Some Quibbles about Terminology Used by My Fellow Freethinkers
I don't typically describe myself as a humanist (though I am extremely fond of humanists and consider
them my mates, as the Aussies say) because I don't much like the term's connotations of
anthropocentrism. In my pantheon of heroes, Charles Darwin looms, I think, largest for his explication of
part of the mechanism that underlies the continuity of all living things, and I much prefer to think of
myself as a member of one of the species of great apes and as sharing kinship with the bonobo and the
so-called “Greater” chimpanzee.
Years ago, I wrote part of a health textbook that was kept off the adoption list in Texas because it
contained the line "Humans and other mammals lactate." The good folk of the Texas adoption committee
didn't like the reference to the bodily function of lactation, but what really disturbed them was that we
had dared to call humans mammals. They were clinging, of course, to the quite medieval notion that
there were animals below, angels above, and humans, an order apart, somewhere in-between, and the
term humanist strikes me as reminiscent of that view that we are somehow different in kind from other
living things. It is extremely important, I think, for us to recognize that we are animals, that we are
products of our evolutionary histories, that we share many, many continuities of morphology, behavior,
and cognitive function with other animals. Our anthropocentrism has been a source of horrific bias in the
sciences that has caused us to fail to recognize similarities with other creatures that ought to have been
glaringly obvious. We are just beginning to figure this out.
I also do not describe myself as an atheist, for that term means someone who doesn't believe in a god or
gods. My problem, there, is that I cannot for the life of me define the term god satisfactorily enough to
make the term intelligible. What, exactly, do we mean by that term? Do we mean an immortal being?
Well, according to that definition, Thor and Odin are not gods, for according to Norse mythology, they die
in the great cataclysm of Ragnorak. Do we mean a being capable of creating a universe? Well, according
to that definition, our descendents might well become gods, for the great MIT cosmologist Alan Guth,
author of the Inflation Theory, suggests that with sufficient energy and technological development, we
shall eventually be able to exploit zero-point energy to create parallel universes—to create, ourselves,
events similar to the Big Bang. Do we mean a being capable of reading our thoughts? Well, again, our
descendents may become just such entities, for we are already building brain-computer interfaces,
opening up the prospect of eventual development of the technological means to bridge the ontological
gap between subjectivities, of not only the "reading" but also the "sharing" of minds. Of course, lots of
terms describe ill-defined sets (e.g., games, poems), but we try to have our philosophical and scientific
terms be well-defined, and I find doing this with the term god extremely difficult. What is it, precisely,
that I am not supposed to believe in? We could go down a list, I suppose. Do you believe in Marduk? No.
In Hathor? No. In Loki? No. In White Buffalo Woman? (No, but I like the story a lot.) But, even after I
had exhausted that long, long, long list of deities I might deny belief in, there would be the additional
requirement that I disbelieve in possible entities of a kind that I cannot accurately describe. That’s one
problem that I have with the term atheist. Here’s another:
The universe is ancient and quite probably filled with lifeforms that have long since passed through what
we are calling the singularity, and as Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
from magic. Are there entities in the universe who have long since merged with one another and with
their technologies, conquered death, instantiated their beings/programs in self-replicating nanofogs and
become capable of changing their forms (like Proteus) at will? I cannot answer this question with a
definitive no, but these are certainly characteristics long associated with gods and are certainly
reasonable extrapolations from current technologies.
It is clear enough, of course, where the particular gods believed in by our fellow apes came from. These
are just-so stories from the infancy of our species, and it's difficult to imagine how anyone, today, who is
at all educated can continue to take them seriously, given what we know of these stories, their contents
and historical contexts. Freud was onto something (though he got the particulars wrong) when he
thought of those gods as projections, as bits and pieces of our own psychic lives externalized and writ
large: like us but more so.
Here's how I put it: The gods (dreamed up by our fellow apes) are dreams of what we might be.
And heavens are what we might create. The beauty and the burden of freethinking is that it returns the
responsibility to us.
It's often said by atheists and humanists that the universe is not teleological, that it is not purposeful,
that things happen "by accident" as opposed to "by design." But from the moment that nature gave rise
to mind, there was design. We creatures with nervous systems of sufficient complexity to be both
purposeful and aware of our being purposeful are purely natural phenomena but are also designers, so it
is not the case that nature is not purposeful. We are existence proofs of the fact that natural phenomena
can be purposeful designers. We are natural phenomena that are also designers. So, yes, nature can be
teleological.
Years ago, I taught for a while in a Catholic girls' school. The head hood, the nun who ran the school,
Sister Theresa Marie, saw me, one day, carrying around a copy of Pierre Theilhard de Chardin's The
Phenomenon of Man. She said, "I've always wanted to read that."
I said, "I'll be happy to loan it to you when I'm done."
She said, "No. Thank you. But I am not allowed to read it."
"Not allowed?"
"No. It's on the Index."
In other words, it was a book that the Church would not allow her to read.
One expects this kind of thing from a religion that has as its foundational myth the sinfulness of eating
from the tree of knowledge.
Here's why Sister Theresa Marie wasn't allowed to read that book: Chardin, who was both a Jesuit priest
and a paleoanthropologist, had this notion that the universe evolves toward godhead. By means of blind,
random forces, mind emerges, and mind becomes increasingly more sophisticated. And eventually, what
it is capable of is indistinguishable from magic. At first, one process was at work: evolution. And evolution
is, of course, a completely natural process. But then evolution produced physical systems capable of
design, and we entered stage two, also a working out of natural processes. And then, if we survive that,
something truly remarkable happens: we are at the very beginning of uniting evolution with
design and starting to design ourselves, to alter our own genomes and to merge with our
technological prosthetics. This is an altogether unprecedented occurrence here on planet Earth, though
possibly the same has happened again and again elsewhere. If we figure out how to continue in that
direction, the positive feedback loop of the designed doing the designing is going to lead to
developments far beyond the imaginings of any writers of science fiction.
In fact, science fiction is becoming increasingly difficult to write because our actual science,
today, is far weirder than are the imaginations of science fiction writers.
A skeptic must by definition, I think, be skeptical about claims regarding what cannot happen as
a result of such a process. That's why I call myself not an atheist but an ignostic. Certainly, I know
that the silly stories told by our ancestors are untrue. It's child's play to figure that out. But a very
important part of skepticism is knowing what you don't know. I have no idea what's out there in the
multiverse or what we might become. But I fully expect the unexpected.
I suspect that Chardin was onto something.
Bob Shepherd