The Big Picture

We believe our laws, morals and values are what separate us from the rest of life in general and particularly from other primates - those are the attributes that make us special. But what is really special is our capacity to speak of them. As it says in the bible’s New Testament, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Indeed, the word, language, was the beginning of our coming out of our naturally embodied selves and coming to consciously create ourselves as cultural constructs. And all of our “gods” reside at the pinnacle of those mental monuments, whatever the culture.

Another attribute that totally separates us from the rest of life is the domestication of fire, which it seems to me, is related to our acquisition of speech. The use of fire was most likely developed before the development of what can truly be called a spoken language. Hominids certainly always had the ability to connect certain sounds with objects in the rudimentary way other species do, but sitting around camp fires surely provided a fertile environment within which to begin to expand on our use of sounds as a means of identifying things, giving expression to our feelings and thoughts and developing greater communication skills, thus increasing survivability. And all this would have gone hand in hand with increased brain activity.

The infinitesimal changes in verbal perspicacity along with alterations in the apparatus for vocalizations took place over long periods of time and could have been selected for within groups through the mutual attraction of those displaying greater verbal ability.

I also suspect that sitting around campfires and staring into the flames night after night for hours at a time affected the wiring of our brains. Perhaps connecting more synapses in novel ways. Certainly the frenetically dancing flames would have produced a much more mild effect than the rapid flashing of light from the video that caused seizures to occur in some Japanese children, but nonetheless mind altering in the long run. Though short term some primitives were probably driven to distraction by intensely gazing into the flickering fire.

Now, it’s interesting to note here that overcoming our nature is touted to be of great value in the civilized world where it is thought we must be trained and disciplined to develop that unnatural ability – our will power comes from some other realm than the physical one. However, in the domestication of fire primitive hominids would have had to overcome their nature in order to accomplish that feat. They had to conquer their inherent fear of fire without benefit of civilized training methods. Overcoming our nature, then, must come naturally to us.

Speech certainly fostered the view of ourselves as being in touch with something other than the physical realm. Giving voice to our thoughts seems a magical thing. If the chimps of Gombe had had language the innate laws that instructed their behavior with respect to the cannibalism of Passion discussed earlier would most likely have been formulated and articulated by one or two dominant males by virtue of their overall interest in community affairs. But they would not have had a clue as to how the laws happened to occur to them. Conscious thoughts seem to appear out of nowhere. Thoughts are the spirit of the brain. Upon hearing the newly formulated laws offered by the alpha males the other chimps of the community would have readily accepted them as absolute truth because the spoken laws were already part and parcel of their innate unconscious instructional program and they would have been in awe of the speaker’s wisdom. They would have wondered where such wisdom could possibly have come from and even though the laws were actually revelations of their own natures they would have appeared to have some other origin and credit for the laws would have been given to some higher source. And thus it was with respect to the human condition.

For example, humans obey the incest tabu as do chimpanzees. That is, not perfectly, but generally. There is something innate in both species that rules out members of one’s immediate family for sexual partnering and directs them both to seek out partners who are unrelated. The only difference between humans and chimps here is that the former can speak of the tabu and express it abstractly as law. If chimps could speak they would give voice to the tabu as well. And, like the chimps, humans were obeying that tabu long before it was ever spoken. We had employed the same unspoken rule throughout our wordless existence.

When the incest tabu was first spoken of it surely struck a chord in those who heard it, connecting as it did with a rule already operating within them, and the speaker was probably thought of as very wise indeed. Again, no one had a clue as to where such wisdom could come from. The impact was such that the now spoken tabu was thought to be of some mysterious origin and took on the aura of otherworldliness - it must be an inspiration from above!

The advent of spoken language, then, changed the perception of ourselves and opened the door to the eventuality of discounting our innate judgments about how to behave as a member of a community and overvalue pronouncements by certain authority figures. The members of a primitive group of hunter/gatherer/scavengers were not instructed by anything other than their own instinct and intelligence about how to best behave with respect to one another and maintain cohesiveness amongst themselves. It was something they just knew according to an immutable law of existence – respect those who you depend on for your survival. Every ‘thou shalt not’ of the ten commandments is an admonition against that which would otherwise bring about volatile, unstable conditions among tribal or community members. Moses needed to instruct those in his charge with commandments because as newly emancipated slaves they felt no constraints on their instincts and desires in the sudden freedom that set them loose. As slaves they had not had the opportunity to exercise their own judgment about how to behave. Nor did they have the experience of trekking through the wilderness as a close-knit group. The commandments were to serve as the catalyst that was once provided naturally by the laws of survival.

Chimps form cohesive communities without benefit of spoken or written laws. A chimp knows not to kill and eat another chimp that is a member of its own community. That is not something a chimp is taught, it is something a chimp just knows. At the same time a chimp knows that cannibalizing chimps from other communities is an acceptable practice. Human tribes that have practiced cannibalism operated under the same set of laws. Even the laws of our civilizations are not absolute in these matters. We say that cannibalism is universally wrong but do not condemn those who are forced to engage in it as a matter of survival. Our law against killing also has exceptions. In a primitive sense we might say that, while it is wrong to kill a member of one’s own tribe, to kill a member of an enemy tribe is permissible. The value judgments of chimps and humans are quite similar here and one must conclude that they are formed from a comparable template. They are not commandments from a supernatural God but judgments of survival formed from the network of natural intelligence.

Verbalizing our thoughts, feelings and perceptions elevated them into a new sphere of cultural space. It actually created that space. Such verbalization gave us a way of fossilizing our past with an oral history that was passed on from one generation to the next. We could also plan for the future. No longer trapped in the present and merely existing moment to moment we began living in a conscious continuum between past and future. We could pay homage to our ancestors who we began to mythologize as godlike. And along with our mastery of fire, language provided the means with which to develop greater survival stratagems.

As noted before, a primitive group was ordered through its shared instincts and its common goal of survival. Before spoken language our instincts and feelings informed and instructed our behavior as nameless subterranean stimulants. The stimulants and the resulting behavior were universal allowing the group to behave as a single organism. For instance, sources of nourishment were attractive while the prospect of becoming nourishment for a predator was repulsive. Hunger attracted us toward food and fear repelled us away from predators.

When our emotions and instincts were assigned names as a consequence of the development of language they were freed from the cage between our ribs and became symbolized, objectified, rarified. Expressing one’s hunger was not the same as one’s hunger. A new self-awareness was born. And the new space that we occupied began to give us a feeling of being other than earth-bound creatures. Language brought us out of ourselves and made the creation of elaborate fantasy worlds possible - worlds that we found more attractive to identify with than the one we were forced to survive in.

Before language we merely felt hunger. It was something that willed us to get food. With language we were able to say, ‘I want food’ as though it was a desire created out of one’s own consciousness. Something that was self-willed. Transposing instincts and feelings on to the idea of self was the first step along the way to the concept of a soul.

But, what about a feeling such as guilt, which seems to have no rootedness in the real world and is believed to be divinely inspired? It is a feeling of moral censure that seems imposed on us from above. How could such an emotion arise out of our base natures? How is it that our conscience can bother us even though our questionable deeds might only be known to us? And even the mere contemplation of doing wrong can bring guilty feelings upon us. A religious explanation is that God knows what we are planning to do as well as what we have done and He torments us with a feeling of guilt.

However, in reality guilt is basically the fear of exile that has been part of our psyches throughout our existence. In primitive groups one did not want to do anything to provoke the wrath of the tribe and risk being exiled. To be banished from one’s group for some egregious transgression was the worst possible fate that one could suffer. Trying to survive in the wild on one’s own was not a pleasant prospect. It was most certainly a death sentence. To remain a member in good standing of one’s group was paramount. The fear of exile was the other side of one’s inexorable need to belong to one’s group. Committing some dastardly deed in secret was no safeguard against the worry that you might eventually be found out and consequently banished by your peers. Thinking about the consequences of a misdeed and imagining what would happen if it were known can be co-opted by the idea of all-knowing gods sitting in judgment upon us. If we disobey the laws or commandments we will be exiled for all eternity

Religions, such as Catholicism, use the threat of excommunication and eternal damnation to exploit our deep-rooted fear of exile in order to bind individuals to their particular group. Law enforcement exploits that fear with the threat of imprisonment, which is a form of exile. Totalitarian regimes ruthlessly exploit it to control their populations.

So, as we can see, all our belief systems stem from the interplay between our natures and the natural world. This is the worldview of naturalism and it is one that many will tend to reject out of hand, though they would be hard put to argue effectively against it. In The Nature of Economies, Jane Jacobs integrates the workings of economic systems with natural systems and in her foreword she reflects on the difficulty people have accepting naturalism. She writes, “…the basic premise on which the book is constructed is that human beings exist wholly within nature as part of natural order in every respect. To accept this unity seems to be difficult for those ecologists who assume – as many do in understandable anger and despair – that the human species is an interloper in the natural order of things. Neither is this unity easily accepted by economists, industrialists, politicians, and others who assume – as many do, taking understandable pride in human achievements – that reason, knowledge and determination make it possible for human beings to circumvent and outdo the natural order. Readers unwilling or unable to breach a barrier that they imagine separates humankind and its works from the rest of nature will be unable to hear what this book is saying.”

The belief that we can outdo the natural order will be our undoing as it has been the undoing for various civilizations throughout history from the city of Ur onward.

And for all our divine civilized conceits it is a primitive tribal mentality that informs and instructs our habit of grouping into various factions that ferociously compete with one another all over the world. These factions, or tribes, seek to eliminate all rivals, each one believing that they must be the last tribe standing. They are ostensibly informed of their exalted view of themselves from worlds beyond this one. But it is merely a primitive tribalism that is at work here and they vie for ascendancy at the expense of honoring a sensible orderliness that would well serve everyone.

We get carried away with the natural tendency to be a dedicated member of a tribal faction while believing we are acting in accordance with divine principles. Tribalism is what rules the world while we believe it is mysticism.

Cultural evolution and the problems created in the transition from living in the wild to living in more and more developed societies is artfully depicted in the biblical story of Genesis. In the Garden of Eden everything was provided for by God/Nature. Food was there for the taking and Adam and Eve lived in harmony as one with the world around them. They can be seen as representing a band of primitive hunter/gatherers.

When Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge they presumably see into the workings of the natural world and figure out, among other things, the connection between the fruit and its seeds. Thus, their perspective of the natural world becomes objectified. This serves to disconnect them from nature. They feel naked in their newfound separateness, their own differences become consciously heightened and they find it necessary to cover themselves. Thus, Eden ends.

Along come Cain and Abel and, instead of God/Nature providing for them, they become the providers and are held accountable as individuals for what they contribute. One is a shepherd and the other a farmer. Abel is successful while Cain is a failure. Abel is held in esteem while Cain is not. Cain feels himself isolated, severed from his clan and through his perceived ostracism Abel is seen as the cause of his suffering, his alienation. Abel becomes his enemy and Cain’s killer instinct, heretofore reserved for the hunt and enemy bands, is allowed to lash out at his own brother. Cain kills Abel.

In a primitive band one did not regard oneself as an individual separate from one’s group. It was all about the group. There were no titles or positions that separated members, one from the other. One’s identity, along with everyone else’s, was as a member of the group. There were no stark differences between any two members. Once they became tillers of the soil and keepers of sheep, however, totally separate identities were created, as there were with Cain and Abel. A chasm was created between the two brothers that only widened by judging them as separate individuals.

Also, when hunter/gatherers became shepherds and farmers they felt that they were more in charge of nature and, thus, they became separated from it. Or to put it another way they became more God-like. After Adam eats the forbidden fruit God says to him, “the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.” In gaining mastery over nature one enters a new territory, new vistas open up presenting new opportunities, which are good, along with new horrors, which are evil. The opportunity for technological advancements like farming and ranching and the horror of a brother killing a brother, for example. Furthermore, patriarchy came to the fore as tribal people became more self-sufficient. God says to Eve on her exit from Eden, “…he (Adam) shall rule over thee.”

The story of Genesis continues and after a lot of biblical begetting took place there came the Great Flood, which was symbolic of another great change in the development of civilization. The flood was a way of portraying the dramatic transition from settled tribal communities into the next stage of human social evolution. The old way of life, rendered extinct, was wiped out as the future belonged to outstanding individuals, like Noah. Men with vision who could see what others could not. Men who could set the world on a new course and lead the coming generations onto the formation of cities and nation states. For not long after the flood the Bible speaks of kingdoms, cities and nations. The descendants of Noah say, 11 4 “…let us build us a city” and 10 32 states that “…the families of the sons of Noah…by these were the nations divided.” The new era of cities and nations could hardly have been warranted by the small number of people that had been produced by the few survivors after the flood - which, again, points to the symbolic nature of the biblical flood.

It’s also interesting to note that this new era was accompanied by a horrendous act of depravity, as was the transition from Eden. First it was a brother killing his brother and then it was a son defiling his father - Noah got drunk and fell asleep naked in his tent. His son, Ham, went into the tent and when Noah awoke he, “…knew what his younger son had done unto him.” So, every advance of civilization brings new troubles of its own. The Biblical troubles indicate the breaking of the bonds that held people together and that is in keeping with the development of larger and larger societies where dynamics shift and forces come into play that can form a wedge between traditional family and communal ties. Competition between brothers and generation gaps, for example.

Religion provided explanations of things and events that could not be knowledgeably explained. What was to account for human progress? How did we go from living in huts to building great cities and nations? And why all the trouble and strife that accompanied our progress? In ancient times there were no real answers to those questions as well as to other questions whose answers were unfathomable in terms of what we knew about ourselves and the world around us. From the very beginnings of our conscious awareness we felt strange relative to other life forms and we looked for explanations of our existence in other realms that we believed were supernatural. In longing for answers to fundamental questions about our existence admitting ignorance was not an option and, so, we found satisfaction through our creative imaginations. We provided answers to the great existential questions - Where did we come from? Why are we here? and What happens to us when we die? - by inventing Gods and Goddesses that were instrumental in our origins, lives and ultimate fate. In this way we try to convince ourselves that we are not strange, we are special.

So, as we saw in the last post, primates in their natural state are quite capable of making moral judgments about what is appropriate behavior and what is not without any moral authority above them in either this or some other world. And so it is with the primate Homo sapiens.

The idea of human nature being a problem or being inherently immoral is an idea born of civilizations where human nature must be molded by an artificial environment - that is, made subject to rules and regulations designed to benefit an impersonal state.

The state employs religion, with supposed connections to a world beyond, from where it claims to receive its authority to impose “oughts” and “thou shalt nots” that are believed to be contrary to human nature. The state, it is believed, has to make laws to save us from our natural selves. In The Moral Animal Robert Wright states that we should not care “…whether murder, robbery and rape are in some sense ‘natural’. It is for us to decide how abhorrent we find such things and how hard we want to fight them.” According to Wright, then, the crimes are natural and our abhorrence and opposition to them is unnaturally arrived at.

It’s clear, of course, that Wright supposes that only the human animal is capable of opposing conduct that is “…in some sense ‘natural’…” and so it is a safe bet to elevate any condemnation of it to something supernaturally arrived at - or arrived at through purely cultural means, which is virtually the same thing. But Wright’s suppositions are contradicted by the way in which the chimpanzees of Gombe opposed the abhorrent behavior of one of their number. So, it is perfectly natural to oppose abhorrent behavior. This contradicts what is known in philosophy as the naturalistic fallacy which states that nature cannot be the basis for how we ought to behave.

It was nature after all that informed and instructed primitives as to how to behave in order to survive. We know that must be true for there was no other institution to guide them. The literature on this subject can be confusing, however. For example, there are some curious statements to be found concerning the conduct of primitive people toward one another in Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. He writes, “…long-term information about band and tribal societies reveals that murder is a leading cause of death.” while a few pages prior to that he explains how conflicts between two people in a tribe are peacefully resolved, “…any two villagers getting into an argument will share many kin, who apply pressure on them to keep it from becoming violent.”

In The Moral Animal, Robert Wright states that, “Men have long competed for access to the scarcer sexual resource, women. And the costs of losing the contest are so high (genetic oblivion) that natural selection has inclined them to compete with special ferocity.”

However, in a documentary film of the Amazonian Yanomamo tribe, a male, who happened to be mate-less and childless, did not have to compete with the other males to obtain a female for himself. The tribes’ people arrived at a more “civilized” solution. The lone male was welcomed by a couple that gave him the opportunity to become a father. The male member of the couple stepped aside to allow the other male sole access to his wife until the child of the other male was born. Such a solution speaks to a powerful ethos at work to preserve tribal harmony over all.

We know from extensive documentation that primitive bands and tribes in places like the Amazon, New Guinea, Africa and Australia were not unruly bunches of savages without a clue as to how to maintain an orderly existence for themselves. On the contrary, members of bands and tribes formed ordered, cohesive groups within which, for the most part, everyone got along with everyone else. Even without the documentation it would stand to reason that primitives did not habitually engage in anti-social behavior within their groups. For, if that were the case, they could not have existed in perpetuity.

Both Diamond and Wright indicate that the real trouble is found in more developed societies. Diamond put it something like this - after tribes came chiefdoms where a more authoritarian leader became necessary as larger societies contained more and more people who were strangers and had to be held accountable to a central authority since the intervention of kin could no longer be relied upon to diffuse a conflict.

But what was there to account for the tendency toward cohesion within a primitive group absent some powerful moral authority imposing law and order upon them from above? Why were they not terminally afflicted by the seven deadly sins? What was there to temper their instinctual passions and appetites? After all, biologically we are individually instructed to pursue our own self-interest. So, what could possibly compel a pack of autonomous self-interested individuals out for themselves to form socially stable units?

Again, the answer in a word is nature. The natural world that primitives were part and parcel of exercised its influence upon them both externally and internally. And theirs was, of course, an exponentially simpler existence unencumbered by the complexities inherent in large social organizations. With regard to the seven deadly sins, for example, they did not enter into the equation of primitive groups at all. Greed and envy could not have played a part in communities where there was nothing to be greedy or envious about. No one owned anything. There was no inequality of possessions or status. No hierarchies or class divisions. Gluttony depends on a glut of food that living hand to mouth in the wild could not provide. Sloth was nonexistent with each and every individual prodded by basic instincts to perform whatever tasks were at hand in order to survive. Anger is usually the result of injustices that are the product of imbalances of power as in being taken unfair advantage of. There were not such imbalances of power in primitive groups. Pride is a sin when one exaggerates one’s importance and believes oneself to be better than others, where one holds oneself to be above the law. This requires distancing oneself from others and there was just no room for that in the necessarily close-knit groups of our primitive ancestral tribes. And lust, as in an unbridled sexual compulsion, was not really an issue for them. Sexual attraction was generally group-directed into pair bonding as the optimum condition for the community.

The opening of Pandora’s Box accompanied the onset of civilization. As the communal tribe changed into a society of separate individuals people were divided into classes, became subjects of a remote centralized power which, along with modernized methods of mass production, specialized jobs, forced labor and vastly unequal distribution of wealth and power created the seven deadly sins of envy, greed, gluttony, sloth, lust, anger and pride.

All in all the order in a primitive band was provided by the most powerful instinct of all, that of self-preservation. Each and every individual realized consciously and/or unconsciously that their own survival depended upon belonging to the band. And., again, not only belonging to the band but one and all felt it incumbent upon themselves to create and maintain a stable, orderly, cohesive group so as to ensure optimum survivability of the group and, in turn, their very own survival as well.

There is also an evolution of religion to be noted here. Diamond again, “…supernatural beliefs of bands and tribes did not serve to justify central authority, justify transfer of wealth, or maintain peace between unrelated individuals. When super natural beliefs gained those functions and became institutionalized, they were thereby transformed into what we term a religion.”

A nascent nation state with religious authority created an environment that attempted to impose the same conditions on their divided subjects as the natural environment imposed on primitive bands. Officialdom impressed upon the people its power and majesty through grand iconic architecture, ceremonies of pomp and circumstance, providing bountiful sources and abundant supplies of food, amassing huge well-armed military forces for foreign conquest as well as domestic policing and doling out severe punishments to lawbreakers. As noted above, the role of religion was to justify the rules and regulations of the state and provide reasons over and above mere earthly authority for obedience and cooperation among the masses.

We are naturally, genetically equipped to be intimately engaged by a natural environment where the process of self-regulation kicks in within small groups as a means of survival. Human nature is distorted, perverted and corrupted by civilization as much as it is provided with opportunities to achieve greatness in the arts and sciences. But with all the great accomplishments of the human race we have not arrived at the ways and means of conducting our affairs so as to inspire universal accord. It is, of course, not in our nature to do so. Accord is something we are naturally equipped to establish within particular groupings.

A simple illustration of how human nature can be perverted by civilization is provided in the following example: We are naturally inclined to seek out sweet smelling and sweet tasting foods. Fruits, vegetables, legumes, berries, nuts, meats and fish all have a particular sweetness about them when they are most edible. One rubric for the ingesting of food might be - the sweeter the better. Primitive tribesmen suffer stinging swarms of bees in order to procure a supply of honey for their tribe. Our appetite for sweet foods, especially as youngsters, can be insatiable. But the sugary foods and candies that we are constantly tempted by perverts a healthful natural inclination into an unhealthy habit. Now we even have candy posing as cereal. Appetite is a powerful motivator in the natural world that in a civilized world can become an out of control unhealthful indulgence.

Taking a look at the sexual appetite of the male, we can get the idea that, as Robert Wright put it, “…natural selection ‘wants’ men to have sex with an endless series of women.” That’s like saying that natural selection wants people to overindulge in sweets. But as with any instinct we have to ask what benefit male sexuality had in our distant past living in the wild. That males find themselves sexually attracted to females in general had a benefit for the survival of the species Homo living in small primitive bands. It assured that whatever women were available would be impregnated.

The opportunity to have sex with an endless series of women, presented itself in more civilized states, just as they generally present people with the opportunity to overindulge other appetites as well. But, as we know, those opportunities were not present within primitive bands eking out a life for themselves in the wild. In such bands of two to three dozen members there would be only about 3 to 5 available females for the same number of available males per generation. Whatever inter-band coupling there was would have changed the numbers but not the dynamics. Each and every male would have been attracted to each and every female in the sense that any particular female would do just fine for any particular male. The males did not compete amongst themselves for multiple females. Also, there was not the vast variety of types to choose from way back then as there is today where an average guy extremely attracted to super models has to settle for a “plain Jane". So, it wasn’t the case where any one male got the one prize that the other males were drooling after. And when pairing off was completed a male hankering for something different could not have been much of a factor because there wasn’t anything that different to be had. And in a primitive setting sexual pairing was just another survival tool that had to be managed within the context of maintaining group stability and, thus, survivability.

Another thing to consider about the desirability of monogamous pairings in primitive bands is that one’s mate was one thing, perhaps the only thing, in a highly communal social group that one could call one’s own. Furthermore, I can’t imagine that the females would have been at all tolerant of one of their number getting it on with another’s mate. It is also difficult to imagine where and when any “hanky-panky” might have taken place. Existing as a tight-knit group does not leave any room for privacy. Everyone pretty much knows exactly where everyone else is at any given moment and what they’re doing. Secret lives would not be possible. And a couple sneaking off into the jungle or the savannah to have sex would become easy prey for predators.

So, again, we see how human behavior could have been molded by direct involvement with the natural environment and how the continuation of that behavior within a civilization must be accomplished by some artificial environment that mimics the natural one. Our instincts and appetites, released from the strictures of a basic survival regimen, came to be regarded as evil and religion sought to instill in us the virtues of self-control by plugging us into an environmental substitute.

The instincts and appetites of primitive tribal people were controlled by their eking out a life in the wild. They were not tempted by the abundance provided by civilizations. In civilizations it is the conditioning power of religion that is supposed to develop self-control over ones appetites. And we are given to believe that it tries to accomplish this through divine inspiration. Religions are advertised as having no traffic whatsoever with base instincts. The religious realm is entirely above such earthly considerations.

However, religions actually appeal to the most basic instinct of all - that of self-preservation. Religion is a substitute for the conditioning power of the natural environment. It creates an ersatz natural environment wherein people can find a common purpose. Contrary to how religions advertise themselves they do not exist above and beyond the nature of things. Religions are really not on a higher plane from where they seek to provide the ways and means with which we are to gain mastery over base instincts and appetites. Religions link one’s base instinct for self-preservation to an eternal life to come and instruct one to obey its tenets in order to gain one’s reward in the after life. Religion instructs us to control, even deny our instincts and appetites as a means of making ourselves worthy of everlasting life. So, religion employs our instinct for self-preservation the way it was employed by the natural environment to bring our other instincts under the rule of the most powerful one. To survive in the wild one had to be a member in good standing of a tribe. To survive forever in the next life one must be a member in good standing of a religion. Another requirement for surviving in the next life is to get along with others, to cooperate with one another and help each other. So, religion seeks to control people’s behavior through self-interest in their survival just as it was controlled in the natural environment.

Also, living in the wild meant mortal danger from predators. There were rules to follow to avoid them, to avoid becoming their prey. And the whole moral drama of the forces of good and evil impacting on immortal souls can be seen as a conditioning substitute for the forces of life and death that impacted on mortal bodies in primitive times and served to keep our earliest ancestors on the “straight and narrow path". It was once necessary for us to follow certain rules and procedures to protect ourselves from beasts of prey. Later we became Satan’s prey and only proper moral conduct could save us.

Furthermore, the roots of our notions of good and evil are to be found in our pre-historic existence. Simply put, what benefited our survival was good and what threatened it was bad. Illness was a threat to our survival and was, of course, considered bad. The source of illness was believed to be evil spirits that “medicine men” or “witch doctors” would attempt to exorcise by means of potions and the performance of certain rituals. The creatures that preyed upon us were bad while those we preyed upon were good. All food sources were good, as were bodies of water. One’s band was good while other bands were just that - other. Other, as in not us, as in foreign to us, not worthy of the same consideration shown to one’s own band members. If bands were mutually beneficial that was good, if not they were possible threats and that was bad.

One would be hard put to distinguish between our present day notions of good and evil and those of our primitive ancestors. Whatever we think of as good must be beneficial to us in some way. Even taking on some terrible burden or suffering can in the end assure us of eternal paradise. And whatever we think of as evil is threatening to us in one way or another. Osama bin Laden and his ilk call the US the great Satan because they see it as a threat to their belief system. George Bush called Iran, Iraq and North Korea the axis of evil for the threat he thought they posed to the US.

Religion gives one a sense of intimately belonging to something bigger than oneself. Or rather renews that sense, which was very much part of membership in a close-knit band or tribe. In the wild one belonged to a group that was held to be bigger than oneself out of necessity. And beyond that there was the grand spectacle of nature that everyone was held subject to.

Religion seeks to keep us humbled by and in awe of an all-knowing omnipotent God with supernatural powers as we were once humbled by and in awe of the power of the natural world. As creatures of the natural world it was our instinct for survival under which all our other instincts were managed. Our survival was dependent on the group and we behaved as subjects to that dependency. Our appetites and passions were tamed by our survival instinct for which our other instincts were fashioned to serve. We must eat in order to survive, we must have shelter in order to survive, we must have sex in order to survive but, above all else, we must have a cohesive group in order to survive.

With the advent of civilization religion stepped in to provide the mortar for cohesive groups. It attempted to tame our appetites and passions through our survival instinct by attaching it to a concern for survival in an eternal after life. As we gained some mastery over the natural environment our instincts became less and less channeled through the demands of basic survival. The cultural environment then became that which informed and instructed our instincts. Civilized religious institutions are a substitute for the conditioning power of the natural world that we were once directly subjected to. Religion is an outgrowth of the awe we felt at the power of the natural world and an extension of the tribal rituals that lionized survival mechanisms. At base, morality is a survival manual to keep a people fit, healthy and loyal to each other and their group. As we became separated from our direct relationship with the natural world, consciously as well as physically, our gods also became separated from the natural world.

There are, of course, different survival mechanisms and stratagems in an impersonally organized civilized society than there were in a primitive society where there was a direct correspondence between one’s nature and the natural world. In a civilized society one was no longer an integral part of a group that was communally engaged in basic survival but rather one became a nonessential automaton in service to a city or nation state. The person of the king-god was the law and to survive one had to obey. Much different than being obedient to the demands of the natural world where one’s instincts formed a seamless congruous whole with one’s immediate environment.

From another standpoint, however, it was not that different at all. One was overwhelmed by the colossal majesty of the king-god’s power as one was once overwhelmed by the colossal majesty of nature itself. In that sense the change from tribal culture to civilized state was nil. All religions plug into the respect for an overwhelming presence that has always been part and parcel of the human condition. And that at base is what religious authority is built on.

From all of the preceding we can get an idea about how human behavior could have been molded by a direct involvement with the natural environment and how the continuation of that behavior within a civilization attempts to be accomplished by some artificial environment that mimics the natural one. Our instincts and appetites, released from the strictures of a basic survival regimen, came to be regarded as evil and religion sought to instill in us the virtues of self-control by plugging us into an environmental substitute.

Religion one might suppose is the bastion of morality and without it humankind would resort absolutely to bad behavior. We would become, it is still thought, like wild savages of the Hobbesian ilk even though we know that the Hobbesian view of primitive man is completely off the mark. We know that primitives are quite capable of forming harmonious groups and making moral judgments.

Here is a story of a group of primitives grappling with a peculiar problem within their ranks without benefit of a spoken language. The group was cannibalistic, feeding on members of other groups that could be isolated, attacked and killed. At one point in this group’s existence one of their number, a female with a young daughter, began cannibalizing within the group itself. The pair would come upon a mother with an infant who were alone and defenseless. The female and her daughter would snatch the infant from its mother, kill it and eat it. After a few of these incidents the female’s aberrant behavior was somehow communicated to the rest of the group despite their lack of a spoken language. The female was admonished with threatening sounds and gestures by dominant males whenever she would so much as look at one of the group’s infants. After sometime the female in question finally seemed to get the message that her behavior was not acceptable and ceased her abnormal endeavors.

This is an example of the formation of a primitive moral structure in the wild by a group that was solely on its own and operating merely from innate powers of judgment concerning right and wrong. Where else could their judgment have come from? All they had was their natural selves to inform and instruct them. They were not subject to any established law or moral authority that could guide them in judging the troubling situation. And it was a situation that none of them had ever confronted before. So, the manner in which it was dealt with originated from an inherent sense of propriety.

But this story must be entirely fictional. Such primitive events could not be known? After all, the group had no language, no way of telling its story and making it a part of an oral history. There would, then, be no way for anyone to know about it. Therefore the story’s conclusion is completely unwarranted.

But even if the story is entirely fictional, I think we can see a structure in it that could serve as a coarse model for our civilized moral orderings. Of course, one could create such a scenario by a kind of reverse engineering. But, again, so what? One could only do so because of what is now in place. There is no way of assigning the origins of morality to such primitive types in any demonstrative convincing way. The story would have to be an actual event to have any legitimacy whatsoever.

Well, the story does depict an actual event that has been clearly documented from observations of a community of chimpanzees in Gombe as part of Jane Goodall’s extensive research there.

In a chapter entitled “Communication” in her book “The Chimpanzees of Gombe” Ms. Goodall writes, “One female, Passion, and her daughter, Pom, began to kill and eat the babies of other community females… They were only seen to do this when the mothers of the victims were with dependent young only. There is no firm evidence that any individuals other than the mothers who were attacked ever knew about the bizarre behavior. On the other hand, the mothers were, it seems, able to communicate at least their fear and/or dislike of Passion to some other community members. When Gilka (who had already lost one infant to the killer) screamed as Passion approached to stare at her newborn, two adult males, one after the other, rushed over and attacked Passion. In fact, Passion’s behavior led to one extremely interesting communication sequence. This involved Miff, a female who had saved her baby from Passion but who remained extremely fearful of and hostile toward Passion for many months after the attack. When the infant was still very tiny, Miff encountered Passion and at once fled, screaming, until she met two adult males, some hundred meters away. Miff then turned back toward Passion, her screams became aggressive waa barks, and glancing over her shoulder at the males, she started back the way she had come. The males, responding to her solicitation for help, followed. When they reached Passion, the males displayed (made threatening gestures) and Passion fled”

This is indeed an extremely interesting scenario for reasons other than communication between chimps. First of all, if one were to imagine what would happen within a chimp community with respect to intramural cannibalism without having any actual knowledge about the actual event one would no doubt come up with quite a different scenario. One might expect the mothers to defend their infants from the initial attack, as indeed they did, but one might also assume that the matter would go no further than that. “That’s life in the jungle among savage apes,” one might say, “You lose your kid to someone stronger than you, that’s just the way it is and that’s the end of it.” “That’s the law of the jungle!” After all, what recourse would chimps have, after the initial incidents had occurred, to do anything about them?

Such assumptions serve to keep the chimps at a comfortable distance from us. They are savage beasts living in a monkey eat monkey world and are incapable of making the kinds of judgments about behavior that we as human beings are capable of making. But such assumptions based on a broad and widely held view of life in the jungle, are by virtue of Ms. Goodall’s studies along with other relevant literature, proven to be entirely erroneous.

Join me, if you will, in a thorough unbiased examination of this particular scenario involving the chimps of Gombe. Now, the mothers of the infants who Passion preyed upon were the only ones who knew about the incidents directly because in order to be successful Passion’s victims had to be in isolated situations. That something was somehow communicated by those mothers to other members of the community about Passion’s aberrant behavior indicates that the chimps felt they certainly did have recourse to further discourage that behavior. There was a judgment made by the chimps that Passion’s behavior was wrong and a sporadic but, nonetheless, concerted effort, contingent on potential or actual incidents, was diligently pursued.

But what exactly could the mothers have communicated to the other chimps regarding their experiences with Passion? The two adult males, for instance, who were summoned by Miff; did they know before coming upon Passion that she was what Miff was so upset about? Or were they following Miff with no idea about what the trouble was? And when they did come upon Passion was it a complete surprise? Were they expecting, perhaps, to find some invaders from another community causing a disturbance? The two males didn’t act surprised at the sight of Passion. They immediately threatened and chased her away. So, either they knew whom to expect from what Miff communicated to them or, upon the sight of Passion, they immediately connected her with the information previously conveyed to them by other mothers. But whatever the case may be the two males availed themselves to Miff’s ravings without hesitation and dealt with Passion in no uncertain terms as soon as they saw her. It was as though they were perfectly tuned into the situation at the outset.

Also, how did Miff know that the two adult males she came upon while fleeing from Passion would respond as they did? Why would they react as they did to something they were not directly involved in? Miff must have known that the two males knew about Passion and knew they would comply with her urgent request to admonish Passion for her unacceptable behavior even though there was no immediate threat in evidence. One may wonder here why Miff didn’t summon other mothers whose infants had been victimized by Passion’s peculiar dining habits and tear her from limb to limb? For one thing the mothers were not moved to aggression toward Passion unless in defense of their own young. But they could somehow ignite male aggression toward Passion even though the males were not directly affected by her abnormal appetite.

So, the males’ interest in all this, one could say, was purely one of law enforcement. Again we don’t know exactly what the males in question knew about Passion’s intolerable behavior. But something was communicated to them that resulted in their admonition of the culprit. And whatever was communicated to them stemmed from the cannibalistic incidents and it was that specific behavior the chimps’ concerted effort sought to censure. So, we have here a kind of crude department of justice at work. The citizenry brought their complaint to the proper authorities in order to have the matter resolved.

Furthermore, why such a to-do about a behavior which all chimps indulge in, albeit, with regard to chimps of other communities? Of course a mother is going to do all she can to save her infant from any kind of attack, but why wouldn’t that be enough? Why did Miff feel it necessary to send Passion a message via the two males after she had saved her baby? A judgment of some kind was made that Passion’s behavior was wrong over and above Miff’s personal experience with it. There were “rules” about such things, Passion was disobeying them and she needed to be taught a lesson.

There is another interesting angle here, which brings up the question of moral choice. If all chimps are cannibals what is it that keeps them, as a rule, from preying upon the members of their own communities? We say such behavior is abnormal for a chimp. So, why would one chimp in a community indulge in that behavior? And if such behavior is possible in one chimp could it be potentially possible in all chimps? Could all chimps sometimes see one of their fellow chimps as a meal and then have that impulse overridden by an innate and socially developed regard for those of their own community?

Chimpanzees do appear to have an innate feeling of community that is socially strengthened through the conditioning process of the community as evidenced by the extremely thorough research conducted by Ms. Goodall and her team. As a chimp, one begins to learn at a very early age what is and is not socially acceptable behavior; including the degree and kind of aggression one is allowed to indulge in with regard to other members of one’s community. It is a very strong conditioning process aimed at preserving the bonds that hold the community together as a unit. But, for whatever reason, the bonds of fellowship in Passion were weak. The impulse for a convenient meal overrode the bonds of communal fellowship and her weakness caused outrage in other members of the community. Could we say moral weakness, moral outrage? If we think of morality as a conditioning property necessary to the survival of a group, then, yes. If, on the other hand we think of morality as a divine decree over and above natural phenomena, then, perhaps not.

The comparison between chimps and humans that is most striking here is distinguishing between when a certain behavior is right and when it is wrong, allowing it in one instance but not in another. Cannibalizing members of other communities is okay for chimps but they draw the line at cannibalizing within their own community. For us, killing is wrong and against the law but we allow it in self defense, state executions and war. Even cannibalism is allowed when it is a matter of survival; the famous plane crash in the Andes, for example, where the survivors fed on the bodies of the casualties in order to stay alive until rescued. We say these discernments are moral judgments. But how are monkeys able to make similar judgments?

In whatever way one tries to explain away these judgments on the part of chimps, “It’s merely their instinct for survival at work,” for instance, the same explanations can be applied to similar human judgments as well. Of course, one might say here that chimpanzees are incapable of universally outlawing cannibalism as humans have and this is a huge and incomparable difference. But the leap from outlawing cannibalism within one’s community to declaring a universal ban is relative to the leap from eating termites with the aid of a twig (which chimps do) to eating sushi with the aid of chopsticks. Again, it is a difference of degree rather than kind.

We see in these incidents with Passion that the chimps were struggling to maintain an orderly, cohesive community and demonstrated a distinct sense of what is proper conduct and what is not, i.e., a moral sensibility. This can hardly be seen as projecting human terms onto the chimps. Their actions speak for themselves. Everyone involved exhibited an interest in the fitness of the community as a whole. This was achieved naturally through the operation of individual self-interest. It was certainly in the self-interest of the mothers involved in the attacks to have Passion stopped. But the dominant males’ self-interest in the matter seems a little less clear. Why did the two adult males respond as they did to Miff’s solicitations? It did not appear to be in their immediate self-interest to do so. They were, in effect, acting as peace officers in a heated dispute between community members, thus exhibiting a basic purpose of a moral system, to maintain a necessary social cohesion. That is something the males would certainly have self-interest in, one that goes beyond their own self-interest and represents the interest of the entire community.

Finally, the treatment of Passion by her fellow chimps was extremely “humane”. Considering Passion’s heinous behavior, a case could certainly be made for banishing her from the community or killing her outright. But Passion was treated as a member of the community who was misbehaving and needed to be admonished for it. The normal chimps that were judging Passion’s crimes were obligated, it seems, not to cross the line that Passion had. They were only interested in persuading her to stop indulging in her depravity. Eventually, Goodall reports, they were successful in that endeavor.

The behavior of the chimps with respect to Passion’s pathology is easily translatable into our language of law and order. Some examples would be; Law number one - chimps belonging to a particular community shall not kill members of their own community. Law number 2 - cannibalism can only be practiced with respect to chimps of other communities. Law number 3 – anyone breaking law number 1 or 2 will become the object of a concerted effort to cease and desist from committing any more such crimes. Law number 4 - all reports of law breaking are to be referred to dominant males who will do all they can to prevent further incidents of wrongdoing from occurring with respect to law number one. And, one would have to suppose that these laws would be common to all chimps and, thus, universal.

If one is tempted to write all this off as a fluke peculiar to a particular chimp community then one is attributing to the chimps the ability to transcend their own natures and act according to a consciously invented formula unconnected to their intrinsic programming.

George Gilder, like the Intelligent Design proponent he is, desperately wants things to be the way he thinks they should be in accordance with his religious beliefs. He does not rigorously examine what he is actually saying but merely judges whether it appears to conform to his ideology, and whether or not it will sound convincing enough to those who don’t know any better. His perverse think tank is called The Discovery Institute; its mission is to employ choplogic, obfuscation and misinformation in order to distort scientific knowledge and sell their specious presentation to the public as the genuine article. Gilder wants his baloney to be thought of as prime rib. For that he needed to hire a public relations firm, CRC, to assist in his deceptive selling campaign.

Gilder and his ilk are exactly who Monod is talking about when he says, “They owe their… moral weakness to those value systems, devastated by knowledge itself, to which they still try to refer.”

In pointing to the complexity found in living organisms Gilder and Behe claim that that is proof of an intelligent designer. But when I look at a tRNA MOLECULE, or CHAPERONIN, for instance, I see a complexity that is more chaotic than not. Actually, they seem overly complex to be the workmanship of an intelligent designer. They appear to be the result of the order that can bubble up in otherwise chaotic systems as detailed in Stuart Kaufman’s Origins of Order. Again, chaotic cancer-like cells might have been the norm in the “primal soup” before incidentally hitting upon the order able to compose coherent organisms. Cancer cells and normal cells are different but not so much as to make their detection fool-proof by a given immune system.

Even the association of codons (triplet nucleotides that specify a particular amino acid) to amino acids seems very unlike intelligent design. There are twenty amino acids and sixty-four codons, sixty-one of which code for specific amino acids. Most amino acids have multiple codons that code for them and there’s just no way that the assignment of codon to amino acid bears any resemblance to forethought planning. It is totally arbitrary. Some amino acids have two codons associated with them and others have four. Two of them have only one and another has three. Also, three codons are stop signals found at the end of a coded sequence.

Would an intelligent designer be compelled to employ all possible triplets of the four nucleotides? Or is this just a matter of a blind chemical system at the mercy of its chemical properties? Why not design twenty codons to code for twenty amino acids, for instance? Or, why only twenty amino acids? Why not 62 for a one to one relationship between codons and amino acids with two set aside for stop signals? Or if some redundancy is prudent how about 31 amino acids with two codons assigned to each? Why not 14 amino acids with dual nucleotides serving as codons making a total of 16 with two set aside for stop signals?

Gilder calls evolutionists “reactionaries” because he says they think that proteins came first in the origin of life. Again Gilder is giving erroneous information because the protein-came-first idea is only one theory that has been posited by evolutionists. There are a couple of others. But calling evolutionists reactionaries is Gilder’s way of saying that he’s a revolutionary. But all he is doing is dressing old dogma in different concepts - intelligent designer as God. And it is information that, according to Gilder, came first. Information is the source of life. But, what information? The information in DNA? But there is no information in DNA without its relation to proteins. Even an intelligent designer would have to have had proteins in mind first and then put together the DNA to code for them. According to an intelligent designer, then, proteins would have come first.

Gilder wants to find ways by which to justify our existence as inevitable from the get-go – to see the big bang as the beginning of the development of a universe whose sole god-directed purpose was the advent and on going existence of human beings. And it was all precipitated by some preexisting pure information in the mind of the intelligent-designer-god.

A fixation on the big bang as a singular event inevitably leading to the evolution of human beings is concomitant with the fixation we once had with a geocentric universe. It’s a product of anthropocentrism whereby it is believed that the whole universe is all about the existence of human beings. The sole purpose of the explosion of heat and light 15 billion years ago was to ultimately project the spectacle of human drama. Then perhaps God is a filmmaker/projectionist!

In the entire scope of things, however, the big bang was a rather inconsequential event. Its ensuing products account for a minuscule part of the universe’s total content. We now know that there is such a thing as dark energy that comprises more than two-thirds of the content of the universe and is responsible for its ever-accelerating expansion. And about one-third seems to be made up of what is called dark matter. Also the universe seems to be adamant in its relentless pursuit to undo the anomaly resulting from the big bang. Within galaxies are massive black holes devouring them apace. The repulsive force of the dark energy pushes them apart and ultimately threatens to tear them apart whenever a vulnerability in there cohesiveness occurs.

But even so one might say that the visible universe is all that really matters and that the burst of light we call the big bang was for us the beginning of everything. In the bible God says ‘let there be light’ and there was light. But is there such a thing as light independent of the eyes of a living being to perceive it? There were photons created to be sure, but without some way of processing those photons as a visual experience would stars really shine?

The universe we are conscious of exists by virtue of the anatomical nervous systems that the universe has fashioned - nervous systems that are able to process the potential information provided by the universe. For instance, we receive through our eyes photons and we process an image out of them that describes a world that is relevant to living organisms such as ourselves. Otherwise that world would not be seen and would not exist as we know it. But everything would be in place for it to exist.

A useful analogy here can be found in a mirror. The image of a room, for instance, that we see reflected in a mirror is not actually imaged by the mirror. A mirror has no capability of processing photons and rendering an image from them. If there were no one or no camera, no photon processing equipment in front of the mirror to receive the photonic output and process it as information then there would be no image occurring in the mirror. The room and its objects would be right where they were as potential images but their image would not be realized in the mirror itself and the room would not be recorded there as a reflected image. A mirror merely reflects photons and has no ability to create an image, no ability to process photons as information. All it is capable of doing is reflecting them. One might say that without classical-world life forms only the quantum world could really exist. Not that we create the reality of the classical world, but, rather, we realize it. We realize it by processing information that is provided by the quantum world. The quantum world makes our world possible, realizable, but it does not realize our world. We realize our world. On the quantum level the various objects of our macroscopic classical world exist as various concentrations of energetic particles. A particular set of those concentrations has created creatures like us who are capable of rendering the particular arrangements of those concentrations as realized objects.

As with the mirror, there is nothing visible in the universe without living things capable of processing quantum world activity into sensible perceptions. There is no light per se emanating from stars, there are photons, but no light. The phenomenon of light is dependent on the existence of optic nerves.

The universe in its actual state bears no resemblance to the way in which we perceive it - just like a DVD disc bears no resemblance to the sights and sounds that appear on the monitor of a DVD player. The information on the DVD has been encrypted in such a way so as to enable it to be read and transformed into a motion picture by the DVD player that is equipped to process the information encoded on the disc. Without the DVD player the information stored on the DVD is pure potential, the disc itself remains unfulfilled.

The world of quantum particles is like the DVD – it needs something to read its information in order to reveal that which we know as the classical world. In this case, however, the quantum world creates its own readers in the form of living things to decipher the information. We are readers and our consciousness is the monitor.

To put it in terms of my individual existence I might say that I am an ensemble of quantum world particles capable of processing those particles in such a way as to effect the materialization of classical world objects. The processing all takes place at the microscopic and unconscious levels. Optic nerve cells receive photons as raw data. That data is processed as information from which my brain produces an image of the world that does not exist for photons. Particular photons are either absorbed or reflected by the molecular structures they come in contact with. We perceive them as objects according to the photons that are reflected. As for my sense of smell, chemical components interact with the receptor cells in my nose to produce a sensation of odor that exists only in my head but which is particular to the actual existence of the various chemicals involved. All my senses operate at the quantum level. My central nervous system processes the data provided to me by photons, chemical components and atmospheric vibrations. The images, tastes, smells, sounds and feel of the world that we experience are sensations developed by our nervous systems with respect to phenomena that we are not consciously aware of. So, for example, the conscious image we have of our surroundings is an accurate rendition of the behavior of photons resulting from their interactions with the molecular structures that we produce images of. The image corresponds exactly to the reality of the molecular structures and the reflected photons but the image is special to our consciousness. Our reality is based on the reality of the quantum world, which informs us about how we must relate to what is really out there at the quantum level. The apparent world is presented to us by a world that is not apparent to us. And to the question - Is our world only a creation of our sense perceptions? I would answer - yes and no.

The bible has it wrong - light was not created by god at the beginning- light was created by living things. Light is a subjective experience of an objective reality as are all other sensations. Such subjective experience, being universal, makes for an objective reality. The world that living things experience was not realized beforehand for them to inhabit. Living things realize the world they inhabit.

We are part of an objective reality that we perceive subjectively in a special way that describes our objective reality. For example, what is solid to us is part of our objective reality although solidity is not a characteristic of the quantum world through which we experience solidity. Photons are an objective reality and the light that we process from them is also an objective reality even though it is a subjective perception. We do not see the color red. Our brains code a particular frequency of light as the color red. A particular frequency of light is the same for everyone and the way in which the light is processed is the same and therefore color is a shared objective reality as are all our other perceptions and sensations. If, as some might insist, there are variations from individual to individual in our sense perceptions it would be so miniscule as to be non-existent. Major variations, such as colorblindness, indicate abnormalities in ones processing equipment.

What does Gilder have to say about all this? Well, again, his fear of science leads to muddled thinking resulting in statements like, “…classical physics collapsed after the discovery of the atom.” That’s like saying - since there is no such thing as solidity in the quantum world we can now walk through walls.

Fear of science, fear of our roots in biology and evolution only leads to misconceptions about ourselves and the world we live in. Gilder does, however, admit to our natural selves. “We already know we’re animals,” he says, but, he goes on, “…to celebrate the view of human beings as modified apes, trousered apes is destructive.”

As soon as Gilder mentions our primate nature he runs from it and gets lost in romantic nonsense like, “Human intelligence is the most powerful force in the universe.”

In that assertion Gilder celebrates nonsense. For, in reality, human intelligence is not even the most powerful force on Earth. Nature is. That’s a fact Gilder and many others find intolerable. Human beings cannot be subjects of nature, they say, we are much too special for that to be the case. We must be somehow supernatural. This earthly existence cannot be all there is. Perhaps it’s not. But the distortion of earthly matters is no way to approach the question.

Wanting to believe things that contradict the nature of things leads to miscomprehension, misinterpretation and misstatements, like a George Gilder who cannot help but indulge in grand buffoonery in his pathetic attempts to establish an intelligent designer. Celebrate the view of human beings as apes??? Who is celebrating that? To acknowledge it is not a celebration. He imagines naturalists like myself celebrating our common ancestry with other primates and our genetic proximity to chimpanzees. But it is not about celebrating that reality. It’s about facing up to it and finding the courage to acknowledge our roots and our biological determinism so that we might intelligently consider how best to configure our civilizations with respect to who and what we really are.

Gilder and his ilk are of course subject to the A/R dynamic. They are powerfully attracted to a metaphysical explanation of human existence, of some higher power that is responsible for all creation. And they are absolutely repelled by the prospect of a totally natural explanation.

I would be the first to admit the powerful attractiveness of the higher power scenario but I am also painfully aware of the fact that strong attraction to something is not necessarily an indication of its validity. A strong attraction to communism or capitalism, for example, is no curative to each one’s inability to serve as a stand-alone operating system for a society.

We also have a strong attraction to empirical knowledge that applies to facts or ideas acquired by study, investigation, observation, experiment and experience - the stuff of authentic discourse.

Note: Gilder quotes are from an NPR program called The Connection on which he was a guest.