My parents had me late in life — my mom was 42, and I was their only child. My dad taught me to read at an early age, and I devoured every book I could get my hands on.
Most of my cousins were five to ten plus years older than me, and I inherited a lot of their hand-me-down books. This was fine with me as well as my parents — save for one book that my dad took great offense to.
It was a picture book about dinosaurs. I’ll never forget one illustration of a drop in a bucket, representing the miniscule amount of time humans have lived on this earth compared to the reign of the dinosaurs before us.
My parents had a big argument when my father wanted to throw the book away. My dad was something of a “closet” fundamentalist — he was from Arkansas, and had quiet beliefs, but they were deep-rooted. He didn’t attend church and I never saw him pray, but he was adamant about this matter. At the time, I was too young to understand what the argument entailed, and I don’t know in retrospect that I really grasped the whole dinosaur thing at the time. The phrase “intelligent design” had not been coined yet — but today, people argue just as fervently about the issue as my parents did.
Nevertheless, my dad was not completely inflexible. He believed Christmas was a "pagan holiday," but he didn't disabuse me of the notion of Santa and Christmas presents. When the now "extinct" Esso gas stations came out with a blow-up dinosaur that was bigger than I was, he bought one for me which I cherished for years to come. Go figure.
Truth be told, it’s hard to reconcile organized Western belief systems with the view that we are just a blip in the universe. It’s rough on the ego to think we are so “insignificant” — and it contradicts what many of us were taught as children. And for those who believe the Bible is literal gospel, it is well nigh impossible to look at current scientific fact — at least as we know it — objectively.
My boyfriend BG was brought up Catholic, and his mom is devout past the point of reason (at least to most observers). BG and his siblings don’t subscribe to her extreme viewpoints, but despite his more rational intentions, a lot of what BG was taught as a child still colors his beliefs — especially about the "afterlife." Part of him still seems to see G-d as an old white guy with a big beard sending down lightning bolts from the sky. Heaven and hell were very real concepts to him as a child — and they still hold sway over him.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - duane
Elvira, what do Jews think about the afterlife?
Re: significance. You can argue either way on that. It's true that we occupy a tiny fraction of the universe, and are made of a type of stuff that constitutes about 4% of the content of the universe, and have been around for a tiny fraction of the age of the universe, we are still rather special, just in being self-aware and technological. Compare us to an interstellar dust cloud, for example.
Oh, nice article, by the way.
2 - Elvira Black
Thanks so much for the comment, Duane. Was your question rhetorical? In any case, my response would be: if you believe in the literal truth of the Bible, how does that reconcile with the scientific "reality" as we "know" it?
But what you say is certainly true in either case. The problem is that our technology, self-awareness and uniqueness cuts both ways--creative as well as destructive.
3 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Duane,
..."what do Jews think about the afterlife?"
I know you do not like the guy and think he is a fraud, but look at Gerald Schroeder's lecture on dying and how it is a path to the after-life from the religious standpoint only, leaving the physics to the side. That is a pretty accurate view of how one arrives at an afterlife based on an analysis of the Torah.
The rest is a bit fuzzy. Prayers talk of what is stored up for the "world to come," but what that "world to come" precisely means is a bit unclear.
The more I look at what Jewish mystics say, the more it appears to me that "the world to come" is not some "heaven." Rather, it is the world after the messianic redemption of mankind.
Put simply, the messianic redemption of mankind means, in Jewish terms, the destruction of the evil impulse. So the goal of one's life now, to do as many mitzvot as possible, becomes impossible and undoable. One can only do a mitzva, a commandment, AND get credit for it, when the option NOT to do the mitzva (out of a refusal to do good) exists. With the destruction of the evil impulse, the option not to do the mitzva out of refusal to do good disappears. This is what free will is all about. Under a regime of free will, one must CHOOSE to love G-d (and thus do His mitzvot) - to be commanded to do so is not sufficient.
Thus, after the messianic redemption, the score of mitzvot gets tallied. In the meantime, the dead are brought back to life - at least the ones who deserve to be brought back are.
What happens after this is not quite clear, even to me...
4 - duane
Elvira, my question was not rhetorical. I'm ignorant and curious. I would appreciate any enlightenment that you might be willing to dispense.
Reconciliation: without going too deeply into it, I'm of the opinion that the universe as depicted in the classical religious texts is prosaic by comparison with the universe "known" in modern science. God is slowly being taken out of the equation, and the scientific "need" for God has pretty much been pushed back to the beginning of time. I am convinced that all claims of design have or will have a naturalistic explanation. What remains is a spiritual need only. I am still open to the possibility that there is something beyond the physical, but ....
Also, it has become clear, thanks to centuries of scientific exploration, that life on Earth is owed to a remarkable series of cataclysms and coincidences. For example, I heard recently that life on Earth (let alone human life) would have been impossible without the presence of the Moon, which stabilizes the spin, which is required for a locally stable climate. The formation of the Moon is itself the result of a chance encounter with a large body (so the theory goes) several billion years ago.
5 - duane
Thanks, Ruvy. I'll go read Schroeder.
6 - gonzo marx
fun read, Elvira..thanks for putting this one up here...
/golfclap
now here's a Thought just to mess with Minds...
you mention in the Article about ESP and the like being something we might evolve into
i say..wait a second there, if these abilities can be proven to exist/have existed demonstrably (and there's a lot of data to say yes, much has been/can be debunked, but a lot of data can't be explained away...just ain't enough yet for definitive hypothesis) that means the potential for them are existent in all of us somewhere in our bio-machines
this means the abilities have been evolved, but are not currently used..an organism does not evolve a feature for no reason...and in this case these abilities appear like the vermiform appendix...vestigal, remnants that don't really function
so when did we evolve these functions and when did we use them?
it would be long before any current written history, and would severely fuck up anthropological timelines (which are sketchy at best...just look at the Italian alps "Iceman" and what he did to them)
just a Thought...do carry on...
heh
Excelsior?
7 - troll
duane...for another discussion of the jewish notions about the afterlife see the comments section here starting at Chamiss' #270
8 - duane
Thanks, troll. I have done some reading since my post #5 (Schroederish stuff, Encyclopedia Brittanica, chaimss, Bible passages), and I feel that I have graduated from ignorance to confusion. That's a start. I found it interesting that Judaic scholars, in addressing this issue, evidently borrow much from Plato, and that chaimss' claim that the soul is imprisoned by the physical body, while possibly conforming to modern belief, is not the way the ancient scholars would have had it. It's all interpretation, interpolation, and extrapolation, possibly a function of the times and the prevailing contemporaneous cultural norms. Is that any way to run a religion?
9 - Doug Hunter
"My personal belief? If we don’t kill ourselves off, we can continue to evolve."
Yes, but into what? I can detect very little selection towards more intelligence in modern society. We've done our best to remove nature's means of selection so the future of our species is in the hands of the breeders. It is commonly percieved that those most likely to multiply in abundance aren't exactly the cream of the crop when it comes to wisdom and intellect.
As for the question of intelligent design, why not? Could DNA have been placed here by powerful intelligent beings for the express purpose of evolving into some complex post-human species. That could explain the apparent extra capacity in our brains and DNA and the similiarities in our blueprints to those of less intelligent life forms. Perhaps they found it was indeed impossible or impractical to travel the vast reaches of the universe, or multiple universes, in mature adult form and chose to embed the blueprints to their species in DNA form, and send them off to a few trillion fertile landing zones.
Perhaps we ourselves are gods playing in some vast reality video game. When we die our consciousness and vast memory are reconnected, we high five our friends, talk about how 'real' our death felt and compare scores. We then decide to play again but in medieval mode. (As the one with the lowest experience points I'll have to start off as a serf. The over under on my lifespan score is 22 years. Yippeee!)
Who the hell really knows? The one thing I do know is that the complex chemical process going on behind my eyes gives off a distinct impression that there's something more to my being. Some find fear in our insignificance in the universe, I find relief. If the vastness and magnitude teaches us anything it's that we're not special. Things repeat themselves and processes cyle through.
This feeling of life is not unique. I live now, I will live again.
10 - Doug Hunter
BTW, thanks for the thought provoking article.
11 - Dr Dreadful
It is commonly percieved that those most likely to multiply in abundance aren't exactly the cream of the crop when it comes to wisdom and intellect.
If you look at it in a cold, clinical light, intelligence isn't a prerequisite for perpetuating the human species. Based on population statistics, neither high intellect nor high economic status appear to confer an advantage as far as passing on one's genetic material is concerned.
"Survival of the fittest" means just that, biologically speaking. And if the qualities that make a species "fit" are not esthetically pleasing, that's just too bad.
12 - duane
Doug says, "I can detect very little selection towards more intelligence in modern society."
Any such evolution toward a higher or lower intelligence would be imperceivable over the course of a single lifetime, of course, and not even observable over a duration corresponding to recorded human history. But, to use my favorite Zeddism, it's a mute point. Human evolution by natural means is dead in the water. Technology has taken over.
technology: natural human evolution
tsunami: a spit in the ocean
Oooh, shades of the SAT.
Could DNA have been placed here by powerful intelligent beings for the express purpose of evolving into some complex post-human species.
Yeah, but that just displaces the Biq Question by a step. You still have to ask ....
If the vastness and magnitude teaches us anything it's that we're not special.
I object. Why do you think we're not special?
13 - SonnyD
Elvira: Enjoyed your article. I've been wondering when someone would get around to commenting on it.
14 - SonnyD
gonzo: "remnants that don't really function" "when did we evolve these functions and when did we use them?"
Now why would you jump to such conclusions? What if humans have always had this ability and still do? Infants are born with the potential to develop many abilities but really only have the use of two at birth. They can eat and cry. Everyone smiles when they see a new baby and within a few days the baby starts smiling back. We talk to the baby and soon it starts making sounds other than crying. The same with all the other things a child learns. What if the potential for other mental skills are there and if the infant tries to use them and receives no positive feedback it quits trying and forgets that it has that ability?
What if we have just drifted away from using a lot of the mental skills that we are born with? It seems like most people recognize that many sets of identical twins have something out of the ordinary going on. And many people have had the experience of having the urge to call someone, then the phone rings and it's the person they were going to call. There are a lot of things I could name that happen to most of us at one time or another. But, if I go into too much detail, someone will feel it is necessary to utter the magic word that brings an end to all such discussions, so I'll leave it at that.
15 - Doug Hunter
"technology: natural human evolution"
Yes, it's called eugenics and although it got a bad PC rap it's certainly making a comeback. I was going to mention that as an alternative in my comment but I suspected I had rambled on way too long anyway.
16 - SonnyD
Well, I see my #14 in answer to gonzo's #6 did show up after all. It just took a while to get here.
Doug Hunter: I was happy to see your suggestion,"Perhaps we ourselves are gods playing in some vast reality video game." I have been plowing through the endless strings of arguments between two sides, each of which is certain only they are right. No one ever suggests other possibilities. I've been wanting to say what if this life is just one humungus MMORPG? What if we are the game designers, the players and the avatars? But, you know, the two sides don't want to hear about other possibilities. That would mean they would actually have to think and (pardon the expression) God forbid they should be called upon to think. Besides that, they also seem to be lacking an important human trait - a sense of humor.
I also have been tempted to write a parody of the life of Jesus. Here was a man who entered this life with an important message for mankind, but no one would listen to what he was saying. They only heard the words that fit in with what they already believed. They constantly misunderstood and misquoted his words. Then they followed him around demanding that he put on another magic show with the miracles. They wanted him to cater their parties with the loaves and fishes and endlessly flowing wine. They finally drove him into a nervous breakdown and he went into rehab with the Essenes for a few years. Ah, but it takes a sense of humor to appreciate that story.
17 - cybcode
I just feel that I should comment on the "we use a fraction of our brain" statement, for the sake of correctness. We don't use a fraction of our brain - it's a myth. We use 100% of it.
Other than that, I like the article.
18 - duane
Damn, cybcode. You mean my standard retort, "Well, I'm only using 10% of my brain capacity," when people accuse me of being an idiot, won't work anymore? What a revoltin' development.
19 - John Bambenek
Gonzo-
You forgot one other function that babies have at birth... to crap. And crap they do. Alot.
Conservation of mass? Not with the diapers my kid produces.
20 - duane
Number two on my top ten reasons why our universe could not have been intelligently designed, although I doubt urine agreement.
21 - SonnyD
John: #19 That wasn't gonzo, that was me. It was in answer to his remarks about functions that he assumed no longer work. I thought about the function you suggested and decided that is an automatic action that takes place with little or no voluntary effort on the part of the infant. In other words, it's not something they have to learn to do. Well, maybe when they time it for immediately after a clean diaper is put on. I've wondered about that.
Duane, You have a sense of humor about some things, I see. That's a good start!
22 - Dan
Intelligent design isn't about dinosaurs. It's a mathematical and scientific critiscism of the probablility of evolutionary theory as a basis for the establishment of complex organisms.
There isn't any proven or probable evolutionary function that is disputed by intelligent design.
Those who shun intelligent design rarely do so on the basis of informed knowledge of the subject.
23 - duane
Please enlighten us.
24 - Dan
Well, let's turn to the bible and see what God has to say about the origin of life.
Just kidding!
Seriously though, one major component of intelligent design is called irreducable complexity.
This refers to the interdependance of separately evolved biological components to perform some function that is desirable, and makes the organism more "fit" for survival.
To simplify (a lot), imagine a bicycle chain and the front and rear sprocket. Before the separate units can evolve alone, and facilitate the desirable trait of propulsion, evolutionary theory would dictate that they must have some stand alone improvement that would aid in the survival of the organism (bike).
It's possible, but hard to imagine what benefits a chain without sprockets would have that would be a survival aid while the bicycle waits for chance mutations to add sprockets.
On the cellular level though, there are over 200 interdependent mechanizms. This would have been news to Darwin, who shaped his theory to more plausable explanations like gills and giraffe necks.
Another facet of intelligent design is just to examine the likelihood, given the short period of time for organisms to evolve, that independent chance mutations would develop into interdependent complexities.
It's possible that I could be dealt 17 royal flushes in a row this weekend in Las Vegas, but it likely would never happen in a billion lifetimes.
25 - duane
Dan, thanks for the reply. I'm fairly ignorant of biology, so I appreciate your input.
The probability of being dealt a royal flush from a standard deck is 1 out of 649,740. The probability of being dealt 17 in a row is just that number raised to the 17th power, which is about 1 in 6.6 x 10^98.
Now, what does that have to do with evolution?