God as Cultural Adaption

Jonathan Haidt proposes in his book, The Righteous Mind, that our concepts of divinity and god spring from evolutionary adaptions going back many thousands of years. In his view, religions and religions' gods came about as cultural tools to aid in creating community solidarity, stability, and respect for cultural norms. Religious rituals and beliefs helped create strong community bonds and group commitment to that community, and that gods were instrumental in that formation. These cultural structures allowed for larger, more complex (and more competitively successful) groups of people.

He sees god as a byproduct of evolution and culture. Religion has always generated positive "social capital" for its members. It allows them to trust each other, knowing everyone in the group has the same world view. As political scientist Robert Putnam put it, the social capital that is generated by religious (and other types of) groups “makes us smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern" more justly and with more stability. It is a valuable asset for a community in that it makes it more stable, stronger, and unified. It is an enforcer of law, order, commonly agreed upon standards, and morality, and is a strong cultural binding agent. Modern religion is an expression of our ancient tribal nature. It is, and always has been, adaptive in an evolutionary sense. This does not mean it comes without drawbacks. The cost of religion to the individual is the ceding of some level of personal control to the larger community, and the implicit agreement to live by the community's religious rules.

Scientists have evidence that religion exploits cognitive "switches" in the brain/mind that presumably evolved as survival adaptations. For example, our "agency detection" capabilities have been with us for tens of thousands of years. Our assumption that some intelligent agent is behind otherwise unexplainable events and our ability to imagine complex hypothetical scenarios eventually resulted in the human creation of gods as those causal agents. There also seems to be a "switch" that rewards individuals for their participation in a local/parochial group (or tribe). Membership in a religion (or military unit, bowling league, school clique, fraternity, debate team, professional work group, sports team, rave, mob, social movement, etc) is inherently gratifying, allowing the individual to temporarily transcend the limitations and concerns of the "self" and permit the group norms and goals to take priority. It can be exhilarating to temporarily relinquish personal responsibility and control and let the larger group take over. Churches fill this need perfectly, better than practically any other type of organization. Research shows that organizations (like religions, cults, military and criminal organizations) that require great sacrifices in belief, action, relationships, information flow, property, and individual rights give back to the participants a proportional feeling of belonging and comfort, and create a very stable operating unit. An interesting aside - communes based on religion (whatever the religion) have a much higher survival rate years or decades later than secular or ideologically based communes. People appear to seek out and embrace group membership, especially in groups that require a lot from its members.

In the last 15,000 years (during the Holocene epoch), human cultural AND genetic evolution reached a fever pitch as population grew and civilization took root, that is, as we became cultural creatures living in large groups. Our religious minds and institutions are products of biological and cultural evolution. They became more complex and refined as we gathered into societies, and probably helped those societies succeed rather than dissolve through the still controversial, but increasingly accepted mechanism of evolutionary group selection (as opposed to the more widely known and accepted individual selection). These byproducts, these cognitive/cultural/social adaptions, came under the sway of natural selection. There is not a solid wall between genetic and cultural evolution - instead they should be thought of as two interwoven strands. What we do with those religious minds is just as culturally constructed as everything else we do. Large organized religions with beliefs in afterlife are relatively recent innovations when considered in the long-term anthropological context. They really only emerged after the development of agriculture in larger scale societies. Once humans started living in chiefdoms and small, stable towns, gods got much more complicated and moralistic. This had to happen to prevent these larger groups from disintegrating into smaller feuding tribal factions. This change served everyone's purpose - it benefitted the individuals by making them safer, happier, and more secure. It benefited the leaders by making it easier to exert control, and it benefited the society as a whole because it became more cohesive, unified, and better able to compete with less focused competitors.

The religious mind is much more than an unmodified byproduct of evolutionary changes that happened 50,000 years ago. It has been strongly shaped by our social evolution. Religious beliefs, shared and enforced by a group of like-minded individuals, promote and combine interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible. As David Sloan Wilson put it, they help people “to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own.”

Haidt and Wilson echo Émile Durkheim, an early 20th century sociologist. In his book, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim attempted to identify the social origin and function of religion, as he felt that religion was a source of camaraderie and solidarity. His second purpose was to identify links between certain religions in different cultures, finding a common denominator. He wanted to understand the empirical, social aspect of religion that is common to all religions, which goes beyond the concepts of spirituality and god. He defined religion as:

...a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, i.e., things set apart and forbidden--beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.

In this definition, Durkheim avoids references to the supernatural or to god. He argued that the concept of the supernatural is relatively new, tied to the development of science and the separation of supernatural — that which cannot be rationally explained — from the natural, that which can. According to Durkheim, for early humans, there was no distinction. Everything one encountered in life was what we moderns would call supernatural.

Durkheim studied emotions related to group membership. These emotions bind us to the group or social entity as a whole. They manifest themselves primarily in the relationships of the society with other societies. When we act under the influence of these group-directed emotions, we become a part of a whole, whose actions we follow, and whose influence we are subject to.

The very act of congregating is an exceptionally powerful stimulant. Once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation ... What is moral is everything that is a source of solidarity, everything that forces man to regulate his actions by something other than his own egoism.

He defined and explained a sociological concept he called "Collective Effervescence", where a community or society may at times come together and simultaneously communicate the same thought and participate in the same action (at a sporting event, a religious ceremony, a political demonstration). Such an event then causes collective effervescence, which excites the participating individuals and unifies the group. Humans, as social animals, by their natures are susceptible to collective effervescence. Just as a single frightened steer can cause a stampede in a herd, a emotional contagion can spread through a crowd of people, given the right circumstances. Collective effervescence is the basis for Durkheim's theory of religion as presented in his book, Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim wrote that the universal religious dichotomy of profane vs. sacred results from the lives of these tribe members: most of their life is spent performing menial tasks such as hunting, gathering, and maintaining the camp. These tasks are profane. The rare occasions on which the entire tribe gathers together become sacred, and the high energy level associated with these events gets directed onto physical objects or people which also become sacred.

Our religious, righteous minds made it possible for human beings — but no other animals — to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship. If you think about religion as only being a set of beliefs about supernatural agents, you’re bound to misunderstand and underestimate it. You’ll see those beliefs as foolish delusions, perhaps even as parasites that exploit our brains for their own benefit, or at a minimum a cause of inefficiency, ignorance, and waste. But if you take Durkheim's approach to religion, which focuses on belonging and the power of unified groups, you get a very different picture. You see that religious practices have been binding our ancestors into groups for tens of thousands of years. The cost of that binding involves some blinding as well. Once any person, book, or principle is declared sacred or profane, then devotees can no longer question it or think clearly about it.

Super-science, the Singularity, and Post-humanism

With the amazing advances in science, mathematics, computers, communications, genetics, medicine, biology, cognitive science and many other sciences and technologies, some optimists project that in the future - possibly the near future - humans will be able to transcend their physical limitations by extending life indefinitely, even "uploading" their consciousnesses into some future form of a computer network. I must strongly emphasize that scientists, doctors, and philosophers don't currently even agree on what is meant by the concept of "consciousness", so to jump forward to "uploading" this vaguely understood thing into a computer strikes me as putting the cart way ahead of the horse. Putting that difficulty aside, either of these would grant us a form of "god-like" immortality. The idea behind this is at some point in the future a technological "singularity" will occur, radically changing what it even means to be human. "Trans-humanists" speculate that these technological advances will begin an exponential growth phase, intersecting the lives of some people alive today, enabling them to live with extraordinary powers, and to live forever. The singularity is the moment when this intersection occurs.

The singularity, the conversion of human beings into trans-humans, and finally our arrival at a "post-human" future has become a near religion to those who embrace its predictions - thus the inclusion of the Singularity into this discussion of god. In this utopian age of super-science, medical advances will allow indefinite life extension, enabling some people to live decades longer, if not forever. It will be possible to create artificial life, grow new organs or entire new bodies, cure all disease (including aging), explain and recreate consciousness, understand the origin of the universe, spread our influence throughout the galaxy, and know how the universe will end. In this view, mankind, itself will have the potential to become a race of gods. In fact, the very definition of what it means to be human may be altered. A race of post-humans would emerge - the product of targeted genetic modification, biological enhancements, and integration with man-made technology. This hypothetical future being will be one "whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards." In fact, such beings might appear as gods by some definitions of the word - they would possess immortality, utilize vast amounts of energy, be able to create life, create and manipulate matter, and have access to immense amounts of information. A "post-human god" would no longer be confined to the parameters of human nature. He might grow physically and mentally so powerful as to appear god-like by current human standards.

Not all who expect the singularity to arrive do so with optimism and hope. Some regard it in just the opposite way - as an existential threat to humanity, as armageddon. Instead of a leap forward in what it means to be human, it might instead extinguish humanity by initiating a "hard takeoff" of a strong artificial intelligence in the form of a so-called "paperclip maximizer" (a superintelligent AI so powerful that the outcome for the world overwhelmingly depends on its goals, and little else. A paperclip maximizer efficiently converts the universe into something that is, from a human perspective, completely arbitrary and worthless, i.e., paperclips). This concept illustrates how AIs that haven't been specifically programmed to be benevolent to humans are basically as dangerous as if they were explicitly malicious. So, one of the conceptual problems people are working on is this -- if you accept that a technological singularity is inevitable, can we pre-empt the process in such a way to ensure that the AI is "friendly" and values life, in particular, our lives?

The origin of concept of the Singularity came from many scientists and futurists - John Von Neumann, Alan Turing, Werner Vinge, and Ray Kurzweil, among them. Either directly or indirectly, they each anticipated the coming singularity - the point at which machine intelligence outstrips human intelligence, and/or computer networks become intelligent, and/or humans and machines merge, and/or humans bioengineer themselves to be super intelligent. The versions of this event that involve machine or network intelligence are premised on the assumptions that consciousness and intelligence are not mystical things, and that they can be created and reproduced outside of human brains. Vinge thought, along with Kurtzweil, that within just a few decades machines will achieve super-intelligence, far surpassing that of humans and become self-replicating and self-improving - each machine generation capable of producing even more capable and intelligent machines as did the "Computer Tyrants of Colu" when they created the humanoid super-computer called Brainiac (Superman #167, 1964). See "Creation of Brainiac" Yes, it can happen in comics - but that is not necessarily a prediction for our own future.

Uploading the mind

A concept that is integral to the singularity is the envisioned future ability to "upload the mind" to some sort of supercomputer. The assumption is that once we understand the brain well enough, we will be able to scan the contents of the brain / mind / consciousness and transfer it into a machine where the individual's sense of its continuity will be preserved, and possibly be able to create an artificial body to house this new representation of consciousness. Another variant of this is that we learn how to create an elaborate "Matrix-like" virtual paradise where we sleep in suspended animation while a program generates a virtual reality for us. These predictions are not generally accepted as realistic by people involved in developing the technologies that one assumes would be required for this science fiction future (computer science, medicine, microelectronics, neuroscience, etc). At best it is science fiction. We are very far from understanding the brain and the mind, having just scratched the surface in neuro/cognitive science. However, many people confidently compare the human cognitive apparatus to a very advanced computer and/or software system. Although the brain does process information, it does much, much more. To conceive of it as a super-complex computer system, or as being reducible to a computer system is an enormous, and unjustified, leap. It is a leap that owes much to where we happen to find ourselves today, in the microprocessor-dominated 21st century. It reflects the technical biases we have grown accustomed to in the last half century.

This is not the first time that futurists have sought technological metaphors to describe the brain. Aristotle, and later Avicenna, conceived of the mind as a "tabula rasa" (blank slate) on which education and experience were written. Galen, and later Descartes compared the brain to a pneumatic or hydraulic system, inspired by the advanced plumbing systems coming into being during their respective lifetimes. Later, during the industrial revolution, machine-based metaphors came into vogue. The human brain was compared to a complex machine, or an extrapolation of clockwork mechanisms composed of gears, pulleys, gimbals, springs, and cogs. During the early 20th century, complex telephone switching systems, representing the apex of electro-mechanical technology, served as the new model of the brain. Today, with our advanced information processing and telecommunication technologies, we tend to envision the brain / mind as a computer / software / communications system, because that set of technologies represents several of our current peak technical achievements. But the brain / body and the mind they generate, are almost certainly not the equivalent of a computer / software system, any more than a human leg is the same as an automobile wheel, or the human digestive system is a chemical plant. They are analogous, and may solve similar problems but are not one-for-one substitutable - all of the metaphors eventually break down. No doubt the future will hold new and interesting metaphors we will use to make sense of the mind.

Consciousness, the thing that makes life meaningful for us, probably arises in the brain and the brain's interaction with the body, and the body's interaction with the environment. The whole brain / body / mind / environment system contributes to the sense of consciousness. The belief that consciousness will arise spontaneously in machines and that it will eventually emerge in them through a spontaneous runaway positive feedback loop is really pure speculation. There is no precedent for it, and no evidence that it is even possible. A popular notion in science fiction is that intelligence self-organizes and consciousness spontaneously emerges out of a sufficiently powerful computer, as it did in SkyNet in the movie, Terminator. But this scenario is highly unlikely. The most recent findings in neuroscience indicate that consciousness is a specific function of "thinking" systems, not just a natural outcome of overall systemic complexity - we don't see incipient consciousness in highly complex systems today such as the internet, or electric power grids, or the Internal Revenue tax code. Complexity and consciousness are not necessarily always correlated, nor causally related.

The idea that the mind, and its connection to the brain, is all that matters for the generation of consciousness is an assertion for which there is no evidence. The nervous system which permeates the entire body certainly contributes much to the experience we think of as consciousness. A disconnected brain (a "brain in a jar") without a body would experience the ultimate in sensory deprivation, and would likely go mad quite rapidly. There is no mind / body split. This Cartesian bias is a lovely philosophical speculation for which no empirical evidence exists - in fact, all the evidence goes against it. The brain / body / mind is a continuous, inter-related, and intimately connected system. The idea that you can upload the contents of your brain into some sort of artificial body or a computer system implicitly reflects a Cartesian philosophical outlook - that there is a mind, and separate from that is the (disposable) physical body and brain. All of modern biological and neurological science is in the process of refuting this philosophy, and is establishing that both the body and the brain are integral to consciousness. The brain and the sensory/motor nervous system are a single, but distributed, system. Amputating the brain, and further, extracting the mind from the brain and storing its contents somewhere leaves the entire sensory and motor apparatus out. We are our bodies as much as we are our brains.

However, if we expand the meaning of "upload the mind" to incorporate any upward transfer of information from a human mind to a permanent medium, storage area, or processing system, well, we have been doing that since the invention of cave painting. The technologies available today for the upload and transfer of human knowledge to non-human destinations have expanded greatly and now include regular conversation, writing, digital video cameras, email, MRI's, twitter and facebook. But no real progress has been made in terms of recreating or reflecting an existing sentient being inside a machine.

Brain as computer

A popular view in the last few decades is that the brain is some sort of digital computer and the mind is a software program that runs on that machine. The idea that we will be able to upload consciousness into another type of machine, extracting the software from our three pound, flesh-and-blood brain, and "porting" it to another type of computer makes a tremendous assumption that we really have no basis for believing. It assumes a "backward compatible" computer system can be built that will run the software of our minds. Even granting that the mind is software or software-like, it may be that it can only run in the machine called the brain in which it evolved. Certainly they are highly interdependent, the brain and mind. And that extra element - consciousness - undoubtedly relies on the brain structure, and on the mind housed in the brain, in countless ways. Consciousness and brain / mind structure evolved together ever since creatures with brains came into existence. The brain may be a machine, but whether the brain is a computer is a completely different issue. It almost certainly is not a computer in the sense that we think of computers.

Cyborgs

Related to the singularity theme is the hope of an eventual union of human and machine in what would best be described as cyborg technology - a technology which creates beings that are biological and artificial hybrids, containing biological, robotic, electronic, and mechanical parts. For several decades we have seen machine implants in human bodies - heart valves and stints, cochlear implants, insulin pumps, artificial eye lenses, advanced prosthetic limbs, titanium hip replacements, hearing aids, cosmetic implants of all sort, pace-makers, and even artificial hearts. Experimental neural implants have been developed to treat blindness, epilepsy, and Alzheimer's disease. Experimental "direct neural interfaces" exist which connect the brain's motor cortex to external robotic devices, and those devices are able to transmit tactile, proprioceptive, and temperature information back to the parts of the brain which can process that information. With future refinements and innovations in nano-technology, genetic engineering, pharmacology, neuroscience, information technology, material science, surgical techniques, and medicine, the trend is toward more complex and useful synthetic augmentation of human beings. The logical conclusion, if the trend continues, is full integration of man and machine at the physical level.

However, even without the envisioned physical integration, human society has already become totally dependent on existing man-machine collaboration. Beginning thousands of years ago with the invention of the lever, wheel, and inclined plane, moving through the development of steam engines, electrical power, telephones, and satellites, human beings and all of human culture have evolved a to a point of complete dependence and integration with our machinery. Life without our artificial creations would takes us back to a hunter / gatherer past. The next step - physical integration - is just the next logical progression, not a radical departure. It is already happening.

New Thought movement

"New Thought" is a spiritual movement which developed in the United States during the late 19th century which emphasized metaphysical and mystical/spiritual beliefs. It single-handedly helped convert the term "metaphysics" from an arcane and respected philosophical discipline to a grab-bag of feel-good and trendy concepts.

This school of thought consists of a loosely allied group of religious denominations, secular organizations, authors, philosophers, and individuals who share a set of beliefs concerning the effects of positive thinking, the "law of attraction", mystical healing, "life force", creative visualization, affirmations, karma, energy fields (not the physics kind, but the mystical kind), and the development of personal power. It promotes the ideas that "infinite intelligence", AKA "god", is ubiquitous, spirit is the totality of real things, true human selfhood is divine, divine thought is a force for good, all sickness originates in the mind, and "right thinking" has a healing effect. Prayer and meditation are thought to lead to spiritual and physical healing through a type of spiritual mechanism.

In general, modern day adherents of New Thought believe that their interpretation of "god" or "infinite intelligence" is "supreme, universal, and everlasting", that divinity dwells within each person, that all people are spiritual beings, that "the highest spiritual principle is loving one another unconditionally . . . and teaching and healing one another", and that "our mental states are carried forward into manifestation and become our experience in daily living".

The three major religious denominations within the New Thought movement are Religious Science, Unity Church and the Church of Divine Science. Some New Thought adherents also subscribe to a monistic belief that spirit or consciousness is the sole universal substance and that all physical processes and events are either illusions, or are condensations of pure intelligence and consciousness into material form. Thus sickness is just a degenerate manifestation of an unhealthy spirit, implying that if the spirit is healed, the sickness will vanish. In any case, according to their view, the material world is only a pale shadow of the spiritual one. These movements all share the common ideal that one's thoughts and your feelings create one's life.

Modern manifestations of New Thought can be found in "The Law of Attraction", "The Secret", and "A Course in Miracles".

God of the Gaps

There are aspects of life for which no explanations can be found in science, economics, history, sociology, or other areas of empirically or rationally obtained human knowledge. For many of those experiences and phenomena, the default explanatory fallback is that god is responsible. Whether the issue is the origin of life, what happened "before the big bang", the question of life after death, or how consciousness arises, when mankind has not discovered answers, the answers must be obtained from a higher power, or a more traditional, personal and anthropomorphic god. The god of the gaps argument is known as an "argument from ignorance" ("because we don't know, then we do know"). Or as Stephen Colbert reported about Bill O'Reilly on his TV show, "Like all great theologies, Bill's can be boiled down to one sentence: There must be a god, ... because I don't know how things work".

Trying to explain the unknown in terms of the incomprehensible can never increase our understanding. As Plato realized, to say that god did it is not to explain anything, but simply to offer an excuse for not having an explanation. (Plato, Cratylus, 426a). In a similar vein, the Norm Levan Panel on Intelligent Design concluded:

Invoking the supernatural is dead-end to further inquiry. Science cannot test supernatural explanations, since they are unfalsifiable, unverifiable, and can be altered to fit any situation post-hoc.

It is a common trap that is very easy to fall into. For many people it is uncomfortable to be faced with a situation for which there is no answer - a more psychologically satisfying position is to believe that there is an answer, but that answer is known only to god. For everything that we did not understand there was always a supernatural and often sentient explanation. Unfortunately for god, the number of things that he is responsible for has been shrinking for centuries, and the pace really began to pick up after the Copernican revolution, the Scientfic Revolution, the Enlightenment (thanks to thinkers such as Galileo, Locke, Newton, Hume, Spinoza, and many others). He is now seriously underemployed. The gaps of our knowledge were once very great, but many of these gaps have been closed. God no longer causes lightening to strike, stars to remain fixed in the sky, planets to move through the sky, earthquakes (or lack thereof), volcanic eruptions, good and/or bad weather, health and disease, sunrise/sunset, rainbows, tides, the change of seasons, plagues or cures for plagues, victory and defeat in battle, or the evolution of living creatures into separate species.

Science has done an incredible job explaining the previously unexplainable through impersonal, observable, and predictable forces. Evolutionary biology and anthropology indicate that morality, altruism, heroism, and other noble and subtle human virtues, as well as the less noble ones, probably have primitive correlates in other species. Behind everything we have so far observed in the external world, natural explanations have succeeded in demonstrating that previously deemed supernatural phenomena are actually the result of causes that can be reduced to space, time, material, and physical laws. The success of methodological naturalism in eliminating gaps and explaining what previously lied within them has shown beyond most doubt that Metaphysical Naturalism is almost certainly true. Humans have found naturalistic explanations for these formerly mysterious processes that used to be attributable to god. Yes, there are things that are not yet explainable.

Given the remarkable and uninterrupted success of naturalistic explanations and the miserable failure of theistic explanations, it is very likely that these remaining mysteries (dark matter, the origin of the universe, how life was created, consciousness, spontaneous order and emergent behaviors) will be be shown to be the result of natural causes, not supernatural. The trend towards taking god out of the causal chain continues with no sign of abatement. For the last few centuries those who relied on god as the explanation for physical phenomena have experienced a long and steady string of disappointments. Unfortunately for them, this is likely to continue.

God of the Gaps is a mistake that even the best of us can inadvertently fall into. Even Isaac Newton, one of the greatest minds in the last millenium did. He discovered the laws of orbital dynamics, which explained mathematically what Copernicus and Kepler first pioneered. But he just couldn't bring himself to believe that planets could go into motion by themselves - someone had to have placed them there:

"The six primary Planets are revolv'd about the Sun, in circles concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same plane. […] But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions. […] This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being."

He also thought that god's hand must occasionally readjust the orbits to get them back on track when they interfered with each other. In both of these examples — one related to the origin of the motions and the other related to the ongoing motion of the planets — Newton is employing textbook God of the gaps reasoning. Scientific theories are proposed to explain as much as possible, and then God is brought in to cover any remaining unexplained gaps in the explanation. We now know that purely naturalistic explanations can account for everything to do with orbits of planets. We must always be vigilant about making the same mistake.

God is Love, God is Good

Carl Sagan addressed this very clearly in his book, Varieties of Scientific Experience, a compendium of his 1985 Gifford lectures. When challenged by a questioner with the assertion, "in reality He is there. God is love", Sagan replied "Well, if we say that the definition of God is reality, or the definition of God is love, I have no quarrel with the existence of reality or the existence of love. In fact, I’m in favor of both of them. However, it does not follow that God defined in that way has anything to do with the creation of the world or of any events in human history. It does not follow that there’s anything that is omnipotent or omniscient and so on about God defined in such a manner. So all I’m saying is, we must look at the logical consistency of the various definitions. If you say God is love, clearly love exists in the world. But love is not the only thing that exists in the world. The idea that love dominates everything else, I deeply hope is true, but there are arguments that can very well be proposed, from a mere glance at the daily newspapers, to suggest that love is not in the ascendant in contemporary political affairs. And I don’t see that it helps to say, forgive me, that God is love, because there are all those other definitions of God, that mean quite different things. If we muddle up all the definitions of God, then it’s very confusing what’s being talked about. There is a great opportunity for error in that case. So my proposal is that we call reality “reality,” that we call love “love,” and not call either of them God, which has, while an enormous number of other meanings, not exactly those meanings."

So, to assert that "god is love" is rather arbitrary. Why not say "god is beauty" or "god is hate" or "god is pizza". There is no particular reason to equate the term "god" and "love" above any other associations.When Christians say "God is love" I know what they mean - I have read their explanation. They are saying that god's essence is synonoymous with "good". God could not issue immoral commands. His essential goodness and loving character] would keep him from issuing any unsuitable commands. This is just begging the question again - assuming that there is a good and a bad prior to god, and that god would not do bad things.

But further, "good" is an adjective. "Goodness" and "Badness" are nouns, but not physical objects, not like a ball or a cloud. They are human-generated categories, abstractions into which we place behaviors, thoughts, actions, intents. We measure things by our conceptions of good and bad, and assign those attributes to the things we judge. To say god is good, in the sense of actually equating those two concepts, is just incoherent wordplay - stringing subject and predicate together with the word "is" in between, and hoping that some kind of meaning will emerge. Lexically, "god is good" parses fine. It just doesn't happen to mean anything.

Last - it is obvious that we have our own conception of good and bad prior to anything having to do with god or the bible. When we read the numerous atrocities in the bible, we are appalled. Our innate sense of good and bad causes Christians to (1) deny that those things actually happened, or (2) claim that it is just a misreading of the bible, or (3) argue that god had a good reason for doing horrible things that we just don't understand, or (4) say that with the New Testament, all that torture and murder in the Old Testament doesn't matter anymore. None of those arguments can deal with the simple fact of recognition - that we, as humans using our innate sense of "reflective equilibrium" can tell right from wrong. We know that there is no way to justify the genocide of entire races of people, as god commands more than once. We already know that is wrong - it is bad. Anything god has to say about it in the bible is just an afterthought.

Spiritual but not religious

Even less god-focused than the "higher power" mindset I covered in the previous section is a new set of "spiritual but not religious" belief systems. These are just as generic and non-specific, but differ in that they don't have a god-centered basis. As such, they don't even qualify as "conceptions of god", which is what this blog is about. They can range from vaguely deistic to completely atheistic. They carry the belief that something divine or sacred is out there, some universal organizing force, but it's difficult to say exactly what that is.

This "un-doctrine" may be gaining popularity as an anti-clerical response to the unsavory reputations that many Christian religious denominations have earned in recent years resulting from sex scandals, child molestation, rape of nuns, general disrespect for women, financial fraud, blatant pandering, crazy rituals, laughable televised faith healing, crooked or perverted pastors, revelations of shocking inner circle practices, transparent scams, unbelievable claims, conspiracy, and outright crimes. A large number in this growing "un-churched" demographic are former members of traditional Christian denominations (Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, Catholics, Evangelicals, generic Christians, etc) who no longer identify themselves as belonging to those denominations, but still want to retain a sense of the mystical and basic spirituality without the burden of heavy tradition, out-of-fashion concepts, antiquated gender mores, and hidebound orthodoxy.

Polls in the US during the last few decades show a growing number of people in the "no religion" camp who still are uncomfortable adopting atheism. They have an aversion to the religious establishment and "organized religion". The "spiritual but not religious" individual wants to have contact with the mystical and spiritual, but without committing to any specific beliefs or actual doctrines. "Spiritual but not religious" is a philosophical destination for some, and for others it is a mid-way point on the transition from the religiousness of their youth to agnosticism or unabashed atheism. This type of belief breaks downs along several lines:

Mystical variety

The mystical version is frequently associated with reports of out of body and near death experiences, visitation by angels, ghost encounters, ESP, precognition, astral projection, non-traditional healing modalities, homeopathy, synchronicity, UFOs, vague notions of karma and reincarnation, and ancient but forgotten wisdom. People who are part of this group have substituted one kind of unsupportable faith (traditional religion) with another (new age fads). In decades past the types of beliefs that were popular for these people were mediums who could communicate with the dead (as with Madame Blavatsky), seances, fairies, trolls, mind reading, levitation, and more.

Naturalistic variety

The naturalistic type of spirituality is very much like "Einstein's God", described earlier. People who adopt this world view substitute awe and wonder for religiosity. They value individual human encounters with the world, and the experiences and emotions those can inspire. All humans share the capacity to experience awe, wonder, inspiration, reverence, and a deeply moving sense of the "transcendent". This kind of spirituality requires no belief in a specific divinity figure or doctrine. What is valued here is the personal experience of a subjective emotion elicited by interactions with nature, contemplation of the wonders of life, personal relationships, and the magnificence of the universe. Einstein described himself as "a deeply religious nonbeliever". This may capture this kind of secular spirituality. Unfortunately, the word, "spiritual" carries such weighty baggage that it has practically been ruined for describing this phenomena - maybe a better way to describe it is a feeling of awe or wonder at the wonderful scheme that is manifested in unfolding of the physical universe. The modern usage of "spiritual" may be gradually transforming into a less religious form, a form that involves no deities or supernatural entities, but instead emphasizes the personal, possibly mystical, experience. Those who have these experiences (and there is no doubt that many do) are, of course, free to interpret them however they want. Some people will respond to these experiences with a strengthened belief in a deity, and others will see them as natural, wonderful, emergent artifacts of our human cognitive apparatus. Nature, science, loving relationships, images of deep space, meditative contemplation, what might be called "deep environmentalism", or even mind altering drugs can call up the more profound aspects of human experience, which in this context we would call "spiritual".

Pantheistic variety

Pantheism is a relatively modern concept. Although for millenia, people have ascribed divinity and spirituality to many aspects of nature, the modern Pantheist philosophy is only a few centuries old. The word literally means "all god", or "everything is god". Pantheists see all of nature and reality as a manifestation of god, or even as the embodiment of god, or that god and the universe are identical. As with other god-philosophies, there is no single, well defined type of pantheist. Many people who might be regarded as having pantheist views would not see each other as sharing a single worldview. It is really a very fuzzy concept, and has no specific doctrine. Although some religions have strong elements of pantheism (Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, Kabbalistic Judaism, ancient Celtic spirituality, Sufi mysticism), none of them encompass all of the others. Probably most people are not even aware of what pantheism is, unless they have actually researched it. Because pantheism is really just a very weak form of religion, I am classifying it in this "spiritual but not religious" camp.

Personal Power variety

This branch focuses on accessing personal power and untapped inner resources. It utilizes Westernized versions of meditation and a Buddhist-like reduction in focus on desire, on the self, and on "ego" (as Eckhart Tolle conceives it). It distills some elements of Hinduism, Zen, Taoism, and Buddhism into a form palatable to Western tastes by, among other things, jettisoning the mind-numbing pantheons of unpronounceable Asian deities, avatars, gurus, and other characters. With a steady avoidance of issues surrounding god and ethereal concepts, it emphasizes personal growth and achievement of inner peace by helping people attend to elements of life that are less superficial and more meaningful.

It sort of makes sense...

Every generation does creative myth interpretation, and redefines those myths in the context of current personal and cultural experiences. As a modern 21st century society, we are trying to find an appropriate language to speak to the new meanings that we find in our experiences. We are trying to recover and build a new language for the evolving understanding that is generated through advances in science and technology of the last century. The unarguable diminution of god as the author of nature (he no longer "makes the sun to rise and ascend in the skies") has left a spiritual void that needs to be filled. The new sense of "spiritual" in this language is not necessarily supernatural, but instead connotes the immaterial, indefinable, non-rational aspect of being human. Instead of referring to immaterial spirits or souls, it refers instead to the ineffable, more fundamental aspects of human experience. In our new society it is losing its overt religious meaning and is becoming secularized.

Traditional religion is declining, while "spirituality" is on the rise in the millennial culture of young people in the 21st century. Since the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century, we were being told by intellects like Rousseau, Emerson, Thoreau, Ingersoll and others that we were moving towards a new secular society. But instead what has happened is an increase in both secularism and fundamentalism both in the US and abroad. A middle ground has emerged, which is a deity-free spirituality that will probably be end up being more effective than either in dealing with the new set of environmental, ecological, and social challenges we are facing in our high-tech society. It has the logical power of secularism, and the motivational, emotional force of belief.

Except for the generous helpings of psycho-babble, pseudo-science, unfounded conclusions, flawed logic, unsupportable factual claims, appeals to alternative medicine, broken history, and false analogies there is actually some useful stuff here. Especially in the West, I think most of us can admit to being too wrapped up in the temporal, acquisitive, and neurotic obsessions inherent in living in a fast paced materialistic, high-tech, post-industrial world. A way of being that helps you break free from surface perceptions and what used to be called the rat-race, to take time to smell the roses, without resorting to navel-gazing has got to be an overall positive thing.

A "Higher Power"

Many Americans have a fuzzy, ill-defined concept of god as a "higher power". It is "higher" in the sense of existing outside and above the scope of the causal agents that we normally see operating in the physical world, and a "power" in that it is able to effect change in our world, typically in ways that mortal agents would be unable to. This vague entity is commonly pictured as an ever-present, intentional agency, though not necessarily anthropomorphic or even conscious (in the sense that we are). It is responsible for the some or all of the workings of fate, destiny, good and bad luck, and the major events of our lives. It may respond to prayers and intervene in major life events.

This belief provides comfort and refuge when life brings the pain of disappointment, misfortune, suffering, loss, unfairness, fear, broken relationships, failure, or death of loved ones. It sustains hope for an afterlife, helps establish a connection to the mystical and mysterious, between like-minded believers, and to the sense of wonder and awe that comes with being human. Those who would say, "I couldn't live in a world without god", "life would be pointless without god", "there would be no right and wrong without god", "what goes around comes around", or "everything happens for a reason" might think of god in these indistinct terms. For them, life would be far too uncomfortable and psychologically painful without this faith. This "appeal to consequences" argument convinces them that, therefore, he or it must exist - if it were untrue then what would be the point of going on? Life would just be too awful otherwise.

There is evidence from the fields of Cognitive Science and Neuroscience that humans have hard-wired "agency detection" centers in the brain that ascribe intention and "agency" to events in the world. The natural human tendency to believe that a higher power somehow directs otherwise random-seeming events may be facilitated by this hard-wiring.

There are "cognitive biases" that may predispose one to come into this belief. "Confirmation bias" is the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions. This cognitive mistake can cause one to filter negative, disconfirming evidence while over-emphasizing positive, corroborating evidence. For example, one may clearly recall times when prayers were answered, accidents narrowly avoided, or good luck encountered and use these occasions as evidence for god's intervention. However, the opposite (and potentially far more numerous) experiences of unanswered prayers, accidents that were experienced, and bad fortune are explained away by other means.

Another cognitive bias or error in thinking is Apophenia, also called "patternicity" (a term coined by the skeptic, Michael Shermer). Shermer defined it as "the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise". In his book, The Believing Brain he describes how humans impute agency and meaning into otherwise random events. This trait can cause people to see meaning and intent behind events that are actually happening for impersonal and random reasons.

Belief in "higher power" can satisfy the natural religious sense without the encumbrance of complex and possibly irrelevant formal religious doctrine, the need to attend church, to tithe, or engage in other inconvenient activities. It can be a source of great comfort and peace, which alone may justify adopting the belief if having those feelings outweighs the need for a theology that has strong backing evidence and makes clear logical sense. For those who simply don't want to bother coming up with a well-formed theology, study the scripture of their childhood faith, or learn about attractive competing faiths, this is a convenient and practical (although somewhat lazy) way to delegate all things spiritual to the higher power and call the job done.

Oprah's God

When I happened to catch a sound byte of the Dr Oz show where he was interviewing Oprah Winfrey, I just had to include this astute theologian's thoughts into my collection of god-conceptions. Here is a frequently repeated report of the interview:

In his introduction of Winfrey, Oz told excited audience members: “Oprah has transformed the lives of millions, and now faces a transformation of her own. Today she says that you have the power to transform your life…she says the answers are all inside of you.”

Asked by Oz, during the Dec. 7 airing of “The Dr. Oz Show,” what her “big plan” was and how she remains inspired throughout her career, Winfrey responded:

“For me at this particular time in my life I recognize that everything is about moving closer to that which is God. And without a full, spiritual center — and I’m not talking about religion — I’m talking about without understanding the fullness from which you’ve come, you can’t really fulfill your supreme moment of destiny. And I think everybody has a supreme moment of destiny.”

“I think being connected to that which is greater than yourself, for me, at this particular time in my life, is the most important thing,” she added.

I hope this clears up any confusion you might have previously had about just what god is :)