Victor J. Stenger: “Freedom and the Spiritual Life”

I can see few advantages of the so-called spiritual life. Religion may provide comfort, but that comfort comes at the price of freedom. Personally, I would rather be free than a slave to supernatural forces. While there may be dangers in unbridled freedom of behavior, as the AIDS epidemic demonstrates, constraints placed on human behavior should have a rational basis, rather than be simply commands from on high, passed on by self-appointed messengers, to be obeyed without question.

When humans were ignorant, superstitious primitives, alleged supernatural command probably served a purpose. Taboos, such as those against incest, divorce, and unhealthy foods helped tribes survive when their members lacked the intellectual tools to grasp the practical necessity for the taboos.

But now we have advanced to where we possess substantial intellectual tools, and are quite capable of examining the evidence to determine what behaviors should be discouraged – for the benefit of both individual and society. We are sufficiently competent to determine, by trial and error if necessary, the optimum systems by which we organize ourselves in society.

We no longer gullibly accept the word of higher authorities telling us that we must be ruled by a hereditary monarch, arguing that God must have intended it to be so when he placed the King on the throne. We can figure out for ourselves, from historical observation, that hereditary monarchies have provided the worst of governments.

With its many deficiencies, democracy has proved the most successful form of government applied so far. This conclusion is based on data, not the assertions of self-proclaimed authorities. And despite attempts by many religious figures to tie democracy to their spiritual teachings, no form of government ever proposed is less consistent with the instructions of religion. Democracy arose from the rejection of religious authority, intolerance, and corruption. Far from being a Christian nation, the U.S. was founded on the notion of separation of Church and State. The word God appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution.

Similarly with our economic systems, the rapid collapse of socialism empirically demonstrated that freedom of the individual still provides the best basis for a viable economy. Socialism was a theoretical ideal, a kind of wholistic system where the simultaneous cooperation of every element was required for successful operation. The results of the attempt to apply this ideal speak for themselves: The perfect cooperation required by socialism, as nice at it sounds in theory, has never been achieved in practice and is probably impossible.

Certainly some cooperation is necessary in society, but the system in which that cooperation is based on mutual individual benefit, agreed to by all participants because of recognizable self-interest, has proven itself to be the best by its own success. As a scientist, I am guided by the rules of pragmatism and parsimony. Free enterprise and democracy demonstrably work, satisfying the rule of pragmatism. They also satisfy the rule of parsimony, by requiring the least artificial control.

And so freedom, in the political, economic, and personal sphere, are natural outcomes of a rational, scientific perspective. At the same time, the religious, spiritual perspective has proven the bankrupt basis for the enslaving of human beings. By telling people that they are ultimately subject to forces beyond themselves, religion has always paved the way for the despots and dictators who would rule us all.

Victor J. Stenger: “The Narcissism of Christianity”

According to Christian belief, God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son to serve as a human sacrifice to atone for the sins of humanity. In return, Christians are expected to return that love. Not only are they to love God and his son, but their neighbors and even their enemies.

What form is that reciprocal love of humans for God to take? Judging by God’s own actions, sacrificing one’s children would seem to be the only adequate response. After all, this is what God himself did, and what he asked of Abraham. I can’t understand how Christians got the idea that God wants them to block abortion clinics in the name of some imaginary notion of “sanctity of life” that can be found nowhere in Biblical or Christian history. If they really followed the directions of the God of Abraham and Jesus, Sunday morning services would contain another ritual: just before the collection, Christians would lay their first-born on the sacrificial altar.

Obviously the Biblical idea of sacrificing one’s children did not take hold, even in the early church. Instead Jesus himself is ritually eaten and his blood drunk. This is still pretty grisly and pagan, but at least only symbolic. And, it’s a lot more convenient than sacrificing your first-born.

So how does the Christian return God’s love? God loved the world, and Christians love themselves. Christianity did not become the 2,000 year success story it is by expecting people to make sacrifices. Quite the contrary. Christianity thrives for only one reason: the promise of the ultimate reward of eternal life. And the people who call themselves Christians do so because they want to live forever.

What kind of people want to live forever? Not those who love God. Not those who love their families or country. Not those who love the world. If they truly love any of these things they would not care about eternal life, which is, after all, a very selfish desire.

How does one measure love? Today we use the word far more loosely than in the past, in ways that degrade and trivialize the concept. The words “I love you” are easy to say, to get your girlfriend in bed or to quiet your spouse’s rampage. But the simple profession of love does not confirm its existence. I would argue that the reality of love has only one valid test: the person doing the loving must place the well-being of the loved one ahead of his own.

The father who gives his life to save his drowning child, the mother who forgoes a career to raise her children, the soldier who jumps on the hand grenade to save his buddies – these are the people who love someone greater than they love themselves. In this, I agree with the message of the Bible and Christianity, for this is nothing more than the message that we have heard from great sages throughout the ages: only by personal sacrifice can we demonstrate our love for someone or something outside ourselves. Jesus was not the only one to say this.

Zoroaster said it too, as did Confucius and Mohammed. The clearest expression of the concept, however, came from the Buddha who taught that the human being can only become at peace with the apparent hopeless reality of life by a complete rejection of self.

But, alas, rejection of self seems to be genetically impossible for the bulk of the human race. We have been programmed by our genes for individual survival, as a practical means for optimizing species survival. So even Buddhism had to find other means to capture the hearts of its followers, with rituals and superstitious teachings. Christianity managed to grow to the largest and most successful religion by a clever stratagem, borrowed from Hinduism and Zoroastrianism and later further modified by Islam: Tell people that this world of pain, suffering, and injustice is only an illusion. Beyond matter exists an infinite world of the spirit which contains joy and immortality. And we all can partake of this gift, if only we follow the dictates of the few who have been chosen, usually by themselves, to point the way.

Only those who love themselves more than God, or family, or country, or any other entity desire life after death. Christianity is successful because it is narcissistic, and the world is full of narcissists.

Victor J. Stenger: “Love and Matter”

More than once I have been called upon to explain love. I must say the challenge puts me out a bit. Why should I, a physicist, have to explain love when nobody else has done so? Poets are simply asked to count the ways of love. Philosophers only attempt to define the word. Why should an expert on quarks and neutrinos be expected to do more?

The challenge usually occurs after I have described how science finds no evidence for any component in the universe beyond matter. I explain how our most powerful instruments reveal no sign of what people have termed the “spiritual” world, and that this includes both the outer world of our senses and the so-called inner world of our minds. At this point, even humanists will blurt out, “What about love?”

Spiritual terminology is so deeply imbedded in our language that people assume spiritual concepts are meaningful. In fact, they fail to meet any reasonable standard of evidence or logic. Still, many feel compelled to define the part of our being concerned with emotions, such as love and hate, as spiritual; that is, non-material, in nature.

Maybe they are. But my point, which is usually missed, is that we currently have no reason for believing this is so. Two competing theories are presented: One holds that everything is matter; the other holds that the universe is both matter and spirit.

Clearly the all-matter theory is more economical, requiring just one component to the universe while the matter-spirit theory involves two components. According to the rules of reason, the burden of proof lies with the proponents of the less economical theory. Thus, as a proponent of all matter, I am not compelled to explain anything, including love, as long as no data forces me to adopt the more complicated picture of the universe asserted by spiritualists.

Nevertheless, out of the goodness of my heart (well, properly aligned brain-cells), I am willing to help the other side in their quest for proof of spirit. I will tell them how to prove me wrong!

The material world is characterized by the fact that all its components obey certain rules: the laws of physics. All the spiritualist needs to do is demonstrate a miracle, a violation of the laws of physics, brought about by spiritual means.

This, of course, is precisely their claim. Spiritualists insist that miracles happen by the intervention of external spirits, or by spiritual powers within individual minds. Faith healers profess to cure illness. Psychics say they can bend spoons with their minds. Love, too, is supposed to work miracles.

Well, show me the evidence. But, let me again remind you that the burden of proof is yours, not mine. To prove that a miracle did indeed occur, you must rule out all natural explanations with a high degree of certainty. To successfully dispute your conclusion, all I must do is find a plausible natural explanation. I am not required to prove my explanation according to the same rules you must apply to prove your less economical alternative. That may sound unfair, but that’s the way it is.

For example, an anecdote about how your mother recovered from cancer as a result of all the love that enveloped her must be weighed against all the equally-enveloped mothers who nonetheless die of cancer. When the survivor of a plane crash says that love pulled him through, you must not forget the equally-loved who died in the crash. You have the responsibility, not me, to demonstrate that your evidence is more than a statistical fluke.

People have been trying to prove miracles for thousands of years, and have failed in every attempt. Perhaps somebody will succeed in the future, but I find that exceedingly unlikely after all this time. I bet my mortal remains that no one ever will.

None of this implies a denial of love as a real, meaningful human experience. Humans are complex material systems who have evolved marvelous intellectual, creative, and emotional abilities. Recognizing the truth of this will move us much farther along the path of understanding and appreciating love than attributing the phenomenon to some imaginary, supernatural force that very likely does not exist.

Victor J. Stenger: “Marooned on Spaceship Earth”

Life has yet to be found anywhere but on Earth. Over a hundred planets beyond our solar system have been identified, with more being found every day. None, so far, is suitable for life as we know it, although this could be a selection bias since only the largest planets will be seen initially. Perhaps life may be someday confirmed on Mars or elsewhere in the solar system, such as under the ice on Jupiter’s moon Europa. But such life will be at best rare and primitive. Certainly humans cannot live on Mars or in an ocean on Europa without extensive life support. Maybe one day the SETI (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) project will hear signals from a civilization beyond Earth. But we are very unlikely ever to sit down together for tea and crumpets.

Much is made of human space flight. It is hyped as the search for new worlds akin to the explorations on Earth during the Age of Discovery. Space operas like Star Trek lead people to think that someday all we will have to do is hop in a spaceship and cross the galaxy at warp speed. Every planet we land on will have an atmosphere and other conditions sufficiently like Earth that we will be able to walk around without spacesuits. In this way, it is widely imagined, humanity will gradually populate the cosmos.

This is very unlikely ever to happen. The chance of humans finding new worlds to live on without extensive life support is very small. A spaceship moving at 11.1 kilometers per second, the escape velocity for Earth, would take 114,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri, the nearest star. That same spaceship would take 3 billion years to cross our galaxy.

Now, Einstein’s special theory of relativity makes it in principle possible to reach anyplace in the universe in the lifetime of an astronaut onboard a spacecraft. The ship just has to go fast enough relative to Earth.

In order to reach the next nearest galaxy (excluding the Magellanic Clouds just outside the Milky Way), Andromeda in 10 years ship-time, the ship would have to travel very close to the speed of light (0.999998c). By the time the ship reached Andromeda, 2.3 million years would have elapsed on Earth. That is longer than the time Homo sapiens has been Homo sapiens. Any humans exploring the universe will effectively cut themselves off from Earth. Even if they traveled to Andromeda and back, aging only 20 years in the process, they would return to an Earth almost five million years in the future as measured on Earth clocks.

Notice that I have not used any technological limitations to argue that spaceflight to distant stars and galaxies is impossible. While a method for accelerating a spaceship to near the speed of light is beyond any technology we can currently imagine, I will not rule that out for future generations.

People also speculate about traveling through wormholes, tunnels through space-time that act as shortcuts to other parts of the universe. I don’t know if that will ever prove possible, but I doubt it.

The amount of effort that is needed to provide life support for humans in space makes it clear that we did not evolve to live in space. Life on Earth evolved under the very special set of conditions that exist here. The sun is a stable source of energy.

The orbit of Earth is almost an exact circle, which keeps us from experiencing too great a variation in temperature. Planets in multiple star systems, such as Alpha Centauri, of which Proxima Centauri is a member, would not have such gravitational stability, making them unlikely candidates for life.

Earth’s distance from the sun is such that temperatures on our world are very suitable for the evolution of life structures based on carbon chemistry. The materials on Earth – large amounts of water, an atmosphere containing oxygen, a surface containing carbon and other elements, have made life possible.

By a fortunate coincidence, the spectrum of radiation from the sun is maximal in the same wavelength region where the transparency of Earth’s atmosphere is maximal. These conditions, and many more, provide the delicate balance needed for complex carbon structures to survive on Earth. No other planet in the solar system has such conditions, and it seems likely that future star trekkers will never find another planet in our galaxy where humans could live without substantial life-support systems.

Notice also that I am not denying the possibility of some kind of life elsewhere in the universe. Indeed, I regard that as very likely. Here I am talking about Earthly life, specifically humans.

The suggestion is frequently made that humanity might someday live in outer space, inside space stations orbiting Earth and other planets. However, even if these space stations duplicate all the conditions on Earth, they may not be able to deal with the cosmic rays from which we on Earth are shielded by the atmosphere. The same threat prohibits lengthy space travel. The types of Mars missions people dream about would expose astronauts to life-shortening radiation poisoning.

Perhaps future technologies will solve this problem, too. Maybe genetic engineering will make new kinds of humans, a new species, suitable for space travel. And, of course, we can always send automatons. The fact remains that humans are not constructed to live unsupported anywhere but on this tiny blue speck in a vast universe. Our species is marooned in space, on spaceship Earth.

Victor J. Stenger: “Secularism – Will it Survive?”

Will secularism survive? Yes, if we can keep science afloat.

Secularism should survive for the simple reason that there is no need for God. God is a persistent memory from the childhood of humanity – that invisible friend who once provided comfort in a strange and scary world. Humanity has now reached adolescence, a crazy and dangerous time when children are fully developed physically but have not yet learned how to avoid self-destructive behavior. Fortunately, adulthood is just around the corner, provided the teenager survives until then. If humanity ever reaches adulthood, it should dispense with God.

As late as the nineteenth century, it still seemed reasonable to believe in God. People looked at the world around them and thought, “I can’t see how the universe and life, in all their complexity, could have come about naturally.” So, they concluded that those things must have come about supernaturally. But the fact that you do not understand something does not imply that it cannot be understood.

Today’s physicists and cosmologists have shown that no laws of physics were violated – no miracle was required – to produce the universe. The laws themselves look just as they should look if they came from nothing. Similarly, biologists, beginning with Darwin, along with modern-day computer scientists, have shown how easily complexity can arise, without design, from simplicity.

Of course, this is not what the many people who still talk to their invisible friend want to hear. Currently, science is under heavy attack in the public arena because of its unwelcome message, and scientists are struggling to defend themselves.

But, barring a new Dark Age in which science is removed from the schools and its books and journals burned, the empirical fact that there is no need for God is bound to seep into common knowledge. The world will remain scary, but we will grow up and learn to grapple with our fears like adults – realistically, without the expectation of help from some imaginary realm.