Recruitment letter

Funny how old memories come back.  When I was in ninth grade, I was in a class called General Science.  Early in the year, our teacher, Mr. Doyle, passed out a little survey, which was probably designed to get an idea of how sophisticated his students' sense of history was.  We were given a list of names and asked to rank their relative importance.  Sprinkled among the more modern names were such ancient names as Moses and King David of the Old Testament.

Now, my family was as Christian as they come, but we were no fundamentalists.  Even my mother, the most devout of all, would never doubt the importance of science and material progress.  She knew, for example, that antibiotics and vaccination had made the world less dangerous for children.  But, as I think I have mentioned before, my idea of the ancient world was formed totally by the Bible.  I reasoned that, if Moses and David were still influential after millennia, they must have been mighty important people.

Others in my science class must have felt the same, because Mr. Doyle was visibly disturbed by our answers to the survey.

Now, in my youth, though I was a believer, I had many questions which I felt I had never received satisfactory answers to, either from my parents or, indeed, from the wise men and women of our church.  If all the world's people believe their religion is the true one, how do we know ours is?  If all the religions of the past have been eventually abandoned, why should ours last forever?  Why did miracles all happen in the past?  I knew none of the answers I'd heard to these questions were convincing, but I was, understandably, still under the spell of my upbringing.

I bring these matters up because I now realize that religious education is miseducation.  My parents thought they were doing their best for me, but instead they had settled layer upon layer of misinformation and mythology on me that has taken most of a lifetime to dig my way out of.

For a long time, Biblical scholars have been trying to understand the origins of the Bible, separating and identifying its various authors, and comparing it to other texts written at the same time.  Archaeologists have never ceased digging up the Middle East for evidence.  A book from 2001, by the archaeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, titled The Bible Unearthed, has digested recent archaeological evidence and put the Old Testament in a new light.

According to the authors, the stories of the Old Testament do not match the archaeological record.  Great events recounted in various locales in Israel, Egypt, and the surrounding area, seem to be out of sync with the current evidence; that is, great battles and conflagrations are reported to have happened in places where, according to archaeological digs, no one was living at the time.  The stories are full of anachronisms, and it makes sense to the authors that most of the Old Testament was assembled in the Seventh Century BCE, because the stories are located in places that were familiar and populated at that time.

The bottom line, according to The Bible Unearthed, is that the Old Testament was written to further the religious and political aims of King Josiah, a fundamentalist ruler of Israel.  Josiah's aim in presenting "history" in the way he did was to show that, whenever a king followed only Yahweh and disallowed the worship of other gods, Israel prospered, but kings who were more liberal and allowed competing religions to exist brought disaster.  Archaeology and other written sources say otherwise.  Even David and Solomon seem to have been relative nobodies.

So now, from all appearances, the text that we always assumed to have been written over a long period, was mostly done during the reign of Josiah, and is not even good history.

I've let this blog entry get away from me a little.  I originally titled it Recruitment letter because I wanted to reach out to young people--or people of any age, really--who sense that there is something wrong with what they are being taught.  If, instead of granting supreme authority to a single (highly suspect) book, you choose to check out what else has been written down through the ages, you will give yourself a future full of exciting, surprising discovery.

Less romantic views of nature

I recently read a couple of books back-to-back that happened to emphasize something about evolution that I had never thought of:  In order for natural selection to work, biology must be tremendously wasteful.

The first book was Alex Rosenberg's The Atheist's Guide to Reality, which points out that entropy dictates that, "Every explanation of adaptation must... harness a wasteful process to create order."

Forget design; evolution is a mess.  This is a fact about natural selection insufficiently realized and not widely enough publicized in biology.

Examples are all around us.  A female leopard frog will lay up to 6,000 eggs at a time--each carrying half of all the order required for an almost perfect duplicate offspring.  Yet out of that 6,000, the frog will produce an average of only two surviving offspring.  Some fish are even more inefficient, laying millions of eggs at one time just to make two more fish.

...

It's hard to think of a better way to waste energy than to produce lots of energetically expensive copies of something and then destroy all of them except for the minimum number of copies that you need to do it all over again.

The second book would seem to be  very different in kind from The Atheist's Guide.  Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek overflows with spirituality and biblical references, but its tenth chapter, "Fecundity," goes even farther in its descriptions of nature's wastefulness.

I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls.  I suppose it is the teeming evidence  that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives....

On top of the wastefulness, Dillard describes the various horrors of the natural world, including parasitism,  and the many instances of species eating their own kind.

Sometimes, when a female [lacewing] lays her fertile eggs on a green leaf atop a slender stalked thread, she is hungry.  She pauses in her laying, turns around, and eats her eggs one by one, then lays some more, and eats them, too.

Flatworms eat their own discarded tails, which, left alone, would grow new heads and be viable.  And it's not just the "simple" animals that do these things.

Even such sophisticated mammals as the great predator cats occasionally eat their cubs.  A mother cat will be observed licking the area around the umbilical cord of the helpless newborn.  She licks, she licks, she licks until something snaps in her brain, and she begins eating, starting there, at the vulnerable belly.

We humans tend, still, to consider ourselves as separate from nature, whether we are praising our own intellect or even godliness or, conversely, condemning our irrational ways or the violence in which we consider ourselves unique, at least in degree.  Perhaps a closer knowledge of the ways of nature will make it plain that humans are less far removed from the rest of it than we think.  The close observation of nature, without romanticizing, goes a long way towards explaining human behavior.  Look at what we come from.