On the case against God.

Sometimes people discuss the case for or against God, hoping to prove or disprove His existence.

That’s not my goal. Deities – and magic of all kinds – are often defined as being beyond the realm of evidence or proof. You either believe or you don’t.

As far as our scientific discoveries are concerned, there’s no reason to believe in God. We’ve never encountered data that would require the presence of a deity to be explained.

But then again, as far as our scientific discoveries are concerned, there’s no reason to believe in free will. We’ve never encountered data that would suggest that the workings of our brains are caused by anything other than the predictable movement of salt atoms inside of us. And, personally? I’m totally willing to believe in free will, based solely on how my existence feels.

So I can’t fault anyone for believing in God. Or gods. Witchcraft, ghosts, or aliens – sure, I do think some of these beliefs are a bit more outlandish than my belief in free will, but it’s all a matter of degree.

Instead, I’d like to discuss the legal case against God.

I’m pro-life.

That’s why I’m vegan – I don’t believe animals should be killed or caged just for me to have a tastier meal. As a heterotroph, I obviously have to hurt somebody every time I eat, but I’d rather hurt a carrot than a cow.

And it’s why I’m an environmentalist. Although climate change would open up a variety of new ecological niches, presumably benefiting many lifeforms (including some that don’t even exist yet!), many of our world’s current denizens would suffer. Many current species would go extinct.

And, because I’m pro-life, I’m also pro-choice. I believe that parents can do best when they’re allowed to choose when & with whom they’ll have children. I believe that fooling around with people is often fun, and can be deeply emotionally fulfilling, and that people should be able to partake in consensual pleasure without the fear of lifelong repercussions. I believe that human women are living creatures and should have autonomy over their bodies.

I vastly prefer contraception to abortion. It would be marvelous to live in a world where safe, effective contraception was freely available to everyone who wanted it!

When my spouse and I were hoping to have children, we declined genetic testing during each pregnancy. Given our immense privilege, we could afford to love and raise whomever arrived in our family. But not everyone believes that they can. Some people feel that they’ll be unable to care for children with dramatic healthcare needs. (Inevitably, when we allow people choice, some people will base their choices on rationales that I don’t agree with.)

Following the Supreme Court’s misguided decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, many states have criminalized abortion. In Washington state, legislation provides “to unborn children the equal protection of the laws of this state,” and in Iowa, legal personhood begins “from the moment of conception.” Under such laws, abortion constitutes murder.

And worse. As Madeleine Schwartz documents in her excellent 2020 essay “Criminalizing a Constitutional Right,” even before the Dobbs decision, many women were already being charged with murder or neglect if they happened to have a miscarriage or stillbirth.

In the vast majority of cases, though, a miscarriage is not the mother’s fault.

Most often, the culprit is God.

Under these laws, state prosecutors ought to bring their murder charges against God.

After conception, each embryo passes through several developmental checkpoints. A wide range of genetic or chromosomal abnormalities could cause a fetus or embryo to fail to pass these checkpoints. At that point, the pregnancy is terminated. The unborn child is aborted by – or, if you agree with the sort of legal language that the Dobbs decision unleashed, murdered by – God.

A miscarriage is often an emotionally wrenching experience for aspiring mothers. The emotional aftermath of miscarriage is typically much worse than that of abortion. The outcome is the same – the pregnancy is terminated – but when God aborts a pregnancy with miscarriage, a perhaps desperately wanted unborn child is lost.

Miscarriage is frequent, too.

It’s hard to know the exact frequencies, because in addition to the general culture of shame and disparagement with which the medical community has long regarded women’s bodies, miscarriage is particularly hidden. Miscarriage is so common that women are advised not to announce their pregnancies until their second or third trimesters, but this means that their support networks of friends, family, and colleagues might not even know why a person feels devastated.

But a good estimate is that about fifty percent of conceptions will fail to pass all the necessary genetic and chromosomal checkpoints.

Which means that – insofar as we believe that legal personhood begins at conception – about fifty percent of all people are murdered by God before they are born. God is a ruthless eugenicist, dispassionately evaluating the DNA of each unborn child and quelling the development of half.

From Schwartz’s essay, you’ll learn of numerous women who were imprisoned – and lost their jobs, their homes, their families – because they were suspected of harming their own unborn children. (And this was all before the Dobbs decision.)

For the cases that Schwartz chooses to discuss, most of the women were very poor. If we as a nation had chosen to spend money to give all women access to high-quality nutrition and prenatal medical care, some of these fetuses may have survived their pregnancies and had the opportunity to become living, breathing, impoverished babies. In which case I’d argue that the people who intentionally withhold free access to nutrition and prenatal care – the Republican governors and legislators – are accessories to murder.

But before we punish any of them, we should start with God.

On the ethics of eating.

Every living thing needs energy. But our world is finite. Energy has to come from somewhere.

Luckily, there’s a lot of potential energy out there in the universe. For instance, mass can be converted into energy. Our sun showers us with energy drawn from the cascade of nuclear explosions that transpire in its core. A tiny difference in mass between merging hydrogen atoms and the resultant helium atom allows our sun to shine.

Our sun radiates about 10^26 joules per second (which is 100,000 times more than the combined yearly energy usage from everyone on Earth), but only a fraction of that reaches our planet. Photons radiate outward from our sun in all directions, so our planet intercepts only a small sliver of the beam. Everything living here is fueled by those photons.

When living things use the sun’s energy, we create order – a tree converts disordered air into rigid trunk, a mouse converts a pile of seeds into more mouse, a human might convert mud and straw into a house. As we create order, we give off heat. Warming the air, we radiate infrared photons. That’s what night vision goggles are designed to see. The net effect is that the Earth absorbs high-energy photons that were traveling in a straight beam outward from the sun … and we convert those photons into a larger number of low-energy photons that fly off every which way.

Image by Dr.Marek Roland on Wikimedia Commons.

We the living are chaos machines. We make the universe messier. Indeed, that’s the only way anything can live. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the only processes that are sufficiently probable so as to occur are those that make the world more random.

We’re lucky that the universe started out as such a bland, orderly place – otherwise we might not even be able to tell “before” from “later,” let alone extract enough energy to live.

The earliest living things took energy from the sun indirectly – they used heat, and so they were fueled by each photon’s delivery of warmth to the Earth. (Please allow me this little hedge – although it’s true that the earliest life was fueled only by warmth, that warmth might not have come from the sun. Even today, some thermophilic bacteria live in deep sea vents and bask in the energy that leaks from our Earth’s molten core. The earliest life might have lived in similar nooks far from the surface of the Earth. But early life that resided near the surface of the seas seems more likely. Complicated chemical reactions were necessary to form molecules like RNA. Nucleic acids were probably first found in shallow, murky pools pulsed with lightning or ultraviolet radiation.)

Over time, life changed. Organisms create copies of themselves through chemical processes that have imperfect fidelity, after all. Each copy is slightly different than the original. Most differences make an organism worse than its forebears, but, sometimes, through sheer chance, an organism might be better at surviving or at creating new copies of itself.

When that happens, the new version will become more common.

Over many, many generations, this process can make organisms very different from their forebears. When a genome is copied prior to cell division, sometimes the polymerase will slip up and duplicate a stretch of code. These duplication events are incredibly important for evolution – usually, the instructions for proteins can’t drift too far because any change might eliminate essential functions for that cell. If there’s a second copy, though, the duplicate can mutate and eventually gain some new function.

About two billion years ago, some organisms developed a rudimentary form of photosynthesis. They could turn sunlight into self! The energy from our sun’s photons was used to combine carbon dioxide and water into sugar. And sugar can be used to store energy, and to build new types of structures.

Photosynthesis also releases oxygen as a biproduct. From the perspective of the organisms living then, photosynthesis poisoned the entire atmosphere – a sudden rise in our atmosphere’s oxygen concentration caused many species to go extinct. But we humans never could have come about without all that oxygen.

Perhaps that’s a small consolation, given that major corporations are currently poisoning our atmosphere with carbon dioxide. Huge numbers of species might go extinct – including, possibly, ourselves – but something else would have a chance to live here after we have passed.

In addition to poisoning the atmosphere, photosynthesis introduced a new form of competition. Warmth spreads diffusely – on the early Earth, it was often sheer chance whether one organism would have an advantage over any other. If you can photosynthesize, though, you want to be the highest organism around. If you’re closer to the sun, you get the first chance to nab incoming photons.

That’s the evolutionary pressure that induced plants to evolve. Plants combined sugars into rigid structures so that they could grow upwards. Height helps when your main goal in life is to snatch sunlight.

Nothing can live without curtailing the chances of other living things. Whenever a plant absorbs a photon, it reduces the energy available for other plants growing below.

Plants created the soil by trapping dirt and dust, and soil lets them store water for later use. But there is only so much desalinated water. Roots reach outward: “I drink your milkshake!”, each could exclaim.

For a heterotroph, the brutality of our world is even more clear. Our kind – including amoebas, fungi, and all animals – can only survive by eating others. We are carbon recyclers. Sugar and protein refurbishers. We take the molecular machines made by photosynthesizing organisms … chop them apart … and use the pieces to create ourselves.

Some heterotrophs are saprophages – eaters of the dead. But most survive only by destroying the lives of others.

Image by Mikael Häggström on Wikimedia Commons, using originals by Laghi l, BorgQueen, Benjah-bmm27, Rkitko, Bobisbob, Jacek FH, Laghi L and Jynto.

For the earliest heterotrophs, to eat was to kill. But, why worry? Why, after all, is life special? Each photosynthesizing organism was already churning through our universe’s finite quantity of order in its attempt to grow. They took in material from their environment and rearranged it. So did the heterotrophs – they ingested and rearranged. Like all living things, they consumed order and excreted chaos.

The heterotrophs were extinguishing life, but life is just a pattern that repeats itself. A living thing is a metabolic machine that self-copies. From a thermodynamic perspective, only the energetics of the process distinguish life from a crystal. Both are patterns that grow, but when a crystal grows, it makes matter more stable than its environment – life makes matter less stable as it’s incorporated into the pattern.

Your ability to read this essay is a legacy of the heterotrophs’ more violent descendants. The earliest multicellular heterotrophs were filter feeders – they passively consumed whatever came near.

But then, between 500 and 600 million years ago, animals began to hunt and kill. They would actively seek life to extinguish. To do this, they needed to think – neurons first arose among these hunters.

Not coincidentally, this is also the time that animals first developed hard shells, sharp spines, armored plates – defenses to stop others from eating them.

The rigid molecules that allow plants to grow tall, like cellulose, are hard to digest. So the earliest hunters probably began by killing other animals.

With every meal, you join the long legacy of animals that survived only by extinguishing the lives of others. With every thought, you draw upon the legacy of our forebear’s ruthless hunt.

Even if you’re vegan, your meals kill. Like us, plants have goals. It’s a matter of controversy whether they can perceive – perhaps they don’t know that they have goals – but plants will constantly strive to grow, to collect sunlight and water while they can, and many will actively resist being eaten.

But it makes no sense to value the world if you don’t value yourself. Maybe you feel sad that you can’t photosynthesize … maybe you’d search out a patch of barren, rocky ground so that you’d absorb only photons that would otherwise be “wasted” … but, in this lifetime, you have to eat. Otherwise you’d die. And I personally think that any moral philosophy that advocates suicide is untenable. That’s a major flaw with utilitarianism – rigid devotion to the idea of maximizing happiness for all would suggest that you, as another organism that’s taking up space, constantly killing, and sapping our universe’s limited supply of order, simply shouldn’t be here.

At its illogical extreme, utilitarianism suggests that either you conquer the world (if you’re the best at feeling happy) or kill yourself (if you’re not).

We humans are descended from carnivores. Our ancestors were able to maintain such large brains only by cooking and eating meat. Our bodies lack an herbivore’s compliment of enzymes that would allow us to convert grass and leaves into the full compliment of proteins that we need.

And we owe the very existence of our brains to the hunts carried out by even more ancient ancestors. If they hadn’t killed, we couldn’t think.

Just because we were blessed by a legacy of violence, though, doesn’t mean we have to perpetuate that violence. We can benefit from past harms and resolve to harm less in the present and future.

Writing was first developed by professional scribes. Scientific progress was the province of wealthy artisans. None of the progress of our culture would have been possible if huge numbers of people weren’t oppressed – food that those people grew was taken from them and distributed by kings to a small number of privileged scribes, artisans, philosophers, and layabouts.

When humans lived as hunters and gatherers, their societies were generally equitable. People might die young from bacterial infections, dehydration, or starvation, but their lives were probably much better than the lives of the earliest farmers. After we discovered agriculture, our diets became less varied and our lives less interesting. Plus, it’s easier to oppress a land-bound farmer than a nomadic hunter. Stationary people paid tribute to self-appointed kings.

This misery befell the vast majority of our world’s population, and persisted for thousands of years. But the world we have now couldn’t have come about any other way. It’s horrific, but, for humans to reach our current technologies, we needed oppression. Food was taken from those who toiled and given to those who hadn’t.

Mostly those others created nothing of value … but some of them made writing, and mathematics, and rocket ships.

Although the development of writing required oppression, it’s wrong to oppress people now. It was wrong then, too … but we can’t go back and fix things.

Although the origin of your brain required violence, I likewise think we ought to minimize the violence we enact today. We can’t help all the animals who were hurt in the long journey that made our world the place it is now. And we can’t stop killing – there’s no other way for heterotrophs like us to live.

To be vegan, though, is to reckon with those costs. To feel a sense of wonder at all the world pays for us to be here. And, in gratitude, to refrain from asking that it pay more than we need.

On burial rites … and a meaningful life.

And now… a super-cheerful essay to celebrate my 32nd birthday!

If you’re writing about conflicts between religious and scientific worldviews, eventually you get stuck writing about death.

Within many religious frameworks, inevitable death lurking somewhere down the line doesn’t alter the meaning of the life that comes before it. I’m typing this essay during the gap between the local university’s graduation and K’s high school graduation, so it’s hard for me not to draw an analogy between many religion’s conception of death and graduation. The fact that schooling eventually ends doesn’t negate the meaning of the time spent there. You learn something (hopefully!), you work toward building an adult self (hopefully!), then you enter the real world. Likewise, many religions interpret this current lifetime as preparation toward an afterlife. Maybe the afterlife will be corporeal, following reincarnation, maybe it’ll be incorporeal in some type of spirit realm, but either way the preceding finite lifetime preserves its meaning because choices made during that life have repercussions that carry on into the afterlife.

(This is my one complaint about Veronica Roth’s Divergent, by the way. For much of the book, her characters seemed to inhabit a secular world; only after her parents’ sacrifice was a Christian perspective with its promise of eternal life in heaven introduced. And I think this mutes the implication of the parents’ sacrifice. It would have seemed more powerful to me for them to give up everything for their daughter; instead, when they save her they merely transition from this world to the next. But then again, Roth’s book was published as YA. It’s perhaps unfair to expect a youth book to invoke the same crushing emotions that are fair game with adult readers.)

Within secular perspectives, though, death becomes problematic. Eventually life ends; if this end is viewed as a negation of meaning, then recursive analysis backward through time would imply that no time, no matter how vivacious a person might feel at any given moment, could have meaning. And if life has no meaning, why bother?

My favorite secular response to this question is Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. His premise was, if you decide that life has no external source of meaning, should you commit suicide? He builds toward a line that surely you’ve seen quoted before:

“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” (translated by Justin O’Brien)

Or you could consider the response given in Philip Kitcher’s recent essay Life After Faith. His rationalization is that life retains its meaning because when we die, not everything we have influenced disappears at once (a generally valid assumption, as long as we don’t all go out from a particle-accelerator-nucleated black hole like Richard Posner speculated about in Catastrophe. Which, don’t worry, most physicists agree that this scenario is exceptionally unlikely. Although it is primarily physicists whose work depends upon being able to use particle accelerators who know enough to address this probability, and as ever it is worth remembering that line from Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Scientists are, sadly, no less subject to unconscious bias than any other breed of human). In Kitcher’s view, our actions create ripples in the world, and those ripples will outlive us, at least for a little while:

“The picture of something acquiring meaning through relationship to something else that already has meaning is doomed from the start, especially if the somethings are qualitatively akin. But we can reject that picture in favor of taking meaning to lie in the relationship itself. One life may be meaningful through its attempts to affect the lives of others, efforts that contribute to the possibility of the lives affected developing meaningfully, even though contingent factors subvert that development.”

I found myself thinking about this while out for a run, and my own list of possible sources of meaning in a secular life instead includes: pursuit of pleasure, productivity, progeny. A runner’s rhythmic concussive footfalls push thoughts toward alliterative consonants. I returned home, slimed the baby (to slime a baby, you go for a run on a hot muggy day, return shirtless and drenched with sweat, then promptly hug the baby to your chest. She will need a bath. But N gets oddly giggly every time she is slimed), then described a rough outline of this essay to K.

She immediately complained. She feels strongly that the act of helping others (but how would I get this to have an alliterative “p” sound?) should have pride of place on the list. And, based on his quotation above, it seems clear that Kitcher would agree with her. But I’m a curmudgeon. In opposition to Kitcher, I feel that aiding others can confer meaning to your life only when paired with the belief that those other lives have intrinsic meaning of their own.

For instance, I think teaching can confer meaning — after you teach people, their triumphs are in part your triumphs. You contribute to their success. But I think the meaning derived from teaching depends upon the value of what is taught, not the act itself. For instance, I don’t think it counts (as far as meaningfulness goes) if you teach someone something that has no utility beyond the potential for your student to then teach that same thing to another. You could teach huge lists of arbitrary pairings between abstract concepts, and your students could go on to teach those same pairings to future students (this is totally hypothetical, by the way. I’m drawing no comparisons to actual subjects taught at our nation’s prestigious universities), and so you would have created a ripple of knowledge that would carry on after you die. But if those pairings have no intrinsic utility, you won’t have brought your students, or your students’ students, any closer to meaningful triumph.

To me, the idea that relationships in and of themselves confer meaning falls into this same recursive trap.

(Although I think it’d be fair to argue that this problem is avoided if the original teacher sincerely believes that the arbitrary pairings are useful, even if they aren’t. Similarly, helping others with their lives could add meaning to your own if you believe their lives to be enriched by pleasure, productivity, or progeny, even if you’re wrong. Because it would be silly to think that we can only know whether our lives have been meaningful if we’ve tracked the consequences of all our actions forward through time. Even the idea that consensus reality is more important than your own perception seems off to me, since it is you, a single potentially mistaken consciousness, that will die, so the most important thing is whether life seems meaningful from within the perspective of that consciousness.)

I suppose it’s a bit sad that my own list of potential avenues of meaning sounds a bit hedonistic (utilitarian, if you’re feeling charitable), but it’s the best I can come up with to reconcile my ethical beliefs with the sense that most (all, hopefully) people can have meaningful lives, in a wide variety of circumstances. Even as people grow older, I think there is a reason to go on living (with some caveats, of course; I hope to have all my DNR paperwork in order before it’s time for me to go).

Because a major theme of my novel is the conflict between religious and scientific viewpoints, death looms large. The most important issues are all related to mind and spirit — in most religions, it’s only the soul that lives on after death, and in the few I know with corporeal persistence that’s generally seen as a bad thing. With my belief system, the entity I think of as “me” resides primarily in the pattern of connections and signals between neurons in my brain. And yet, even when dealing with the inanimate shell that had once contained a soul, religious and scientific perspectives diverge.

I think I’ve slapped up one old piece of writing (and accompanying cartoon!) dealing with the body after death. And for myself, I don’t want much. I’m an organ donor; after I go, I hope people have a chance to take from former-me anything they might need. After that, I just want for my bones to be kept in a burlap sack and ferried from place to place by my daughter, wherever she might go. I’ve wanted this even before I had a daughter to saddle with the responsibility, ever since I read Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.

“Pilate, your father’s body floated up out of the grave you all dug for him. One month later it floated up. The Butlers, somebody, put his body in the cave. Wolves didn’t drag the white man to the front of the cave and prop him on a rock. That was your father you found. You’ve been carrying your father’s bones–all this time.”

Some others prefer the idea of interment within a coffin, although Bertram Puckle, who authored a surprisingly humorous volume titled Funeral Customs: Their Origin and Development , strongly opposes this practice: “The placing of antiseptic carbolic sawdust, etc., in the coffin greatly tends to preservation, whilst the use of india-rubber and other such expedients is the outcome of foolish sentiment which seeks to delay the reasonable and inevitable courses of Nature in reclaiming what she has lent us.”

(I’m not sure if this quotation gives you an accurate representation of how jovial his book is. Here, let me include a passage from the first page:

“Has Nature, then, her undertaker? Certainly she has. He is appropriately known as the Necrophorus mortuorum, or more popularly as the sexton beetle, for he is equipped with spade and all that is necessary for “undertaking.”

There is much that the human variety might learn from this humble and industrious insect. Whilst he is dressed in a conventional garb of black, he seeks to enliven matters by means of two broad bands of yellow on his back. He is cheery, and when his duties are over for the day he indulges in a little music, not perhaps entirely a matter of art for art’s sake, but like most joyous notes of nature, his immediate object is to attract the attention of the opposite sex.

In praising the Necrophorus mortuorum, we must admit that in his work he is not actuated by motives of disinterested philanthropy any more than is the case with the human undertaker.

Nature is indeed far too wise to entrust any important work to the spasmodic efforts of the well-intentioned. If she wants a job done thoroughly, she does not grudge a reasonable wage for services rendered.”)

But my vote for the most ecologically-sound funeral custom goes to the Parsis. In Mumbai, their corpses are left atop the Tower of Silence for vultures. When we were traveling through India, a friend and I attempted to visit. We were, perhaps reasonably, denied admittance. The woman who first came out to greet us was about to let us in (after interrogating my friend as to whether she was on her period, explaining “If it was your temple, you would not allow someone with blood to walk inside. It would profane.”), but then a young gentleman with an AK-47 stepped forward and said “No, no outsiders.”

Perhaps there is a chance that they would have let us see the aviaries, though. There were no accompanying aviaries when we visited, back in 2005, but I believe there now are. And there is a striking pair of sentences in Gardiner Harris’s New York Times article:

The cost of building the aviaries and maintaining the vultures is estimated at $5 million spread over 15 years, much less expensive than it would have been without the ready supply of food.

“Most vulture aviaries have to spend huge sums to buy meat, but for us that’s free because the vultures will be feeding on human bodies — on us,” Mr. Mehta said.

Frank Brown Cloud

Justice through words.

Tag: life

On the case against God.

On the ethics of eating.

On burial rites … and a meaningful life.