Adelphiasophism
Materialism, Evolution, Consciousness: It's Nature
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Sunday, March 07, 1999
The Cosmos
By the universe (Greek, kosmos) is meant the whole of Nature, whether on earth, in earth or beyond earth in the heavens. The universe is a huge manifestation of phenomena, and is crowded with life and activity. It is made up of matter and motion, in space and time and Adelphiasophists believe it is a gigantic life form which we call the Goddess simply because it constantly gives birth and so is most identifiable with the female principle.
Energy is the substance of the universe. Energy may be visible and substantial like solid objects, liquids, gases and plasmas when it is called matter, or invisible and insubstantial like the fields of gravity and the quantum fields which fill the intervals between the particles and the space in which the bodies are distributed. Even the void consists of energy. It is a fixed quantity, indestructible and eternal but might well be transferable to and from parts of the universe that are inaccessible to us. As energy is indestructible and eternal, so nothing is created; everything has been born of and evolved from something else existing before.
We have no knowledge of the creation of energy out of nothing, or of any law by which it would be possible for such to occur. All has been evolved from something existing before. Even the original Big Bang that created our local part of the universe was merely redistributing energy from elsewhere, but those parts of the greater universe are unlikely to be knowable to us.
As the knowable is that which lies within the range of human reason and conception, so the unknowable is that which lies outside it. The Nature and substance of the cause being unknown and unknowable, we have no knowledge of the cause as a person possessed of human attributes.
It is difficult to conceive, with the above knowledge, where Jesus could have ascended to, what planet he visited, or how he could have resisted the law of gravitation; it is for Christians to explain these things.
Materialism and Idealism
Today, materialists are the only idealists. Materialism has two meanings. One is as a theory of the reality of Nature. No feature of the real world requires anything different beyond it. Nothing in the cosmos suggests a spirit breathing on it. The human story is only a sentence in the saga of the material universe. The world of Nature is intricate, awesome and mysterious enough in itself without inventing unneeded obscurities beyond it. It is a solid, material, natural fact.
A supernaturalist cannot appreciate Nature properly because, for them, it is not real, or not complete. They cannot appreciate it as it is, without ghosts in the background pulling its strings. To imagine that nonentities control the world is to have no ideals relevant to it.
The other meaning is the opposite of idealism, the absence of ideals—selfishness, acquisitiveness. Those intent on discrediting materialism as a theory of reality deliberately confuse it with the opposite of idealism, implying it is the absence of ideals. This is either childish or dishonest. They imply that rejecting a spiritual world beyond the real one, is rejecting ideals in the real world, because they are actually spiritual. So, a materialist cannot prefer health to drunkenness, cannot know beauty or love, cannot be honest rather than hypocritical and lying, cannot feel more pleasure in culture and art than in jacking-up or pornography.
History does not confirm this view. The highest ideals of ancient Greece and Rome were no less than ours. The Stoics or, in Rome, Stoics and Epicureans, had the highest social ideals. Stoicism, of the ancient philosophies or religions, is quite on the level of our own, and both Stoics and Epicureans were materialists. To them, the idea of spirit was a joke—a figment of the imagination. Confucius and Buddha also taught that people should not concern themselves about souls, spirits and gods.
No materialist denies the value of cultivating high thoughts and behaving accordingly, but they deny their origin is other-worldly. If the whole world concluded tomorrow that thought and feeling are not spiritual gifts of God but functions of the brain, it would not make an iota of practical difference, except to stop giving some fools an excuse for their foolishness. Why then do we need to hypothesize a God? Nature herself is sufficient.
The more enthusiastic people are about spirits the less they know what they mean by spiritual. They cannot find a definition for it, usually regarding it as the same as religious or sacred. No one has ever been able to get hold of any spirit to test its properties, so, to a materialist, spirit does not exist. Spirit then is a notional opposite of matter.
The study of reality is only a few hundred years old. At the outset two theories of reality—materialism and spiritualism—claimed attention, but all investigation and logic in that time has confirmed the hypothesis that the world is material. Every one of the millions of discoveries we have made confirms the materialist and refutes the spiritualist theory. Nature does exist. It is material.
The success of science is in assuming the world is material and that simple laws and processes can explain how this material behaves. Critics often call this reductionism, but that is nothing but petty name calling. The whole point of science is to discover how simple processes can cause complex behaviour. Scientists are more aware than anyone that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Their objective is to find out how, but that means first finding out how the parts work. The two processes are called analysis and synthesis.
Though scientists cannot explain everything by mechanics, the mechanical principle has given us remarkable discoveries and insights into Nature, and there is no clear reason why extending it will not, in time, explain everything it is possible to know. Needless to say, what it is not possible to know through scientific method, we have no reason to think we shall learn by spiritual means, despite religious claims.
Yet this evident and practical conclusion about life and reality is continually spattered with excrement by bigoted writers who disdain and revile it. Those defending religion are not as scrupulous as those defending materialism. Though they often claim divine authority, they are guilty of ignorance and prejudice, while others pretend they can speak to spirits to gull money from the bereaved.
Christians are supernaturalists—believers in the existence of spirits—for two reasons. They have to have a god and they have to have a way of receiving eternal life. They are not sincerely concerned with Nature outside their need to have a basis for their beliefs in figmentary fathers and immortality.
Energy or Vital Principle?
People like to seek one ultimate principle. In modern science, it is energy. Energy used to be considered an abstract idea, but now the most direct concept we have of energy is motion. it is appreciated as continuous random motion. The fundamental energy field of the universe is like the surface of a choppy sea. Earlier scientists spoke of the “ether,” though ether was static and the energy of the universe is motion.
One view about life is that living things evolved and a formidable body of evidence agreed by most scientists confirms this. Another view is that life was created, the only reason being that the first chapter of “Genesis” says so. Some used to hold, and perhaps still do, that the energies or movements of a living thing are due to the presence in it of an immaterial something which they call “the vital principle,” the breath of God at creation, or the soul.
This story of creation is an ancient Babylonian attempt to explain what has been far better explained by modern investigators. A century ago scientists were not agreed upon the subject, and high authorities could be quoted for the creation of life. They are now absolutely agreed upon the evolution of life, and even theologians generally no longer believe creation, despite the bible. Why then must we continue to believe the nonsense about God’s breath giving us a soul? In practice, soul simply means life. People decide the soul has departed when they observe that someone is dead.
A female ovum does not begin to split up and begin to form a body until a male cell enters and blends with it. Thus the young inherits from the father as well as the mother. Both germs were thought to be of equal importance—but the spermatozoon is not needed! If the ovum is pricked with a needle, or stimulated in other mechanical or chemical ways, it begins to divide just as if it had been fertilized by a male, and it goes on to form a complete normal body. Has the doctor’s needle introduced soul into these ova? If not, where has the soul come from?
These experiments show the mechanical nature of foetal development. Once a particular feature develops, it automatically triggers the development of others. Stop it and the other features do not appear. Variations of function have been shown to depend upon concentration flows of certain chemicals, whether produced “in situ” or in glands. The working of the forces inherent in the organism can be altered just as mechanically as we can alter the concentration of chemicals. Milk appears in a mother’s breast just when it is needed because the foetus secretes and passes into the mother’s blood a chemical which stimulates her milk-glands. Some other glands are vestiges of organs which were useful in a different way in a remote animal ancestor, but have taken on new functions. This shows that they evolved and were not created perfectly formed. Discoveries like these support materialism.
The materialist sees the world of life as just as material as the physical or inorganic world. No sound reason has ever been given to suppose that life is due to an immaterial principle. The physiologist, by his research, explains the living body as the functioning of a system of mechanisms. Few physiologists in the world now admit that a “vital principle” is needed, or would explain anything if admitted. The materialist has thousands of facts to support him. The vitalist builds only on obscurities, or on things not yet discovered. Vitalism has not explained anything.
Consciousness
An outstanding question is the nature of mind. For the materialist, mind or consciousness is a function of the brain. To the spiritualist, “mind is spirit,” simply means that “mind is not material.” It says nothing useful about what the mind is.
Mental life falls within the province of psychology. Progress in the explanation of mind all tends in one direction. Psychology began as the science of mind, and mind was a spirit. Before the end of the nineteenth century it was no longer the science of mind, but of mental phenomena or states of consciousness. Psychologists ceased to talk about an underlying something, a mind or spirit of which these ideas and emotions were acts. Psychology and neurology have no interest in such old questions as the spirituality or immortality of mind.
Modern instruments let us see the brain working under different conditions. The science which set out to apply our modern exact methods of research to the mind has failed to see any evidence of spirit. We still want to know what mind is. It has been said that the brain produces thought as surely as the liver produces bile. Although the analogy is imprecise and deliberately provocative, it is true in terms of function. The brain is an organ for thinking, and thinking is important in evolution.
Questions remain. What is the relation of mental phenomena to other things in the universe? Why are all these atoms of psychic life, these ideas and emotions, so intimately connected that each of us is convinced that they constitute our own single personality. Why did each particular collection of ideas and emotions begin a certain time ago when we were two or three, just when the brain began to mature, and make progress in recognizing the world. If our souls are eternal, why do they need training? And if they need our brains to interact with the material world, then how can they retain a personality when the brain dies?
Mind is either a function of the brain or it is the activity of something which, though bound up with the brain, is not material. All the rules of logic and common sense declare it is a function of the brain until proof is given that it cannot be. The spiritualist is really making a dogmatic statement. The materialist says that spirit does not exist, and philosophers and theologians have been trying for two thousand years to prove its existence and have not succeeded. The spiritualist makes the dogmatic statement that the brain cannot produce thought and so implies spirit.
If some philosophers agree that the mind is a spirit, must we pay attention to them? Sir E Ray Lankester defined philosophy as a blind man in a dark room trying to catch a black cat that does not exist. Philosophy is valuable as a mental training, but makes no discoveries. Joe McCabe once invited a philosopher to fill a single sheet of note paper with truths on which all philosophers are agreed. He declined to attempt it. Science fills libraries with discoveries or truths on which are generally agreed, or are fruitful lines of enquiry. Thousands of years of enquiry reveal nothing of a spirit world, other than creeking boards, cold draughts, death watch beetles and faulty plumbing.
Spirit can only be defined as something that is not material, so what these philosophers really assert is that thought is not a product or function of the material brain. Yet most philosophers have no neurological training. This physiological ignorance of the philosophers means their speculation about the mind as a spirit rests on unsafe ground.
A professor Eucken attempted to prove that mind is a spirit. This philosopher claimed the world of ideas and emotions, perceived through consciousness, is of a different order, or on a different plane, from the world of material reality. One is qualitative and the other quantitative. Here is the real mystery or obscurity of consciousness. The world of moving masses of matter can be weighed and measured. The world of dreams and fantasies seems to have no material standards. They are two different orders of reality, say the philosophers. The basis of one is material reality and of the other spiritual reality. Yet, thoughts and emotions are of a different or a qualitative order only in the sense that they are not yet proved to be measurable. It is one of the gaps that God and his spirits occupy until science finds an explanation, then suddenly no spirits are found. And the gap is closing. Scientists are finding that they can create emotional states, not just with drugs but with electro-magnetic fields.
The materialist suggests that thought is a function of the brain, and here you at once get a difference. Spiritualists claim love and duty and beauty are as real as iron and wood, but iron and wood are realities or substances, thoughts and emotions are functions of a reality. Even if the mind were spiritual, thoughts and emotions are functions of it, so the spiritualists are mixing together apples and pears. They are not stupid, just deliberately obfuscating the thoughts of those they seek to control.
All these inquiries so strongly suggest that the brain is the only basis of mental life, that some philosophers take refuge in what is called idealism. Mind alone exists—matter is only an idea in the mind. No group of philosophers is more supercilious about materialism than these idealists, but their position is really absurd. Astronomy is a fairy-tale for children, and all cosmological research is a waste of time, if the universe exists only in the mind. History is merely another dream on which time is wasted. Literature and art are colossal illusions. If any of us cannot get beyond our own mental world, then each of us wrote “Hamlet” or the “Iliad” or formulated the quantum or relativity theories, or Kant’s “Critique” or composed Beethoven’s “Fifth.” Unless our study of electrons and protons in an atom is a study of external reality, it is a waste of time. No modified version of this idealism can be held. If everything is not imaginary, then something must be real.
On the spiritual side, psychologists have completely failed to find any other basis than the brain for the unity and connectedness of each individual’s mental life, and philosophers have completely failed to prove that the mind is something more than a function of the brain. On the materialist side, hundreds of things suggest that mind is a function of the brain. Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing as a medical man as long ago as 1871, published “Mechanism in Thought and Morals” showing how mind varied with the brain as faithfully as the shadow varies with the body that casts it. His evidence has been multiplied many times over today.
Some admit these things prove the dependence of mind on brain to express itself, but that mind is still a separate spirit. “The relation of mind and brain is like that of musician and his instrument.” The musician is distinct from the instrument and works it by physical contact. Mind is a function of brain, so this intimate correspondence is natural in the material outlook. On the spiritual view, no one has ever been able to give even an elementary explanation of it. No one has the least idea what a spirit is, how it can be bound up with matter, how it can possibly move matter, why a spirit should be more capable of thinking than a brain is, what the function of the brain really is if it is not thought. The spirit-hypothesis creates more problems and explains nothing.
The materialist sticks to realities. Where the realities are still obscure he can afford to wait. Progress favours the patient investigator. If a statistician could sum up all the evidence that suggests mind is a function of brain, be would say that the chances are overwhelmingly in favour of the materialist. Materialism has triumphed everywhere in practice.
Determinism and Morals
Does materialism not lead to demoralization because it implies Determinism or the denial of free will?
The individualist is sure that socialism means ruin, and the socialist that it is the only means of social salvation. Conservatives always predict ruin from democracy and things that actually improve the world. Protestants despair of the future of society if Catholicism makes any progress, and Catholics are confident that their faith is good for their souls. And so on. You have the same flat contradiction between the opponents and the defenders of nearly every creed or theory. The world is material, but people are less demoralized than they were when Catholicism ruled the thought of Europeans, and everyone thought spirit was far more important.
The anxiety about free will, which apologists profess, is entirely insincere. The proper experts on this supposed liberty of the will are our psychologists, and it would be difficult to quote a modern psychologist who believes in it. They realize that the witness to our freedom which consciousness is supposed to give us is not at all an unambiguous testimony, that the words “free will” are found on analysis to be loose in their meaning, and that the claim of free will means in the last resort something which is impossible.
Free will is the ability to choose freely. No one is compelled to make any particular choice. Yet, a choice is eventually made. There was a motive for the action. The brain-process which initiates your action has an antecedent brain-process which is the motive or cause of it, and this much would have to be recognized even if you believed the mind to be a spirit. The strongest motive wins. Deliberate perversity is just another motive. A free act in the sense in which theologians use the word would be an uncaused act.
Theologians are not even consistent with their own principles. They evade the question of how spirit can act on matter by pleading that spirit does not act on matter, but with matter, as soul and body are substantially united. Then, when they come to free will, they want us to admit the act was initiated by the soul alone! It is not only inconceivable, but false. The nerve-process which represents the successful motive initiates the executive nerve-processes, and the testimony of our consciousness is consistent with that scientific interpretation of what takes place.
In truth, our motivations are many and complex, so we cannot usually know why we make an apparently arbitrary choice. It is rather like a sequence of pseudo-random numbers. They look random, but really are not. We have pseudo-free-will because we are complex creatures that respond to many stimuli. In practice pseudo-free-will is hard to discern from free-will.
The Origin of Life
The Christian belief is that God made mankind. Darwin and Wallace showed that mankind did not have to be made by any sort of supernatural superbeing—animals evolved one into another and often went extinct.
Living matter differs from non-living matter in possessing the power of intent or purpose that enables it to adopt means to certain desirable ends, manifesting a desire for life. Life is ever changing the face of Nature. Intelligence becomes conscious in and with progressive evolution of structure arising from the constant struggle for existence, whereby the fittest survive to reproduce.
Without the sun’s light and heat, few animals and vegetables indeed could exist on earth. The power of the sun is responsible for climate and the growth of a plant. It is responsible for the migration of the moose and the flow of the rapids, for the composition of a poem and the generation of a musical note, for fluctuations in the price of coffee, and the ravages of a famine. It is even responsible for for the rise and fall of nations.
The reason is that the sun’s heat is the main source of energy on the earth. From this energy comes all the power of creation—physical forces, life forces, mental forces and social forces. Nature keeps these forces in harmony but humans, since they discovered how to use them, have been unable to do so.
Nature knows annihilation, and it knows creation but all is evolution. All phenomena are manifested in accordance with a uniform law of Nature called evolution, to which all progress and development in the universe, including religious feeling and moral ideas, are due. Humans have truly evolved from other animals but this is merely a part of the cycles of birth and rebirth in Nature.
God made the Big Bang?
Cosmologists proposed a Big Bang 15 billion years ago that started space and time. "Ah," breathed the theologians, "the Holy Book was correct." Though Christians saw in the Big Bang the finger of God, cosmology had no need of that hypothesis.
Our universe might have had a parent, but it was not God. It was another similar creature. Darwinian evolution has spread into the heavens. The universe is a large black hole. Eventually it may collapse back into the singularity from which it came. A singularity can spawn universes by allowing the matter that falls into it to squeeze out elsewhere in its own Big Bang. Thus, each singularity in our universe could be linked by a narrow "wormhole" in space-time to a universe. There are estimated to be hundreds of millions of black holes in our galaxy alone, so there could be a very large number of universes out there.
Of course, each one is not necessarily like ours because when it forms the various physical constants that define it will vary slightly. Thus, each universe has its own set of properties. The successful ones however will be rather like ours because they are the ones with the sorts of properties that have the optimum density of black holes for daughter universe formation. Effectively there is a meta-universe consisting of all of the universes made hitherto.
People have often wondered why the universe seems so ideally suited to the formation of life. The easy answer is that if life formed, it had to be, and the fact that we can think about it is precisely because we were born in a suitable universe. If it had been unsuitable, we would never have had the chance to think about it. The new Darwinian idea of cosmology, however, tells us that lots of universes are indeed made which are unsuitable for life, but others are suitable. Naturally, we have evolved in one that is.
The theory goes further. Each universe will tend to produce daughters with physical constants like its own. Universes which have a bad set of physical constants will not make many daughters and nor will they. But universes with a good set will produce many daughters and they in turn will produce many more. Always a small proportion will get worse but most will evolve toward the ideal. That is then the real reason why we are here. The evolution of universes has created a meta-universe most of which is ideal for further universe production. These too are the ones that are ideal for life. If the reproduction of universes goes on indefinitely then there will be an infinite number of universes all the same, rather like our own!
The Christian prescriptions are therefore wrong in every particular. Man was once the pinnacle of God’s creation living on a planet that was the centre of the universe. Now we are just one of an infinite set of universes, all alike.
Human Evolution
It is arrogant and idle to pretend that mankind is an image of god, specially created and treated like a favourite but wayward son. The development of humans from the tiny fertilized egg in the ovary is simply a recapitulation of their evolution from the structureless atom of protoplasm from which all organic life originally sprang. We all had the same origin whether it was local or vast distances away in the universe.
Humans are physically as like another animal as that is like yet another, and in similar ways they differ. Indeed, they are so close to chimpanzees in genetic make up that we should be classified together—either we are a type of chimpanzee or chimpanzees are a type of human being. The ape is subject to similar diseases as man, various traits of gesture, expression, and so on, are similar in both and both are liable to reversions and monstrosities.
In the struggle of primitive humanity intelligence proved more useful than strength. The development of technological levels of intelligence in human beings is the profound difference between humans and animals
Beginning at the common stock of apes and humans, mankind gradually evolved as tree-dweller, cave dweller, and lake dweller. In the Stone Age they protected themselves and obtained food with stone tools, then successively with flint tools, bronze tools and iron tools. They evolved from an ape-like animal to Homo sapiens but humans have yet to evolve to civilized man (Homo cultus or “Woman”), an intelligent but cultured ape fully sympathetic and symbiotic with its environment.
Man did not make society, society made man. When the habits of using sticks and stones, of building shelters, and of living in families began—and they have already began among apes—wits grew rapidly. The prolonged human infancy requiring a lot of parental effort forced the evolution of society to provide protection for the dependent young, and thereby bred co-operation without which humans would have remained a type of gibbon.
Humans, having the power of speech and feeling superior to other species in animal life, concluded that they were too perfect to be simply a part of Nature. They made up stories of their special creation, one form of which was the Genesis fable, which has been perpetuated by religion. Yet, no Christian ever stops to think how man could have been made in the image of an omnipresent God. Plainly at the time when Genesis was first written, God was thought of as a big man!
The New Human Evolution
Are human beings always going to be as we are now, or are we going to evolve into something different? If different, will we be better mentally and physically or will we have lost the use of our legs, be dependent on drugs, be incapable of unassisted reproduction or of unassisted thought—even appendages of the computer?
Colin Tudge of the BBC Radio Science Unit in “New Scientist” declares that human beings “are” still evolving, but not in the way one might expect. Evolutionary changes will be a part of our chemical and anatomical fabric, but will be confined to our brains, but will not be built into our genes, and so will be of a kind that can be obliterated in a single generation.
Evolution currently means that the organisms in a population, at a point in time, contain between them a particular collection or “pool” of genes, and that as the generations pass, some genes are lost from the pool and others are acquired—or some that begin as being rare become common, while some common ones become rare. After a time, the change in frequency of the genes is such that the physical changes thereby brought about are noticeable. Organisms that exist a million years later are different from those that lived at first. A degree of genetic change that makes the later organisms unable to breed with the earlier ones means, by definition, that a new species has emerged.
In this Neo-Darwinian sense, there will be some change in the human species, but nothing very striking. There are no natural selective forces now, of the kind that Charles Darwin envisaged, to eliminate harmful genes wholesale, and none that would specifically discourage the spread of new mutant types. Successful people, who apparently have a survival edge over less successful ones, do not breed any faster. Frequency will change but mainly as genetic drift. So, the human species of 10000 years’ time will be no different from now, except in minor cosmetic ways.
Little biological evolution will occur in human beings over the years, and none that really matters, but there will be evolution of the things that humans do. Julian Huxley concluded that although Neo-Darwinism in humans has more or less run its course, evolution continues at a cultural level.
Cultural evolution is different from biological change. Cultural evolution is Lamarckian. Jean Baptiste Lamarck suggested, in the early 19th century, that evolution happens in all organisms by the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Each new generation “learns” something that the previous generation did not know, and this learning is passed on, so that later generations inherit (in the legal, rather than the biological sense) what its ancestors acquired.
Human mental development is thought of as a two step process. Our genes (nature) equip us with a brain, and our experience and education (nurture) cause our brains to operate in particular ways—constrained by the brain’s innate capability and predilection. Modern scientists have often drawn an analogy with the computer—the brain itself is the hardware, while our experiences, including our education, are the programming… but this two step picture does not work.
The brains of infants do not develop purely according to the genetic program of the body. The “hard-wiring” of the brain, the routing of neurons, seems to depend on early experience. Experiment and common sense both suggest memories have a chemical and perhaps anatomical basis that influence our subsequent thoughts, predilections and ways of thinking, as part of the physical structure of the brain! Not only does early experience help to compose the program that determines how the computer will operate in future, but it helps to build the computer itself!
Max Planck accurately noted that old physicists cannot learn new tricks—they become bonded to their world outlook. Progress depends on the old generation dying, taking its old ideas with it. The new generation takes the old ideas as received wisdom and is eager for new ones. A-level students now learn with ease concepts that the greatest professors of a hundred years ago struggled to comprehend.
The process by which people acquire their first language is qualitatively different from the one by which they later learn a second language. How do English infants learn to speak their native language in three years with a perfect local dialect and without formal training, while generally failing in later years to learn more than rudimentary French despite the best efforts of educators? The answer is that acquiring your own language is part of development—both refining the hardware and imposing the program—while secondary languages are mere education, a new task for the already formed and programmed computer to address itself to.
Formal education comes relatively late, and its role is not, in computer terms, mainly to provide the program, and still less to shape the computer itself. It merely determines the tasks to which the program is directed. What really changes from historical phase to historical phase, and is truly evolution, is the period of development in which our infant, plastic brains receive their final hard-wiring and most of their programming.
The cultural environment in which we grew up is totally different from the one in which children grew up 100000 years ago or 1000 ago or even 100 years ago. Because of this, our brains are “wired” differently, and adult human beings of modern Europe are biologically different animals from adult humans of medieval times, not in any obvious way, but because they have brains differing in “wiring” and chemistry, and so different in the way they work.
Medieval people grew up believing the world is innately mysterious, and that they could understand only what they were told by God, through the revelation of His priesthood or prophets. Modern people grow up knowing the world is understandable, and that knowledge can be acquired by observation and experiment. We understand Darwinian evolution and Einstein’s relativity, medieval people could not have, and nor could they, even if they could be transported into modern times. We are different both because we know more (which is cultural evolution) and because our brains, as infants, were formed and shaped in a different way, and now work differently.
Changes wrought in our own brains in infancy are not passed on to our offspring through our genes. We influence them through giving them the environment we have created, the product of our own appreciation of the world. An environmental disaster would interrupt this evolutionary process. Children born after it would grow up in circumstances so different from ours that they would become, in their ways of thinking, quite different animals, most likely reverting to something akin to a more primitive stage of human evolution.
Human beings are evolving, then. If we want to understand what kind of animals our distant descendants might be, we must ask what kind of influences they will grow up with. Will they learn to “speak computer” before they walk? Will we bring them up to love the earth or to love a fantasy? Will six-year olds play with the ideas of quantum physics? Finally, will our descendants believe that it is a proper thing to conserve the planet, and for individual humans to take into account the needs of humanity as a whole? Nothing is fantastic, particularly as we understand better how to train people in infancy.
Religious Bigotry
The Christian Right are extreme conservatives who accept this fable as true history handed down by God and hold that all good and every moral standard comes solely from some malefactor the Romans crucified in the first century AD. They think no morality existed before Christianity was invented yet good behaviour needs no supernatural revelation.
There is an important difference between scientific rationalism and religious bigotry. Even a Christian like Robert Grosseteste, later Bishop of Lincoln, who was the first to teach science at Oxford University as long ago as the early thirteenth century, wrote that it was:
…impossible to understand Nature without experiment or describe her without geometry.
He was among the first minds to emerge from the black night of the Dark Ages of Christianity into the Renaissance. Science had to seek answers through inquiry, investigation, observation, making hypotheses, experimenting and critically examining. In this way, it incrementally progresses towards the truths of Nature. But, religion is fossilised in the past, petrified by creeds and infallible scriptures, depending on superstition and credulity to benefit no one except a small class of priests and preachers, almost exclusively male. They place the authority of the scriptures higher than that of Newton, Darwin or Einstein.
The bible condemns homosexuality because the Second Temple priesthood wanted the people to multiply to generate Jews who would sacrifice at the temple and make the priests rich. The Christian Right considers this cynical ploy to be an infallible word of the Infallible Ineffable and freely condemn homosexuality today as the grossest sin. What is harmful, today, of same sex couples having their sincere relationships consecrated?
Pederasty and child abuse must be far worse because one party is not mature enough to consent. Yet, what does this same infallible holy book tell us? Mary the so-called mother of God was given into the harem of an old man, Joseph, the earthly guardian of the saviour god, when she was not yet a teenager.
Christian protests do not alter the facts of the situation described in their infallible book, which, according to their own rules, condones the practice of taking child brides. If Joseph were to take such a young woman into his household today, the right wing zealots would have him castrated. Perhaps they did then, explaining the perpetual virginity of the budding goddess.
These same Christian Right wingers blatantly ignore the explicit teachings in these infallible books of the crucified man they claim as a god. They ignore his advocacy of personal poverty and his condemnation of the wealthy as the worst sinners. Their only god today is Mammon.
They deify the capitalist economic system that encourages and depends on the selfish pursuit of self-gratification, the profligate exploitation of Nature’s resources, the deliberate planning and engineering of obsolescence thus polluting the earth with prematurely discarded garbage. Added to all this, it is a God-given right to carry firearms though murder is an unqualified sin.
Robert Owen begged Europe and America to see that “man’s character is made for him, and not by him,” and made by his domestic and economic conditions. “Materialistic!” said the clergy! They had been guiding their flocks for fourteen hundred years on the theory that humans have souls and free will, and all they need is moral sustenance—and the world was in a mess for all of that time. The improvement of environment—home, workshop, purse, recreations, schools, baths, clothes, has done more in a hundred years than priests had done in a thousand years.
Yet, Sunday after Sunday, the pulpiteers fixedly warn about the mortal dangers of materialism! “All forewarned, and warned for all,” the pulpiteers cry. But the congregations know they are insincere and are increasingly ignoring the cry.
“All for women, and women for all,” is the Adelphiasophist response. Adelphiasophists aim to restore matriarchy, a kinunity of all human beings with Nature, not some ancient set of rules or laws agreed unilaterally by patriarchs for their selfish purposes in ancient and ignorant times.
Druids
All of us should accept that we are not separate from Nature but part of it and, having accepted it, look to what we are doing to our surroundings. Humanity’s alienation stems from us having cut ourselves off from the natural world and our roots in the past. The purpose of religion is to heal this alienation.
Druids were famously interested in Nature and considered themselves her children. However, ancient Druids refused to write down anything about themselves. The essence of their scholarship was an apprentice system requiring the learning by heart of orally transmitted legends, sagas and romances, not to mention the many practical skills that many categories of Druids needed, and which the Merlins of Celtic cultures sedulously kept to themselves. Our knowledge of the Druids today is based on the work of classical authors—who were prejudiced against barbarians—and archaeology which, though it can be revealing, can tell us little of the rituals or practical principles of the Druids.
We have no business pretending we know what we cannot know, and attempts to reconstruct ancient knowledge, never recorded and gone forever, is a sham. Modern Druids who make this pretence are in danger of simply reviving the methods of control of patriarchal religious. John Tolund, a seventeenth century founder of the modern Druids, opposed "priestcraft" as the exploitation of religion for personal and political ends. Quite so!
Supposed ancient codes become dogmatic assertions, invaluable to priests and preachers who would control people’s ways of thinking and behaving but not something that anyone should respect, occult or otherwise, unless it is based on sound evidence. When Paganism becomes fossilised by setting itself in ancient and not understood rigmaroles, then it is no better than the patriarchal religions with their creeds and scriptures that we decry.
Religious confidence tricks often depend for their success on equating age with wisdom. Their practitioners find it easier to establish their authority if they can persuade punters that the are entering an age-old sanctum. Christianity did it by pretending to be New Judaism, the Theosophists pretended to have the wisdom of ancient Tibet and the New Druids pretend to have the secrets of the ancient Celtic administrative and priestly class.
Modern Druidry seems genuinely based on love of the natural world, but it is transparently the product of Christians—a form of Creation Spirituality, a recognition by Christians that their selfish faith has no part in the universe of the Goddess. It is patriarchal, it is eclectic, it is complacent. It will attract those who pretend that dancing in groves and wandering in woods will cure the destruction of the world. It will not.
While Druids complain that they have no access to Stonehenge for the midsummer solstice, the abuse of the Goddess is continuing. As a variety of Franciscan Christians, they will pray, admire animals, birds and trees (while they exist) and play at spotting dryads, but otherwise will depend on God answering their prayers. It will be their ultimate disappointment. The Goddess is the Goddess of death as well as life. Those tempted to humour the Goddess by seeking fairies in forests had better realise that she will not be appeased.
Promise of the Goddess on seeing Earth
My heart is dusty as a desert,
Dust do’th settle on a despairing heart;
My mind is arid and dry,
Parched for want of the dew of selfless thoughts;
A thick sediment is laying on my body,
My struggles are feeble, my pores are choked.
I lie encased in the fetid filth of unbounded greed,
Yet my concern empowers me.
I must bathe in the fresh fountains of life
And breathe the pure air of truth
To inspire the human soul and heal this earth,
Else the recompense of greed shall be filth,
And the reward of dust shall be dust.
Einstein’s God
Einstein was not religious in the conventional sense, but it will come as a surprise to some, aware of his statements such as that God does not play dice, to learn that Einstein clearly identified himself as an atheist and as an agnostic.
Thus I came—despite the fact I was the son of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents—to a deep religiosity, which, however, found an abrupt ending at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived… Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude… which has never left me.Albert Einstein
Boston’s Cardinal O’Connel attacked Einstein and the General Theory of Relativity and warned the youth that the theory “cloaked the ghastly apparition of atheism” and “befogged speculation, producing universal doubt about God and His creation.” On April 24, 1929, Rabbi Herbert Goldstein of New York cabled Einstein to ask:
Do you believe in God?
Einstein’s return message is the famous statement:
I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.
From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist… I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of Nature and of our being.
The Life and Times, by the professional biographer Ronald W Clark (1971), contains one of the best summaries on Einstein’s God:
However, Einstein’s God was not the God of most men. When he wrote of religion, as he often did in middle and later life, he tended to… clothe with different names what to many ordinary mortals—and to most Jews—looked like a variant of simple agnosticism… This was belief enough. It grew early and rooted deep. Only later was it dignified by the title of cosmic religion, a phrase which gave plausible respectability to the views of a man who did not believe in a life after death and who felt that if virtue paid off in the earthly one, then this was the result of cause and effect rather than celestial reward. Einstein’s God thus stood for an orderly system obeying rules which could be discovered by those who had the courage, the imagination, and the persistence to go on searching for them.
Einstein’s god was the Adelphiasophist god—Nature and the human place in it as a social being dependent upon it and our fellow humans.
The Pantheist Credo
Adelphiasophism is a pantheistic religion or philosophy of life. For anyone visiting us for the first time they might be interested in this Pantheistic Credo, prepared by Scientific Pantheists, which expresses quite well the central pantheism of Adelphiasophism.The WPM says their credo is not like a Christian one, fixed in time. Adelphiasophists are concerned however that anything called a credo will come to be the unchangeable core of a belief system, and that is undesirable for any natural religion. But, perhaps there is that danger in committing anything to print. Anyway, here is the WPM Credo.
- We revere and celebrate the Universe as the ever-changing totality of being, past, present and future. It is self-creating, self-organizing, and inexhaustibly diverse. Its overwhelming power and fundamental mystery establish it as the only real divinity.
- All matter, energy, and life are an interconnected unity of which we are an inseparable part. We rejoice in our existence and seek to participate ever more deeply in this unity through knowledge, art, celebration, meditation, empathy, love and ethical action.
- We are an inseparable part of Nature, which we should cherish, revere and preserve in all its magnificent beauty and diversity. We should strive to live in harmony with Nature locally and globally. We believe in treating all living creatures with compassion, empathy, and respect. We believe in the inherent value of all life, human and non-human.
- We believe in freedom, democracy, justice, equity, and non-discrimination, and in a world community based on peace, an end to poverty, sustainable ways of life, and full respect for human rights.
- We believe there is only one kind of substance, matter/energy, which is not base or inferior, but wonderfully vibrant and creative in all its forms. Body, mind, and spirit are not separate, but all inseparably united.
- We respect reality and keep our minds open to the evidence of the senses and of evolving science. These are our best means of obtaining and refining our knowledge of the Universe, and on them we base our aesthetic and religious feelings about reality.
- We see death as a return to Nature of our elements. Our actions, our ideas and memories of us live on in the world, according to what we do in our lives.
- We believe that every individual can have direct access through perception and emotion to ultimate reality, which is the Universe and Nature. There is no secret wisdom accessible only through gurus or revealed scriptures.
- We respect the general freedom of religion, and the freedom of all pantheists to express and celebrate their beliefs, as individuals or in groups, in any non-harmful ritual or symbolic form that is meaningful to them.
The WPM says you may print out this credo and distribute it to your friends and other people. Stick it on notice boards, leave it lying around on desks and tables, whatever you like. You may also reproduce it and copy it in any form you like, provided you do not alter or distort it, cite their URL and include the notice:
