that man invented God for himself, and if not all those omnipotent beings, then at least the vast majority of them (ie: all but one - the God in whom I believe).
Suppose, for the sake of argument - which sounds logical, and maybe it is also true - that man had a need to understand the world in a clear and consistent way, and the creation of a higher power provided him with this need in an accessible and convenient way. For example, it has always been known, intuitively at least, that if any object changes its state of motion, it is a sign that someone or something exerted a force on it (ie: moved it). If a person in the forest hears the sound of a branch breaking, an essential need for him is to learn that someone has stepped on him, that is, that he is not alone in the forest. It is known that babies learn to make the connection between a spinner and a spinner (result to its cause) already in their first year. Therefore, if the sun moves in its path in the sky, it is not possible for it to move by itself. Because here, on earth, our day-to-day experience teaches us that there is no object that has infinite movement, and if we do not continue and exert force on it, the object stops its movement after a while.
Hence, if the pre-Newtonian man has an existential need to create a logical and consistent picture of the world for himself, then he could not avoid the conclusion that there must be some force, sublime and mighty, that moves the sun. And if, by chance, the cause of the breaking of that branch was not revealed to that person in the forest, then it is reasonable to assume that some mysterious creature passed there, who at will appears and disappears at will, one of several deceptive spirits that surround us, and sometimes tend to fool us, leaving us without any other logical explanation.
The evolution of the creation story
It is easier to start with the evolution of the creation story. This story will serve us as a parable, and perhaps as a sensitive sensor, which will indicate the evolutionary processes that go through the perception of God himself. After all, almost every human society, as it composed some kind of creation story for itself, also did so with God and gods. Some are culturally related to each other and others are disconnected and completely different from each other. Here too it can be assumed, with a great degree of certainty, that man invented most of them, if not all of them.
It is likely that creation stories were shaped in such a way as to provide man, each one with his own culture, a satisfactory, clear and logical explanation for the existence of the universe, and in the process to convince the unconvinced that some higher power created man as well. And since we owe him our very existence, and due to his being omnipotent, we are obliged to listen to his voice as it is heard from the mouths of priests, priests, magicians, pagan doctors, or from the mouth of any other religious authority. But the stories of creation have become over time a double-edged sword for faith, especially in modern times. With the accumulation of knowledge, the creation stories were the first to expose religion to criticism. Involuntarily, they became the tentacles of religion. They also became the first limb that could be given up in order to stay with the essence: faith in God himself.
Of all the different creation stories, it is natural that we deal with the central ones, the biblical creation story, accepted by the three Western religions, Islam, Judaism and Christianity. The first major conflict of this story with the facts began with Copernicus. The establishment we will rub shoulders with was mainly the Christian establishment, for the simple reason that scientific men in the Western world were also mostly Christian believers. The assumption was, until then, according to the religious tradition, that the world is at the center of the universe, and around it revolve, in miraculous circular perfection, the rest of the heavenly bodies. "And he will give them in the firmament of heaven" (Genesis XNUMX, verse XNUMX) was accepted as it is. Copernicus, by the way, was not the first to challenge this worldview.
He was preceded by three Greeks, Philaus (520 BC), Heraclides (350 BC) and Aristrachus (280 BC). But Copernicus was the first to build a complete and detailed model of the solar system, placing the planets in the way we know them today. Copernicus completed the draft of his work in 1530, at the age of 57, and circulated it among his friends. The rumor spread quickly, and caused ridicule, although it was the Pope, Clemens VII, who looked at Copernicus's ideas with a sympathetic eye. Martin Luther, on the other hand, wrote in 1533: "This fool seeks to turn the whole science of astronomy upside down; But the Holy Scriptures (the Bible) tell us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand in its place, and not the earth." From this it must be concluded, of course, according to Luther, that the sun is the one that moves.
Another review from 1541, by Melanchthon, version: "The eyes testify that the sky revolves in space for 24 hours". That is, of course: anyone with eyes in their head can go outside and see what's going on around what. So how dare this son of a puddle, Copernicus, claim otherwise? This criticism reminds me of a criticism by a literary critic and a secular believer, according to his definition, of Yuval Steinitz's book "A Scientific Logical Missile to God and Back": "The essential mistake of Yuval Steinitz is that instead of starting the proof of God's existence with a simple observation of the world, and the conclusions that flow from it, he started , continued and ended with an endless polemic…” In the opinion of this critic, anyone with eyes in his head can go outside and immediately see that such perfect nature could only have been created by God.
The essence of the concept of "perfection"
The concept of "completeness" is a complex and convoluted concept. At least according to the criteria of perfection coined by naturalists and religious people in the distant past, who sought in nature "an almost incomprehensible completeness and harmony", in the words of Linnaeus, the great biologist of the eighteenth century, such perfection does not exist in the world. I previously referred to this in the article "On the unattainable perfection of nature" ("A place for thought", September 1998). It was a superficial observation that lacked depth of thought that led Copernicus's critics to state that a simple observation of the world, and the conclusions derived from it, is enough to prove that there is no truth in his innovative idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun.
Copernicus received his printed book, which he dedicated to the next Pope, Paul III, on his deathbed, being 70 years old. A few hours later he died. Galileo, who tried to prove Copernicus' theory, was the one who took the brunt of the fire. He was also not satisfied with going outside and seeing, but learned to look deeper with the help of telescopes he built. At this stage, the church was already fighting for its dignity, as claims had already been raised, and precisely from the opponents of Copernicus, that the Copernican theory explicitly contradicted the Scriptures. These claims made the church a prisoner in the shackles of its conservatism, since turning the world upside down becomes, according to its own words, a contradiction of faith. The interesting side of the whole story is that at these stages both the geocentric method (assuming the earth is in the center) and the heliocentric method (sun in the center) were only theoretical.
The heliocentric method was also, in its first stages, as written by Copernicus, inaccurate. It was Kepler who improved it, by changing the shape of the planets' orbits from circles to ellipses, and in the process broke another religious assumption - philosophical in origin, in fact - which was supposed to testify to the "completeness" of creation. Newton was the one who added the gravitational forces to the theory, and thus added to it a necessary layer of understanding how it works physically.
The church was forced to retreat, in the end, with many twists and turns. So are other religions. If so, the earth is not the center of the universe, as the Bible implies. The earth moves, contrary to what the Bible implies, or, as much as it is unpleasant to admit it, that Joshua, when he placed the sun in Gibeon, either did not know the facts or made a mistake in the wording. And more blows came. Paleontological findings (fossils) indicate the existence of the country long before five thousand seven hundred and fifty years. This is also evidenced by other geological findings.
The migration of the continents points to a dynamic and changing world. The fossils, as well as the biological processes, testify to the gradual development of life, and not to a one-time creation. Is there something wrong with the creation story as well? The religious authorities don't learn fast enough how to deal with the growing pool of facts, and repeatedly slapped before the biblical stories. Religion is a conservative institution, which manages to survive thanks to faith and not thanks to knowledge. But when knowledge changes, faith has no choice: if it does not change according to accepted knowledge, it will die out.
Someone once told me that she heard from a rabbi that the evolutionary order of the development of organisms corresponds to the order of appearance of the various creatures in chapter 400 of Genesis. I examined the things with her: the first organisms that God created were on the third day. These were terrestrial plants, including the fruit trees. Practically speaking, the first land plants (ancient mosses) appeared for the first time only about XNUMX million years ago, long after the development of all marine systems of algae and animals, including the vertebrates - fish, and probably also amphibians of freshwater bodies.
The sun itself (and the moon and the stars), which is so essential to plants due to the process of photosynthesis, was only created on the fourth day. Flower plants and fruit, by the way, first appeared much later, "only" about 140 million years ago (and herald the end of the Jurassic period), after the appearance of reptiles, birds and early mammals. The water creatures of all kinds, the earliest in the animal kingdom, were created, according to Genesis, only on the fifth day, together with the crocodiles and the birds. The "creep of the earth" of its kind, which in this term, so it is assumed, includes the insects and other arthropods (spiders, scorpions, etc.), groups that are very ancient, and developed at the same time as the terrestrial flora, appeared long before the birds and crocodiles. According to the biblical story of creation, they came into the world only on the fifth day, along with the terrestrial mammals and the other animals of the land. It was perhaps the first time that woman bothered to examine the rabbi's words.
The story of creation as a metaphor and parable
Contrary to the religious establishment, many of the believers themselves, who are ready to accept the evidence provided by science, today see the biblical story of creation as only a metaphor and a parable. Many others are still, along with the heads of the religious establishments, in the Lutheran stage of denial. The battle of this assembly was based on the ignorance of the public, which does not know the facts for sure. Facts related to the age of the earth, as well as the existence of other animals and plants in the past and evolutionary processes in the present, are not as simple or as easily exposed to the public as one simple diagram of the solar system. As a result, the religious establishments give up only a heel on the side of a thumb.
Repentants are even ready to call to their ranks the Big Bang as proof of divine creation, and to ignore the fact that the Big Bang is an event that happened, according to the findings, about 13 billion years ago, and which was not accompanied by the creation of life on earth. However, despite the struggle that the religious establishments are conducting for their prestige and authority in matters of opinion, these debates are a luxury. The main concern of the religious establishments is the growing willingness of the public to give up God. And what really happened to the perception of God over the years?
The first interesting fact is that throughout human history, the higher powers of Western culture have transformed from many gods to a single god. From gods whose image is like a human figure, or heavenly bodies, or animals and plants, to an abstract and formless god, a god who cannot be seen. The meaning of the process is that God became, over time, a figure that is more difficult to disprove. As our knowledge of the world increases, it becomes more difficult for us to accept gods in the image of the Greek gods, for example. Already in the days of the Greeks and Romans, following the development of philosophy, people became more skeptical and sophisticated, and were ready to accept, in the end, the abstract God of Judaism, if also in a slightly different, more missionary - Christian garb.
And most importantly, the modern god has become a god whose existence cannot be contradicted. He is everywhere, and at the same time he is also not everywhere. The more abstract and unattainable it is, the less it conflicts with knowledge. God, the existential basis of belief in its laws and instructions, underwent a process of cultural natural selection, while clashing with man's knowledge and independent thinking, until he remained as a metaphysical god - a god who cannot be refuted.
Along with the dramatic change in the character of God, the faith also changed, and the written Torah was and continues to be added all the time to the oral Torah. It updates itself, without a choice, with facts and hypotheses that the public for the most part has already accepted, just as it updates itself, all the time, with social conventions (for example, the growing willingness of the Jewish religion, in modern times, to accept equality between the sexes). The Jewish and Christian religions, whose believers or their descendants are more exposed than the believers of any other religion to the rapidly increasing modern knowledge, are like a large glacier on which water is dripping, and it changes its shape in the process, according to the increasing pressures, when some of the water dripping on it and washing it freezes on its surface and becomes an indestructible part separated from it, until it is difficult to distinguish between them and the source, while other parts of the same glacier melt and disappear.
Accordingly, each person, according to the degree of his education and the degree of his willingness to accept the findings of science, so he is right, without choice perhaps, to change his belief. According to the most abstract belief, God stopped interfering in everyday life. He just created the world, "stretched the spring" and let it go. This is the distant and non-intervening God of Isaiah Leibovitz. This is also the God that the religious establishment does not like, because it does not leave him any role. In modern times, and certainly in post-modern times, the religious authority, which dictates the essence of God, and with it the good and the bad, has declined from its greatness. In modern times, according to the data he accepts as true, each person creates another God for himself, or, if he does not trust his spiritual independence, relies on another rabbi. In modern times, each person has or does not have his own God.
* Dr. Oren Hasson teaches about the evolution of interpersonal communication at the Hebrew University in the Department of Communication and Journalism, and at the University of Haifa at the Institute of Evolution, and deals with science education at the Association for Excellence in Education.
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Where was I in 2004 ... ~