The Nervous Giraffe — the recursive laryngeal nerve isn’t the only thing turning against itself.
TL;DR — the recursive laryngeal nerve, and it’s other bulwarks of ‘modern’ arguments against the divine are, like ‘fitness’ in evolution, domain dependent.
If you’ve ever paid any significant attention to the border between evolution and the question of God (or, if you like you some NatGeo—or biology in general) then you’ve likely stumbled upon the following.
The basic concept with the recursive laryngeal nerve of the giraffe is that if things were divinely ordered then you’d likely be taken aback by discovering that a giraffe has a biological detour that would make even the worst case of an missed off ramp on an interstate look like a slight suboptimal misstep in your journey.
Granted the giraffe is simply the optimal extreme for this apparent great inefficiency found in many vertebrates.
The point of it all is that if one looks at fish anatomy they’ll find that the distance of the laryngeal nerve is nice and short, yet the further you get away from fish in the genetic taxonomic branches through which things evolved the more and more convoluted, and needlessly long, the recursive nerve becomes. The giraffe being the apex of the apparent absurdity.
And if this doesn’t dissuade you from either monotheism, polytheism or any of the ‘-eisms’ (that don’t start with an ‘A’) then this is just one of many cases held out against the concept of a benevolent, or any kind of, God(s).
Just to name a few more of the more prominent arguments on the scene, as of late:
- A “universe from nothing” (seemingly self explanatory in terms of the question of god(s))
- Mean and capricious. Who’d want to worship a God who lets so many bad things happen without it being the cause of just us and our mistakes? Why are there natural things who’s seemingly whole existence revolves around putting our lives and welfare in danger or who’s modus operandi consists in afflicting or killing us?
- A God who would seemingly take out 80,000 worshipers on a holy day, while they were in their houses of worship. Contradictory? Disloyal? Arbitrary?
- A God who seems to share many traits with the likes of that place that brought us The Interview (In case you’ve not heard of the movie it’s about North Korea, the talk below is the late Hitchens describing his experience there, and then comparing the constant praise all must give to the “Great Leader” and the “Dear Leader” of Korea to what he was taught about heaven by his childhood religious teachers.)
There are surely others, and—as I have heard many of them—I could go on for some time, but these suit the purpose which I’m addressing.
Richard Dawkins (often referred to as today’s most famous, most outspoken ‘militant’ atheist—he’s also the man who coined the term ‘meme’ as in ‘internet meme’), in his book The God Delusion, placed his definition of ‘the God Hypothesis’ as being thus—
there exists a super-human, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us
This was his goal post. And it’s arguably not far off from the goal post of probably every other of the individuals who’s words I’ve linked to above.
But the interesting thing that we learn if we go about reading Dawkin’s books (he being first a world renowned evolutionary biologist—if you haven’t read the Blind Watch maker, do, it’s well worth it) is that one of the key components in natural selection is that fitness, or opti mal design, in one instance, in one context, in one habitat, can be a death knell in another.
And that is very much the case for these arguments against the existence of God. Without the assumptions that are made about God the arguments are as fragile as qubits when the cooling systems fail
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit
To see an example of how one can do such a thing of turning commonly held beliefs on their head please consider Sam Harris’s concept of the moral landscape.
In it he makes a stirring case for using science to approach many moral issues that most people have never considered science to have any say in. I don’t have time to go into the details, but one of his key initial arguments in favor of the use of science in this domain is considering the concept of a moral landscape, envision something like a three dimensional plane with valleys and peeks and any given point represents the opposite of the best possible world &/or universe.
Mr. Harris cleverly takes a concept held by some of the religious, that we are in the best possible universe, and uses it’s counter position to set up his argument for using science to approach morality.
He says to imagine the worst possible world/universe. His conclusion is that the worst possible would be where suffering is maximized for all.
I agree.
As he points out, it’s hard not to agree with that.
He then goes on to make some very powerful points in arguing that well-being, health and distance from suffering are means by which science can achieve moral improvement. He doesn’t pretend it can get to all, or even always very specific answers, but he does seem to use it as a kind of
‘discrete optimization’ to narrow our options. (sorry, I’m a programmer, I have to squeeze in some of programming lingo☺ )
Sam Harris takes the context, in which most presumed that either science was too clinical and detached to give us any morals, or in which we thought that it simply was ill suited to it, and he shows us that it’s very simple to use the concept of the worst possible world/universe/existence and use that as a basis for seeing the falseness of the idea that science and morality don’t mix.
It’s admirable and genius.
Now, if you will, please permit this believing Mormon to try a bit of rhetorical jujitsu myself- using this same mechanic, wielded admirably by the formidable
Sam.
Here I go.
Draw your mind back to all those shining examples of contemporary theocritical thought.
To change the context, the habitat where such positions have such strength, I’m going to borrow the move from Mr. Harris.
Rather than imagining a seemingly horrendous or illogical or seemingly capricious or lacking in design chops, deficient in execution and stewardship over the whole of creation, or the domineering and petty celestial Kim Jong Un equivalent of a god painted for us by these prominent and popular theocritics.
Imagine a god that the theocritics themselves could put forward as such a being which they could potentially believe in.
Take the concept of a God who would allow bad things to happen. Especially one who would allow suffering upon us that extends beyond our own bad behavior.
To start with we’ll go with the whole enchilada and ask why God would allow anything bad to happen at all?
I mean, he is all good and all powerful and all knowing—right? Then why would he ever allow evil to go down?
Well, can you make a computer with code that has no variance? I mean where the code was all ones and no zeros?
Can you have an interesting universe if it doesn’t start out with some variance?
No.
If you don’t believe me just go watch that “universe from nothing” vid from the great instructor Mr Lawrence Krauss for a refresher course then.
Existence rather demands that variance occurs.
You simply can’t be good/moral if there was never a way for you to be bad/immoral.
In fact many an atheist has recognized aspects of this in some of their arguments against those who behave only out of fear of punishment, or only at the promise of reward.
This, they’ve rightly claimed, is not virtue, it’s merely Pavlovian robotics, not love but mere economic exchange, as one would find with prostitution or stereotypical wall street, or fast food purchases—instant gratification based on economic activity.
And if God hasn’t made you to be an agent unto yourself, that is, if God hasn’t made you to be your own person, something that has free will apart from any other external influence, then all he’s doing is simply making robots that are just doing what he has instructed them to do, in essence we’d just be extensions of god, without agency.
Puppets with unbreakable strings.
Then you’d have an illogical, all powerful, all knowing, ‘god’ … which, of course, breaks the definition of a god, seeing as all knowing and illogical don’t quite fit in the same being.
That would leave you with no real god.
But the point of this whole exercise was to posit a god opposite to the ‘bad’ God perceived by the theocritical people’s arguments against a God.
So it’s settled that we have to have some opposition.
Now let’s address Stephen Fry’s issue with kids with cancer (I have a baby niece myself on her 5th round of chemo as I’m typing this), or kids who are afflicted by a fly who’s life cycle consists of eating their eyes from the inside out and Sam Harris’s Tsunami argument (where he lays out the reality that every 10 days there’s the equivalent to the great asian tsunami, in terms of the number of victims killed, but all of these victims are under 5 years of age)-
Many an atheist and anti-theist have taken issue with this (Heck, if that doesn’t give you pause then I don’t think anything can get to you).
Are we forgetting the ‘all powerful’ and ‘all knowing’ attributes ascribed to God? Surely a god could get rid of such things, could it not?
Let’s stretch out the implications of such a world.
So such a world would need to protect people that haven’t really become accountable.
Let’s say we have a world where nothing bad happens to anyone that’s not really fully aware or accountable for their actions.
I mean that’s just, right?
How can you sin if you don’t even know fully what is or isn’t sin?
So we have a world where, at the very least, a segment, even if very small, of the biomass of the planet is shielded from the likes of disease, pestilence, bad stuff not caused by those suffering. Now try and imagine living in such a world where such a reality was omnipresent.
Do you think that would never impact anyone’s capacity for self determination?
Can you fathom a world where there were, in any of the possible manifestations of such a globally visible immunity for the innocent, whether partially applied or fully applied to any given segment of humanity (or beyond humanity to our animal friends), such a phenomena? Can you imagine what it would look like?
How would you conjecture that such a reality would impact our capacity to think? To reason? To decide and to act with respect to the decisions we have to make about the reality or falseness of the divine claims?
Can you imagine how such would impact motivation to learn about the natural world?
In short, what would this do for agency? For free will?
What would this do to a human race who, by the admission of the likes of Richard Dawkins, took an embarrassingly long time to see the reality of evolution?
I rather agree with Dawkins that it is quite surprising that it took humanity all the way until the age of Darwin to even start to really grok that everything really is ontologically related. Can you imagine how much harder that would be if the cruelties of natural selection were either covered, muted, or otherwise obscured?
If humanity was the only portion immune, would that give the evolutionary biologists pause?
Let’s let you think about such a world as we move on to another aspect of that.
If you, like the late Christopher Hitchens, despise the idea of a petty dictatorial ‘sky daddy’ watching your every move and meddling in everything, in making everything revolve around him, then look at the opposite of that.
What you get is a distant and detached Deist like concept of a God—
…let’s pause for a second and let that sink in…
—do you feel it? That horrid smashing sound is those two concepts of theoretical gods smashing together and leaving neither one remaining, the one who built a universe where bad is limited by seemingly magical powers and the other one where a God doesn’t make his presence announced over a loud speaker day after day, (not even in the zoo, by the parrot.—a reference to one of Hitchen’s stories about North Korea)
But that’s what you’d get if you had some protected class of people, or if the whole of reality was sufficiently distorted to mitigate bad, or evil, or danger, or suffering.
Moving on.
So they, the theocritics, say they don’t want a God that you have to approach by faith.
Rather, they would want a very ‘scientific’ God.
So what would that look like?
Once again you’re brushing up against the concept of freewill, accountability and the actual capacity to be good, evil, or anything other than mere extensions of a supernatural being, which, if it was illogically playing a game of dolls on a cosmic scale, would not be an actual good and all loving being.
Not to belabor the point, but going off the whole idea of wanting a ‘scientific’ god you have the idea of a God that takes out 80,000 people in Lisbon Portugal who were worshiping him on a holy day.
So what’s the opposite of that?
Well clearly a God that would favor, rather than kill—or allow to perish, those that were seeking to sincerely worship.
But what does that look like? What would that look like to any statistician who got their hands on the data? What would you do if it was unequivocally undeniable that, with statistically sound methods and solid data over time, a certain set of believers consistently out performed the rest of society in all measures of being blessed, prospered, intelligent, rational and correct (or at least more correct than most) when compared to the population as a whole? And what if the application of this benefit was clearly accessible to any and all who choose to align themselves with this group regardless their prior ethnic, socio-economic, education, training or any other condition?
Again we’re pulverizing the concepts either of 1-free-will and/or 2-of accountability for our actions.
Just as the observation of one in a pair of particles that are linked through quantum entanglement fixes the one observed to be in a state opposite to it’s partner so to are each of these arguments in contradiction to one or more of the other arguments given.
And this is not simply a matter of some of these atheists choosing one angle of attack and some choosing another, most of these I’ve heard readily argue from any of these varied arguments.
They seem all too happy to mock or scoff at the glaring contradictions in the likes of the creationists arguments. An all too easy task. They revel in brow beating the politicians and others who hold to any unscientific or irrational view, especially if that clinging comes due to the beliefs such people have about God.
Well my secular, atheist, anti-theistic friends, let’s see some rational response to your own incongruity.
And just think, it’s a Mormon who’s pointing it out to you. So stop chuckling as you watch and re-watch the Brandon Flowers v. Richard Dawkins showdown—
and try some actual response to Mr. Dawkins imagined home run refutation of the Book of Mormon —
Here’s my bonus material for this post, some may have noticed that, in my thoughts upon a God that would be more palatable to those theocritical masses I left out addressing the very first of their arguments that I listed, namely Lawrence Krause’s “a universe from nothing.” For any that have really looked at the issue it is a ‘nothing’ that is a ‘something.’ (as an interesting aside there’s a line in a Mormon hymn ‘If You Could Hie To Kolob’ that says “no man has found pure space” — a fitting claim even today)
In short, what you may think is just space, after you’ve removed everything, still has mass/energy popping in and out of existence on a quantum level, in fact some of the math even has this nothingness as being a potential source for additional big bangs after things have gotten sufficiently full of ‘nothing.’
So whether it’s multiple dimensions that give us a multi-verse, or it’s the possible infinite expanses beyond our visible universe, there could be countless other universes.
Now while atheists who posit this possibility are accused of simply looking for some argument that obviates the seeming problem with the anthropic principle and their position regarding divinity’s likelihood, they are justified in pointing to the evidence and the maths and saying that this is where it seems to be taking us.
You may have heard, at some point in time, that us Mormons think we’ll get our own planet some day. This is a misstatement that makes the creationist’s 6000 year — yard stick across the continental USA—look like a good horseshoe toss. We don’t believe we may get our own planet. The doctrine has always been, as it’s stated in the New Testament itself, that the ‘joint-heirs with Christ’ will obtain ‘all that the Father hath’ — that’s to say the whole of a/an/the cosmos.
Now isn’t it a bit ironic that the whipping child of Atheism’s grand proclamations on the absurdity of religion is often Mormonism. Yet no other religion has got such a prime spot, one postulated by the great Carl Sagan when he proclaimed—
A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths
—Carl Sagan The Pale Blue Dot
“But isn’t it Mormonism that had Joseph Smith saying that amish-like men lived on the moon?” Well if you are so ready to take such questionable assertions, given by a single source, many decades after the actual claimed telling of such by Joseph Smith, then you are likely not well suited to a movement built around rationality.
Joseph Smith claimed that all things were made of matter/energy—that there never is, nor could be, anything supernatural. He claimed that when our eyes were purified we would see that it all is matter/energy.
If you’ve seen the musical, or paid heed to the words of contemporary Atheistic and Anti-theistic champions you could be forgiven for thinking that Mormonism is simply an extra-’m’ mislabeling. But an actual critical and rational deconstruction of the claims of Dawkins, Krauss, Pinker, Hitchens, Harris, Dennet and others, on Mormonism, are simply the loudest voices in the echo chamber of modern Atheism, their key informers are almost exclusively disaffected Mormons, or almost Mormons who can be shown, demonstrably, to either hide the whole case from view (an accusation they love to level against the LDS / Mormon Church proper), or they are horribly ignorant.
Many will not want to believe this, but if you’ve made it this far in this, you’re likely one that could very well be one of the few to discover what the ‘counter-cult’ Evangelicals only started to realize just a bit over a decade back. That is that you’ve been long since losing the logical and rational fight with Mormonism apologetics, and you don’t even realize it yet.
