Fire and Water

Geneticist Michael Denton has favored us with a number of books that are very much worth reading. Two of my favorites are Fire-maker, and The Wonder of Water. A non-scientist would have no trouble following and understanding either book.

Each of them provides the reader with fascinating information on almost every page as they examine two commonplace phenomena in our environment, fire and water, and explain that if those two phenomena didn't have precisely the properties they do, and if everything that relies on them didn't have precisely the structure it has, life would be either very much diminished, or even impossible. Certainly living things as complex as human beings would be impossible.

In Fire-maker, for example, Denton reflects upon all the properties of planet earth that have to be just right for the phenomenon of fire to exist and then recounts all the physical characteristics of human beings that have to be just as they are for us to be able to use fire. He then examines what human culture would be like were we or the earth even slightly different such that fire could not be made or harnessed. It all just leaves one shaking one's head in amazement.

Here are a couple of related videos that'll give you an idea of what the books are about:

The more we learn about the world in which we live the harder it is to think that it's all just a marvelous coincidence that everything just by coincidence has precisely the properties it does.

For those who may have a stronger background in science and wish to probe more deeply into these matters, I recommend an earlier book by Denton titled Nature's Destiny.

The Madman

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a man before his time. He was an atheist who saw clearly that atheism entailed far more than just the "death of God." Nietzsche saw that when modern men pushed God out of their lives they created a vacuum, an emptiness from which meaning, morality, and hope had all been swept out.

The "murder" of God meant that man was left to create his own meaning, his own morality, and to learn to live without hope. Man's existential predicament would inevitably lead him to despair.

Nietzsche foresaw all this, but most men of his age did not. In their exuberance and rejoicing over their "assassination of God" and the liberation they were sure their deed had brought them, they failed to grasp that when God "died" with Him died any hope of transcendent purpose and any solid ground for right and wrong.

Nietzsche expressed this failure in a parable he included in his book The Gay Science. It's called the Parable of the Madman:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" -- As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? -- Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him--you and I. All of us are his murderers.

But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition?

Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?

Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us -- for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves.

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

The madman carried a lantern in the daylight because darkness was imminent. Man has become unmoored, like the earth unchained from the sun. Cold despair settles upon us as we plunge in all directions, adrift in nothingness. We are haunted by the sense that all is becoming colder.

Nietzsche's lantern-carrying madman is an interesting and perhaps intentional counterpoint to another lantern-carrier depicted c.1854 by the artist Holman Hunt.

Hunt's lantern-carrier, unlike Nietzsche's, did not bring despair, but hope. He did not wipe out the horizon we use to navigate through life but rather gave life direction and meaning. Nor did he set us adrift in an infinite nothingness, but set our feet on the solid ground of objective, transcendent reality:

We might suppose that Nietzsche's lantern-carrier was driven mad by the consequences that he foresaw following upon the murder of Hunt's lantern-carrier.

Hating Those Who Resist Evil

Dennis Prager has a very insightful piece at HotAir.com in which he claims that people hate those who fight evil more than they hate those who do evil. He also offers an explanation as to why this perversity exists.

He begins by recounting his experience as a young man in high school at a time when communism was the greatest plague ever to beset human civilization. He writes that despite communism's obvious evil it astounded him that, "a great many people -- specifically, all leftists and many, though not all, liberals -- hated anti-communists far more than they hated communism."

To those born after say 1975 the history of communism may be a bit murky so Prager offers a summary of the horrors it inflicted upon the world:

Because of my early preoccupation with good and evil, already in high school, I hated communism. How could one not, I wondered. Along with Nazism, it was the great evil of the 20th century. Needless to say, as a Jew and as a human, I hated Nazism. But as I was born after Nazism was vanquished, the great evil of my time was communism.

Communists murdered about 100 million people -- all noncombatants and all innocent. Stalin murdered about 30 million people, including 5 million Ukrainians by starvation (in just two years: 1932-33). Mao killed about 60 million people. Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge (Red Cambodians) killed about 3 million people, one in every four Cambodians, between 1975 and 1979. The North Korean communist regime killed between 2 million and 3 million people, not including another million killed in the Korean War started by the North Korean communists.

For every one of the 100 million killed by communists, add at least a dozen more people -- family and friends -- who were terribly and permanently affected by the death of their family member or friend. Then add another billion whose lives were ruined by having to live in a communist totalitarian state: their poverty, their loss of fundamental human rights, and their loss of dignity.

You would think that anyone with a functioning conscience and with any degree of compassion would hate communism. But that was not the case. Indeed, there were many people throughout the non-communist world who supported communism. And there was an even larger number of people who hated anti-communists, dismissing them as "Cold Warriors," "warmongers," "red-baiters," etc.

This is still true today, amazingly, but today there's yet another evil roaming the world, militant Islam, and the same bizarre hatred of those who oppose it can be found everywhere:

At the present time, we are again witnessing this phenomenon -- hatred of those who oppose evil rather than of those who do evil -- with regard to Israel and its enemies. And on a far greater level. Israel is hated by individuals and governments throughout the world. Israel is the most reviled country at the United Nations as well as in Western media and, of course, in universities.

This hatred for Israel has always struck me as irrational and inexplicable, but it's ubiquitous. Here's Prager:

Israel is a liberal democracy with an independent judiciary, independent opposition press, and equal rights for women, gays and its Arab population (20% of the Israeli population). Its enemies -- the Iranian regime, Hamas and Hezbollah -- allow no such freedoms to those under their control. More relevantly, their primary goal -- indeed, their stated reason for being -- is to wipe out Israel and its Jewish inhabitants. Hamas and Hezbollah have built nothing, absolutely nothing, in Gaza and Lebanon, respectively. They exist solely to commit genocide against Israel and its Jews.

Prager concludes by offering a possible explanation for this human tendency to hate those who resist evil more than those who perpetrate it, and I encourage you to read the rest of his column. His explanation is probably correct, but I think, too, that another factor in the explanation is that there exists among much of humanity a kind of moral sickness that blinds people to what is right and true.

After all, anyone who can look at the historical facts relating to the crimes of communism or the depravity of militant Islam and somehow defend them really is morally purblind.

Atheism's Suicide Problem

There's an interesting article at the HuffPost written by a very "evangelical" atheist named Staks Rosch in which Mr. Rosch argues that depression and suicide are prominent problems among atheists. He states that,

Depression is a serious problem within the greater atheist community and far too often, that depression has led to suicide. This is something many of my fellow atheists often don’t like to admit, but it is true. I know a lot of atheists, myself included, would all like to believe that atheists are happier people than religious believers and in many ways we are. But we also have to accept the reality that in some very important ways we are not.

Rosch's diagnosis of the problem, however, seems a bit off to me. He writes:

There are of course many valid reasons why atheists are sometimes more prone to suicide than religious believers. Interestingly enough, one of those reasons is religious believers themselves. We live in a world dominated by people who often fervently believe ancient superstitions and who many times demonize, harass, ostracize, and disown those who lack belief in those ancient superstitions. Atheists on the receiving end of this treatment are understandably stressed and isolated. They often experience anxiety and depression as a result.

This may be true in Muslim cultures, but I have a difficult time believing in our post-Christian, secular West - Europe and North America - that atheists experience much persecution from Christians. And even if they did the kind of mistreatment they receive is as nothing compared to the horrific persecution of Christians at the hands of atheists throughout the twentieth century. Yet we don't read of persecuted Christians as having had a suicide problem.

I think Rosch is closer to the mark when he writes this:

Imagine you are a young person who has just come to the realization that God is imaginary. You have just realized that everything your religious tradition and your parents have taught you is make-believe. Your whole world has just come undone and for the first time in your life, you now have to wrestle with the great existential questions of life on your own and without any support networks. What does it mean to live a meaningful life without a supernatural deity? Without an afterlife to live for, what is the purpose of life?

If a sensitive, intelligent young person comes to the realization that all of our thoughts and emotions are just collisions of chemicals in our brains, that all of our griefs and joys, sufferings and pleasures are ultimately extinguished in death, that all of our hopes, dreams, and ambitions are destined to amount to ephemeral satisfactions at best, that our lives are just meaningless flickers in a vast meaningless universe, then it's little wonder that they'd ask themselves why they should go on living when their lives are filled with hopelessness, pain, and rejection.

This is why the atheist character Kirillov says in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, "I don't know how anyone can know that there is no God and not kill himself on the spot."

Rosch, however, demurs. He writes:

As a community, atheists should be reminding each other about the wonders around us. It is far too easy to get lost in our day-to-day struggles and problems. To paraphrase Ferris Bueller, life moves pretty fast sometimes and if you don’t stop and look around every once in a while, you just might miss it. We only have one life. There are no do-overs and no magically perfect kingdoms awaiting us when we die. This is it. Life’s too short to waste. If your life sucks, work to make it better… if not for you, for those who come after you. Again, there is a vast cosmos out there and we are links in the chain of human achievement.

Unfortunately, this is not much consolation for the person experiencing the existential angst he talks about in his article. In the first place, the more one reflects on the wonders around us - life, the starry heavens - the more one feels either completely forlorn or drawn closer to the Creator of those wonders.

The more closely one studies life and the heavens the more these wonders cry out that they're not a just a fortuitous cosmic fluke - they're intentionally designed.

Secondly, why on earth should anyone who believes that after this life there's nothing but annihilation care about the state of the world after they die? The happy talk about being "links in the chain of human achievement" is just so much whistling past the graveyard.

Thirdly, Rosch seems implicitly to be making the moral claim that pure egoism - caring only about one's own happiness - is wrong, but what grounds does he have for making any moral claims at all? If there's no objective moral authority then morality reduces to nothing more than subjective preferences. Rosch can say that he doesn't like it when people don't care for those who come after, but why should anyone think they should govern their life according to what someone else likes or dislikes?

To the extent that atheism has a suicide problem - I'm taking Rosch at his word that it does - it does so because it simply cannot offer people the spiritual resources to help them cope with the existential predicaments of life. Nor can it provide satisfying answers to the most pressing metaphysical questions of life. Young people in pain who think to peer into their souls find, if God's not there, that all they can see is a huge aching emptiness.

That discovery is almost inevitably a recipe for despair.

Three Pounds of Wonder

This seven-minute video from the John 10:10 project illustrates the breathtaking complexity and capability of the human brain. It is astonishing what this organ does, and personally, it's also astonishing that anyone still thinks that something like this could somehow arise through sheer chance and blind mechanical processes.

The creators of the video write this:

The human brain has been called the most complex structure in the universe and every moment of every day, it controls each movement we make, thought we have, and word we speak. In this visually compelling short video, stunning computer animation and cutting-edge imagery will transport you inside a realm of unimaginable wonder. We have been blessed with a gift that not only makes life on Earth possible, it also opens the door to a personal relationship with the Creator of the heavens and the Earth.

See what you think: