Heretic's Devotional for May 27th

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!  So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature[d] a slave to the law of sin.

Paul the Apostle (Romans 7:14-25)

I am tired...but I'm pretty sure I should not take a nap right now.  My wife is 9.2 months pregnant and miserable, far less content with the situation than our future son apparently is.  My 2-year-old and 3-year-old girls are casually wrecking the living room, postponing their nap.  The kitchen still hasn't been cleaned up since after lunch.  My tools are strewn about the back porch where I'm 80% done with a 4-weekend-long project to remove a window and single door and put in a large 4-panel patio door (my most ambitious project to date).  In the larger scheme of things, I'm about two years into a one-year project to re-vamp our new house, with about 3 (or 6?) months to go.

Things are overdue.  Things need to be done.  But conflicted as I am, I still manage to ignore all of that, and catch a 30-minute catnap before guilt motivates me to get up, marshall my girls to their room for naptime, clean up the kitchen, tend to my bed-ridden wife, and proceed to the back porch to delicately balance productivity and noise levels until naps are over.  Well, really that was Plan B.  I ended up opting for Plan C which was to lock the girls in their room and nap for another hour.

This battle has unfolded 1000 times in 1000 ways in my brain.  My awful, selfish, lower-order needs and impulses do battle with my higher-order plans and ideals.  I want to spend every extra minute fixing the house, so it can be complete and we can enjoy it instead of living in a construction zone...but I still have found plenty of time for Netflix in the last two years.  I want to be attentive to my wife who has loads of physical and emotional needs right now, but sometimes I just get frustrated and give her righteous vitriol instead of loving care.  I want to be a productive employee at work, but I also want to write this blog that has been fermenting in my brain for a week.  Sometimes the Ideal Me wins.  Sometimes Base Me wins.

Paul the Apostle talks about this--I want to do some (awesome) thing, and end up doing some other (disgusting) thing, even though I don't want to.  Why is that?  On it's face, it makes no sense.  Paul, and Christian theology in general, explains that we have this mystical evil living inside of us, constantly thwarting our higher ideals.  If left unchecked, we will quickly become the most vile versions of ourselves, no better than animals.  So, conterintuitively, we must struggle mightily to do the awesome things that we already want to do.  Paul (and Christianity) says we can never win that struggle on our own, that we must constantly be in communion with God, meditating on those higher ideals.  You can't do this on your own, because only God has (or "is", if you want to get all theological) this mystical good that is the antidote to the mystical evil.  I'll note here that it's a little annoying that Paul attributes all his bad desires to some dissociated evil that happens to be residing in him, and declares that the good desires are the true self.  

Christianity in its best form centers around studying (alone), discussing (with others), and meditating (with God) to decide what the best awesome things to do are, and how to most effectively do them instead of the disgusting things we already don't want to do.  If you take away evangelism, this is the bulk of what Christianity is.  Most other religions center around this struggle.

CS Lewis (my archetypal Christian Apologist) argued (in some non-Narnia book) that this struggle, both the evil force that we are drawn to, and the especially the instinct to resist it, are evidence of a Good God that wants to save us from the mystical evil that would otherwise consume us.  I cannot deny that the struggle exists, but once I abandoned my faith, I began my search for a better understanding that did not involve anything supernatural (beyond logical understanding) or mystical (beyond logical understanding by design).

Well, fundies, your worst fears are about to come true, because I have found in Evolution the answers I left Christianity in search of.  The consolation, if it is any, is that I'm not going to end up advocating a hedonist free-for-all house party now that God/Dad is not here to spank us with lightening when we are bad.  To my own satisfaction, at least, I can both explain the existence of this moral struggle AND argue in favor of practicing a morality that is continually refined by study (alone), community (with others), and introspection (you can still call it meditation, or even prayer), without once invoking a deity or supernatural mechanism.

This will start with a primer on Evolution, since the afforementioned fundies (perhaps you, dear reader) have left us with an educational system bereft of good Evolutionary Science.  Evolution is a ruthless process, not a caring God. The most important thing in Evolution is survival of your genetic code(self), second is propagation of your genetic code (reproduction), and the third is survival of that genetic code (ie your offspring).  If 10 beings exist with only slight differences, the ones best suited for survival and reproduction are the ones that are going to produce the next generation, and pass along those unique qualities that will make that next generation, on average, better at survival and reproduction.  Over thousands of generations, these incremental differences result in beings who are extraordinarily well equipped to both survive and reproduce.  Sometimes in this process things change just because they do (evolutionary drift), but mostly they change in direct response to the need to survive and reproduce (evolutionary pressure).  

Early in evolution, as organisms started developing brains, the most critical functions were the ones that facilitated survival and reproduction.  Think of two prehistoric lizards.  One had a brain that rewarded him with chemical sensations when he ate large amounts of nourishing food, and punished him with hunger pangs when he had not eaten.  The second lizard's brain was neutral towards food.  The first lizard had an intense adrenaline rush when a predator was near, and the second remained relatively calm.  Which lizard survived and produced offspring?  It's easy to see how these primal brain functions--hunger, fear, greed, aggression-- would intensify quickly with each successive generation.  If a monk-lizard showed up with with an urge to feed the starving beggar-lizards that he came across, and to turn the other cheek when he encountered a predator, he would be removed from the gene pool quickly, and the increasingly greedy, selfish, aggressive lizards would take his place.  There is no room in that small brain for altruism, only self survival and reproduction.  That's the reptile brain, the primitive brain, or as it's known in humans, the limbic system, and it's one of the most hardwired parts of our brain.

Later in evolution, as the brain developed outward around that center, it developed other functions which had less to do with survival and reproduction of the individual.  Think of a herd of mammals, lets say buffalo. These animals started living in families and herds, and started to develop functions that benefitted other members of the herd.  This is because--after survival and reproduction are taken care of--ensuring the survival of your offspring and close relatives is just as powerful a force in writing your genetic code into future generations.  The outer brain started developing altruistic functions--not because it's the moral thing to do, but because the herd that took care of its own out-survived the individuals that struck out on their own, and successive generations became better and better at taking care of each other.  These are still secondary and tertiary concerns, however, and the self-survival instincts are still at the center of our brain.  By design, the fight-or-flight instinct will override all other brain functions in a fraction of a second.  A nursing mother will reluctantly abandon her calf to a pack of wolves, illustrating emphatically the way her survival instinct overrides her caretaking instinct (or at least contends with it heavily), and also how the altruism of the wolfpack doesn't extend an inch beyond itself.  These higher order altruistic behaviors that benefit the group can come into direct conflict with the primal behaviors that benefit only the self.  


Once I am in a herd, and my survival is taken care of by others, I don't need to be as greedy, or selfish, or aggressive to survive, or even to reproduce--this creates space for the altruism.  If I am still selfish when there is no need to, then I am shunned by the herd because I am acting unnecessarily in my own self interest at the expense of the herd.  The suppression of the primal, selfish behaviors in favor of the secondary altruistic behaviors must necessarily be motivated by other members of the herd.  The herd with a member that hoards food and leaves him unpunished is not as strong collectively as the ones that drive selfish members out of their midst.  The herds that had the best balance of skills thrived in larger and larger herds, producing more and more offspring that had very sharp perceptions of fairness--balancing self-interest versus group-interest.  This is the beginning of morality, that is, balancing primitive impulses with higher-order altruistic impulses.  Thinking of others before you think of yourself.


Then evolution produced humans, who have a luxuriously large brain, which had cultivated several layers of higher order skills beyond simple altruism.  The fear and aggression and greed of the lizard brain that ensured our survival among other animals already competes with the altruism that engenders loyalty to our own tribe.  But in the context of survival among warring tribes, you need higher order skills as well.  Skilled warriors will ensure their own survival, but diplomacy will ensure the survival of your entire tribe, and charisma will allow you to build an army of followers that can overcome any individual warrior.  I'll crudely group these highest order skills under the heading "self actualization", if only to reference Maslov, and his heirarchy of needs, which is a rough map of evolutionary psychology, and an variegated mix of altruism and self-interest.

There was no room for something as complex as diplomacy or charisma in the lizard brain, but humans had developed a brain capable of these complex skills, and the humans with the best balance of these lower- and higher-order traits were the ones that survived. The rest were removed from the gene pool, sometimes by a pack of wild animals, who maintained evolutionary pressure on the lizard brain, and sometimes by Ghengis Khan, a man replete with self-actualization.  He had lots of higher order skills to accomplish what he did, but it was supported heavily by aggression and greed as well--still potent forces, even this late in the evolutionary process.  I'm not saying what he did was right or wrong...but it removed large swaths of genetic code from the record, of people with less, um, self-actualization.  

The point is that there are now layers of behaviors that have all been written into our own genetic code for a variety of different reasons, at a variety of different times.  Some of these behaviors are still useful and some are less so, and they compete with one another on a daily basis.  And it is ultimately our decision to decide which one wins out in each given moment.

So that brings us to today.  I don't need my lizard brain on a daily basis to survive, but it's still at the core of my brain.  I don't need to be greedy around food to be well-fed, and I even have an instinct not to be greedy if it means I can feed my family or friends well instead.  And yet sometimes I still am, despite not wanting to be.  Know what I mean, Paul?

I can reproduce readily with my wife.  (I'm not bragging; I'm going to make a point.)  And yet I still lust after other women.  It's rooted in my brain because my genetic ancestors that mated with multiple partners passed on much more genetic code than the ones that had lower sex drives or were naturally monogamous.  And why don't I pursue other women?  Because I also have somewhere in my brain an instinct for loyalty and monogamy that is competing with the impulse towards multiple partners, because at some point in evolution, monogamy played a larger role in survival and/or reproduction.  Maybe it was because STD's wiped out all of the polyamorous tribes, leaving only monogamous survivors, or because bonded pairs made better parents and gave their offspring better chances of survival.  In any case, that's why we developed bonding emotions like love that are tied to mating, and developed heart-wrenching sadness when that bond was broken.  At some point the ones who loved the most were the ones that survived...you have them to thank when you get all flittery around your spouse.  That's why we have BOTH an instinct to bond for life, AND an instinct to pursue new and exciting partners.  To say that these emotions are no more than a product of the machinery of evolution makes them sound cold and amoral.  And yet the heartbreak that I will feel, and see in my wife, if I am not loyal to the instinct towards monogamy is just as real as the hunger I will feel if I am not loyal to the instinct to eat.  (Side note: it's just as real as the awesome feeling of having sex with someone for the first time, be it a wife OR a mistress)  One is a lower-order, primal need and the other is higher-order, but they were produced by the same process.  

From an evolutionary perspective, it's wrong not to eat, but it's also wrong to cheat on your wife.  You don't need some lightening-bolt-throwing God in the Sky to chisel a menu in stone, and deliver it to you so that you will know that you need to eat.  You likewise do not need a God to decree "thou shalt not commit adultery," because you already have an impulse to be loyal to your wife.  But the higher-order impulse is going to be competing with some other partially-outdated impulses, so it's not going to be automatic or easy.  This is not some mystical sin nature competing with a mystical good deity working inside you.  This is old evolutionary brain wiring competing with new evolutionary brain wiring.  And it's a struggle in which your own conflicted brain may very well betray you, but it benefits us and our descendants to wage that moral battle--to choose the best path, and pass it along both in our actions and in the wiring of our brains.

Similarly, you have an impulse to eat sweet things, because 10,000 years ago, they had not yet invented cupcakes, and anything sweet (an apple, for example) was an excellent source of readily available nutrition.  That instinct still drives you when you destroy an entire box of thin mints (or drink an entire bottle of wine), but you also know that you will feel miserable when you do that, because your body has also evolved the ability to let you know when you overdo it.  So, that impulse that was once critical to your survival is now something that needs to be reined in now that your environment has changed.

I think the key to understanding why we act the way we do, and why we should act the way we should lies in a better understanding of the evolutionary process that molded us and got us here, and the environments in which that occurred.  We don't need to be true to our instincts towards morality because some deity planted those ideas in us.  We need to be true to it because evolution has brought us to the point where THAT is our truth.  That instinct you have for good is what has caused the human race to survive and thrive, and if we're truly interested in enriching and improving ALL humans, most especially our descendants, we can start by trusting those instincts, coupled with our own reason.  I don't think we will be relegated to Hell for not obeying them, but if given the choice to continue the human race in a positive direction or a negative one, I'm probably going to choose what MOST of my ancestors did, and keep it steered in a positive direction...after my nap. 

I've gotta end this somewhere, but I have so many other ideas to flesh out going forward, so the rest of this is notes for myself, to remove once each becomes its own post.

1) I'm not here to rob the world of poetry, or romance, or whimsy, and replace it with a cold gray scientific understanding of the world.  I think the fractals in a leaf are just as beautiful if they are a product of millions of years of evolution rather than the craftsmanship of a master-artisan Intelligent Designer...maybe even moreso.  There is still aesthetic beauty in a magnolia tree's blossom, a songbird's tune, or the poetry of John Donne, even if it is ultimately based on rigidly deterministic physics (or random quantum machinations) and not sprung from some unseen Being that is mystically perfect.

2) The idea of religions as scientific hypotheses to help us understand the world, and how/why they have been refined over the years.  For example: did our more comprehensive understanding of Science, and the physical world around us drive us towards Monotheism, since we now know that many observable phenomenon are governed by a small number of complementary natural laws?  Was Polytheism a more intuitive theory in a world that was not fully understood, and one that seemed to be governed by multiple competing forces?

Following was trimmed from the post above: Men writing what are now religious texts over the last few thousand years were also trying to understand this same conuterintuitive internal struggle, but where their understanding of the things around them ended, they created a system of beliefs to support what they knew to be true.  They assumed anything they could not explain with their five senses and reasoning must be attributable to an unseen God.  

If a man had an instinct towards loyalty to a spouse, but also an instinct to leave her for another woman, then those two competing desires could not be coming from the same person.  It must be the self versus some unseen God, or two Gods warring inside of your head.  It is easier to create a God as an understanding of that riddle than to search for the explanation in evolutionary psychology, which was not an option then.  The urge towards loyalty to a spouse is wired into our brain from a time in evolution when monogamy somehow contributed to survival of genetic code moreso than polyamory.  Maybe STD's wiped out all of the polyamorous tribes.  Maybe bonded pairs took better care of their offspring, giving them a higher chance of survival...in any case, it left a mark on our brain  The urge to have sex with ANY woman comes from, well, all points in evolution, because those people generally have more offspring.  This evolutionary hypothesis is a more complex explanation of this internal mental struggle, and one that nobody could have come up before Evolution was a concept both studied and understood.

So that was an early application of the scientific method: lets try this theory out as a way of understanding things, and see if it holds up.  Lets start praying to the God of Rain and see if he even exists, and can come get the crops up out of the ground so we don't die.  And since then 10,000 different theories (i.e. religions) have been created to make sense of complicated ideas that couldn't otherwise be understood.

To some extent, those religions have been refined when they do not hold true under testing, or when they've been replaced by better theories.  We no longer have rain dances or ritual sacrifices to try to get rain on our crops...for the most part a scientific understanding of meteorology supplanted that idea.
   
Why then do we still have this concept of an unseen moral God, when we can view "morals" as behavioral impulses that we can rationally explain?  Why not abandon the outdated theory, and revisit it if this current one starts to fail? 

What aspects of God and religion are untestable by their very design--what aspects of religion will not yield to the progress of scientific understanding? If lack of understanding motivated our ancestors to practice religion, what lack of understanding currently exists, and should we practice religion only in that space--why or why not?  

3) Where did Gnosticism (as it appears in Paul the Apostle's writings) come from?  Platonism?  What is the root of these ideas?  Upon abandoning my own spirituality / the supernatural / gnosticism / platonism, I fell directly into nihilism.  Now I've arrived at nominalism...I think.  I really only have a vague idea what all of these mean and want to dig into it more.

4) Christianity at its best does no harm, but if we can achieve the same levels of compassion, community, love, acceptance, warmth, etc....if we can still have the net positives of "Christianity at its Best", and strip away the religion that can be abused or exploited, can injure and harm, either intentionally or unintentionally....why don't we?  I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater...but I do want to get rid of the dirty bathwater, you guys.