Godless Scum

Sky pixies

It'll come as no surprise that I don't hold much truck with the idea that there is something in the sky that needs to be placated by the world's baldest primate.

Although religion can take credit for some good and charitable things, it's very much a matter of opinion whether these outweigh the litany of awful things done in its name. An apologist may explain that those performing the Inquisitions, putting Galileo under house arrest, flying planes into buildings, justifying pogroms, burning brides and witches, denying women contraception or basic human rights, spit-roasting Saracens, pushing walls onto lesbians, bombing buses, mutilating the genitals of 'their' girls and boys, or cauterising the latest heresy are not true practitioners of the religion. This is no argument at all: if your God is so unwise as to create a moral system plastic enough that almost anything can be justified in its name, then is your God really worthy of worship? In any case, why would an omnipotent creator be so needy as to require continual praise for his handiwork? Throughout history, religion has been used as a justification for violence against unbelievers, be they heretics, members of other religions, atheists, or merely the people next door with the good farm land. There are plenty of mass-murdering scum-bags who (generally coincidentally) happened to be atheists, but they are somewhat outnumbered by those who claimed to be actually doing God's work whilst up to their elbows in other people's blood.

However, before you dismiss me as yet another tiresome dyed-in-the-wool atheist with a chip on his shoulder, I'd like to get in my apology first. Just like every religious person, I have a faith (of sorts). This is not atheism - which is merely a lack of faith in the supernatural - but a belief that the universe is amenable to modelling (which seems borne out by the evidence), and more importantly, that modelling the universe objectively, rationally and empirically is a worthwhile and satisfying activity, and that evidence trumps intuition. The pleasure I derive from scientific enquiry is just as subjective as the pleasure experienced by a religious devotee. If religion deserves a naturalistic explanation, then so too does science, and so too does my belief that science is somehow a 'better' way of finding things out. If you're not interested in reading yet another derivative polemic, you might try skipping to the second half of this essay, where I try to address this.

The usual suspects

Christianity is the religion that is closest to my heart, having sung as a Church of England choirboy, and attended Archbishop Tenison's School for the Indoctrination of the Impressionable in Croydon for the worst part of my formative years. Many theists assume that atheists reject the idea of god(s) on account of some terrible faith-shattering incident; I do it based on the (complete absence of) empirical evidence, and I expect this is the rule rather than the exception amongst the godless masses. It seems rather unfair for theists to disingenuously ask why atheists are as they are, since few theists will formulate the answer to the converse: no baby is ever born praising the Lord(s), so theists must get at least the specifics of their religiosity from somewhere; how many Baptist fundamentalists have considered whether they'd be vehement Wahabis if they'd happened to be born in Riyadh rather than Tennessee? Christianity as a religion is quite fascinating, since of all the 'great' world religions, it is one of the most insanely hotch-potchy of the lot, incorporating Jewish taboos, Hellenic philosophy, Mithraic legend, Zoroastrian dualism and Gnostic mysticism, which were hardly the most internally consistent religions to draw from in the first place. [I apologise in advance for going for the obvious target, but it's the one I have the most experience with].

The evidence presented in favour of Christianity's claim to be The Truth (or at least a useful guide to truth) basically consists of a book, the Bible, composed of two disparate chunks. The elder of these chunks is a mish-mash of fairy stories (many ripped off from the Babylonians; the creationists' favourites, the Garden of Eden and Noah's Flood, being the most notable and regretful plagiarisms), absolutely endless lists of mostly silly taboos, (broken) promises from a god to look after his Chosen People providing they do something unspeakable to their boys, vaguely historical records, and the sometimes coherent ramblings of self-styled prophets. It's also packed full of the very stuff 'real' practitioners of religions abhor, such as incest, murder, rape and war.

It was touch and go as to whether the Old Testament would even remain in the official Christian canon until the quashing of the heresy of Marcion in the second century CE. In fact the Jewish version of the Old Testament wasn't even canonised until the Council of Jamnia in 90 CE, somewhat as a way of ring-fencing rabbinical Judaism from the mush of other sects present in the Middle East at that time.

The second coming over Bayswater
El, the loftier of the gods of the Old Testament, was originally just the king of the Caananite gods, husband of Asherah, and father of all the gods except Ba'al (wherefrom we get Be'elzebub). Yahweh, the fickle Old Testament god, he of the burning and smiting, eventually united with El to form the Jewish state god, not unlike the Egyptian henotheism of Amun and Ra.

The first five books of the Bible (the Torah) exhibit a profligate history of revisions and editing: it is clear from literary analysis that the Torah was not penned by two guys called Moses and Joshua: it had at least five authors/editors, and incorporates two quite different religious traditions, one lot worshipping a booming sky-god (in fact, probably one of several gods) called El, the other lot worshipping a fickle, anthropomorphic god called Yahweh. In many places, you can find more than one version of the same story: there are two irreconcilable creation stores, one (Genesis 1) in the Elohist (strictly, the Priestly) tradition, and the other (Genesis 2) in the Yahwist tradition; likewise for the flood story. So much for the biblical inerrancy claimed by the more thoughtless fundamentalists.

Whilst presenting compelling evidence for the amalgamation of two proto-Jewish cultures, the shoehorning of the two scriptures into each other left the whole a rather raddled mess, which later editors, who tried to hack off the protruding inconsistencies, actually managed to worsen, by introducing yet more theological baggage centered on the rising importance of the Temple cult in Jerusalem. All in all, not great evidence for The One True God, but historically fascinating evidence of political machination and the amalgamation of divergent scriptures under the kings Hezekiah and Josiah. However, as a historical record of events, the Torah is generally pretty unhelpful: the most damning example being the complete absence of the Hebrews from the Egyptian record at the alleged time of the Exodus. The idea that Moses and Aaron could've made the reign of Ramesses II or any other Son of Ra such a living hell and gotten away without a single mention in any papyri from that era is one of those Extraordinary Claims that requires Extraordinary Evidence to be taken seriously. And what sort of god 'hardens the heart' of Pharaoh anyway? One that clearly moves in some very mysterious ways indeed.

The second half (actually, the last third) of the Bible is composed of four-and-a-half biographies (the Gospels/Acts), a wad of postcards from a guy called Saul, and a book of gibberish called Revelation. The last of these is just a rehash of Jewish apocalypses like the book of Daniel, although with its lakes of hell fire, and as a future historical document, it carries about as much weight as the eschatological daubings of Terrence McKenna. In any case, it barely made it into the Christian canon, being widely regarded as heretical, along with fifty or so other books, such as the Gospels of Philip, Thomas, Judas, Mark (the Secret version) and Mary Magdelene, which make very interesting reading.

What actually constituted Christian canon and heresy was largely decided at seven ecumenical councils from 325 to 787 CE. The first of these, the infamous Council of Nicea, was instigated by the Augustus Constantine, Emperor of Rome, who, having decided to become a Christian, got rather confused as to what exactly he was signing up for. There were dozens of Christ-based religions about at the time, and it was still not entirely clear what Christianity was, as compared to Judaism and Gnosticism, the latter being an outgrowth of early Christianity that denied the divinity of Jesus and considered the material word to be evil. Christians spent the first millennium after the death of their Lord murdering one another as heretics, and, when they had time-out from the schismatic blood-letting, nailing down the text of the New Testament in such a way as to justify the raising to divinity of a (largely fabricated) Galilean carpenter and his mother.

The upshot is that the contents and interpretation of the New Testament are largely the results of the political manoeuvrings of bishops, rather than an inspired collation of everything known about the ethereal Christ, and fleshly Yeshua ben Yosef. Of that which was officially approved by the Councils, the letters of Paul (at least, the ones that can actually be attributed to him), contain barely anything about Christ as a physical creature of flesh and blood. These are the earliest literature on Yeshua/Christ, being written sometime around 50 CE, and it is startling how little biographical information they contain.

The next oldest part of the canon, the Gospel of Mark (c. 70 CE), in its original form, contains nothing on the virgin birth or resurrection either: it starts with baptism and ends (in a peculiarly abrupt fashion) with a tomb. Only the later gospels (Luke and Matthew) contain this detail, and most of it has been culled from Hellenic mystery cults such as those of Mithras, Osiris and Dionysus: you'd be surprised how many god/human hybrids seem to have been born of human ladies impregnated by divine spirits, been worshipped on the solstices or equinoxes, had sacred meals and baptisms involving bread, water, wine or blood, been killed and resurrected, and gone on to be rulers of the Next World™.

Although some of the parallels claimed between Jesus and Pagan-God-X are not nearly as parallel as some might like (and simultaneously far more parallel than others would like), the more important point is that Christianity is not special: its hero does very much the sort of things that all other demigods of similar style did: you can very much see the sources of 'inspiration' that the authors of the gospels had at their disposal to recast the somewhat unappetising ogre of the Old Testament into a happier and clappier mould suitable for the Greek market.

Mithras killing the divine bull.
The cult of Mithras, a sort of Hellenic reinterpretation of Zoroastrianism, may be one of the more important sources for Christianity, and was its direct competitor in the Roman world. Mithraism was a mystery religion, based around the deeds of the solar deity Mithras, principally the slaying of a divine bull, which represented the end of the Age of Taurus. Initiates into the mysteries of Mithras were baptised in the blood of a bull, and participated in communal meals. The Persian god from which Mithras takes his name was born to the virgin goddess Anahita, and acted as intercessor between man and the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda. Mithras was further amalgamated with the solar deity Sol Invictus, whose main festival was the winter solstice (25th December in the Julian calendar). Another god-man bearing more than a passing resemblance to Jesus is Dionysus: a Hellenic god murdered by the Titans, and then reincarnated by the impregnation of a mortal girl by a divine essence borne by the king of the gods, Zeus. He then descended to the underworld to rescue his mother, and ascended to Olympus. None of these stories is an exact parallel to that of Jesus, but it's quite obvious that Jesus is a pick-n-mix demigod of this sort.

"Don't like the whole bull sacrifice thing, Luke, it's just too expensive these days. And the virgin birth thing might be a bit hokey: we can't seem to work out if Anahita was really a virgin, or if Mithras' mum was actually a rock". "Well then Matthew, just take the date of birth and the astrological mumbo-jumbo then: magi, twelve disciples, and all that. We can get the virgin birth from someone else. Actually, let's make ours a bit different: we could say that God didn't actually have sex with her at all, it all happened without recourse to semen of any kind. That way she really is a virgin, just in case someone starts splitting hairs about whether God's penis was involved or not". "Brilliant idea Luke. While you're about it, can you look into resurrections? I hear Osiris has a job lot going." "Those should do fine. Oh bugger, forgot about the healings, a god-man's gotta do healings". "Erm, how about Asklepias? Might get some nice ideas from him. The baptism thing's a problem though. Still need the bull blood, you see. Any ideas, Mark?". "Erm, maybe water instead? Like that other geezer, John. Tell you what, we could even make him the big J's cousin!". "Excellent idea Mark."

The remaining gospel, that of John, not only disagrees utterly with the three other synoptic gospels, but barely made it into the canon, despite its current popularity with the fundamentalists. The three synoptic gospels themselves are largely consistent with each other (synoptic means 'with the same view'), which most scholars agree was due to Matthew and Luke plagiarising wholesale the Gospel of Mark and another source ('Q'), containing the alleged sayings of said Galilean carpenter, and similar to the extant, but heretical, Gospel of Thomas.

The evidence as presented in the New Testament is at best second-hand, since none of the gospel writers ever met Yeshua ben Yosef, and Paul only met with a grand mal seizure, which is certainly not the same thing. Jesus as he appears in the Gospels is very much a prophet in the Jewish tradition, and certainly did not appear to want to be the universal saviour to the goyim that Paul proclaimed. It is also draws on far many more (largely pagan) sources than the alleged words and deeds of said carpenter, and it is questionable how much of even Mark and Q can be said to be the authentic teachings and actions of Jesus: they are at least secondary sources and therefore have an evidential weight somewhere between a literature review and a historical novel.

And here we run into the largest problem with the evidence. There is almost nothing, beyond the dubious religious texts (canon and heresy), that there was ever a bloke called Jesus trolling round Galilee at the turn of the last-but-one millennium getting in trouble with the authorities and preaching the laudable but derivative 'do unto others as you would be done to'. 'Do unto others as they would like to be done to' is a better maxim anyway. The only reliable contemporary source that mentions Jesus is Flavius Josephus, and the Testamonium Flavianum has been endlessly called into question: at the very least it is embellished, at worst, it is a later pious fraud:

About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared. - Jewish Antiquities, 18.3.3 §63

The bits in bold are a) blasphemy for a Yahweh-fearing Pharisee such as Josephus, and b) very likely not original. It's also telling that Josephus seems far more interested in John the Baptist than in Jesus, indicating that Jesus hadn't made nearly as big an impression at the time as Christians might like to believe.

So there we have it: the evidence for the divinity of Christ, and the basis of Christian religion, are three biographies (Mark, Q and John), none of which are eye-witness accounts, two dozen postcards from someone who appears almost entirely ignorant of the life of a man called Jesus, a pamphlet of phantasmagoria for scaring kids, and (the only unbiased account) a couple of quotes that have in all likelihood been tampered with.

Did Jesus really exist at all? Well, it depends what you mean by 'exist'. There is no doubt that Judea was crawling with messianic prophets around 30 CE. There is no doubt that many of them were called Joshua, sorry, Jesus, and quite a lot of them pissed off the authorities enough for them to get the rabble-rouser killed. However, there is a great deal of doubt that any of these self-styled prophets was the miracle-working incarnation of a god, because the evidence is thinner than a fundamentalist's skin. Once you strip that away, and see the thing in its historical context, it doesn't really matter whether the New Testament was based on a real historical character, or not. It's like asking if The Shire is based on England. Without the hobbits, it hardly matters.

Pascal's bad bet

The evidence, for a skeptic such as myself, that Christianity is the One True Way to the One True God is tenuous to say the least, and creationists who believe the Bible to be the completely inerrant, inspired word of God would do little more than amuse me if it weren't for the fact they appear to be trying to turn the USA into a bellicose Christian theocracy. Furthermore, exactly the same sort of literary critique applies to every other religion with a revealed text or divine oral tradition:

Have ye thought upon al-Lat and al-Uzza And Manat, the third, the other? These are the exalted intermediaries [cranes], whose intercession is to be hoped for.

Those were the infamous Satanic Verses (the original ones, not the eponymous book by the filthy apostate Rushdie). The three ladies mentioned were the patron (polytheistic, idolatrous, female) goddesses of Mecca, who appear to receive temporary approval as intermediaries to (monotheistic, iconoclast, very-definitely-male) Allah. Later it was claimed that these verses were put on Mohammed's tongue by Satan. The problem is that the temporary stay-of-execution given to the three aforementioned goddesses was politically useful to Mohammed in spreading his new religion to pagan Mecca without getting bumped off by the residents, and why it was Satan rather than God that came to Mohammed's aid is something you're not supposed to ask. By the way, the God-given replacement for the Satanic latter part was:

What? Shall you have male progeny and God female? This is indeed an unfair partition.

Which in my eyes (and in the those of at least half the readers of this) is not really an improvement.

The plethora of divergent interpretations of the hundreds of extant (let alone extinct) religions is the principal atheist objection to Pascal's wager, the idea that you should believe in God, because:

The problem with Pascal's wager, i.e. that even pretending to believe is better than not believing, is Who the hell are you supposed to believe in? To paraphrase Homer Simpson: what happens if we believe in the wrong God? Every Sunday we're just pissing him off even more. Since most religions are mutually exclusive, you can't believe in all of them, so the chances of your picking the correct one are quite negligible. I wonder where the big divine sign saying 'I'm Quetzecoatl, you idiot' is buried. Pascal's wager really needs some caveats:

It all suddenly looks less appealing put like that. Pascal's wager is quite ridiculous anyway, and smacks of exactly the sort of hypocritical self-interest that atheists find so repulsive: do you really think you can cheat an omniscient god by pretending to believe in him? Anyway, the game-theoretical aspects of Pascal's wager are not really the point for most atheists. The spectrum of atheist opinion spans from those who see no evidence that there is a god, to those that deny that we can have knowledge of whether there is a god or gods at all (agnosticism). To this clutch of godlessness, we might also add pantheism, the belief that the universe is God, and God the universe, which seems so airy-fairy as to be just meaningless fluff over an atheist core. As to the agnostic position, either gods are in some way detectable (and therefore scientifically demonstrable), or they are not, in which case they will in all likelihood have no influence over the universe, and might as well not exist: God might only answer prayers except under scientifically controlled conditions, and therefore, try as we might, and despite Her existence, we'll never gather any scientific evidence for Her. At best this is terribly modest, at worst capricious and misleading, since science is just a generalised form of common sense, as vested in us by Her divine plan. A sufficiently subtle God could evade scientific endeavours yet be clear as day to the religious, perhaps through revelations directly into the brain of believers that somehow have no other physically measurable effect. Some of the more subtle sorts of theist rather like this experimentally unfalsifiable god. As far as I can see, this is stretching the definition of 'god' so far from what it has historically meant, that 'god' doesn't seem to be a very appropriate term any more. Either a god has at least one attribute by which it could be experimentally disproved (sky-hammer-wielding, virgin-impregnating gods can get their coats now), or the god is defined in such a way as to be devoid of any characteristics that would be amenable to disproof. This is essentially a god of the gaps from which all measurable and falsifiable properties have been removed. The choice between this sort of god and no god at all is, by definition, entirely arbitrary and subjective, since its existence cannot be investigated. A god that is purely a matter of taste doesn't seem like much of a god to me. Maybe it does to you, and if so, good luck with it: what on earth this logical construction is supposed to do is beyond me though. If you make sure that it cannot be experimentally investigated, then the purpose it intends for its creation is utterly unknowable. If you want to be really clever, you could say your god both has properties, and simultaneously lacks them: it has no experimentally investigable effect on the universe, but somehow imbues life with meaning. This creates an illogical monstrosity, whose properties (should the word even apply) are not subject to reason, and certainly not to theistic pontification. You almost start to pine after the unsubtle straw-gods of yesteryear: the subtle, property-less post-gods of today just don't cut the mustard. Perhaps this is my real beef with religion: religion is based on faith, and if that's good enough for you, then fine. I find this intellectually unsatisfying, but who am I to judge? You probably find my vision of a beautiful but meaningless universe just as subjective and bizarre. However, the moment you try to reason about your faith, the properties of your god, or the nature of the universe, then it's foolish to get precious when application of the aforesaid reason eats into your magisterium.

It seems a pity that the Abrahamic God only gives us the one chance at life: it's somewhat unfair to condemn us unbelivers to hell-fire for a first offence, when I'd be quite happy to learn from my mistakes. I'd also argue that the fault lies squarely in His court anyway: He just doesn't seem to do a very good job of letting His will be known: the Bible is hugely inconsistent and a great deal of it is a matter of interpretation and emphasis (not to mention exactly which bits you consider inspired), and the Torah and (even worse on this front) the Qu'raan were written in languages that were incapable of distinguishing (the moral equivalent of):

"Love everybody today"

from

"Leave everybody to die"

as the original Hebrew script lacked short vowels, and the original Arabic script not only lacked short vowels, but the pointing that distinguishes z from r, j from h and ch, and several others besides. Could God not have provided some vowel signs to go with His divine revelations? This would appear to be one of those examples of God moving in mysterious ways, so beloved of religious apologists. Many religions claim God to be omnipotent and benevolent to His believers. The evidence of crusades, holocausts, inquisitions and alleged lion-baiting would suggest that at least one of the assumptions is wrong. God does indeed 'move in mysterious ways', which is another way of saying He defies logical analysis, and is therefore His will and motives are about as easy to determine as is it to nail jelly to the ceiling. Perhaps that's why He's allowed such opaque and contradictory books to summarise it. In any case, it'd be nice if God were a little more proactive in His creation, and a little clearer in his objectives. If any gods happen to be browsing this site, feel free to drop me an email (or thunderbolt if you'd prefer). If you could include a few answers to the questions below, that's be nice too:

Necropolis
A necropolis, just the right sort of size to house all the gods who have disappeared off the face of the Earth without apparent ill effects. Apparently those thousands of blood sacrifices to Huitzilopochtli weren't actually required to bring the Sun up after all.

Viruses of the mind?

The majority of human beings claim to follow one religion or another. A phenomenon this large is worthy of some sort of explanation, and dismissing them as 'viruses of the mind' seems far too simplistic to me. Religions offer a number of things to their adherents. These can broadly be divided into:

  1. Some sort of description of history and the nature of the world, probably including a creation story.
  2. Some sort of description of human nature and moral code to curb it.

This is pretty simplistic, but will serve our purposes here. The claims of religion to speak with any sort of authority on the former point have been roundly - and hopefully permanently - diminished to the point of near irrelevance. Even the Catholic church pays lip-service to Galileo and Darwin now. What of the second 'magisterium'? What authority does religion have to speak about questions of morality, free-will and human nature? Science always beats religion hands-down on the 'how', but should religion be trusted to explain the 'why'?

The rest of this rant is a long way of saying "not really", but with a lot of caveats. The caveats are the most interesting bit.

Human beings are large-brained, partly-bald, sexually-dimorphic, bipedal apes, living in (increasingly) large social groups. They are somewhere between chimps and gorillas in their sexual behaviour, make extensive use of tools, and are K-selected with high investment in their young. They also have an ability that is quite unusual in the biological world: they efficiently and intuitively copy the (aims of) actions of other human beings, and the inventory of copyable actions and their artefacts is termed 'culture'. The primary medium by which culture is transmitted is language, and most human beings refer the actions of their bodies to a 'self' which they generally consider as somehow apart from the rest of their meat.

Humans beings tend to consider themselves 'special', but the adjective 'special' is something any self-conscious organism is likely to apply to itself and its attributes. What aspects of the description above is actually worthy of the word? Certainly not our bipedalism: this has likely evolutionary advantages, such as the freeing of our hand to use tools, a trait seen to a lesser degree in a number of other species. Our sexual habits are pretty much exactly what you'd expect from the weight of the male of our species's testicles: we produce average amounts of semen because we are somewhat sexually opportunistic, unlike our relative the gorilla, where harems and tiny testicles are the rule, or chimps, where huge testicles are required to keep up with all the polygamy and sperm competition. Even language has some fairly obvious evolutionary advantages to an ape living in a large social group (or to an insect, q.v. bees). In each of these cases, the best way to frame the question about a 'special' attribute of human beings is to ask a Darwinian question of it: is this feature of human nature a product of natural selection? The answer is almost invariably "yes", and an explanation of this aspect of human nature will be a variation on a theme of the reason that carnivorous plants are limited to bogs, or that fish shoal, or that cold viruses make you sneeze.

The essential point is that human beings are one of several million extant products of billions of years of evolution: they are part of the natural order, and human nature is partly, if not largely, what you'd expect of an ape that made its living on the savannah 10 000 years ago. Whatever religions would like to do in the way of curbing our bestial side, science has provided us with the real 'creation' story and the real history of our species. If you want to genuinely understand (or influence) human nature, then a knowledge of what that nature really is, is vital. A discussion of morality, culture, free-will or consciousness will be far less illuminating without knowing that these attributes of human beings have an evolutionary history: they have precursors in the rest of the tree of life, they have not remained fixed throughout time, and they are very unlikely to continue unchanged.

Culture is one of the items on the list of human attributes that is genuinely special, in the sense of something not seen to any great extent in other species, and seemingly tied into the self-consciousness that is the root of our feeling of specialness. Culture is a collection of learnt behaviours and their artefacts, which vary widely between different groups of humans. For any such human attribute, we need to ask the Darwinian question: did this evolve by natural selection, and if so, how did it benefit the reproduction of its bearers? Learning is a widespread phenomenon in the natural world, and its usefulness is quite obvious: adaptive behaviours can be improved, and maladaptive behaviours can be expunged with less danger of their constant repetition proving lethal. However, much of cultural indoctrination differs from simple learning in that humans don't just acquire culture by themselves sticking a pole into a nest and noticing that this is a good way of harvesting ants. Humans learn a great deal of what they know by imitation of their parents, or by the imitation or instruction of other human beings, or (one step further removed) by instructions from books and other media. Imitation of adults can also be highly adaptive, because you can learn from dead children's mistakes. For a child to imitate living adults humans is generally a good trick, because those humans have survived until they are of breeding-age, and therefore those things that these adults have learnt (or themselves imitated) are (a) unlikely to be lethal and (b) may well benefit the survival and propagation of their genes. However, the interesting thing to note here is that imitation is a form of copying: something gets replicated from the brain of one human being to the brain of another. This is important because things that are replicated are candidates for natural selection. It is not a gene that is replicated from imitated to imitator, but some chunk of culture. For want of a catchy name to illustrate a point about the un-specialness of genes as subjects of natural selection (rather than to launch an ungodly theory of culture, as is often assumed), Richard Dawkins dubbed these chunks of culture 'memes' in The Selfish Gene. Churches, clothes, and computer files can be considered the products of memes, in the same way that bodies are the products of genes. When you confine a population of replicators (be they genes or memes), they compete for resources, and some replicators will replicate more efficiently than others. Memes (or ideas, or whatever you like to call them) get themselves propagated by being catchy, by giving rise to genetically-useful products like lightbulbs and spades, or by manipulating the levers in our minds that natural selection has furnished us with: the pleasure we take from sex, food, power and other things whose acquisition is likely to improve our genes' chances of being passed on. The interests of genes and memes are unlikely to be always aligned: celibacy amongst Catholic priests may (or may not!) be a successful idea, but it in no way directly favours the genes of priests. Our genetic and cultural heritage may 'disagree' over what the body in which they sit should be doing, in much the same way as the genes of a parasite and its host 'disagree' over whether the host should be making spawning bastards or coughing up parasite-ridden phlegm.

Bacteriophages
Real viruses. Bacteriophage are viruses of bacteria, so next time you're complaining about your sore throat, remember even the bacteria that made you lose your voice have their own problems.

Religions are large collections of ideas, and are increasingly dismissed as 'viruses of the mind' by enthusiastic meme-converts. However, this terminology is not biologically apt, as for the most part religions have been transmitted vertically, that is from parent to offspring. Although transmitted culturally, such behaviours might as well be passed on genetically: they will have almost exactly the same aims 'in mind', because they share the same route into the next generation of believers. So religions have been more closely equivalent to gametes than to viruses for much of their history. Those practicing religions that avoided eggs, may have also enjoyed a survival advantage over their Salmonella-stuffing competitors. If something is primarily transmitted from parent to offspring (whether biologically or culturally), and if it is highly maladaptive, it will not have great evolutionary success. Hence, when people live in small groups, and do not interact much with other groups of humans, religion will almost certainly be (genetically) adaptive. We may therefore have been genetically selected for specifically religious behaviour. However, killing competitors, keeping harems, infanticide and so on are all genetically influenced in other animals, and are sometimes practiced by humans too. It may well be that all three of these things are good for human genes in some situations, and therefore good tricks for vertically transmitted religions to pick up on too. Furthermore, if a religion has a number of objectively true tenets, then the religion will benefit its followers by stopping them dropping dead of e.g. salmonellosis. However, if the religion also demands that you follow all of its tenets, then having been shown objectively that half of the tenets really are true, through bouts of diarrhoea or similar, you may not be so keen on breaking the untestable ones that tell you that you must not touch a light-switch on a Saturday. The stupid ideas get promoted with the useful ones, and if the religion demands an all or nothing attitude to its 'truths', there is nothing to encourage you to break the rules. The idea that you should obey all the tenets of a religion prospers because it encourages its own survival, but almost any other meme can ride on its back too. A religion may not be a virus of the mind, but hitching a ride on the genetic bandwagon unlikely to give you the moral high-ground.

In the last few millennia, religions have taken up the viral way of life too. Horizontal transmission frees them from the dictates of genes, and the more evangelical religions, such as Christianity and Islam, have largely supplanted many of the more vertically transmitted religions like Zoroastrianism and Judaism, where the religion has traditionally been transmitted from parent to offspring. These religions have come to prosper in large societies, so the meme-gene coevolution will be quite different. In a large society, ideas that are highly genetically maladaptive (suicide, celibacy, etc.) can be readily transmitted from brain to brain, so there is every reason to expect such religions not to have the survival of their adherents at the top of their list of priorities. Conversely, communication of these religious ideas from brain to brain will increasingly come to rely on the structure of the society (ISPs, advertising agencies, transatlantic flights, etc.) in which they hope to prosper. Although there is less conflict from genes, there will probably be more conflict from other cultural traditions ('memeplexes'), particularly those, such as politics and science, which propagate from brain to brain by appealing to different (although frequently no less genetically maladaptive) levers.

Those who dismiss religions as 'viruses of the mind' (without an appreciation that religion needs a fuller explanation than this soundbite) very rarely seem to take an objective look at science. Science may ultimately produce a truer truth than religion, but by science's own objective standards, this cannot be held as 'better': science may be better in the sense of more durable, higher-fidelity, or more fecund, but these sorts of better are not morally better. Fitter would be a more appropriate and ironic term. Better in the moralistic sense is as meaningless applied to science as it is to religion.

Fibre optics
Science's favourite tricks to get you to pass it on: medicine and communications. Keep your hosts alive, and keep them talking, the perfect recipe for cultural success.

Science survives because it is much more difficult to refute scientifically demonstrated ideas, and because it is not the end of the world if they are refuted and replaced with something else. Indeed this is the whole point of science: unlike dogma, science evolves very rapidly to cope with changing circumstances. Scientific medicine is a clear example of meme-gene coevolution: when medicine saves a life or aids breeding through IVF, the genes that helped make a mind receptive to medicine are propagated along with the idea that medicine is something worth investing in. The superstitious or religious, whose unreceptive brain makes them avoid blood-transfusions are more likely to end up in the ground. Science plays all the same tricks as religion, and it presses all the same buttons too: feed (some of) the world, have sex without disease, avoid painful illness.

However, the real success of science has been due to the fact that its technological products facilitate the replication and proliferation of ideas, including (obviously) the concepts of science. Science and engineering have given us the internet, printing press, flight, DVD and telephone. Every time you use one of these, you spread your cultural influence on the world, and you implicitly support the proliferation of science, because all these things rely on the methodological and technological framework that scientific ideas have provided for them. Science may benefit our survival through medicine and so on, and it may reveal some of the workings of the universe, but as with religions, science exists only for its own sake. The only thing it really has that religion doesn't is a consistent way of describing the universe that eventually leads to an explanation for its own existence. There is no way one can objectively say that science is 'better' than religion; it can 'only' explain how things are as they are. Science is just a very fit memeplex for explaining the universe, and its own existence. Both science and religion use whatever is in their power to get themselves replicated (like me, ranting away when I 'should' be having babies). One is objectively more accurate at describing reality than the other, but the idea that objectivity is 'better' is merely a recently successful idea.

Morality

Describing religions as viruses of the mind is overly simplistic, but religion has evolved in a genetic and cultural milieu in the same manner as science and politics, so it is certainly worth asking cui bono from religious guidance on issues of morality. Religions have always got the 'how we got here' question entirely wrong, so is there any reason to listen to them when they explain 'why we should be aiming for there' whilst pointing at their subsiding moral high-ground?

Bullet crucifix
Does morality stem from divine inspiration, or is it really just the consensus of the people with the oratorical skills, big sticks or bullets?

Our sense of morality comes from the same place as much of our nature: from our evolutionary history. Human beings are social apes, and social apes practice seemingly altruistic behaviour. Altruism means doing things that benefit others to the detriment of yourself. 'Disinterested' altruism does not occur in any organism other than us (and even there, it's a minefield of semantics). In all the other cases that have been studied, such as bees dying in the defense of the hive, or vampire bats sharing blood-meals, seemingly altruistic behaviour has turned out to be pseudo-altruism, based fundamentally on the competition of genes. Two main sorts of pseudo-altruism can be distinguished: kin selection and reciprocal altruism. In the kin selection case of the bees, the fact that the other members of the hive are closely related to the suicidal bee ensures that even if a few copies of the genes for kin-altruism are lost, many more will be saved. Bees are really no more altruistic to each other than the individual cells of your body. Reciprocal altruism ('if you scratch my back, then I'll scratch yours') occurs when a bat who has had a successful night of vampirism will regurgitate blood to an unrelated hungry bat, providing the recipient reciprocates in future. This requires a good memory, because free-loaders will be excluded from the happy band of 'friendly' co-operators. Humans have a built in genetic propensity to kin-selection and reciprocal altruism, because we have very good memories and can keep track of relatives and friends. 'Disinterested' altruism is probably an oxymoron, but human beings will often act altruistically to people they have never met, and without hope of apparent reward: this may well be because because ideas are spread better by altruistic individuals. I'm not going to live any longer, or have any more mates (in either sense of the word), so cui bono from my wasting my time writing this? The ideas on these pages of course…

We are apes living in large social groups, and consequently we have developed emotions such as guilt, which is what genes use to keep us engaging in reciprocal altruism, which is to their reproductive benefit. Morality is not the child of religion: it is an inherent part of human nature. Religion will claim morality as its own, because all memeplexes accrete moral ideas. Judaism says 'thou shalt not steal', science says 'thou shalt not plagiarise', and New Labour says 'thou shalt not appropriate the middle ground'. These are all recastings of an inherent moral sense that taking without giving is bad, and this is ultimately because (the genes of) those who took meat but didn't reciprocate with berries got left out in the wild to die. On the big questions of killing and stealing, human morals are simply codified versions of what you'd expect of a social ape with middle-weight testicles: we don't usually steal if we think we'll get caught out, we don't usually kill kin or friends, and men get to cheat on their wives in direct proportion to their bank-accounts. As we come to live in ever larger groups, these moral precepts tend to get broadened, and to be better policed: this is not because religions tell us to aspire higher, but because the mindless but enlightened self-interest of our genes and memes makes it happen.

Nowhere in this picture can one discern a universal 'Right' or 'Wrong'. Is murder wrong? Many of us would think so, but this has not been the case throughout human history. And what, pray tell, is war? If lions, a species in which infanticide is common, had culture, I would lay a bet that murdering children would be morally acceptable. Maybe there would even be anti-infanticide groups that would be reviled by a majority pro-infanticide group, in a bizarre version of the current abortion debate. So am I advocating some sort of anarchic free for all? It wouldn't matter much if I were. If anarchic and bellicose ideas we're more psychologically appealing that peaceful ideas, then (running out of bodies and brains aside) anarchy would spread. However, it hasn't, not because war is bad and peace is good, but because war is generally (and increasingly) destructive of those very people whose genetic predispoistions and ideas make them want to go to war, provide them with the tools to go to war, and justify the desire to go to war.

This thesis may not appeal to you. When you start to look at human culture from the outside, and attempt to describe it, and make predictions about it, you are liable to be labelled a reductionist, or worse - a determinist and denier of free-will. If morality is whatever the competition between our genes and memes have made us, then in what way can we be responsible for our actions?

Razor wire cross
If my betrayal of you to the authorities is necessary to fulfil some barking mad divine plan, does that make me a deicide or a saint? What would Judas do?

I have no problem with reductionism. Modelling the world by breaking it down into simpler bits has been remarkably successful, and natural selection is quite beautiful in its reduction (hardly an appropriate image) of the diversity of the natural world to the mantra of 'variation, heredity, competition'. If we are to understand consciousness, morality and the sense of self, reductionism is the only sensible way to go if you don't want to just wring your hands and invoke magical homunculi. If there's some little man in our heads doing the decision making (and there really isn't), then there has to be a similar little homunculus inside him, and so on through infinite regress. Somewhere along the line, it's got to come down to the (emergent properties of the) jiggling of atoms, quarks, n-branes or whatever the currently fashionable fundamental entity is. Explanation at lower levels does not imply that models at higher levels are invalid: no-one would try to explain the epidemiology of HIV using quantum electrodynamics. However, Cartesian theatres are a terrible model of consciousness, precisely because they fail to reduce the mystery in anything other than physical scale. Any useful description of human culture, morality, consciousness and free-will will necessarily seem denuded, for the very reason that they are explanatory: natural selection is hugely explanatory, precisely because it reduces all the variety of living things down to something you could explain to a five year old. However, it shouldn't lessen the amazingness of the living world, any more than an understanding of what a parabola is should lessen your enthusiasm for baseball or cricket (should you have any to begin with). Human beings evolved in a middle-sized world, where most things move a lot slower than light, where there appear to be causes of effects, and where the majority of organisms they meet (particularly the bald bipedal ones) appear to have intentions, and to choose their future from a subset of possible actions. However, all these intuitions natural selection has furnished us with are merely models that have proven useful in propagating the genes that construct the data-processing equipment that generates these models. Our brains are evolved organs, and its intuitions are often flawed when they move outside the realm of our evolutionary experience. General relativity, quantum mechanics, and natural selection stand as particular totems for how flawed our in-built models of the world are.

If - despite all the moral sense instilled in you by being a ape living in a large community - you kill me, then you are guilty of murder. But it was your nature (genes?) and nurture (memes?), in combination with the situation you were in that made you do it. If the universe is deterministic, then your killing me was entirely predetermined by this combination of circumstances and predispositions. You have no free-will, and therefore cannot be held responsible for my murder. Quantum mechanics shows that the universe is not in fact deterministic, but this seeming get-out clause brings no comfort, since invoking mysterious nondeterministic pixie dust to interfere with the collapse of wavefunctions and calling that free-will leaves all the mystery in and has no explanatory power whatsoever. Morality has a natural, reductionist explanation, but does that mean reducing free-will to an illusion too?

Yes and no. Free-will has always been an illusion, in just the same way that the solidity of objects (which are mostly composed of nothingness) has always been an illusion. However, both solidity and free-will have been - and still are - useful models of how things work: those ancestral human beings whose models of the world included beliefs in the solidity of objects and the free-will of their neighbours obviously prospered. You are not responsible for killing, but I am no more responsible for putting you in prison, or the electric chair, or turning the other cheek. Looking at human culture from the outside, the concept of responsibility is just one of several that proliferate by propping up the structure (society) in which concepts like responsibility and free-will replicate. As long as human beings are here, ideas will prosper according to their psychological appeal, and their ability to spread to more people than they kill. For an idea to spread to many minds, it must have as large an audience as possible, and hence we now live in communities that are huge, massively interconnected and multiply inter-reliant. Transmission of culture relies on vast interacting machines: humans, printing presses, TVs, ISPs, and so on. Very bellicose ideas may well fail to prosper under such conditions because they tend to destroy the brains and bodies that underpin the society they infect. Even if we realise that moral responsibility for one's actions is technically meaningless, that does not mean that we will act irresponsibly, because the idea of acting responsibly [under most circumstances] will have higher longevity than the idea of being a complete bastard. If I explain that walls are actually mostly made of empty space, it's still pretty unlikely that the world will come to an end as huge numbers of people kill themselves by running headlong into them. We are stuck with responsibility and guilt whether we like it or not, because moral codes can be more fecund in a sort of large community that they themselves foster.

42

If you have waded this far, you may still be thinking, 'all this explanation of how we came to have our morals and our illusion of free-will is very well, but science can only tell you how we came to be, but it can't tell you why we are here'. Ultimately, 'why' questions have no real meaning, even when applied to living things, because they ask for purpose where there is none. 'Why?' implies a purposeful agent that causes things to happen, a god, or little homunculus in our brains. The 'reason' animals and plants are here boils down to the purposeless jiggling of molecules, particularly replicators. Self replicating molecules do not exist for a purpose, they merely exist, and come to be prevalent if they are good at replicating, for completely obvious reasons. We can explain how animals and plants evolve, but the 'why' question boils down to the 'how' question if there is no purposeful agent. 'Why are cactuses full of water?' and 'How have cactuses come to be full of water?' have the same answer: in the past, cactuses that had less efficient ways of retaining water died of desiccation. They therefore gave rise to fewer offspring. Consequently, we now see cactuses that are full of water. This explanation can be made to look as if the environment were a purposeful agent: inefficient cactuses died because the environment dried them up. We can pretend that the environment is a purposeful agent, but we know that this is not really true.

In the same way, if we seek to explain human culture, we need to break it down and formulate testable hypotheses; if we are conscious agents, this is worthy of explanation that doesn't invoke supernatural powers. By necessity, this will explain away the specialness, the mystery, and the reasons. Human beings model other human beings on a one-to-one basis as largely rational conscious agents with free-will, because this has been an evolutionary sucessful strategy. If a model of culture as a whole tends to treat the components (humans) as expendible, mindless, deterministic automatons, that doesn't mean that the model we have been furnished with by natural selection was completely wrong, or that this new model will be useful in 'deciding' what to have for lunch. There is no real purpose for our existence and our culture, beyond the simple fact that replicators prevail if they are good at replicating. The 'why' question again boils down to a 'how' question. 'Why did I have a Mars bar for lunch' has the same answer as 'How was it that I came to have a Mars bar for lunch?'. The answer is that people are apes, and their genes have been selected for a predilection for sugary foods, because proto-humans that ate more sugars tended to leave more offspring. Our culture is full of advertising, which helps to propagate the idea that eating Mars bars is wise, and I live in a place where such confectionary is freely available. The combination of my genes, culture, and my current situation led me to have a Mars bar for lunch. There is no reason for my eating a Mars bar beyond the blunt physical causes, and attributing real purpose to the jiggling of molecules is unnecessary. Humans, plants, bacteria and culture may look very purposeful, but their only 'purpose' is to spread their replicators, and this can be reduced to a purposeless story about how the replicators in question came to be dominant. Replicators are only molecules (or clumps of brain tissue made from molecules) and a molecule has no purpose. It just is. We are lumps of molecules, and lumps of molecules have no purpose. We just are.

Science seeks to explain the workings of the universe and its denizens, by rational analysis of empirical evidence. Religion seeks to explain the same by an appeal to faith in supernatural forces or inspired human beings. Without wishing to fall into tiresome post-modern navel-gazing, calling either of these approaches 'better' is making an aesthetic choice: the objectivity of science is not in question, but a preference for empiricism over baseless faith is subjective. Science would probably explain this choice as being ultimately due to the mindless jiggling of something or other, and might well deny the usefulness of a concept of 'choice' under some circumstances. Religion would probably explain the choice as being down to free-will, and might well ask for faith that despite this, it is still part of a divine plan. I find the former more satisfying, despite its apparent bleakness; and I am sure the religious find similar solace in their - to me - wishful-thinking. However, I recognise that if you live by the sword, so too must you die: I am host to a belief that the universe is amenable to modelling. This choice to believe in the value of modelling - and your perhaps opposite choice - is therefore amenable to modelling, is not really a 'choice' in some rather interesting ways, and I cannot really consider it to morally better or worse than your 'choice'. However, for the very same reasons, I still find religion a deeply unsatisfactory exercise, object to many of its intrusions into my life, and whether it's really 'my' choice or not, it's pretty likely I'll be whinging about it for some time to come.