Beard of the Week LXXXIX: It's Cool that No One's in Charge
I think one of the defining moments of adulthood is the realization that nobody's going to take care of you. That you have to do the heavy lifting while you're here. And when you don't, well, you suffer the consequences. At least I have. (And in the empirical study I'm performing about interacting with the universe, I am unfortunately the only test subject I have complete access to, so my data is, as they say, self-selected.) While nobody's going to take care of us, it's incumbent upon us to take care of those around us. That's community.
The fiction of continuity and stability that your parents have painted for you is totally necessary for a growing child. When you realize that it's not the way the world works, it's a chilling moment. It's supremely lonely.
So I understand the desire for someone to be in charge. (As a side note, I believe that the need for conspiracy theories is similar to the need for God.) We'd all like our good and evil to be like it is in the movies: specific and horrible, easy to defeat. But it's not. It's banal.
[…]
No one is in charge. And honestly, that's even cooler.
The idea of an ordered and elegant universe is a lovely one. One worth clinging to. But you don't need religion to appreciate the ordered existence. It's not just an idea, it's reality. We're discovering the hidden orders of the universe every day. The inverse square law of gravitation is amazing. Fractals, the theory of relativity, the genome: these are magnificently beautiful constructs.
The nearly infinite set of dominoes that have fallen into each other in order for us to be here tonight is unfathomable. Truly unfathomable. But it is logical. We don't know all the steps in that logic, but we're learning more about it every day. Learning, expanding our consciousness, singly and universally.
As far as I can see, the three main intolerant religions in the world aren't helping in that mission.
For all their talk of charity and knowledge, that they close their eyes to so much—to science, to birth control education, to abuses of power by some of their leaders, to evolution as provable and therefore factual (the list is staggering)—illustrates a wide scope of bigotry.
Now, just to be clear. If you want to believe, or find solace in believing, that someone or something set these particular dominoes in motion—a cosmic finger tipping the balance and then leaving everything else to chance—I can't say anything to that. I don't know.
Though a primary mover is the most complex and thus (given Occam's razor) the least likely of all possible solutions to the particular problem of how we got here, I can't prove it true or false, and there's nothing to really discuss about it.
If Daniel Dennett is right— that there's a human genetic need for religion— then I'd like to imagine that my atheism is proof of evolutionary biology in action.
[excerpt from Adam Savage, "Food for the Eagle", speaking to the Harvard Humanist Society, April 2010.]
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on Wednesday, 21 April 2010 at 23.44
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I can see where some might believe in a need for religion based in genetics, but I'm skeptical of it. Then again, I maintain that while all religions are based in faith, not all faith is or need be plugged into a particular church or organized religion.
I don't know if God set all the dominos in motion to get us to where we are now. I accept it as a possibility at least as good as the possibility that some random, extremely longterm and complicated chain of events got us to the world we inhabit today.
Being atheist, you'll probably approve of my skepticism about assigning God's will to all sorts of good and awful occurrences in the lives of individual human beings. Although it's long been a teaching tool of religious parents and of some religions and their clerics, the Great Scorekeeper concept of God seems very unlikely. My conception of God is such that he would no more attempt to devote his perfect knowledge and wisdom to perpetually updating his tally of who among the world's billions of human beings is being naughty or nice, and how naughty or nice, plus trend lines and cross-referenced historical data per individual. It's enough to give a mortal a headache, just thinking about the tedium, the monotony, of such a project.
No, I think what we have in this life is the capacity to make for ourselves a more or less good life or a bad one. I think one of the dynamics of this life relates to an admonition my mother was given to using on me: "The good or bad you do has a way of coming back to you, not always directly or right away, maybe, but it does. And it adds up to make you a person who is good or not, which is important to how you feel about yourself and how others feel about you." Something like that, anyway. I think it appeals to logic more than God as the Great Scorekeeper.
on Wednesday, 5 May 2010 at 10.41
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There are many ways I can imagine believing in a god, if I did. Easiest to believe in, I think, is the version at the hands-off, set-it-in-motion kind of creator. Move up the scale towards the scorekeeper deeply concerned in my every act and entreaty and willing to help me win every football game–my credulity would be severely tried long before.