Putting Away Childish Things: A New Synthesis

Putting Away Childih Things: A New Synthesis

By Jon J Mercurio

Copyright 2012 Jon J Mercurio

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Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1 – The Long View of History

Chapter 2 – What is This Thing Called God: History of God

Chapter 3 – A One Way Street; Monotheism: The Bible and other Revelations

Chapter 4 – Holly Holy: The Deification

Chapter 5 – Dr Strangelove: Mad Science

Chapter 6 – A Whimper Never Heard: A new Creation Tale

Chapter 7 – A Swingin' Affair: Monkey Madness

Chapter 8 – A Dangerous Trajectory

Footnotes

References

About the Author

Preface >>

The motivation for this text springs from several sources. The first grew from a challenge from a follower of evangelical Christianity whom we employed in our small family business. As is usually the wont of fundamentalists this well-meaning person tended to interject her strong beliefs into the business environment, to customers and associates alike. We held numerous discussions regarding the appropriateness of such actions. The behavior escalated to attempts to recruit a young worker into her church circle. The challenge arose from the question posed to me during discussions regarding appropriateness: What is the harm? At that precise moment I was unable to respond to the inquiry, but it did start an internal analysis and a quest to firm the basis for my stance, my beliefs and a defense of it. Our answer to the harm question will be treated in our conclusions. The second impetus arose from a visit from relatives.

An aunt and cousin, both displaced by hurricane Katrina, came to live in our home while their homes on the Mississippi Gulf Coast were being rebuilt. The cousin was one who, though close in our youth, had become a somewhat 'distant relative' over the years. Prior to her 'Katrina visit' we, in our adult years, had perhaps two or three chance meetings at her parent's home. During this Katrina induced visit, many situations led to heady discussions on wide ranging topics. My cousin, not your typical uneducated person- she held a Masters degree in Special Education- quite often posed the question: How do you know that? Rather than a challenge, the question was a reaction to her seemingly amazement that a person she once knew well had such a breadth of knowledge. It was not that her cousin was extraordinarily bright. As it turns, the data that amazed were routine bits of information that most of today's undergraduate students might encounter in the course of satisfying their general education requirements. I am quite sure my cousin was exposed to this same database, but over three decades of concentrating on her profession, of dealing with distressed/disabled children and her total immersion in her born-again Christianity, such had faded into oblivion. Each of her days with us she spent hours immersed in the Bible; a likely typical day in the last thirty plus years of her life. I was never able to determine if all those hours of reading were devoted to trying to make sense of the content or trying to find some lost, hidden meaning. A final push toward this writing arose from our insatiable need to read.

The quest to put thought together to answer the harm question led to a considerable amount of research. While our readings ran the full spectrum from mainstream theistic authors and biblical scholars such as John Crossan [Crossan], Elaine Pagels [Pagels], Karen Armstrong [Armstrong] and Bart Ehrman [Ehrman] it was some recent books by avowed atheists Sam Harris [Harris][Harris], Richard Dawkins [Dawkins], Christopher Hitchens [Hitchens] and Daniel Dennett [Dennett] that set the wheels in motion. These texts, while well written and erudite, seemed to me to be very one-dimensional and suggested that a treatise that provided a broader treatment might be in order.

In my reading quest I soon learned that in order to appreciate the position I held and that is to be exposed in this book one needed a very broad understanding of a diverse set of subjects. In order to give a fair treatment to the topic required for this examination it seems that one needs to be versed in a wide variety of disciplines including paleontology, archeology, history, biology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, biblical scholarship (both historical and devotional) and more. Concentrating solely on Biblical readings and interpretations by ordinary (biased?) ministers, as many do, as my cousin and employee had, might be compared to viewing and judging the aesthetic value a statue from a photograph. Viewing a one-dimensional picture of one side with the background and surroundings covered one misses the dimensional quality, the depth, the essence and recondite nature of the subject. Such a reader might be compared to a typical owner of an item featured on the PBS program 'Antiques Roadshow'. The owners may personally value and appreciate the piece and may even have some (mis- ?) information about the value and history of the piece, but they must turn to an expert who can put the item in the proper context, assessing all aspects to determine the truth. The expert fills the role of someone with sapience¹. Unfortunately the everyday minister or priest one routinely encounters does not have the breadth of knowledge to be considered sapient1 in matters related to cosmology or science.

Most folks are aware that philosophy is a word with two Greek roots: 'philo' connoting love and 'sophia' meaning wisdom (or sapience), the conjunction yielding love of wisdom. Without demeaning Socrates (469 BCE -399 BCE) and his student Plato (428 BCE -348 BCE) both providing the basis for much of western thought we might focus on Plato's student, Aristotle (384 BCE -322 BCE) (for a quick review of these Greeks see [Richard]), who provided the first comprehensive (for his time) compilation of writings that summarized 'knowledge' at that time. It was indeed an exhibition of the love of wisdom. For all of that, we might make note that while some of his exposition were indeed groundbreaking and informed (e.g. he essentially invented zoology) some, maybe most, of the 'wisdom' he offered was wrong. But at this point correctness is not the point. His attempts at organizing and categorizing thought set a precedent that in the end served mankind in that it provided groundwork. He and his immediate predecessors underpinned the basis on which the progress of rational human thought was built. As we have intimated, when Aristotle penned his texts the amount of knowledge was comparatively limited, but his contribution was the cauldron for the development of wisdom. In fact it took 2200 years before there was sufficient amount of information, wisdom if you will, on a single sub-topical area to warrant separating the endeavors of philosophy into specialized fields of knowledge with a special name, like science. And it was a few more decades before the emergence of science specialties, like physics or chemistry. Due to the paucity of information in any category, until the nineteenth century, philosophers were likely experts in science, i.e. in physics, mathematics, meteorology, and every other discipline that now constitute separate academic departments at any modern University. Aristotle's writings encompassed morals and ethics, long before religion usurped these topics; and aesthetics which defined the meaning and validity of critical judgments concerning works of art, and the principles underlying or justifying such judgments; and politics, logic and science. His writings on science were in a volume entitled Physis the Greek word translatable into the English noun, nature. When he was finished with all the natural things Aristotle treated the topics he referred to as the immaterial. Since the ideas treated in this arena were esoteric, or in his words being in the highest degree of abstraction there was no simple, defined word to be used for a title of the containing volume so he titled the work Metaphysis, which simply means 'after physis'. Metaphysis, in our terms Metaphysics, naturally included a discourse on the topic of the highest abstraction: theology.

Aristotle, who was submerged in a society imbibed with the Greek gods that were not looked upon with the same devotional eye as our contemporary God, was little concerned with human involvement with a deity or the reverse. He was a product of a social and cerebral environment that looked at both sides. Centuries prior to this man, a theologically centered milieu existed but it had given way to a new approach. While there certainly had been some even earlier initial groundwork, this new approach, generally attributed to Thales (c. 624 BCE - c. 546 BCE) an early Sixth Century BC thinker, can be identified with natural causality. The motivation was likely the frustration found in trying to explain everything by reference to a deity or deities, an approach that tends to lead into an intellectually unsatisfying dead end and mythological musings. It is interesting to note that Thales was a contemporary of the self-absorbed Jews caught up in their Babylonian captivity.

If one looks around every sensible thing seems to have a beginning and an end. This seemingly finiteness appeared to be the way of nature and so the natural world must have some unexplainable beginning. Aristotle was not interested in engaging in such conjecture and unsubstantiated explanations that accompany such; his focus was on unbiased understanding. That is the approach we are about to undertake and we ask our readers to place their prejudices in suspended animation. As I have indicated, to draw the larger picture we need to draw on numerous academic disciplines, and while I would like to transfer to the reader, in full, even my mediocre understanding of all these subjects I realize that it is probably not possible in a short tome. Far be it for me to portray my self as an expert in any of these topics except perhaps in the field of Physics. And not even in all areas of Physics, my PhD is in Classical/Atmospheric Physics so my expertise in the areas we are about to explore is limited. As I might expect some to defer to me in my area, I do defer and respect the knowledge base that others have in the other disciplines to be used in this book. Even though I have drawn on these experts I likewise do not expect every reader to accept everything or anything presented as truth. Thus this book might be viewed as a challenge offered by me to the reader. The challenge is to evaluate everything that is presented in a unbiased manner using authoritative sources to verify the information that is offered and draw your own conclusions but only after all the evidence is in. Use our references or find your own and then draw your own conclusions. We will be offering our judgments as well as our comments and assessments throughout the text not in expectation of your acceptance but rather as a possible alternate viewpoint. You will find us critical, but criticism is not bad when it is used as an assessment tool, it should not be offensive unless it is demeaning.

To adequately travel the road we intend will require delving into a number of diverse topics. To aptly cover each topical area in the manner it deserves would require a library not a single text, thus it is hoped that the synopsis of each as presented here is of sufficient detail to allow the reader to understand the critical points. The library is available to assist in repairing any faults left by the author.

<< The Long View of History >>

"Today we view religion as something esoteric, outside the bounds of everyday life – something extraordinary and somehow concerned with the ultimate reality; but for our ancestors in the beginning and throughout our agrarian history nothing was more real than the vicissitudes of everyday life, nothing more real than the continued fertility of the fields, the beasts and humans – for them it was a matter of life and death. " William G. Dever [Dever]

In 1779 Edward Gibbon published the first volume of his seminal work, The History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. That work provided a particular prospective on an approximate 800-year period that included the age that was once referred to as the Dark Ages but more recently and more appropriately termed Late Antiquity. The underlying premise of Gibbons work was that the long lived Roman Empire collapsed under pressures primarily induced by barbarian intrusions and that those incursions were precipitated by the growth of decadence within the Empire itself. That premise was the accepted view that, for over 150 years, infiltrated the story taught to generations of history students. Gibbons was working from available sources, primarily a group of writers known as Roman Moralists writing in the 4th and 5th centuries CE, i.e. during and just after the collapse of the western portion of the Roman Empire. Since these sources were contemporary to the 'Fall' one might suspect, as did Gibbons, that their information was incontrovertibly valid. However, since the 1940's historians have studied a wider variety of sources and have modified the view of that period. The current sentiment [Harl] is that the Roman Empire's Fall was not in utter collapse enabling invading barbarians used to overcome the former impenetrable Roman fortress, rather the loss of Roman hegemony was a gradual process, a modification, initiated by the Romans themselves through their admission of barbarian cultures and their gradual assimilation into the empire. These new peoples had readily adopted many of the empire's values but as time progressed and their assimilation neared completion their values were naturally viewed through and altered by a set of very different cultural lenses, lenses that were molded in past generations, a past with a different focus. It will be seen, that for the most part, the invaders were not the uneducated, unsophisticated warrior bands who destroyed the Roman culture with their barbarian ways; rather that these barbarians were amply sophisticated and had already accepted the Roman way including one form or another of a Christian religiosity to which the once pagan empire had itself succumbed [Heather].

Much in the way that the additional information changed the impression and beliefs that were harbored with respect to the Roman Empire, it seems it is time for a similar review and alteration of the religious mores that have lurked in the background of the cultural evolution; and have been a part of the cultural fabric of every place touched by the European expansion or more widely by monotheism. As with Gibbon's History our perspective is still tainted by sources that are perhaps too biased. A bias that could hide or, at least, incorrectly shade the results that we derive. And while religious views are highly personal they are still convictions based on information and if that information is prejudiced, false or perhaps merely myth-derived then there is the danger that one has beliefs that do not correctly reflect on-the-ground reality. If those beliefs are personal, there may be little social harm, but we have too often witnessed the negative effects of social mores derived from conviction-based religion. Mores so developed tend to be more rigid and far less amenable to modification. The reason for this will be explored. More importantly such conditions have led to intolerable behavior, to wit: inquisitions, mass murder, etc. This may seem to be an unwarranted indictment, but it is not meant to be unfair. Rather it is meant to be, as in a court of law, an accusation that requires support and a defense. This book is written as the support of that indictment and it will be up to the reader to supply the defense. Once again as in a court of law the judge and jury must, without prejudice, listen to and absorb the prosecution's information before the defense has its turn. We can only hope that the reader will follow similar guidelines.

Religious mores are complicated, more complicated than the way in which we tend to approach them, learn them or form our strong beliefs. As with all convictions there are a myriad of factors contributing to the result, but we rarely review those factors and since religion is such an intimate part of the culture in which we are immersed that it seems 'natural' it is important that such a review takes place. For the average person religious studies tend to be focused on the tenets of a given set of religious beliefs - an indoctrination. Rarely are contrasting views presented and when they are opposing views, are unfairly denigrated to a point where rational choice is removed. Religion, or the history of religion in general, is more a story of the events surrounding the defense of such tenets. This is much different from the way in which we study other topics that affect our lives, Science, for example. We will discuss the scientific method in the course of this book. This is not to say that there are not scholarly studies that approach religion in much the same manner as a science confronts a problem e.g. [Hick][Smith]. It is for the 'layman' that the studying of religion is different. The intent of this book is to provide the layman with a somewhat dispassionate, pseudo-scholarly study of religion and philosophy, with a particular focus on the western monotheism. While we do not claim to be a scholar, the text is, in any case, written in an attempt at pedagogy.

A proper review of religion does include a review of its basic tenets. But more than that, it requires that the foundations of the belief structure be investigated and most importantly viewed with a relativistic, detached perspective. Thus the review, as we will approach it in this book, will encompass a historical review, of both monotheism, in general, but also Islam and Christianity; a philosophical review; a study of the psychology of religion; and of how the beliefs that form the basis of western monotheism squares with the development of 'other knowledge' known generally as science (in reality philosophy).

There are two opposing arguments that one seems to encounter when discussing science and religion. In the first, one argues that religion and science are comfortable bedfellows, while some argue that science and religion are incompatible, or as the evolutionary biologist and science historian Stephen Jay Gould termed it: members of different magisterium [Gould]- that is, they exist in different realms of authority. I argue that the former is more the truth than the later. The crucial issue is, for the average human mind, they coexist in the same head, inside the same realm. And while the issue is confusing, they are as incompatible as the two Latin terms that define their basis: religion is a priori² based and science is a posteriori based. This seems to indicate that in order to remove the conflict, once and forever, one or the other must be removed from the human realm. Realistically the question comes down to should we throw science and all the advancements it has provided to the wolves? Likely not, but can we then safely put religion on the shelf along with all the ashes of past lives and at each glance as we proceed into the future reverentially bow our heads as a gesture of acknowledgment to our ancestors, a 'good shot, ole man'- nice try.

The confusion is not a dilemma introduced by the advent of modern science rather it is a problem introduced by the lack of knowledge and an early and continuous attempt of man to devise answers without sufficient scientia- knowledge. Such attempts should not be the subject of derision. Rather they should be a clarion call for inspection and correction, for that is indeed the trail that has been so successful in advancing knowledge on other topics. Philosophy's cosmological argument, first attributed to Aristotle in the 4th century BCE, but more famously used by Thomas Aquinas in the middle Ages, is a case in point. Before one can see the source of the confusion it is necessary to note the difference between two similar but different words of Greek origin. Cosmology is the study of the every thing related to the Universe and by extension the role of humans in it. Cosmogony, on the other hand, is a theory on how the Universe came into being. Aristotle's issue anticipated Isaac Newton's laws of motion by indicating that the Universe, notably in non-linear motion, must have had a 'Prime or Unmoved Mover' to initiate that motion³– he was of the mind that the Universe had always existed so, for him, there was no need for a creator. For Aristotle it was purely a matter of physics⁴ (i.e. nature), unrelated to the human question. Aquinas, a great intellectual in his own right, extended an argument first advanced by another major philosopher, Avicenna (c. 930-1037) a noteworthy Islamic thinker, that the Universe required more than a Prime Mover- it needed a creator, thereby conflating the issues. The extension is natural since it might be argued that cosmogony is a subset of cosmology, but Aquinas' argument was strictly an issue of cosmogony, not cosmology yet the explanation attributed to Aquinas is referred to as the Cosmological Argument. The difference is subtle but the issue was gigantic. Aquinas was using theory (theory in the small sense, a premise) to prove another premise -the classic a priori approach. A premise he certainly thought was a conclusion – that there is a higher being responsible for creation- it becomes a circular argument. That is the reason it is uniformly rejected in philosophical circles today. We will explore such subtleties and the confusion they continue to inject into today's dialog between the advocates of religion and science.

For the modern Christian, regardless of sect, but primarily those caught up in the newest wave of fundamentalism, another significant source of the confusion is complicated in the inability to remove their focus from the Bible. This incapacity, rooted in in-scientia, perhaps fortified by stubbornness, or maybe by fear, creates an environment in which misuse and misinformation abound e.g. see [Miller] Only a Theory. It is with this point in mind that this treatise will carefully define words that the author feels may be misconstrued.

Islam and Judaism have their own variety of fundamentalism and prejudices that, in the same manner, inhibits intellectual growth. Islam's issue is the same as the Christianity's: the inability to rationally review and reject or modify founding principles. Judaism’s similar issue is fortified by a xenophobic attitude. An attitude of superiority that created a cultural impasse that periodically leads to other cultures' need to eliminate the rawness that the attitude invokes⁵.

Some Groundwork

The history of man is a narrative of general advancement and growth, and despite the struggles, a somewhat uplifting and happy tale. In an earlier time, the stories were passed on from generation to generation verbally and as with any such method of transmission the storyteller imbues the tale with his own character, his own bias, ideas and prejudice and may even tailor it to fit the audience. We are all familiar with the child's game of secrets. A story is told in secret from one child to the next and within a short time the content and the meaning of the story can and inevitably does change. If this did not happen it would not be a fun game. Such games are illustrative of events that happen in the adult world. This progression from game to reality is sometimes even more amusing when adults, with a serious intent of not falling into the 'trap', engage in transfer of information by word of mouth. One simply has to attend a courtroom in any country in the world and listen to the reports from different eyewitnesses to the same event. In many cases, a listener may wonder if the 'witnesses' were recounting the same incident, and perhaps even be curious to know if these reporters were even in the same country at the time of the incident. It is a well-established part of human nature, and an important factor that has contributed to necessary diversity for the human species to grow and survive that we not be automatons. But the importance and the dangers of this characteristic must be viewed with some level of concern. It is in that interest that this book is directed. Before we can adequately address the primary issue there is a considerable amount of background information that must be laid out. A fair treatment of religion, be it critical or supportive, must be dispassionate and complete.

As a scientist I feel comfortable with another method of attacking a problem or issue – the scientific method which will be addressed in further detail in Chapter 5, Suffice it to say, this method requires that one understand all that has gone before, that it be placed in the proper context and that the proper emphasis has been ascribed to it, and that the appropriate attachments be applied at the proper time. While we will find that ignorance or bias did ill-inform some great scientists⁶ and other thinkers⁷ it did not entirely stymie their contributions- nobody is perfect. I must add that any bias be entirely mitigated. The approach in this book is an effort to achieve, in a minimal sense, that methodology. We are addressing and attempting to understand faith in a deity and we are going to dissect it much in the same manner that it came natural to me over the past six decades but not necessarily in the same order or with the same emphasis. Needless to say that this then is a very personal book, but I hope that I can keep my scientist's demeanor sufficient to remove any personal bias and present a cold-eyed view of the dangerous trajectory that the continuation of our current strains of faith have on mankind. We will be using many terms which have different meanings to various people therefore the reader will find we provide some definitions of words and terms as we proceed.

I indicated that the history of mankind has been a tale of advancement and that is true in all but one area. That area is the one of decisive importance: the quest for understanding, what we call, the immortal questions. Why do humans inhabit the Earth? How did we get here? What is our purpose for being? What happens when we die? It is the natural inquisitiveness of the human species that has allowed us to progress in so many arenas, but the toughest questions of all seem to have relegated man to remain somewhere near the darkness of prehistoric times. We are not going to attempt to shine light on that darkness, but simply try to understand it in terms that are more appropriate to the 21st century rather than terms that are better suited to a person living in the time of, say, the Hittites. To do this we need to examine how it all started and what paths we took. A truly comprehensive attempt at such an examination would in the truest sense 'take a lifetime' and require an encyclopedic mind. One approach to mitigating this problem is to compare a theoretical encyclopedia, in snapshot form at different but crucial points in history. To do this we will choose (1) 165BCE, (2) 476CE, (3) 1274CE, (4) 1546CE, (5) 1727CE, (6) 1791CE. Any person somewhat knowledgeable of the history and with a different focus could choose a different 'arbitrary' set of dates and may recognize the dates we have chosen as

(1) Approximate date of the penning of the Biblical Book of Daniel;

(2) The approximate date of the death of Romulus Augustus- the last Western Roman Emperor;

(3) The death of Thomas Aquinas;

(4) The death of Martin Luther;

(5) The death of Isaac Newton;

(6) The signing of the Polish-Lithuanian Constitution- significant as a marker for the Age of Enlightenment.

We choose these dates because they coincide with significant shifts in the emphasis and thinking in the western mind. While the stress is on the western mind it might not be surprising that some of these dates provide an approximation to the time of shifts in other parts of the world as well. If not tied, a close inspection of other societies would reveal a similar set of transition points occurring at different times. We might also note that as the history of man advances the dates of significant shifts become closer.

165 BCE⁸ (Book of Daniel)

Background: The planet had already endured a number of significant geographic, climatic and species changes. On the Eurasian land mass humans had already domesticated the plants and animals that would be familiar to any 20th Century earthling. The resulting agricultural revolution already 9-10 millennia in the past had permitted evolution from a hunter-gatherer clan-like society to various civilizations that would effectively define much of human history. A goodly portion of the world is already populated with a number of ancient and diverse cultures some settled and some remaining nomadic. At this time, Eastern Asia which likely supplied the earlier groups who (1) explored, settled and then ventured out again on island hopping excursions across the Pacific and (2) braved and adapted to the harshness of the far north to settle the continents of North and South America and (3) supplied periodic waves of nomadic tribes that provided for a massive diversification and melding of peoples over Eurasia.

Civics: The dominant form or government had developed from a tribal-chief into a shifting monarch/emperor/dictator type. China had its dynastic emperors, the nomadic tribes of the Asian steppes had their local chieftains and warlords sometimes alternately dominated by 'super-chiefs' or Khans. India had been dominated by a succession of rulers who originated from outside its borders with most coming from the central steppes of Asia. The earliest known invading group were the Aryans who originated from an earlier group that contributed peoples and language which are ancestral to most of the current inhabitants of Europe and south-central Asia. In the region to the east of India, Persia and many other empires, most, derivatives of the Aryans have alternately dominated one another – a rise and fall of various civilization centers being the norm. India, Persia, south-central and south-west