I just finished reading The Happiness Hypothesis, a book by Jonathan Haidt, who's a professor in the new science of "positive psychology" at the University of Virginia. Most of the book is a straightforward distillation of scientific research on what truly brings happiness and contentment in life, illustrated with quotes and references to famous philosophers and sages of the past who taught similar lessons. There's nothing to object to about this - I think it's a laudable thing for science to study what makes people happy and helps them flourish, rather than focusing solely on disease and dysfunction. And I even learned a few interesting tidbits - the chapter on moral hypocrisy, and why we have a much easier time noticing it in others than in ourselves, was particularly good, as was the chapter on ways that advertisers and proselytizers influence us and trick us into doing what they want, rather than what genuinely makes us happy. That's the kind of information that should be much more widely disseminated.

However, near the end of the book, the argument took a surprising turn. Haidt himself states that he's an atheist, and is careful to note that secular people as well as religious people can experience feelings of transcendent awe and wonder (he calls it "elevation"). But in the last few chapters, he has some unexpected praise for the importance of religion and the allegedly vital role it plays in human community:

...my research on the moral emotions has led me to conclude that the human mind simply does perceive divinity and sacredness, whether or not God exists. In reaching this conclusion, I lost the smug contempt for religion that I felt in my twenties.

This chapter is about the ancient truth that devoutly religious people grasp, and that secular thinkers often do not: that by our actions and our thoughts, we move up and down on a vertical dimension... An implication of this truth is that we are impoverished as human beings when we lose sight of this dimension and let our world collapse into two dimensions. [p.184]

If the third dimension and perceptions of sacredness are an important part of human nature, then the scientific community should accept religiosity as a normal and healthy aspect of human nature... If religious people are right in believing that religion is the source of their greatest happiness, then maybe the rest of us who are looking for happiness and meaning can learn something from them, whether or not we believe in God. [p.211]

I wasn't sure what to make of this, until I read past the end to the acknowledgements:

I am deeply grateful to Sir John Templeton, the John Templeton Foundation, and its executive vice president, Arthur Schwartz, for supporting my research on moral elevation and for giving me a semester of sabbatical leave to begin the research for this book.

That explained a lot. (If you didn't know, the Templeton Foundation is a group founded by a billionaire evangelical Christian whose major purpose is to pay scientists to say nice things about religion. See Jerry Coyne or Sean Carroll for more.)

In these chapters, Haidt speaks of the "ethic of divinity", which he says is tied to human concepts of sacredness and holiness and which runs along a continuum from purity to disgust. As an example, he discusses his research in the Indian city of Bhubaneswar, where Hindu priests from the Brahmin caste have an elaborate system of rules, similar to orthodox Jewish laws, to maintain the purity of their temples: when to pray, what to eat, what to wear, how to touch others, who is allowed to enter which rooms, and so on. He contrasts this with the Western "ethic of autonomy", that people should be free to do whatever they want as long as it harms no one.

Though Haidt recognizes the value of autonomy in a modern, melting-pot society, he has some praise for this ritualistic ethic of purity and contamination as well:

When people use the ethic of divinity, their goal is to protect from degradation the divinity that exists within each person, and they value living in a pure and holy way, free from moral pollutants such as lust, greed, and hatred. [p.188]

Haidt further explains that the goal of this system is not just to follow arbitrary rules, but that these practices have "a deeper relationship to virtue and morality... If you know that you have divinity in you, you will act accordingly: You will treat people well, and you will treat your body as a temple. In so doing, you will accumulate good karma" [p.190].

It all sounds very noble and elevating. But there's another, darker side to the ethic of divinity, one which Haidt mentions only in passing. Lost in all the pious rhetoric about maintaining the purity of one's body and accumulating good karma is this: In every society which has that vertical dimension of divinity, it's possible to move down as well as up. When an entire society is structured around the distinction between clean and unclean, holy and unholy, these ritualistic rules inevitably end up labeling not just actions as unclean, but people.

India, after all, still has its Untouchables. It still has its widows who, by tradition and custom, are confined to a lifetime of silence and isolation - even child widows who never met their arranged husband before his death. In medieval Europe, the ethic of divinity and Christian concerns about blood purity led to vicious anti-Jewish persecution - the inquisitors called it limpieza de sangre - and Hitler's racial-purity-obsessed Final Solution was the last and most bitter fruit of that evil tree. In America, it led to slavery and segregation, and still fuels opposition to marriage equality, still motivates Catholic priests who wield the Eucharist as a political weapon. In the Torah, the uncleanness of the Canaanites is invoked as a motivation for genocide by the conquering Israelite army. Ultra-Orthodox Jews assault outsiders who enter their neighborhoods and women whom they believe aren't dressed properly in public. Islam, of course, has its own purity concerns which perpetuate the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation, which suffocate women under veils and burqas, and which imprison them at home and prevent them from getting an education or visiting a doctor.

At the beginning of the chapter, Haidt quotes this line, allegedly spoken by Mohammed:

God created the angels from intellect without sensuality, the beasts from sensuality without intellect, and humanity from both intellect and sensuality. So when a person's intellect overcomes his sensuality, he is better than the angels, but when his sensuality overcomes his intellect, he is worse than the beasts.

But he fails to notice the implication - that people who follow the dictates of "sensuality" are worse than animals - and, presumably, can be treated accordingly. And the long and bloody history of religion offers all too many examples of exactly that.

Haidt may wax rhapsodic about purity laws, but if the choice is between the ethic of autonomy and the ethic of divinity, it should be more than obvious to any thinking person which one to keep and which one to jettison. No one was ever murdered, enslaved, or tyrannized in the name of autonomy. We can get by without superstitious concerns about divinity, but a society that lost its concern for autonomy would soon be plunged into a new Dark Age - as, indeed, many modern theocracies are. And he may claim that us smug, contemptuous secular thinkers have a lot to learn from the religious about purity and sacredness, but I'd turn that formula around: Before they deserve to be listened to, religious fundamentalists ought to come to us and learn from our teachings about why they need to respect the autonomy and human rights of others. Only once they've absorbed that lesson and put it into action in their own cultures do they deserve to be granted any consideration about what they might have to say to the rest of us.

You may have heard that, after an exasperating series of setbacks and delays, the massive particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider is finally up and running. Even in preliminary tests, it's set records for the most powerful particle collisions ever recorded in a lab - and when it's reactivated later this year, it's expected to set new ones.

Recently, I was struck by this quote from a National Geographic article on the LHC:

So far, the CERN team has been very cautious as it ramps up toward full power — and that's a good thing, said Fermilab's [Dan] Green.

Even if caution means that it takes a while for experiments to start, Green said, "I've been in this business for more than 20 years. I can wait a little longer."

When I read that, I was reminded of the medieval cathedral builders - the architects who embarked on these grand projects knowing, or so the story goes, that they wouldn't see them to completion in their own lifetime. This selfless labor produced some magnificent architecture - but while I admire the beauty of great cathedrals, ultimately they're sterile; they produce nothing of tangible benefit to humanity. But the same is not true of the great modern scientific experiments, the cathedrals of our time. These grand projects, while built on the same soaring scale and evoking the same reactions of awe and wonder, prove their worth by producing knowledge that expands our vision of the cosmos and humanity's own place in it.

Image via. Note the relative size of the workers at bottom left.

At right is a photo of ATLAS, one of the six particle detectors installed in the Large Hadron Collider and currently the single largest one of its kind ever built. Like an onion, ATLAS is constructed as a series of concentric layers, each one designed to detect and measure different aspects of the different kinds of particles produced by collisions in the LHC - superconducting magnets to bend the path of charged particles and reveal their momentum, calorimeters to absorb particles and record their energy, others to record radiation, velocity, electric charge, and so on. ATLAS is about half the size of the Notre Dame Cathedral, weighs 7,000 tons - about the same as the Eiffel Tower - and running at full capacity, can generate one petabyte - one million gigabytes - of raw data per second. (A network of computers will process this deluge of data to filter out the relatively tiny fraction of events that are of interest for further processing.)

Among other discoveries, ATLAS and the LHC are hoped to make the first conclusive detection of the Higgs boson, the elusive particle that may explain the existence of mass. If more esoteric ideas in physics are true - such as supersymmetry, the idea that every species of elementary particle has a previously-undiscovered, massive partner - ATLAS could also explain what makes up the majority of the universe's dark matter. If certain hypotheses of string theory are correct, it could even even prove the existence of extra dimensions.

Another modern cathedral in the making is the Thirty-Meter Telescope, an enormous ground-based observatory to be built in Hawaii atop the summit of Mauna Kea. Scheduled for completion in 2018, the TMT will boast unparalleled range and sensitivity, observing the cosmos in wavelengths from infrared to ultraviolet with resolution as much as twelve times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope.

Image via.

The TMT's primary mirror, as its name suggests, will be thirty meters in diameter, giving it tremendous light-gathering capacity. (Hubble, by way of comparison, has a diameter of 2.5 meters.) But casting such a single, enormous piece of glass would be impossible - the mirror would sag under its own weight - so instead, the mirror will be made up of 492 hexagonal segments, each about a meter and a half in diameter and computer-controlled to work together as one. To compensate for the blurring effect of Earth's atmosphere, the TMT will use a cutting-edge technology called adaptive optics. Nine laser emitters around the telescope will fire laser beams into the sky; sensors detect the photons that are scattered back to the telescope and compare their predicted waveforms with what's actually observed. Using that information as a reference, the telescope's computers will control thousands of mechanical actuators that reshape the mirror's surface as rapidly as eight hundred times per second, with a precision measured in nanometers, to perfectly cancel out the distortion of the atmosphere - and all this as the entire massive assembly slews across the sky to keep pace with Earth's rotation.

When complete, the TMT will be able to see the oldest and faintest starlight in the universe, back to the first stars that ignited just 400 million years after the Big Bang, and the formation of the first generation of galaxies. It will be able to directly observe Earthlike planets around nearby stars, detect supermassive black holes at cosmological distances and take direct images of their accretion disks, map the distribution of dark matter with unprecedented detail, and image the universe with greater clarity than was ever possible before.

One more example is LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, currently up and running in the United States. Like the other scientific cathedrals, it shows the tremendous effort and astounding ingenuity that human beings have poured into understanding the details of the universe we live in.

The theory of general relativity predicts that cosmic catastrophes like the collision of two neutron stars or the merger of two black holes should produce gravitational waves - fluctuations in spacetime which ripple outward from their source. The direct detection of gravitational waves would confirm one of the last and greatest predictions of Albert Einstein, and could potentially provide important information about the behavior of black holes and other massive, distant objects that are difficult or impossible to observe in the electromagnetic spectrum - since gravitational waves, unlike light rays, are not blocked by cosmic gas and dust.

Image via.

LIGO has two physically separate sites, one in Louisiana and one in Washington. Each site operates an identical detector: a laser interferometer, which consists of two tubes set up in an L shape. Each tube is two and a half miles long, is filled with an ultra-high vacuum, and contains a set of mirrors at each end. A beam splitter fires a laser beam down both arms of the L simultaneously; at the far end of each, it strikes the mirror and is reflected back to its point of origin. Under normal circumstances, the two lasers bounce back in perfect simultaneity. But the ripples of a passing gravitational wave would distort space in one direction, causing one of the laser beams to return before the other, which can be detected. If both sites register the same event simultaneously (accounting for lightspeed delay), we can be certain that it arrived from a cosmological source rather than some local event on Earth.

But even the strongest expected sources of gravitational waves, such as a merger of black holes, produce an effect that will be extremely faint by the time it reached Earth, due to the great distances involved. To account for this, LIGO needs astounding sensitivity and precision. The tube arms of the interferometer are filled with an ultra-high vacuum, evacuated to a pressure of just one-trillionth of an atmosphere, to prevent scattering of the lasers by gas molecules - one of the largest and purest vacuums ever created on Earth. (By comparison, the International Space Station orbits through atmosphere a hundred times denser.) And LIGO's mirrors are cooled to just one-millionth of a degree above absolute zero to prevent thermal noise from distorting their surfaces. With these and other innovations, LIGO's sensitivity and precision are such that it can detect a change in length as tiny as 10^-18 meters - one-thousandth the diameter of a proton. And future improvements in the works will increase its sensitivity by a factor of ten.

These great cathedrals, devoted not to worshipping imaginary deities but to understanding the cosmos we live in, give me hope for humanity's future in a way that few other endeavors do. Our world is still roiled by war, burdened by overpopulation, inflamed by religion, threatened by climate change. Yet in the midst of all the stupidity, all the greed and short-sightedness and delusion, there are places where human beings from many nations and cultures have come together to construct vast projects that are purely peaceful and devoted solely to the cause of gaining knowledge. There's no better testament to the fact that, when we choose, we can rise above our worst instincts and cooperate on something worthwhile and beautiful. Even more than any of the specific scientific findings they may produce, this is the most valuable lesson that humanity in general has to learn from these modern wonders of the world.

This past summer, I was visiting the New York Botanical Gardens when serendipity struck: this beautiful little creature alighted on a stone railing around the edge of a pool, staying just long enough for me to snap this shot:

I think, though I'm not an expert, that this is a blue dasher, Pachydiplax longipennis.

I don't usually like close-up photos of insects - they have an eerie, alien feel that I find disturbing. (I admit it, I'm a mammal chauvinist.) But this one is one of the rare exceptions. Looking at it again, it's hard for me not to feel admiration for this sleek, graceful creature.

With its iridescent blue scales, its impossibly frail and transparent wings, its delicate jointed legs, it scarcely seems to belong to nature at all. It looks almost like a device, a tiny whirring clockwork machine made by some detail-obsessed jeweler - except, of course, that we humans haven't yet learned to make machines of such fine and precise workmanship, nor any that pack so many marvelous capabilities into such a small package.

So much of its head is taken up by those huge, gorgeous compound eyes, it seems it has scarcely any room for a brain to process the information they take in. Yet dragonflies have keen eyesight, and are blurringly fast and acrobatic fliers - and imagine how well-tuned their organs of balance must be, to control their pitch, roll and yaw in three-dimensional space at such speeds, a task that would overwhelm a human vestibular system. And though they seem so clumsy, so fragile - adult dragonflies can only fly, not walk, and their wings can't be folded in like a beetle's but must be held out at all times - on their own small scale, they are fearsome and effective predators. And of course, like all living things, dragonflies have one more astounding ability that human-designed devices can't match: they can make copies of themselves from the raw materials of their environment!

All in all, despite all our brains, we humans can't create anything nearly as clever, as intricate, as adaptable, or as beautiful as a dragonfly. But we shouldn't feel too bad: when it comes to forging machines, we've had barely a few hundred years of practice. Evolution has had hundreds of millions of years to refine its designs, to hone and sharpen them against the ruthless grindstone of natural selection. With that much of a head start, and with all the resources of a planet to use for trial and error, it's no wonder that even this blind algorithm produces results of a beauty and craftsmanship we can't match.

And yet, the stunning truth is that we ourselves are products of the same evolutionary process. Look at your hands, your arms, and imagine tens of millions of years of natural selection pushing and tugging on them like a sculptor kneading clay, slowly molding flesh and bone into new shapes. Imagine the skeins of DNA coiled in your cells, woven out of evolution like a tapestry from a loom. Imagine the unbroken chain of your ancestors stretching back into the misty recesses of time, each one only subtly different from the last - but even subtle changes add up, until you reach a point, untold millions of generations ago, where the ancestral lines of human and dragonfly merge into the same track.

This knowledge should fill us with awe. The fact of universal common descent via evolution means that I and this glittering blue dragonfly, no matter how distant the links, are related. When I snapped that picture, it was a family reunion, of sorts - and the admiration I felt for its intricacy and beauty is the same kind of admiration I'd feel for any talented relative whose glory reflects, even if only a little, on his siblings and cousins.

The human species is like a hiker who, having scaled a long and arduous path, can finally stop at a vantage point and look back on the journey he's taken. Looking out across the landscape, we can see our fellow travelers, each one taking a different course from all the rest, all of them spreading out from a single point of origin in the far distance. Why should we not feel a sense of kinship for all the other beings who are traversing life's winding, contingent paths along with us? And why should we not marvel all the more that our astonishing existence is not the result of deliberate planning, but of a glorious, messy, freewheeling cauldron of chance?

I've got plenty of goodies in the bag for this post. Frankly, more has been happening lately than I can write about - but that's okay, because there are lots of other fantastic atheist bloggers who've said it all!

• First, there's this outrageous story out of Washington, D.C., where the Catholic church has threatened to completely shut down all the social services they provide to local homeless people if they're forced to obey laws forbidding discrimination against same-sex couples.

I may write more about this later, but for now, I'm happy to send you to She Who Chatters, whose eloquent anger sums up everything I feel when I read this.

• On a related note, Atheist Revolution tells the story of a Cincinnati atheist billboard - bearing only the peaceful and non-confrontational message, "Don't believe in God? You are not alone" - that had to be moved after the billboard company was deluged with violent threats. Remind me again, what do we stand to gain by being civil and respectful and tiptoeing around so as not to offend anyone's superstitions?

• In the Washington Post, Jonathan Turley asks the cogent question of why the courts let parents off so lightly when their religious beliefs result in the painful and unnecessary deaths of their children from treatable medical conditions.

• On a less somber note, I'm happy to endorse Young Freethought, a new blog focusing on the work of atheists and freethinkers between the ages of 16 and 21. Every new generation shows a greater and greater willingness to think for themselves and challenge the old religious orthodoxies, and I'm very glad to see more young people step up to voice their convictions and add to this groundswell of free thinking. From what I've seen so far, this blog has some very promising, well-written essays already, and I'll be watching them closely to see what else they come up with. You should too!

• Finally, a reader turned me on to this wonderful website, Symphony of Science. Its creator has taken the words of famous scientists speaking about the discoveries that make us shiver in awe, then remixed them with his own brand of ambient, trip-hop music. The effect is eerie and surreal at first, but also hauntingly beautiful. It may not be for everyone, but I enjoyed it immensely. Combined with the lyrics, it spoke to me in a way that almost no other music does. (It reminds me a lot of Forest for the Trees, a band I used to listen to in high school and college.) If this interests you, I highly recommend checking it out.

Hello Quixote,

Considering your last letter to me was some time ago, I apologize for the lateness of my reply. To tell the truth, this was the hardest one for me to write. It's not that I couldn't think of anything to say. Much the opposite: If I had said everything I wanted to say, this post would have been too long! Cutting it down to a reasonable length was more of a struggle than writing it. I've endeavored to edit in a way that does justice to your points and to mine.

I also want to say at the outset that this will be my last reply. I've enjoyed our conversation these past few months; I think we've both had ample opportunity to speak our minds and I'm glad for that. If you'd like to offer some final thoughts in reply to this letter, you're welcome to do so.

While you good folk may connect these observances, and they are real world observances, with logical arguments or rationale for unbelief, most do not. In ministry, we engage believers and unbelievers continuously, and it's a rare bird that cites any of the philosophic staples in my first paragraph, or others like them. The ones who do generally do not exhibit even a serviceable grasp of the attendant issues. This is my overwhelming and consistent experience firsthand.

That may be one of those points where we'll have to differ. In my experience, most atheists, even if they aren't experts in theology, come to atheism because they've decided that something about religious belief doesn't rationally add up. This may, of course, be self-selection bias - it's likely that most of the people who visit Daylight Atheism come here because they like to give thought to these issues.

However, I maintain that since there isn't (yet!) a thriving, real-world atheist community in the same way that there are religious communities, very few people are going to become atheists just because it's the default option in their peer group. Most people who become atheists do so as the result of a conscious decision on their part and an intentional effort to seek out the advocates of that philosophy. Granted, if we're as successful as I'd hope, that may change in a few generations. Greta Christina wrote a very thoughtful post about this (link), about how every social movement needs must start with the most independently-minded, committed people, and how that inevitably diminishes as its goals are accomplished and it becomes a more widely accepted position.

An insulating factor actively laboring against this realization is immersion. I define immersion as a progressive group dynamic which isolates and subsequently reinforces cognitive structures, mores, and peculiar linguistics — and a host of other things — among individuals sharing (un)beliefs and community. We're all guilty of it, and I can't speak for y'all, but one thing accomplished by this dialogue is the weakening of this exclusive immersive web by the coupling of new strands to existing ones.

I couldn't agree more! Why do you think I wanted to do this in the first place?

Lastly, I might also ask you a related question: to what degree is your atheism dependent upon your birth in a western culture steeped in secularism? Would that influence your estimation of the reasonableness of your atheism? I'd also like to hear to what degree you believe your birth into a Judeo-Christian culture has imported tenets from those religions into your atheism, whether consciously or subconsciously.

I don't accept that Western culture, particularly American culture, is steeped in secularism. On the contrary, I'd say that being an atheist where I live requires swimming upstream against an overwhelming tide of public opinion: opinion treating belief in God not just as the expected, but the only moral position. Look at the money in your wallet if you don't think that's true. There may be some places where your remark about our secularism-steeped culture has a degree of truth. But in vast swathes of this country, nonbelief in public life, or even in private life, is all but impossible unless carefully concealed.

I'll grant that living in this culture does make atheism possible - in the sense that, as god-saturated as our society is, we've still managed to carve out some breathing room between religion and government, creating a small space where nonbelief can exist. In many cultures of the past and the present, even that wouldn't have existed, and outspoken atheism would not be an option at all. In those cultures I'd have been imprisoned or worse for saying the kind of things I say nearly every day on this blog.

As for importing Judeo-Christian tenets into my atheism - I don't know, which tenets do you have in mind? There are many moral principles, like the Golden Rule, that find expression in every culture. In our culture, which is heavily influenced by Christian thinking, these universals naturally find expression in a Christian context. In that sense, I'll concede that my worldview has been influenced by these beliefs; it would be virtually impossible for anyone who grew up in 20th-century America to say otherwise. On the other hand, the Bible and historic Christianity have promoted many principles that are antithetical to my worldview, and many social reform movements to whose ideals I subscribe - separation of church and state, women's equality, secular public schools, birth control, GLBT rights - were and often still are viciously attacked for being anti-Christian.

I've never lived a moment without out it that I can recall. There's definitely times when it's stronger, though. After absorbing so much heat for this admission, I'm figuring I should just go ahead and claim it as an evidence for God — I've got nothing to lose! I'd enjoy hearing of your comparable experience...

Well, now you've asked me a hard question! Trying to do justice to experiences like this is like trying to describe the experience of listening to a symphony. But I'll give it my best shot.

This kind of experience tends to come upon me suddenly at my happiest moments, though it sometimes wells up for no apparent reason. (Maybe it's from a little trickle of current in my temporal lobes.) The most salient aspect is a sense of heightened awareness - a feeling that all the world has suddenly become much richer in detail, that everything has become immeasurably more significant. Always accompanying this is a sense of great affection, of love for all the beauty of the world and my fellow living things. And lastly, there's a feeling I can only describe as oceanic: like the boundaries of my self dissolving, being opened up to all the unimaginable vastness of the world, and experiencing it as a source of bliss. In those few perfect moments, it feels as if the world is full of magic, and I've only briefly gained the ability to see it.

I won't say that this state, this awareness, is present in my life every waking moment. But when it does emerge, it's like the sun breaking through clouds, and I wonder how anyone ever does without it.

When I read your commentary and essays, I sense that you consider some things to be right, and others wrong, in a manner that equates them with objective moral values — in a manner that you would consider them right and wrong if you and every other human had never existed; simply put: more than only the natural functioning of a human cortex, a deliverance of human reason, or an emergent consciousness. I'm not convinced yet that your and your commentator's actions match your beliefs. Where is my misstep here?

I do consider that some things are objectively right and others are objectively wrong. However, I do not consider that this is mutually exclusive with the natural functioning of the cortex. I think these explanations are complementary: the existence of conscious, reasoning beings brings right and wrong into the world, just as it brings in a whole host of other abstract concepts - democracy, for example, or money, or science, or music. It wouldn't make sense to say that those things aren't "real", that they're just tricks of the cerebral cortex. We make them real by participating in them.

How can you prove that the only reason God would permit evil to occur is to bring about some other end?

Truthfully, I think that's the only defense a Christian could possibly offer, even as unsatisfactory as it is (a point you seem to agree with, if I read you correctly). For if God did not create evil as a means to some other end, there's only one other logically possible option: that God created evil as an end in itself. In other words, he created evil for its own sake. That's the definition of what an evil being is, and that creates an irreconcilable contradiction with the core tenet of Christianity that God is good.

If a genuine free will exists, not every possible world is feasible for God to create, and the one we know may just be the possible world feasible for God to create that contains the most good with the least amount of evil given the counterfactuals of creaturely free action. As I think I'm on the side of reason here, I'll endure the Panglossian taunts happily.

I really doubt that very strongly. When you look out at this world, you can't think of any way it could be improved? We wouldn't stand to gain by making human beings more empathetic, less prone to resort to violence to settle their disagreements? We couldn't gain by making free agents who are more inclined to take the long view, less inclined to value immediate short-term gain? By making people who are more courageous and morally steadfast, less willing to compromise their principles for material benefit?

These are all contingent parameters of human behavior that could hypothetically be altered; a creator could twiddle those knobs without depriving us of free will. If you really think this world is unimprovable, that's your right. All I can say, though, is that if God turned things over to me, it wouldn't take long to draw up a list of fixes.

Put yourself in my shoes for a moment: if you were convinced there existed an all-wise, all-good, all-powerful being, wouldn't you trust in Him with regard to evil?

If I was convinced of the exact statement you gave, yes, I'd pretty much have to. However, that's because your conclusion is contained in your premise: if there existed an all-wise, all-good, all-powerful being, it follows as a matter of logic that there can be no unnecessary evil in the world. But that's putting the cart before the horse. I see no rational way to draw such an inference, given the fact that unnecessary evil manifestly does exist. How anyone could look at this world and infer that supreme moral goodness intended it all to be this way, that's a conclusion I simply can't see any way to justify.

As I've said before, to infer moral goodness, one has to have at least some understanding of the actor's motives. But you say we should treat God's plan as a mystery, that we can't know he doesn't have good reasons of his own and therefore should trust him. Again, this is putting the cart before the horse. If God's motives are unknown to us, to be consistent, you'd have to say that his moral status, good or bad, is also an unknown quantity. Believing that God is absolutely good and that he has a motive for all the evil he causes is an argument that goes straight from premise to conclusion without any intervening steps.

This month's Poetry Sunday features another poem by Robinson Jeffers, an American poet of the early twentieth century. Born 1887 in Pennsylvania, Jeffers was the son of a Presbyterian minister who taught his son Latin and Greek. Nevertheless, Jeffers did not follow in his father's footsteps. Rather than theology, he became enthralled at a young age with the natural world, and became an avid outdoorsman and follower of scientific discoveries in biology, astronomy, and other areas.

Jeffers found his voice as a poet in the first decade of the twentieth century when he moved to Carmel, on the California coast. He would live there for the rest of his life with his wife, Una, in a granite home called Tor House which he built himself. Jeffers found in the wildness and isolation of the coast, combined with his scientific background, a potent inspiration for poetry. Most of his poems are about the stark and awe-inspiring glories of nature - the "astonishing beauty of things", as he called it. Jeffers also wrote much about human civilization, which he viewed, Thoreau-like, as decadent and corrupted, compared to the clean, fierce freshness of the wilderness. (The fact that he lived through two world wars seems to have given him a certain cynicism about the destructive tendencies of civilization.) His poetry is well-known in the modern environmental movement. His published works include Californians (1916), The Women at Point Sur (1927), Be Angry at the Sun (1941) and The Beginning and the End and Other Poems (1963).

Jeffers' religious views were pantheistic. Rather than the anthropomorphic, miracle-working god of Christianity, he believed in a god that exists as the sum total of all natural forces - "the wild God of the world", he wrote in his poem "Hurt Hawks". In "Roan Stallion", he mused, "Not in a man's shape / He approves the praise, he that walks lightning-naked on the Pacific, that laces the suns with planets, / The heart of the atom with electrons". Jeffers' deity was "no God of love", "no anthropoid God making commandments", but rather "the God who does not care and will never cease". Like nature itself, he shows no mercy and grants no afterlife, and is often violent and savage, but nevertheless spins out astonishing and luminous beauty to fill the world. (Read more here and here about Jeffers' pantheist views.)

In today's poem, Jeffers writes of his own home, Tor House, and contemplates whether the work of his hands will survive the passage of time. Nature, in its eternal renewal, will survive; and the cosmos will remain - and I'm in awe of his description of the constellation Orion, spanning a nearby valley like a lamplit bridge - but Jeffers predicts that humanity, and our works, will eventually sink like ghosts into the depths of the earth.

Tor House

If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes:
Perhaps of my planted forest a few
May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard
With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.
Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art
To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.
But if you should look in your idleness after ten thousand years:
It is the granite knoll on the granite
And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the Carmel
River-valley, these four will remain
In the change of names. You will know it by the wild sea-fragrance of wind
Though the ocean may have climbed or retired a little;
You will know it by the valley inland that our sun and our moon were born from
Before the poles changed; and Orion in December
Evenings was strung in the throat of the valley like a lamp-lighted bridge.
Come in the morning you will see white gulls
Weaving a dance over blue water, the wane of the moon
Their dance-companion, a ghost walking
By daylight, but wider and whiter than any bird in the world.
My ghost you needn't look for; it is probably
Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite, not dancing on wind
With the mad wings and the day moon.

Other posts in this series:

• Poetry Sunday

The nineteenth-century German theologian Rudolf Otto, in his book The Idea of the Holy, popularized the term "numinous", an adjective describing the sense of mystery and wonder that purportedly stems from the presence of a deity. According to Otto, the sense of the numinous had two main characteristics: the mysterium tremendum, the sense of fear and trembling that comes from the presence of that which is wholly other, and the mysterium fascinas, the sense of fascination and curiosity that such an experience evokes.

Otto's theology concisely sums up the categories of religious experience. But the problem with his conception of the numinous is that it lacks one very important quality - understanding.

For Otto, as for many theists, the numinous is not something we should seek to comprehend. We should cower in its presence, or chase after it, or both, but there is no mention of penetrating the mystery, learning what it truly is and how it works. There is no mention made of pulling back the curtain of our ignorance, nor of plumbing the depths of the strange and unknown until it becomes known and familiar.

This idea may seem sacrilegious to theists, but I answer that it's what humanity has been doing throughout its history: piercing the mysteries that surround us, drawing them back one by one, and learning ever more about who we are and what our place in the world is. We are great solvers of mysteries; we have never been content to live in ignorance.

After all, to primitive people, the world was a strange and terrifying place ruled by forces they could not comprehend. To them, everything they encountered was a mysterium tremendum et fascinans: thunderstorms and lightning, sunrise and sunset, the cycle of the seasons, the fall of the rains and the coming of prey, the growth of crops and the bearing of children. Every one of these things, and many more besides, was once a religious mystery before which we worshipped in terror and awe.

But through science and reason, we have pierced the veil of these mysteries. We have learned that natural forces, which once must have seemed like mighty and capricious gods, were in reality grand clockworks, controlled by the predictable unfolding of the mathematical laws that govern the cosmos.

Thunder and lightning are not the spears of the gods, before which we cower in terror; they arise from the buildup of electric potential between cloud and ground, and the shock wave caused by the rapid superheating of air when that potential is discharged. The seasons come from the earth's axial tilt as it orbits the sun. Fertility is no longer a compelling mystery, but a section of the evolutionary trajectory of life as it perpetuates itself. These mysteries and many more we have solved, setting aside primitive superstitions of ritual and sacrifice, and learning through reason how to use the laws of nature for our benefit.

What, then, of the numinous? Is every religious experience doomed to fade as our understanding grows?

I think not. Or, rather, I think the religious experiences of our childhood, born of superstition and fear, will die - but when understanding comes, they can be reborn in a stronger and purer form. Far from science robbing the world of awe and wonder, I think it's only science that makes true awe and wonder possible at all.

I remember standing in the rain of El Yunque, touching the leaf of a plant and contemplating our kinship, our both belonging to that unbroken tree of evolutionary history that unites all life on Earth. My sense of the transcendent was not undermined, but deepened and magnified by that knowledge, the insight into the vastnesses of time and space and the twisting paths of contingency that led to we two living things side by side in the rainfall. I look at my hands with the knowledge that they are shaped from the dust of exploded stars, and that looking up at the night sky, I am looking at the place of my origin. Many more examples like this could be given, proving that true understanding does not diminish awe, but enhances it immeasurably.

The religious experience is, at best, a stunted variety of this feeling. Awe without understanding, or at least the desire for understanding, degenerates into mysticism: viewing a mystery not as a challenge to be solved, but something to be worshipped for its own sake. Mysticism states that ignorance is a desirable condition, a state we should glory in. This attitude only keeps us frightened and ignorant, and worst of all, robs us of the deeper and more genuine awe that comes with comprehension. I say, let us explore. There may be problems too high or too deep for us, mysteries we cannot penetrate - but so far, we haven't found any, and if there are any, they will not need to be protected from our investigations.

The story goes that the renowned physicist Richard Feynman was once asked to summarize the most important finding of modern science in a single sentence. Feynman replied, "The universe is made of atoms."

Although there are many other scientific discoveries that are arguably of equal importance, Feynman's choice makes a lot of sense. The discovery of atoms is so familiar to us that it's easy to overlook its breathtaking significance. We know, at the smallest scale where it still makes sense to talk about distinct objects, what are the fundamental building blocks that matter is made of, and we have described their interactions with astounding precision. Our understanding of everything from why the stars shine, to how DNA replicates, to why a table is solid, relies on our knowledge of the way atoms behave.

Atomic theory is now so well-established, and so widely accepted, that it's easy to forget how controversial a notion it originally was. In fact, atomism was once synonymous with atheism, and it was the bête noire of Western religion not just for centuries, but for millennia.

It was in the fifth century BCE that the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus first proposed the idea that matter was composed of indivisible particles called atoms. But these ideas came to their fullest flowering in the mind of their successor, Epicurus, who lived around 300 BCE. In Epicurean philosophy, the world was ultimately comprised of atoms and the void. All that exists and all that occurs - from flowing water to burning fire to human thought - is due to the movement and collision of atoms and the endless, ever-changing array of patterns they arrange themselves in. The ruling principles of the Epicurean cosmos are natural law and random chance, not purpose or plan, and we who live in it and are part of it can find happiness by learning to accept whatever happens with virtue and tranquility. Epicurus did believe that the gods existed - he saw this as the only way to explain the widespread dreams and visions of them - but in his philosophy, they were not supernatural spirits but material beings composed of atoms, just like humans. More importantly, they did not take any interest in human affairs; they were more like images than actual persons.

In scientific terms, it's impressive how much Democritus and Epicurus got right. They correctly anticipated the very discovery that Richard Feynman called the most important element of modern science. Epicurus even believed that atoms sometimes exhibited "random swerves", a startling point of agreement with modern quantum mechanics. If he had claimed that a god told him all this, it would have been by far the most impressive example of theism anticipating later scientific discovery, and genuinely difficult for an atheist to explain.

Yet to the theologians and churchmen who came after him, Epicurus' ideas were the depths of heresy. His materialist notion of the cosmos - no creator deity, no life after death, everything that exists made of patterns of atoms - was anathema to the monotheist conception of an orderly cosmos arranged and guided by God. For centuries, being accused of "Epicureanism" was a very serious charge indeed. For example, the Jewish writings known as the Mishnah, in 200 CE, had this to say:

And these are the people who do not merit the world to come: The ones who say that there is no resurrection from the dead, and those who deny the Torah is from the heavens, and Epicureans.

Indeed, the Jewish word for "heretic" - apikoros - appears to be a Hebrew transliteration of "Epicurean". The Hebrew benediction known as the Amidah, which is recited three times daily by observant Jews, contains a prayer which asks that "may all the apikorsim be destroyed in an instant" (source).

As Christianity became ascendant, it treated Epicureans no less kindly. Acts 17:16-18 records how the first Christians viewed them:

"Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him, when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry. Therefore disputed he in the synagogue with the Jews, and with the devout persons, and in the market daily with them that met with him. Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoicks, encountered him. And some said, What will this babbler say? other some, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods."

Early Christian apologists such as Tertullian, Jerome and Augustine reviled Epicurus, calling him a "pig" and an advocate of "depravity and gluttony", and his philosophy a "frigid conceit" (source; see also).

Throughout the Middle Ages, as Christianity gained secular power, the ridicule and persecution grew worse. The Byzantine emperor Justinian I, who actively suppressed non-Christian faiths, closed down the philosophy schools of Athens, including the Epicurean Garden, which had survived for eight hundred years. The twelfth-century philosopher Nicholas of Autrecourt, who taught an atomist doctrine similar to Epicurus', was condemned and forced to recant and burn his writings. In the Divine Comedy, Dante depicts Epicurus and all his followers "who with the body make the spirit die" as imprisoned in flaming tombs for all eternity. As late as the 1600s, Epicurean theories were reviled, as one pamphleteer wrote: "Let that beastly Epicure's mouth be now sealed up in dumb silence."

Yet Epicurus, that sly old Greek, had the last laugh. The church persecuted his followers and sought to stamp out his teachings, but not only did Epicureanism survive, it was vindicated. The universe is made of atoms after all. Natural phenomena like weather, the growth of crystals, even the currents of human motion and thought can be traced back to patterns of atoms and their ceaseless ebb and flow. As in many other areas, this is one where religion arrogantly thought to wade in before science had had its say, and was forced to retreat. We do not live in the medieval church's world, where our bodies are just so much fleshly dust powered by immaterial currents of spirit, and the heavenly bodies move in spheres of celestial ether. We live in a grand cosmic clockwork of atoms and molecules, a vast mesh whose unfolding is determined by random chance and the immutable laws of cause and effect. We live in Epicurus' world.

If you search the internet, it's not hard to find New Agers and others who think that the dawning of the age of reason was a mistake. They envision a more "holistic" approach, one that properly pays heed to the mystery and complexity of existence, and castigate science for being cold, unfeeling, heartless in its probing, reductionist scrutiny of the natural world. For example:

The reason things are advancing so slowly... is that science has neglected the (spiritual) indications necessary for its efficient performance - "with all your heart and all your soul...." -- indications that govern higher creativity and exist for the specific purpose of breaking the cosmic bank. The upshot is that science has become excessively expensive, bureaucratic and materialistic. The integration we need, external and internal, requires an incomparably more intense confrontation between the spirit of the researcher and the natural phenomena he is contemplating than what is currently practiced by even the most zealous of researchers.

And yet, the age of reason is also an age of wonder. The devotees of superstition and pseudoscience do not know what they are missing. In grasping after fool's gold, they have missed the true vein. The universe is a grander, more majestic and more beautiful place than any human being has ever imagined, or can imagine. The unsubstantiated and anthrocentric claims and inventions of people can never compare to the wonder and mystery held by reality as it truly is, and now that we truly have begun to understand how the cosmos works, we are at last getting a glimpse of that awe and wonder.

Consider what we witness when we peer into the cosmos with our telescopic eyes. We see light born billions of years ago in the crucible of dying stars, shining out across the cosmos and becoming ever more diffused, until at last our telescopes captured the lonely few photons that arrive bearing news of stupendous, ancient catastrophes. We see colliding galaxies, matter swirling into the abyss of black holes, and stars exploding with titanic force, sending out jets of energy visible across the known universe.

Our astronomy bears witness to births as well as deaths. We sift invisible light and see the ripples in the faint microwave glow that bathes all of space, distant echoes of the incomprehensible cauldron of heat and density in which the universe itself was born. We see dense nebulae where new stars are being born, burning away the dusty cradles of their formation like sunrise through fog. We see young planets circling their parent stars, their gravity cutting clear swaths through the veils of gas surrounding them. Most of the planets we have detected are hot Jupiters, but perhaps in some of these systems lurk embryonic Earths, awaiting their chance to cool and condense and one day become cradles of life of their own.

Turning closer to home, our emissaries have explored the solar system and brought back news of the other shores that await us. We have seen the shadows of the setting Sun creep across the mountains of the satellites of Jupiter, and we have seen the Earth rise in the night sky from the surface of the Moon. We have traveled the surface of Mars with our robot rovers, and sent landers parachuting down to the methane seas of Titan. Our age, for the first time ever in our planet's history, has sent ambassadors voyaging so far beyond our own shores that they could look back and see the Earth itself, our one and only home, as a pale blue point of light drifting in infinite dark.

Closer still, we have turned our gaze back upon ourselves, exploring our world in all its complexity. We have learned of the web of evolutionary kinship that connects all life on Earth. Everything - from human beings to redwood trees, from the lowliest cyanobacterium to the fluorescent tube worms on the ocean bottom - is a branch of the same family tree, every living creature a cousin, however distant, to every other.

We have delved down to the molecular roots of life itself, glimpsing the intricate choreography that turns inanimate molecules into living, growing cells, and the equally intricate assemblage that builds living cells into living beings. We have begun an effort to survey the tree of life, discerning the family relationships among countless species living and dead, and mapping the vast, frozen structure branching multidimensionally through those sections of design space that evolution has so far explored.

Traveling down into Earth's history, we have learned to read the record of the rocks and the chronicles they tell. We have retraced the multimillion-year drifting of the continents and learned of the planetary convulsions that wiped out whole branches of the tree of life and ushered in new ones in their place. We have glimpsed primordial eras long before humanity and envisioned the strange landscapes that once existed where we now place our feet.

All these findings far exceed the most fantastic imaginings of ancient mythology or modern pseudoscience, not least because they are true. In what other age of human history has anyone been able to look on a shooting star or a volcano and know what it really is? In what other age have we known the true age of the planet or understood the power source of the sun? These wonders and countless others, most of which are familiar and mundane to us, would have made people of past ages gasp in awe.

Out of the entire span of human history, these breathtaking discoveries have been made only in the last few hundred years, when we began to think and explore rationally. It was not crystals or prayer or Tarot cards that brought us these things. It was not superstition that was responsible, nor mysticism, nor credulous acceptance of extraordinary and unverified claims. It is the scientific method – institutionalized skepticism, rigorously and comprehensively applied – that has given rise to these wonders of understanding and accomplishment. As long as we human beings were willing to blindly accept the claims of others, to be meek and easily led, to believe without questioning, we remained frightened, brutish, short-lived and ignorant. There are some today who would gladly have us return to that state. Worse, there are some whose methods would inadvertently lead us back to that state, even as they hypocritically seek to take credit for the fruits and innovations of science while rejecting its rules.

But as for me, I remain a skeptic. I am proud to call myself a rationalist. And I will always fight against the proponents of darkness and unreason, because I believe that humanity has barely begun to tap its potential, and that if we continue the path of science, we may some day create wonders we currently lack the ability even to dream of.

Around this time last year, I wrote a post titled "On Atheist Janitors", addressing an e-mail from reader Serban Tanasa that asked whether atheism has something to offer to people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. The other day he wrote back to me with a follow-up post addressing some of the issues first discussed here, and I wanted to offer some further thoughts.

Atheist forces and their agnostic coalition members have launched devastating artillery barrages against the veracity of the Holy Books. But Abrahamic Religion is not mostly, or even primarily, about the Books. The truth is, religion is a Life. It provides a social network. The conditions for membership can be harsh, but are simple enough that even the dullest can understand them, if not fully live up to the ideological ideals. In some cases, membership provides a sense of community, a sort of family away from home. It can also be a help network. Most importantly, going through the motions provides one with the sense of self-worth and accomplishment, supposedly achieved by getting closer to God.

These are all good points, and I agree. Atheists should keep this in mind: The tenets of religion are not irrelevant, but for most individual believers, they're beside the point. The majority of pew-fillers, I would venture, are there not because of a philosophical or rational preference for the tenets of that particular faith over all competitors; they are there because that church and that religion are the locus of community in their life. They provide a sense of place, of purpose, and of belonging - basic things that all human beings seek. This is a truth that we atheists need to keep in mind if we try to persuade people to step out of the fold. It doesn't make our efforts futile, but it does mean that we're struggling uphill. I agree that we need to offer something more than logic, however eloquent and persuasive that logic may be.

So far, Atheism has offered Truth (well, Doubt). This Devil's Sourdough is a little too bitter for many people (even though most would get used to it if they had to).

I have to say that I just love the phrase "Devil's Sourdough".

Most of us live in capitalist democracies. With the partial collapse of traditional values, materialism has prevailed. In an age of mass democracy and juridical equality, wealth and conspicuous consumption have emerged as the only ways to distinguish oneself from the crowds. What can Atheism offer to the hordes of disenchanted losers, who slowly realize that they'll never make it to the top, or even to the middle of the pack? How can Atheism provide spiritual succor? The joys and awe of science? It takes a curious mind, and even then, it takes patience and skill to be a scientist. Most people have neither.

I agree that most people don't have the traits that would incline them toward life as a professional scientist, but that's a very different matter from saying that ordinary people don't have the ability to appreciate the glories of science at all. That's like saying you can't appreciate poetry unless you're a professional poet. Not everyone can participate in the creative process, it's true, but I do maintain that anyone who wishes can appreciate the fruits of that process.

I think that most people do have the intellectual curiosity needed to learn, not necessarily all the technical details, but the broad strokes of what a scientific theory is about. And I do think that most people, given the proper encouragement, can find awe and mystery in that. I don't consider those emotions to have any correlation to one's level of economic prosperity.

More to the point, I don't think that people who'll "never make it to the top" are "disenchanted losers". That comment implies that the real goal of life is material success, and that understanding the wonders of the cosmos is just a consolation prize given to those who miss out. On the contrary, I think it's the endless pursuit of the mirage of wealth and fame that renders life flat and unsatisfying. True happiness comes not from accumulating possessions, but from more meaningful and spiritual pursuits.

If you think about it, religion is in the same business-branch as computer games: providing users with an alternate reality where they get to be significant, one that users are willing to pay money to be allowed access to. There is no reason why this should not be doable in a far less haphazard manner. Identify the temporal lobe brain centers that endow objects with deep meaning, find a way to predictably generate tunable stimulation patterns, and you blow religion out of the water. You can get people to stack piles of manure and feel that they're experiencing an epiphany with each shovelful.

This idea is disturbing to me, and I think it's missing the point. Our goal shouldn't be to develop brain stimulation so that people can be zoned out and blissful despite leading miserable lives. Our goal should be to restructure the world so that more people can lead the kind of lives that are genuinely fulfilling and blissful.

Studies have borne this out, showing that religious influence wanes as societies become more prosperous and more secure. People who lead good lives in this world don't need to cling to the hope of another.

In terms of community support, we have to get organized. When we can get people to go to 'church' (for lack of a better word) every Sunday, without the promise of eternal life to drag them out of bed, we will know we have succeeded.

This is one point where I do agree. I've written on multiple occasions about building the secular community, and my sketch of a post-theistic world has humanist organizations that serve as focal points of meaning and fellowship. These things are intrinsic aspects of human psychology, not the property of religion. Creating them is an ambitious effort and one that will take a lot of work, but it can be done, and there is no shortcut. To dislodge religion and end its monopoly, we must be prepared to offer people a meaningful atheist alternative.