The Problem of Evil - Theodicy 101

A common argument against God's existence is, "How can a good God allow bad things to happen?" For Christianity, this is "the problem of evil" in the world. One formulation of the argument says, if God is all powerful, he could prevent evil, and if he is all good, then he would surely do so; therefore, either he cannot or does not want to, and either way, he is not the theist idea of an all powerful, all good God.  Of course this argument does not support atheism, but it does appear, on the surface, to undermine the Judeo-Christian view of who God is.

Theodicy is the term used for the apologetics of the problem of evil; explaining why there is evil in the world, and how a good God can allow evil to exist.  Many explanations have been offered by better authors than me, and in more depth than I can go here.  For example, C. S. Lewis has a go at it in his book God in the Dock.  For a good on-line look at the topic, see this on YouTube.  The topic is huge and, in the end, the sum of the responses and explanations is probably inadequate or unsatisfying to many, and perhaps especially for atheists.  Nevertheless, I will have a go at it from my own perspective.

Few people will doubt that evil exists in the world; bad things do happen to everyone at some point.  It is widely accepted that there are two types of evil in the world.  Moral evil can be attributed to humans: starvation, war, murder, theft, rape, abuse, cheating, corruption, etc.  Natural evil, on the other hand, refers to other forms of suffering not attributable to people: diseases of various sorts, earthquakes, tornados, floods, and other natural disasters, often referred to as "acts of God", even though they are all in the natural realm. In some cases, there is overlap between these two types, as when humans purposely spread, or withhold treatment for an otherwise natural disease, for example.  There is also a third type of evil; spiritual evil, as in the actions of demons, curses, spells, and other occult phenomena. But if you don't believe in God, you probably don't believe in such things anyway, so here I will focus only on the moral and natural evils afflicting our world.

At the highest level, the explanation for both types of evil is 'The Fall'.  Man rebelled against God, so things broke down and went wrong.  In the garden of Eden, the first humans decided they knew better than God what was good for them and so went their own way, separating themselves from him.  As a result they were evicted from the garden and had to deal with the resulting problems.  Adam and Eve could have stayed in Eden with the tree of life, enjoying easy living forever, but foolishly they chose to rebel against God's simple instruction, and got what they were warned about.  According to this doctrine, even the world itself suffered, and became less comfortable for people, animals and the rest of creation.  Creation was damaged by man's disobedience, resulting in ongoing sin, death, suffering and evil.

No one is perfect and we all make stupid mistakes that sometimes cause hurt or damage, and sometimes we do these things on purpose.  In Christianity, this tendency is called original sin.  Whether you take the Eden story literally or allegorically, all humans are clearly prone to sin and, without guidance and discipline, do not naturally seek God and their neighbour's good.  Even with careful upbringing and education, all people sometimes do things they know they shouldn't, or fail to do what they know is right. With this understanding, we see that God did not create the evil in the world, but he allowed it to happen. This explanation does not satisfy most people, so I will need to expand on it.

We humans were created with free will, the ability to choose between different actions for our own reasons.  God values and honours our free will, in particular, our ability to ignore or deny him, so he allows evil to exist in the world as the direct result of our choices.  The Bible teaches that we all have some evil in our hearts, that none of us on our own will seek God or always do the right thing.  This doctrine of original sin is easy to demonstrate: every honest person will surely admit to knowingly doing things that were wrong.  Pride, greed, envy, vengeance, hatred, fear, jealousy, ill wish, competition, and so on, are feelings experienced by all humans, and we all at various times succumb to and act on them, causing bad things to happen.  I doesn't take much imagination to see how this explanation accounts for most if not all moral evil at the individual, group, national and global scales.

Suppose that God were to step in to stop our actions or block our evil intentions in order to prevent the evil from happening. We would then not be truly free, as for example, in a 1984-like police state where our every thought and move are monitored, and we are coerced into only one path at every choice of consequence. Not much free will there!  Moreover, if our mistakes were corrected at each pass, we would never learn from them.  Of course we are all free to choose the good and right, and perhaps we mostly do so, but we are still prone to evil choices and deeds, and God usually allows us to proceed, regardless of the consequences. God does not like what we do wrong, but he constrains himself in order to honour our free choices.

In addition to our free will, God values faith and wants us to recognize his existence, as well as his goals and desires for us.  If God acted all the time to stop evil, there wouldn't be much room for faith since his actions would be obvious and predictable.  This does not mean, I hasten to add, that believers don't continue to sin.  We are ALL broken and fallen and need God's grace to grow in goodness, and we ALL need his forgiveness for our misdeeds.  With sin and evil all around, it is hard - even impossible - to think and act perfectly, unless your name is Jesus the Christ.

In this approach to the issue, God's highest priority is not our health, comfort, safety, or well being, although he does want those for us.  Rather his highest goal is for us to seek and find him, to turn our lives, hopes, dreams, behaviour, and thinking over to him willingly, trusting that he knows what is best for each of us.  Our relationship with him is more important than minimizing or removing evil from the world.  To maintain our free will, God allows our evil acts, even when they cause serious harm to others or his creation.  And of course, he sent his Son Jesus to take the burden of our sins so that we would not have to pay the penalty for them - a penalty we could not possibly ever pay.

Some apologists for Christianity point out that not all pain and suffering is necessarily evil.  Pain serves a purpose as physiological warnings: remove hand from hot surface, avoid those cactus spines, stop exercising when it hurts, etc.  And we know we should seek help for injury or prolonged pain; e.g. toothache, sickness, overwork, self-harm, etc.  Rest that sprained ankle, it hurts for a good reason! 
Moreover, some types of suffering may build strength of character; the Christian version of, "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you better".  Some people who go through evil times come out wiser and better for it, and in hindsight, no longer condemn the suffering they faced.  Many Christians even report that more serious evils in their lives helped them grow as persons or believers.  Some readers may find this questionable, but it is an oft-reported reality.

Humans may also be personally complicit in some types of seemingly 'natural' evils. It is hard to blame God for your lung cancer if you've been smoking all your life.  If you break his rules about sexuality and catch a serious disease, don't rail against God.  If you live on the shallow waterfront of a river, or ocean beach front in Florida, don't complain to God when you are flooded during a hurricane or spring runoff.  Many similar situations could be listed.  God gave us minds to make wise decisions, not to ignore danger signs we know about and understand.

According to Bible, the Fall also caused some natural evils to arise: labour pains for women, tough soil and weeds in farming, and ultimately, death itself (see Genesis 3:16-19).  The moral aspects of all of creation are entwined together, so that our hereditary rebellion affects everything.  This concept of evil could therefore be extended, in principle, to other perceived evils: animal attacks, sicknesses, even natural disasters.

It will, of course, be argued that natural disasters are entirely natural and not man made.  But as science and technology progress, we have an increasing ability to mitigate or prevent these "evils" through, for example, tornado and tsunami warnings, rescue teams, safety standards and building codes, hurricane evacuations, reliability improvements, vaccines, cancer treatments, modern health-care, etc.  To the extent that we do NOT develop and widely apply these so that suffering continues and people are hurt, some of these natural evils begin to look more like moral evils - largely intentional failures or oversights on our part in caring for our fellow humans.  If we collectively choose to fund weapons development above health care or disease prevention, do we not become complicit in the resulting evils?

Nevertheless, these broad "explanations" cannot cover all forms of perceived evil in the world.  They are particularly unsatisfying for certain specific evils: children dying of cancer, healthy people dying of heart attacks or struck by lightning, tornado deaths, random accidents, etc.  These seem like real evils that mankind cannot completely mitigate or prevent.  So there is always some residue of evil that is difficult to "explain away".  In such cases, Christians fall back on trusting God and knowing that his ways are largely inscrutable to us mere mortals (see Isaiah 55:8-9, or Romans 11:33).  That explanation will, of course, be particularly unsatisfying to non-believers.  Theodicy can perhaps account for and explain most forms of evil to some degree, but the problem of evil does not go away, and remains a mystery and one of the most difficult areas of Christian theology.

To turn the tables, however, atheism also has a serious problem with evil.  In a materialist world - nature is all, there is no God, no heaven or hell, etc. - there can be no good or bad other than how we individually or collectively feel about things.  There is no absolute right or wrong, no "ought", only "what is". So how can atheists complain about evil except as special pleading, "I don't like this or that"? After all, we do not consider a lion to be evil when it kills an antelope to eat.  If we are all just evolved apes, then how can we cry foul when bad things happen to us, or to our family and friends?  To complain about evil in the world is to recognize that good and evil truly exist and that we have a moral compass to recognize unfairness and to express our deepest indignation about the suffering and harm so apparent around us.  Ultimately to recognize good and evil as realities implies a moral source and some standard above material existence to judge events and their effects.  That begins to look like spirituality, pointing to a Source for truth, or even to God.  In this way, "the problem of evil" becomes a pointer to God's very existence.

There are many other similar postings, essays and entire books on the general subject of theodicy.  Here, for example, is an excerpt from one such article:

"For Augustine the Fall is central. According to him, God created an idyllic paradise with no suffering, death, or natural disasters. It was human disobedience that introduced these things into creation. Most educated people in the West no longer find that account plausible. The whole process of evolution involved the suffering and death of millions upon millions of creatures, within a context that included occasional earthquakes and floods. These facts are now part of the scientific data we must accept. And they strongly suggest that God, in the process of creation, built in the inevitability of suffering as a part of His method."

I hope my writing here at least partly addresses the widespread complaint against Christianity regarding evil in the world.  I am aware that it does not completely satisfy, but perhaps it cuts evil down to something less enormous and impossible to deal with.  And discussion about evil should not be all negative or unhappy.  There are things each of us can do to limit or mitigate evil in and around us.  The next time you are upset about some particular evil in your life or in the world, consider:

1. Have I helped bring this on by my own choices and actions? e.g. obesity, smoking, lack of exercise, unwilling to share my resources, being unkind, ignoring warnings, taking risks, letting anger, revenge, or hatred loose.  There are many ways we can contribute to or aggravate evil around us.
2. Is there something I or we could do to mitigate the effects of this wrong?  e.g. can I help with pollution, hunger, loneliness, pandemics, poverty, crime, distrust, etc.  How could I live better? e.g. honesty, generosity, love, compassion, gentleness, etc.  There are many things even individuals can do to make the world a better place.
3. If the "evil" is truly not my fault and cannot be significantly prevented or mitigated, then where do I go for comfort, solace, support, etc?  Family, neighbours, agencies, government, or maybe, perhaps even God?  God invites us to bring our cares to him in prayer, and many people do receive these, along with a degree of peace.

In the end, we are all dismayed by the evil we see.  We think, "this is not how it is supposed to be!"  We all suffer and see others suffering, we all bear it as best we can, we all strive to minimize pain and suffering, and we can all do better to alleviate hurt and danger for others, helping our neighbours here and around the globe to live better.  Ultimately, we will all die - the final evil - and then what?  Only belief in God holds the ultimate key to overcoming evil with good, God's own good, through Jesus, for those he created and loves.

Addendum: Some Later (much later!) Thoughts.

There is far more to say on this topic.  People have studied, speculated, analysed, struggled and theologized about it for millennia, in far more depth than I can pretend to.  I am obviously not going to resolve it in a blog post - even an extended one.  However, I have lately been reading Evil and the God of Love, by John Hick, an excellent introduction to theodicy from a historical and philosophical perspective.  While he plays loose and fast with scripture, he does cover the topic and makes the reader think deeply.  As I read through it therefore, some additional thoughts came to mind, as follows.

A major area of confusion I've seen is regarding the meanings of "good" and "evil" - whose good and what counts as evil?  Some authors consider any pain or suffering from any cause to be 'evil'.  Some even worry about 'metaphysical evil': why the world is not more perfect in every way?  And why isn't everything angelic everywhere?  That seems unnecessarily demanding, to my mind.  We know that God made the world "very good", and was originally pleased with it.  That should be good enough for us too, I trust, rather than being concerned about how God could somehow have made it 'better'.

Limiting ourselves to more prosaic, but very real sorts of evil, what should we include as "evil"?  A wild-fire burns trees, a bird eats worms, a lion kills and eats a gazelle; surely those are not evil events?  It is a lion's created nature to hunt, kill and eat other animals.  The world's long history is filled with death and destruction: viruses kill bacteria, plants die and rot, animals are killed and eaten, violent natural disasters strike, and so on - all part of the natural, created order that long preceded humans and the Fall.  Indeed scientists say that 99% of species that ever existed on Earth are now extinct.  Is all that history truly evil?  Perhaps the extinctions made way for better lifeforms or more variation over time, leading eventually to ourselves.  Thus, while it may be disappointing for many to have no more trilobites or dinosaurs, their disappearance from creation need not be considered 'evil' in any moral sense.  Mind you, I'm sure the gazelle is not happy to be killed in such a violent and painful way, and the dinosaurs probably felt pain as they were wiped out, but was any of that truly evil?

While I cannot speak for plants and animals, and they rarely speak for themselves, if we limit evil to include only natural evil affecting humans, combined with moral evil produced by human sin, then we vastly reduce the 'problem' of evil in the world to recent geological time when humans existed, or even later, after the Fall of Adam and Eve through their disobedience.  Their sin was tasting of the fruit of the tree of "the knowledge of good an evil" against God's explicit command (Genesis 3:1-6). If good and evil were not known by humans prior to the Fall, then that should be a good place to start studying the problem of evil. I'll say more on this below.

On the other side of the question, what should be meant by "good"?  There is the good of our individual private desires, the good for humanity's well being, and God's good for his eternal purposes; perhaps his creation's stability and endurance.  Clearly these "goods" are not all the same.  Your wishes can be the opposite of another person's, making it impossible to please you both.  Surely that is not an evil, and even God could not fulfil each person's every wish.  Moreover, as fallen humans, many of our wishes are wrong - indeed, evil - so we should look at a higher level to define "good".  I suggest that since God is good, his definition of good should be the benchmark here.  Of course we don't know for sure what that entails over the history of the universe, but we can hope and trust that it includes what is best for humanity in the long run.  After all, God did send his son to pay for our sins and lift us out of our fallen condition, so he clearly wants the best for us - within his own context - as he originally intended.

Based on these understandings of "good and evil", there should be fewer distractions and difficulties to consider as we further discuss theodicy.  My previous notes about evil and, especially, the human responsibility for essentially all moral evil, and perhaps aspects of natural evils, can still be applied. The following are some additional thoughts which may help explain why some level of 'evil' in the world is inevitable and thereby limit the arguments against a good God that started the need for a theodicy. 

One such consideration is the overall story of the universe.  Any good story - one worth reading or being part of - requires a plot and a variety of characters.  If all the characters were identical, and perfectly good to each other, or if there were no difficulties, tensions or conflicts to be overcome in the story, it would be rather tedious and boring for all involved.  Perhaps God, in his wisdom, made the universe including both good and the potential for evil - or at least difficulties to be dealt with - in order to make things interesting and worth doing, not just for him, but also for his creatures, especially those with spirits and the capability to commune with him; that is, us.  We need challenges to help us strive, learn and grow.  Some of those challenges may hurt or set us back, and so often seem like evil to us.  Yet often in retrospect we see that we are better for the difficulties we have gone through.  This does not absolve us or all evils, but may explain some of the gentler ones better, and narrow down the field a bit.

That explanation is a version of the "aesthetic approach" to theodicy, in which God allows certain problems and difficulties in order to make the world a better place - more beautiful, varied, exciting and changing - for its inhabitants.  I note that some theologians' focus on "perfection" of the created world, including sinless humans is somewhat misplaced.  God never viewed his creation as 'perfect', rather he called it "good" and then "very good".  This suggests that there was room for conflict, disagreement, disappointment, sorrow, struggle, etc. and hence 'evil' at some level.  Here too perhaps, the perfect is enemy of the good?

Another thought: perhaps in Eden human beings were endowed in a way that kept natural evils at bay.  Carnivores would not harm them, they were immune from diseases, natural disasters occurred elsewhere, they were perhaps warned of impending dangers, and so on. Or perhaps those blessings would have been included with the fruit of "the tree of life", which they did not get around to eating?  Once evicted from the garden, however, through their own fault, any such attributes were stripped off or faded away, making then susceptible to the same sufferings and hurts experienced by other animals, as suggested in Genesis 3:17-19.

Some more thoughts on the Fall: the "felix culpa" (happy fault) view holds that while God intended Adam and Eve to be innocent and naïve for a time, their Fall gave them "knowledge of good and evil", thereby allowing them to become fully moral creatures, for better or worse, and ultimately calling on Jesus as the blessed Redeemer to enter creation on our behalf as part of the unfolding of God's kingdom.  Or perhaps God was saving the "knowledge of good and evil" for later, once they had matured in the protected place.  Why else have that tree in the garden?  Note too that Eden was indeed a garden and not the entire created world, suggesting that God started his people off there as a sort of newbie 'sandbox' environment, to let them grow and mature before releasing them into the wild world. They however,  jumped the gun, gaining God's displeasure, and making life harder for themselves - a sort of hasty "childhood's end" that brought misery along with the opportunity for growth -  but He still loved them and continued to care for them, albeit at some distance.

Having herein dabbled into theodicy and 'the problem of pain', evil and pain do not disappear, of course.  Neither is all apparent evil our own fault or the due penalty for our own misdeeds.  Evils, both natural and moral, are very real and the mystery of evil in a good world, with a loving God remains.  However, by dividing up the scope and types of evil and explaining some of the above aspects of it, I hope I have provided a more nuanced perspective, reducing the scale and range of the problem, and opening up some avenues for further personal reflection.  The problem of evil is very real and isn't going to go away, but it can be reconciled with a good and loving God who still wants the best for us and has done his best to make it possible for his spiritual creatures to have a good life, in fellowship with him, both now and eternally. 

Some Favourite Sayings

Here are some bits and pieces that I have collected over the years - a very mixed lot. I reserve the right to add more as I find them. Enjoy!

"Science advances one funeral at a time." Max Planck

"The foolish are often in error, but never in doubt." Modern proverb

"When all is said and done, more is said than done." Aesop

“He who marries the spirit of the age is soon a widower.” Dean Inge

“If you don’t read the newspapers you are uninformed — if you do read the newspapers you are misinformed.” Mark Twain

"The problem with a quarrel is that it spoils a good argument." G. K. Chesterton

"When the observed facts come into conflict with a cherished theory, then it is so much the worse for the facts." Ernst Mach

"Everything we call real is made up of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet." Niels Bohr

“Heaven has a wall, a gate and a strict immigration policy. Hell has open borders. Let that sink in.” Published by Reggie McDaniel

"Human kind cannot bear very much reality." T.S. Eliot:

"The first moral obligation is to think clearly." Blaise Pascal

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Hanlon's Razor

"Science is a good servant but a bad master." Michael D. Aeschliman

"Religion without science is lame, but science without religion is blind." Albert Einstein.

Here are some of my own - not necessarily original:

You can't read while eating a grapefruit!

Immoral + cross = Immortal

Funny how all free thinkers seem to think alike.

Offense is more often taken than given.

Most of the cells in your body are not human!

For me He died, for Him I live!

Small Could be Beautiful?

Over the past two centuries, the average height of humans in developed countries has increased; microevolution in action, although it can be argued that this effect is more due to improved health care and nutrition than to any significant genetic changes.  One doubts that tall people have more children than shorter ones.  In any case, this shows that it is possible to breed humans for simple changes in stature, just as we have bred dogs and other animals of different types and sizes.  Leaving aside the shadow of eugenics for the moment, I want to suggest that, instead of breeding taller humans, we should breed ourselves shorter -- significantly smaller.

Taller people are not necessarily healthier, smarter or more successful, just as shorter people are not less well off, unhealthy or of lower mental acuity in general.  However, it is clear that taller or bigger people need and use more resources than smaller folk.  Very tall people, aside from being better at basketball, have serious problems with doors, cars, chairs, clothing, and other standard acoutrements of civilization than normally sized people.  Moreover, very tall people and certainly oversized (that is, wider) people have health issues that occur less frequently in smaller (or thinner) people.

We already have some small people with us, those with dwarfism of various types and degrees, often proportionate (sometimes called midgets), for example.  Although they may have some associated health issues, they can live happily, even in our normal-sized cultures.  Now imagine what would happen if everyone was smaller, say about one meter tall, give or take -- child, or hobbit size you might say.

There would be significant benefits to humanity and the world if we were all smaller.  If houses, cars, roads, etc. were designed for people one meter tall, instead of 1.7 m tall (5 ft 6 in, the approximate current average), and were proportioned about the same as hobbits, or normal five year old children, our average weight would be only around 20 kg or 45 lbs.  This would solve or mitigate all sorts of obesity issues at the very least!  It would also mean that we would need less food and numerous other resources to live a healthy and fulfilled life.

A world of hobbits could include at least twice the number of people as our world for the same resource usage.  This would solve the "overpopulation" problem many seem to worry about.  In any case, being 1m tall would greatly reduce your "carbon footprint", not to mention your actual footprint!  Small shoes should be cheaper to make, transport and stock.  This saving applies in spades for houses and cars, and all that they entail.  Instead of 8 ft ceilings, queen sized beds, doors 32" wide, and so on, we could have 5 ft ceilings, and everything else proportionately smaller too.  A 500 sq ft house would serve as well as a 1500 sq ft one does today.  Think of the heating and air conditioning savings that could accrue, not to mention the capital cost of building and buying the house.  Smaller schools, malls and other buildings would multiply this benefit.

In particular, cars could be four feet wide (1.2 m) instead of six or more, and much shorter in length and height as well.  This would reduce their weight by 70% or more, while increasing their gas mileage accordingly.  Trucks could also be smaller since most of the cargo they carry would be reduced in size and weight accordingly.  I suspect that less human and metal momentum would make traffic accidents less serious as well, even without reducing speed limits.  Of course, smaller vehicles would mean narrower roads, smaller bridges, and other infrastructure, all saving additional cost and resources.  Lower taxes maybe? (dream on).

Narrower roads and smaller buildings allow more people to live in the same area, or the same numbers to live in less than 35% of the area for cities and towns.  Smaller cities means quicker commutes, less pollution, and freed-up land for agriculture, recreation or nature.  One can envisage all sorts of benefits that would accrue if humans were about one meter tall on average.  Even space exploration would be easier and less costly, given the cost per kg of placing humans into orbit and maintaining them there.  Little green men, meet little pink men!

With everything human much smaller, unchanged natural environments - trees, plants, animals, rivers, etc. - would seem larger to us, but human activity and interactions would be largely unaffected.  There is little, aside from most sports, that would suffer from making people significantly shorter, and sporting achievements should be easy to reset for smaller folk -- scale down Olymoic records, football fields, etc.  In developed countries, there are few jobs that still require large people, aside from the arbitrary standards for firefighters, military, etc.  Indeed, smaller soldiers would be harder to target, and could fly smaller airplanes, or drive smaller (and cheaper) tanks. Big construction equipment could be just as easily driven by smaller workers, as could farm equipment.

With some joint effort by all nations, coupled with advanced genetic knowhow, we could easily breed ourselves to have smaller stature, and could probably achieve the one meter average within, say six generations, so that by 2200, the goal would be achieved and we could start reaping the benefits noted above.  This would go a long way to addressing the climate change worries that some people have.  In principle, meter high humans, with associated right-sized infrastructure, should used less than a third as much carbon as we full-sized ones, even without other changes.  If we can breed dogs one quarter the size of wolves, reducing the average human height by only 40% should be easy.

This is all tongue-in-cheek, of course, I am not seriously proposing that we try to shrink humans over the next 150 years.  Not only would that proposal be laughed away as a joke, impossible to enact meaningfully, and attract lots of negative responses, but it would raise the ugly prospect of eugenics, the use of genetic manipulation and coercive laws to make humanity "better" according to some elite goal or standard.  Eugenics has had a nasty track record in 20th century Germany, the USA and elsewhere.  If we start breeding smaller humans, why not smarter, or more beautiful ones?  That way leads to a Brave New World that inevitably results in totalitarian measures, and groups of people judged unfit, or of lower importance, by those deemed superior somehow.  I certainly do not want to go there.

So, people as hobbits is an interesting exercise, but it must remain a thought experiment.  We will have to find other ways to limit our footprints on the world we have, and make more efficient use of its limited resources.  Alas, our track record for doing that in the developed world has been less than stellar.  So unless everyone is willing to shrink their stature, we should all try harder to shrink our negative impacts on the planet.  If we all did that, we would not have to wait 200 years to see the benefits.

Is Science Going Off The Rails?

Science is a human pursuit based on asking intelligent questions, making educated guesses, trying different things, and then seeking to understand what it all means.  The scientific method applied over past centuries has greatly improved life for humans all around the globe and has increased our understanding and control of nature enormously.  I love science and have studied it all my life, but in recent times, the practice of science seems to be going off the rails in some ways.  Science should not be influenced, much less directed by personal power, fame or greed.  It should not be swayed by political or ideological biases.  Yet scientists too are human, and the institutions, research centres and funding agencies are also all too human, so those unwanted influences have been creeping into many aspects of scientific work.

The most well known examples of this are in the so-called soft sciences - sociology, psychology, anthropology - as well as in health sciences such as psychiatry, nutrition, medicine and related specialities.  There have been recent attempts to verify or reproduce published findings in some of these areas, and in many cases - even most in some reports - the published results were found to be wrong or not supported by the evidence.  Then there are the human studies that tend to confirm politically correct assumptions and biases, regardless of the evidence, or where the experiments are skewed to yield preferred results irrespective of the truth.  There has been much soul searching in some quarters, and the number of retracted papers continues to mount.

We all make fun of the nutritional flip-flops from experts on things like the health dangers (or benefits) of wine, salt, animal fats, eggs, coffee, and so on - to the point that few people take such pronouncements seriously now.  Even the gold standard of randomized, double-blind drug studies can come to unwarranted conclusions based on selection bias, corporate pressures, statistical legerdemain and other human foibles, conscious or otherwise.  Doubtful therapies, unnecessary procedures, questionable medication regimes abound, all at great cost.  Such concerns are now a regular component of science publishing.

In the area of psychology and mental health, discounted Freudian theories and social Darwinist influences can still be found.  Then there is the over-medication for any "condition" considered outside some assumption of "normalcy".  Hence we get huge numbers of people on anti-depressants, anti-anxiety drugs, ADHD medications, and so on.  Over-medication has led to the problems of antibiotic resistant diseases, and much of the opiate crisis that is currently devastating many in our society.  Yet the pharmacology industry continues to promote new and often unproven drugs.

Under the spell of political correctness, many scientists and related professions pretend not to know when human life begins - a simple scientific fact understood for more than a century.  More recently, under the fad of transgenderism, we allow doctors to experiment on children with hormones, to mutilate their otherwise healthy bodies, and to leave them infertile and on drugs for life, all supported by pseudo-scientific pronouncements from "gender theory experts".  Meanwhile, we make certain types of counselling illegal because powerful interest groups don't like them and dredge up "studies" to support their agenda, despite evidence that other people want and benefit from them.  The ever-progressive media lap this up, and the confused public is left wondering or silenced by self-censorship on social media.  Yes, some of what passes for science these days can be autocratic, obsessive and quite ugly.

The hard sciences are no longer immune to such improper influences and the need to follow certain ideas and approaches in order to chase further research dollars.  Climatology is unduly enamoured to the "settled science" of climate change, notwithstanding the lack of hard evidence and the mounting strikes against the theories, models and over-hyped alarmist pronouncements.  Regardless of what you think about climate change, it is not good science to overstate selective or uncertain findings while shutting down or denouncing research results from the other side of the issue.  False projections, fear mongering and demonizing your doubters do not promote public respect for the authority of science.  Scientists are supposed to try to disprove their theories, not shore up their preferred hypotheses with filtered data, while ignoring results they don't like.  "Science is faith in doubt", as some have said, but this does not seem to apply to certain favoured theories these days.

Biology in general has been wedded to Darwin's theory of evolution far too long, ignoring or denying counter evidence that continues to pile up.  This faith in an unproven theory-by-extrapolation has led to factual errors such as the myth of "junk DNA" for instance, and epicycle-like attempts to account for all the myriad complexities of life forms.  The Darwinian paradigm is crumbling, but most biologists still fail to recognize the fact, and many go out of their way to censor, dismiss and shut down alternative viewpoints and their findings.

Some branches of chemistry are likewise swayed or even blinded by their deeply held, but unscientific preconceptions.  The obvious example is origin of life (OOL) research.  Not a year goes by without some scientist publishing yet a new "breakthrough" in OOL research, which is then published as if it is just a matter of connecting a few dots to explain how life arose on Earth.  Meanwhile, the truth is quite the opposite: the more we learn about biochemistry and related areas, the harder it becomes to find credible natural pathways from non-life to life.

Even the king of hard sciences, physics, is not without its defects.  At the limit of the very small, theoreticians are looking for ever more esoteric "particles" which they hypothesise existing (such as WIMPS, MACHOs and AXIONs), but for which there is little or no experimental evidence.  There are now pleas for many billions more dollars to build ever larger accelerators to look for such imagined particles.  Meanwhile, whimsical and esoteric "grand unified theories" (or theories of everything) attempt to account for all the known forces, while postulating various new unknowables.  Yet our two most successful theories in physics - quantum mechanics and relativity - are mutually incompatible.

At the other end of the scale range, cosmology is tripping over various murky hypotheses about what makes up 95% of the universe, while pretentiously explaining in great detail what must have happened in the first attoseconds of the big bang, using ungainly theories of "inflation".  Meanwhile "dark matter" and "dark energy" continue to elude capture and even consistent definition.  And recently, to avoid the need to acknowledge that the universe had a definite beginning and the obvious precision fine tuning that goes along with that, some posit an increasing menagerie of unobservable and complicated multiverses, setting aside Occham's razor in favour of elegant mathematics.

Again, don't get me wrong, I love science, and especially physics, but in general, much of the scientific enterprise seems to be wandering beyond reality.  Retractions are on the rise, more and more time is spent publishing the latest marginal findings, and chasing continued funding or the all-important citations in the literature.  Reputation and the reigning paradigm seem to trump actual content, valid conclusions, and credible advances.  Overstatement, emotive appeals and even unfounded hype leak into publications and get blown out of proportion by the eager science media.  Interpretations go beyond the evidence, especially in controversial areas, while unpopular implications of research are denied, ignored or suppressed.

Meanwhile, there is now a whole breed of publicity-seeking scientists making pronouncements way outside their areas of expertise, and the public toss about unfounded statements of what "science says" or "studies show", without even being able to cite their sources.  Much of science has become politicized with favoured viewpoints skewing or sometimes even dictating how experimental results shall be interpreted and reported, even if the conclusions are not supported by the data.

All of this serves science poorly.  Instead of neutrally investigating hypotheses and welcoming alternative perspectives and theories, much of science is now stuck in favoured paradigms and looking mostly to shore up reputation, funding, esteem and legacies.  Thus, science has shifted from the idealized view of Karl Popper, that only falsifiable hypotheses are science, to the more cynical views of Thomas Kuhn, where paradigms of belief are held firm until the old guard dies off.  As Max Planck famously said, "Science advances one funeral at a time".

A lengthy look at the trends in modern scientific studies led one non-scientist observer to write:
"Both natural and social science investigators have exhibited many of the pathologies of modern science, i.e. failing to report negative findings, ignoring counter evidence, relying on correlation rather than on more rigorous test for causation, failing to pursue replication studies that would confirm - or refute - earlier results, misusing data, attributing higher levels of accuracy to their data than warranted, and torturing statistics in order to produce more useful outcomes. Much of this abuse is driven by competition for funding and prestige that characterizes modern academic research, but some of it is driven by ideological preferences."
Michael Hart, Hubris: the Troubling Science, Economics and Politics of Climate Change, pg 565.

Even at Scientific American, blogger John Horgan has unkind things to say about the declining state of science today: the replication crisis, questionable motives in the healthcare industry, the overhyping of incremental research findings, untestable hypotheses touted as science, and so on. Here is another blog saying much the same thing, but in better words than mine above.

I am not a scientist myself, and do not have firm suggestions to improve how science is done.  Fortunately, however, many people are beginning to take note of the problems outlined above and wiser heads have made suggestions on how science can be made fairer, more open and transparent, and less connected to financial and societal success.  Science is important to future human and environmental well-being, and the better scientific establishments are at doing true science, the better the public will accept their results and appreciate the work they do.

By all means everyone should study science, but it is best to do so with a sceptical mind, looking for weasle words, hidden biases, unstated assumptions, and unsubstantiated conclusions.  Consider alternative interpretations and look for critical analyses of published findings.  The deeper you delve into science, the more interesting it gets, even as it remains a messy, all too human pursuit.

Starship Technologies

Forgive me for dabbling in some science fiction here, but for decades on and off, I, like many others, have speculated on what it will take to build and send out an effective Starship; that is, one that can take humans to another star system beyond our solar system in anything like a reasonable time line.  This is, of course, a long term conceptual dream, with negligible chance of coming to fruition in the next 100 tears.  However, I also believe it is not an impossibility, and that, barring human extinction or other catastrophe, mankind will eventually cross the huge voids between stars and begin populating the galaxy.  Bear with me as I conjure up some technologies I feel will be needed for this ultimate human adventure.

First, I am assuming that any starship will take the slow-boat approach to Alpha Centauri, or wherever we decide to send it.  Between now and then, solar-system based technology such as precision telescopes and radio astronomy, will have helped us know more about nearby star systems so that we can choose the one most likely to support some sort of human colonization effort, assuming that is the ultimate goal.  It is probable too that before building a manned starship, we will have sent robotic ones to nearby stars by some method; enough to have explored them somewhat, so that we are not sending people in blind.  That would presumably take several decades, but would also serve as preliminary work for the Starship development itself.

The slow-boat approach assumes no "warp drive", magic gravity-changing techniques, or other speculative ways to achieve non-reactive thrust and thus, sustained high acceleration.  The slow boat is just a continuous push at low acceleration, over a long time (decades), something we can mostly understand today, with no new physics required.  See more below on Starship drive possibilities.

Biotechnology will be one key component for sending people and other life forms to the stars with minimal weight penalty, little life support requirements, and no worries about boredom en route.  We are already developing the means to go from DNA to living lifeforms in the lab.  With further development, it should eventually be possible to reliably reconstitute many different animals and even humans from a DNA library.  Plants can be grown from seeds, and in some cases, animals can be transported as frozen embryos.  We already have that capability for simple lifeforms, and we can store human ova and sperm, or embryos for years.  Future technology may approach artificial-womb status, at least for animals, allowing various species to be regenerated at the far end of the voyage.

The ultimate would be an automated laboratory that can generate any DNA from a data file and then use biochemical and cellular mechanics to grow each lifeform from its particular DNA strand.  Using such an approach, a Starship could carry a significant population of numerous species - even an entire biome - to another star system, with minimal mass/volume and life support costs.  The laboratory I have in mind does not yet exist, of course, it would have to be highly automated, and reliable enough to work properly after decades in space - a major hurdle for something so complex.  Some sort of advanced AI and general purpose robotics would be needed to do most of the work and render the lab operational after the long flight.

To maximize the chance of a successful trip, a Starship will most likely need some live, trained humans at some point during the voyage, to handle unexpected emergencies, or at least to kick start and supervise activities upon arrival.  Therefore it may be good to send a few (perhaps six?) actual human adults along in some sort of yet-to-be-developed cryo-sleep.  I envisage a technique for greatly slowing human metabolism, supported by blood additives and a variety of chemical drips, cooling down the human body to perhaps 10°C.  The human would then be in a coma, monitored by the robotic AI, and could remain in that state for years with perhaps little aging.

There has been some work in this area, but it obviously needs a lot more research to become practical, especially for reawakening the person at the end of the trip, or if needed earlier.  I assume the robotic AI would be in charge of the Starship through most of its voyage.  Awakening one or more humans only when needed at the end, or perhaps in an emergency.  The human crew would likely be all female so that they can have children (via in-vitro fertilization) in the new world.  Biology is not  destiny, but it helps in this situation.

To minimize travel time, the starship would likely have to get up to somewhat relativistic speeds midway through the voyage. Thus, the people and stored DNA inside would be subjected to increasing, and increasingly directional, ionizing radiation in interstellar space: high energy photons, electrons, neutrons, protons and an occasional atomic nucleus.  To shield the biological "cargo" against radiation damage over decades, heavy water could be used to surround the sensitive humans and other biological specimens.  Of course, the same heavy water could provide the fuel for a fusion drive for the Starship.

Ultimately, of course, the primary limitation on any Starship design is the drive; how to get decades of significant acceleration out of an engine, using less than 100% of the starship mass for fuel.  At present, if I may be so bold, the only significant hope here is fusion power.  Granting that any practical fusion generating station is many decades off (see this for an explanation), the concept of directed fusion exhaust pushing a starship with some reasonable efficiency, is not impossible, at least in principle.  No, we cannot do it today, but maybe in a hundred years we will be able to harness the materials, physics and other technologies needed to do so reliably and sustainably.

The idea is to take tons of heavy water (D2O), break it down, and use the deuterium atoms to fuse into helium nuclei, yielding enough energy to blast the helium, loose electrons, and perhaps the left over oxygen out the back of the ship, at high speed, more or less in one direction.  Fusion energy gives the biggest push per unit mass of fuel that we are likely to see for a very long time.  The starship would be built in orbit and then accelerated at some low but steady rate until halfway through the voyage. It would then turn around and decelerate the rest of the way so that it could arrive at a low enough velocity to successfully enter the target system and orbit a planet there.

What realistic acceleration a fusion drive would yield and what ratio of fuel mass to ship and cargo mass it would need to travel a few light years, is for others to calculate.  They have done so under varying assumptions, and although not a slam dunk obvious success, there are some hopes of eventual good results.  Aside from the technical hurdles of achieving continuous fusion, keeping the torch burning successfully for decades would also require major engineering design work. Nothing in Starship design is easy!

I have mentioned robotic AI above, and that is a more promising area of development.  There have already been major advances in robotics and artificial intelligence, and these will doubtless continue and become more advanced over the next century.  While I doubt we will ever make a human-like AI system, the software will surely advance to the point that most controls and processes can be fully automated.  There would have to be numerous repair mechanisms, contingencies and reset protocols built in, along with considerable redundancy, but we humans already do a lot of that for other purposes.  Fortunately, AI software does not take up much space or power, and robots needs no life support systems.

There would also be major technology requirements at the end of the trip. What needs to be done when the Starship has arrived at its destination and entered orbit around a selected planet?  The human crew (or cargo) would have to be awakened from their deep sleep, and allowed to recover.  The AI could continue operating the Starship, and could perform much of the lab work and orbital tasks before anyone or anything actually goes down to the planet.  The fusion drive could be shut down or turned way down to provide ongoing electrical power.

Previous, unmanned missions would most likely have occurred to test the Starship technology, and to deliver most of the hardware needed by the crew at their destination.  Landing shuttles and their fuel, supplies for the crew, materials for on-orbit construction, research and communications equipment, extra habitat modules, and so on could be delivered in advance of the manned Starship. These earlier missions would also be scouting out the system for potential habitations such as asteroids, moons, or "goldilocks" planets, and collecting long term data to minimize surprises after the ship's arrival.  Thus the crew would have a head start via robotics at the far end, and their ship would only finalize its approach once everything was reported to be in place and ready.  Moreover, they would likely stay on orbit for months in preparation for descent or major construction projects.

After arrival, detailed plans would be made to begin colonization.  The crew, aided by the robots, would prepare needed equipment, likely by cannibalizing the Starship materials, which would have been designed partly for that purpose. The (female) crew would become pregnant (IVF), deliver babies occasionally, with some eventually being males.  If artificial wombs are then possible, they could be put into service instead.  The crew and support robots would grow or synthesize food, perhaps initially using algae and yeast cultures on orbit.  Most supplies can be recycled, and materials could be reused or remodelled into needed equipment or tools, probably using some form of 3D printing.  Similar to the plans afoot at NASA to set up a colony on Mars, materials could be used for a larger habitat.  With a suitable habitat, they could grow plants and start to generate live animals.

Eventually, the colony would want to descend to the surface.  For that, they would need to have studied the planet in detail from orbit, and made plans and contingencies for every scenario.  Probably only a small team, complete with robotics would be sent down initially to get things going, build the infrastructure and test out the processes for living there.  It is unlikely the planet would have abundant life and an oxygen atmosphere, so processes and equipment for life support would have to be made or taken down from orbit.  The planet-bound people would work on developing soil, water supply, power, waste management, and all the myriad other things needed to support a small colony, using mostly materials extracted from the planet.  None of this will be easy, and people will probably die along the way, but none of it is impossible in principle.

Once the initial colonists have shown they can live on the surface, grow food, recycle effectively, and generally make a go of it - possible over a year or more - the remaining people on orbit, and the DNA database and labs could be brought down as needed, and the colony would then grow slowly and carefully.  Whether some crew remain on their now demoted Starship in orbit, or they leave that up to the robotic AI, can be decided at that time. However, the idea is that there should be no need for people to return from the surface back to the Starship, thus simplifying the colony transportation requirements (no huge rockets needed).

Aside from the fusion drive and the futuristic human biotech, the other major hurdle will probably be reliability.  How can we ensure the AI, robotics, and bio-lab will continue to function, or can be self-maintaining over decades in the unforgiving environment of interstellar space?  How could we maintain complex systems without human attention over the same period?  Given the track record of computers, complex factories, and mechanical hardware, even here on Earth, the prospects are daunting.  This calls for careful engineering and probably redundant design at each level, up to and including multiple Starships to same destination.  Having a human crew available during the trip might improve the chances of success, but would entail other requirements and raise other problems, such as life support and human sanity over decades in space.

Serious science fiction writers have grappled with these issues and suggested future technologies along these lines for a long time.  As technology advances and our understanding of physical processes and the requirements for space travel improve, the fiction becomes more detailed, and in some cases, more believable.  At some point in the distant future, perhaps a century from now, the science fiction will turn into science reality, and serious engineering can begin to design a real Starship, perhaps using some of the above concepts.  By then, mankind will have learned to live on Mars, and possibly other planets or asteroids, and nearby star systems will have been studied in great detail.  By that point, sending off a Starship to seed the galaxy will not seem so far fetched, but will simply be the next giant leap for mankind.

Addendum: Starship Drive Options

Some further notes about potential starship drive options. The energy needed to accelerate a mass M to a velocity v is E = 0.5Mv^2. Ignoring relativistic effects for now, at v = c the speed of light, that would become E = 0.5Mc^2. Since the starship has to slow down at the other end, a similar amount of energy would be needed, yielding E = 2x0.5Mc^2, or E = Mc^2, which of course is Einstein's formula for the total energy in a given mass. Relativistic effects make this worse since the mass increases as the velocity approaches c. Therefore, to get a starship up to anything close to c and back down to zero would require converting the entire starship mass M into kinetic energy E at 100% efficiency. That of course is impossible. 

So without some sort of "warp drive", a starship using only the fuel it carries cannot achieve truly relativistic speeds. If we limit ourselves to fusion, using heavy water as fuel (as mentioned above), then the maximum speed would be considerably lower. The fusing of deuterium to helium nuclei converts up to 5% of the mass into energy. That energy, with some losses, needs to be turned into kinetic energy of the exhaust that pushes the ship forward. Doing so heats up the oxygen atoms (four times the weight of the deuterium) as part of the exhaust, without adding more energy. For a given mass of heavy water then, the most energy you can get by fusion is probably less than 1% of the total mass equivalent. 

Assuming that, say 90% of the initial mass of the ship is heavy water (a rather unlikely extreme), the mass converted to velocity to get up to speed must be less than 0.9x0.01x0.5xM = 0.0045 M. (The other 0.5 is needed to slow down.) Applying this in the E = 0.5xMv^2 equation yields a maximum velocity v around 0.067 c, or less than 7% the speed of light - not really relativistic. The average speed (from zero to this maximum) is then perhaps 3.3% of c. At that rate, it would take the ship 130 years to get to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star! Definitely a slow-boat prospect! The ship could probably do a bit better since its mass would be greatly reduced at the turn-over point due to the loss of the fuel used to get there, thereby requiring less energy to slow it down. Nevertheless, the ship would not get much faster than the 3.3% of c and the total travel time would remain around a century.

This is not the final picture however, there are some conceivable alternatives to this approach. In principle you could send out fuel tanks ahead of time along the route, to be met and drained by the ship en-route. That would require careful planning for location, speed and timing to match the ship, allowing some sort of docking to occur, and of course the fuel tanks would need to be launched years in advance and tracked very closely. Difficult, but maybe doable. Those tanks do not need to slow down, and the ship itself would then not have to be mostly fuel. This refueling approach might get it there a bit faster and quicker.

A second option is to externally push the ship to high velocity using laser light from the solar system,  similar to the Breakthrough Star Shot program that was investigated recently. Orbital solar collectors generate power driving huge (terawatt level?) lasers, focused on a huge solar sail around the ship. That would help speed up the ship (slowly), but the lasers would have to operate for decades for each ship, a major engineering challenge! Moreover, this cannot be used to slow down the ship, so fuel is still needed for maneuvering and braking. A related approach would be to use photovoltaics to convert the laser light to electricity to power ion engines. I don't know whether that would work any better than fusion or light pressure.

A better option, I think, is to change the fuel. If the ship could carry primarily antimatter in suitable tanks, then in principle, the mass conversion efficiency goes way up. Perhaps anti-heavy-water could be made, given an electric charge and stored as anti-ice - more manageable than liquid - in magnetic bottles. In that case, the raw conversion efficiency would approach 100%, although not all that could be turned into impulse drive, given the difficulty of focusing gamma rays.

Antimatter is notoriously difficult to create and work with, and very dangerous in any quantity - one leak and boom!. The best approach would be to use a large solar array in distant orbit (one of the Lagrange points?) to provide terawatts of energy to generate anti-matter in bulk, one subatomic particle at a time. New physics and advanced engineering could in principle then combine those to make anti-deuterium and anti-oxygen, together yielding anti-heavy-water! Freeze this, store it in blocks far from the orbital array (and Earth), and then attach its container to the starship as it leaves the solar system. Not for the fainthearted this mega-engineering project, nor the trip itself for that matter!

Using such a matter-antimatter drive at say 50% max efficiency, and a fuel load of 25% heavy water and 25% its antimatter equivalent, for half of the total launch mass, would yield a max kinetic energy equivalent to perhaps 0.125 M, a big improvement over mere fusion. This might allow a maximum velocity around 35% of c, reducing the total travel time to only 12 years or so to Alpha Centauri, much more manageable.

This is all fun, and may well eventually be feasible; more than science fiction, although I can't see it happening in this century. Nevertheless, I hope we keep pushing the technology one step at a time to expand the human footprint into space.

Philosophy 102 - The Nature of Reality

To summarize my previous Philosophy-101 post, I exist, there is most likely some reality apart from me, and you, dear reader, probably exist as a mind separate from mine.  How's that for a recap?  Now let's explore a bit further into this supposed reality.

Maybe the "reality" as I perceive or experience the sensations coming into my mind bears no resemblance to what is actually outside my mind, in the "real world".  How can I know that I actually have hands and eyes, that what I "see" as I am apparently typing out my thoughts is indeed a computer screen with words on it and a black keyboard, along with opaque walls, transparent windows, etc.  Can I be certain that the noises I hear reflect traffic on the street or music in the next room?  Here too, all I have for certain are the sensations (or perceptions as John Locke calls them) coming into my mind.

As mentioned last time, I could be trapped in The Matrix, with a data stream generated by a super-AI feeding my brain stem.  At a different level, even assuming that these sensations bear some semblance to the "reality" around me, how can I be sure that the "real objects" they seem to represent are actually as they appear to my mind, are stable in time and space, and continue to exist as I see them now, when I am asleep or just away from this room?  Is there really anything behind the wall in front of me?  Is my wife really in the other room watching TV, or is this all some sort of Holodeck program for my confusion and deception?

In this regard, Bertrand Russell made a key observation in 1927: “We do not know enough of the intrinsic character of events outside us to say whether it does or does not differ from that of ‘mental’ events”, whose nature we do know.  He never wavered from this point.  In 1948, he noted that physics simply can’t tell us “whether the physical world is, or is not, different in intrinsic character from the world of mind.”  In 1956, he further remarked that, “we know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events except when these are mental events that we directly experience.”  In other words, our mental reality is the only reality we know for sure exists!

However, there is a high degree of coherence and consistency among the various aspects of the stream of sensations entering my mind.  When I reach out my hand and touch my desk, the position of my hand correlates well with the intention I had in moving it; the touch sensation of the hard surface is consistent with what I see and what I remember from the past.  If I tap on the desk, the sounds I experience are consistent, and if I press too hard, the pain I feel fits into the same overall mental picture or model.  When I remove my hand, the appropriate sensations occur on cue and are all consistent.  This applies regardless of what I do.  Even when I make a mistake or stumble, or something unexpected happens quickly, it all fits together, into a real, coherent perfection of virtual reality, if that is all it is!

What's more, in my interactions with the "other people" around me, they seem to be in the same reality as I am.  If I ask someone to pick up that book over there, they seem to hear my words, see the same book as I and understand what I want, and if they are agreeable, they can pick it up.  We both then see the same action occurring, albeit from different perspectives, and if we continued talking about our own sensations about the event, they would agree reasonably well.  Thus, other people seem to have a very similar view of the reality around them.  This suggests that there is indeed something real about that reality.  The two of us, and others as well, can navigate and operate in complex ways around the same objects and spaces, and interact with each other physically as well as verbally in very consistent ways.

The exceptions sometimes offered by philosophers just prove this point.  The stick in the water that appears to be bent due to refraction effects is seen the same way by anyone looking from the same position, and is well understood to be an exception to seeing a straight stick.  The same holds for optical illusions.  The very name says that we understand they are not representative of the true reality but are just artifacts of how our visual apparatus works.  We can usually explain the apparent abnormality in a cogent way, acceptable to most people.  Thus, these "exceptions" do not seriously undermine our models of the reality around us, nor our belief in its true existence and nature.  Indeed, one could say that magicians present stronger evidence against our models of reality when they fool us with their tricks.  But there too, we know they are not messing with reality, even if we don't know how they fool us.

This gets to my primary reason for accepting that our perceptions of the reality around us are fairly accurate, and that reality is, by and large, as we experience it.  The reason is that if there is any reality beyond our minds, then the apparatus we have for perceiving it is simpler if it is fairly accurate.  As an Engineer, I know that simple, semi-linear sensors, transducers and detectors are much easier to design, make and use than ones which send out signals (to our minds) that bear little resemblance to the reality they transduce or sense.  If reality existed, but was significantly different from the way we perceive it in our minds, then the intervening transducers and sensors would have to be extremely sophisticated.  Worse, the coordination among all these errant data streams would have to be continually correlated in complex, high-speed, non-linear ways in order to fool us into interpreting them as simple, yet consistent inputs for a coherent reality.

Evolution (if you believe in it) would surely adopt the approach that an accurate representation of the "real world" is better for survival than an inaccurate one.  If various people can get together and agree on the attributes of say, a table in front of them, and that say, a photo of the table seems to represent the same object, then the simplest hypothesis is surely that the reality is to a large extent as we perceive it to be.  How would evolution proceed to give us such a mental model of reality if that reality was totally different from the model generated in our minds?  Any biological equipment to do this latter would have to be very complicated, and could not arise by a series of simple evolutionary steps.  Of course, this particular argument assumes that we are indeed biological creatures, so perhaps it is merely begging the question.

Obviously we do not perceive reality perfectly or completely.  We cannot see in the dark, or detect radio waves or X-rays, we cannot accurately quantify the sensations we do detect in terms of decibels, brightness, intensity, force, taste, etc.  But most of what we see, touch and hear is most likely a reasonably accurate representation of what is around us; at least the parts of reality important to our continuing existence in the environment we find ourselves.  All people with normal colour vision will agree that this desk is brown, and that if we have only a red light in the room it will, of course, look red.  Imperfect perception does not imply perception that is totally wrong.

Another approach to this question might be to consider a new-born child.  Born into the world with no apparent mental model of reality, each baby must create and assemble her own such model, based on the sensations perceived by her developing mind.  This is a major undertaking, making babies the world's busiest scientists and philosophers!  What are these random blobs of shade and colour that I perceive somehow.  As I grow, I find that they go dark when I close my "eyes" (something that initially happens without my control).  Then I notice that when I move my "head" (also uncontrolled at first), everything shifts, but in a consistent way.  Later, I discover that these things waving in my visual field can be controlled, and eventually learn they are my "hands", which prove to be quite useful as I explore their movement and purpose.  In such a way, a child discovers her world and builds up her mental model of reality.  Of course, none of that is done consciously at first, making it even more likely that it is real.  But here too, perhaps this is just question begging since I am assuming that eyes, head and hands are actually real.

All of this still leaves open the possibility of a very clever virtual reality; that there is nothing apart from our minds and we are operating in a totally deluded state, either self-delusion, or generated by some other entity to deceive us.  For my best shot at getting past that hurdle, see Philosophy-101 again.  If other people truly exist, then we all occupy the same reality, or at least think we do.  A virtual reality capable of fooling billions of people, continually over decades of time, would be beyond anything we could do, and would raise the "why?" question.  What possible purpose would be served?  Yet, we cannot completely discount this possibility.  Nothing in reality can be proved or disproved absolutely!

The final option to reality being real, is that we are all part of some grand simulation somehow.  Like a vast video game, we are software constructs in some immense computer.  This staple of science fiction is taken seriously by many people, and cannot be totally disproved.  However, if this option is true, then the simulation would simply be our true reality, so that, once again, "reality" would be as we perceive it.  After all, even in our taken-for-granted reality, everything we see and do is just atoms and electromagnetic fields interacting, and we don't perceive things at that level.  So whether atoms or bits in a computer, our reality is as we perceive it.

Having attempted to solidify our belief in the reality around us, I should say that there is considerable and growing evidence that, at least at microscopic scales, reality only exists as such when we observe it!  Quantum physics experiments bear this out for photons, electrons, atoms, and even fairly large molecules.  Until we (or some mind) observes the experiment, or the interaction of these particles, the outcome remains a set of probabilities in superposition, that remain unexperienced, and so undefined or even in some sense, unreal.

This finding has serious and troubling implications for philosophy, science and consciousness.  When I close my eyes, does the computer in front of me continue to exist?  Is there really anything behind the wall in front of me if I am not actively thinking about it?  Such questions seem silly to most of us, but they are the sort of thing philosophers delve into.  And more and more, cosmologists and physicists are also considering questions like that.  That mind may be essential to the existence of reality is a serious topic of ongoing study and debate.

Nevertheless, like 99.999% of humanity (assuming such exists), I will go on believing that my mental model of the world around me fairly represents reality, and that the sensations I perceive are good representations of what is going on outside my mind.  I cannot prove that for certain, but little in life is certain, and the assumption surely makes life easier and more interesting.  In any case, these questions are fun to explore and discuss.

Thoughts on Genesis 1-4

The early chapters of the Biblical book of Genesis are foundational to the Judeo-Christian scriptures, doctrines, and worldview. The first four chapters cover the seven days of creation, Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, the Fall from grace, and mankind's first generations in the world. These chapters have been the focus of much discussion over the centuries and I would like to add a few observations and ideas of my own to the mix.

I believe there are two opposite errors in interpreting these chapters.  One is an overly literal reading as a detailed historic account of actual events.  That is a fairly recent fundamentalist way of understanding scripture.  The other is to dismiss it all as a myth that science has "disproved"; the modern or "progressive" way of reading and then ignoring scripture.  Between these two extremes, much has been written about these short chapters of the bible.  They are central to the creation-evolution debates, and of course, they set the starting point for all of theology and Christian doctrine.  I will not repeat what is widely available elsewhere.  In particular, I will not comment on most of Chapter 1, and especially the "seven days" of creation which have been the subject of much argument and speculation.  Rather I have some insights (I hope) and observations that may help shed further understanding on parts of the text, and possibly defuse some of the polarized arguments, at least for people looking for serious study of these first parts of the Bible.

Adam & Eve and the Image of God:
Introduced in Gen 1:26-27, the image of God concept is, I believe, one key to understanding some of the seeming difficulties in Genesis.  Humans (species Homo sapiens) have physical bodies and are alive like any other mammal, but we more than that.  The Bible teaches that we each have a spirit, a divine spark of the divine, setting us apart from other animals.  God himself is entirely spirit; apart from Jesus' incarnation, he has no body, so his "image" is surely also spiritual rather than physical.  Our human spirits from God give us self-awareness, introspection, and other higher consciousness attributes unique to humans; for example, the ability to wonder about morality, mortality, God, the future, the universe, etc.  Our spirits also make us capable of creativity, complex language and social skills, and higher intelligence, among other special attributes setting us apart from other animals.

Thus, one way to read Genesis is that Adam, the first man, was a spirit-infused hominin, thereby transforming a clever ape into a human being having a spirit.  Gen. 2:7 can be read to support this idea.  Hominins were formed from the "dust of the Earth" as God's handiwork in creation, over eons of time.  Once God deemed the species capable of sustaining and enabling a spirit, perhaps around 50k years ago, it was time to create man (Adam).  Thus, there could have been a hominin population in the Pleistocene, from which two healthy, young, representative adults were selected by God who then breathed spirits into them.  Voila, Adam and Eve, who were then separated out and placed in the garden of Eden.  As newly born spirits, they would be naïve of morality (i.e. no knowledge of good and evil), yet able to learn and commune with God their creator, for his good purposes.

Versions of this approach have been suggested by others.  It does justice to the Biblical text, while resolving various issues many have with it.  One intriguing thought is about language.  Adam and Eve may have had rudimentary vocal communication from their hominin past, which God augmented, perhaps aided by their naming all the animals (Gen. 2:20).  The perennial question about who did Cain marry (Gen 4:17) can be easily answered by Cain selecting another hominin female. God then ensured that their children also received spirits.  Similarly, a population of non-spiritual hominins could explain who Cain was afraid of in Gen. 2:14, and how Cain could build a city by himself in Gen. 2:17.  Using his superior intelligence, Cain could train and lead other hominins.  The odd verse in Gen 6:2 about the sons of God choosing spouses from daughters of men may suggest that others of Adam's descendants also married un-spirited hominins they were attracted to.  One effect of the Fall may have been not recognizing whether other hominins carried spirits.  God in his mercy ensured that all offspring of spirited hominins (i.e. humans) would have human spirits.  Thus, over time as the superior humans took over, all Homo sapiens would have spirits.

Original Sin:
This concept of humans as spirit-infused Homo sapiens may also help some better understand the doctrine of original sin.  The Pleistocene hominins did not have spirits.  Thus, they were like other animals, without any moral compass.  No one calls a lion evil when it catches, kills and eats an antelope; that is simply its nature.  Similarly, ethicists and scientists alike balk at the idea that a male chimpanzee killing an unrelated baby chimp is somehow evil.  Humans do not, properly speaking, attribute morality on animals.  Thus, before receiving spirits from God, the hominin group was incapable of sin, even if they beat, cheated, or even killed each other.  That would simply have been part of their "nature" as a species.

Once the original couple was chosen and infused with spirits, however, God gave them some simple moral duties and rules (Gen. 2:15-16).  This, in a way, may be considered being granted "free will", or a moral conscience, as a gift from God.  Even though they did not yet have the "knowledge of good and evil", they were now free to either obey or disobey God.  Tempted by the serpent, they chose (however naïvely) to disobey, and so became the first human sinners, resulting in the Fall as recorded in Chapter 3.  The Bible says that all subsequent humans have inherited this propensity to disobey God and to knowingly sin, from Adam and Eve, as our first parents.  Indeed, original sin is perhaps the one Christian doctrine that is on clear display every day in every culture!

Good, not Perfect:
Some Christians claim that God's initial creation, prior to the Fall was "perfect".  But the text does not actually say that.  Only God is perfect and he himself deemed creation "good", and at the end, "very good".  As creation's engineer (designer) and maker, God knows that no complex system can be deemed "perfect".  Any design can at best, only be "optimal", according to some criteria selected by the designer.  In any design there are tradeoffs among varying and sometimes conflicting design goals and purposes.  Thus no reasonable engineer will claim his design is "perfect", although he may say it is very good; i.e. good enough under the specified constraints and specifications.  The upshot is that Eden was not "perfect", and realistically, seeming imperfections or conflicting purposes could occur among different intents and perspectives within the garden, even before the fall.

Death:
An important consequence of the above is the introduction of death into the world.  Many Bible believers assume there was no death in Eden, and that mortality came into existence after the fall.  I think this is an overly simplistic reading.  First, when God told Adam not to eat the fruit of knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:17) and that if he did he would die, Adam must have known what that meant, or else it would have been a meaningless warning.  Adam must have seen plants and/or animals die (perhaps in his pre-spiritual life?), so he had a fair idea what death was.  Moreover, all living involves death on a small scale: the shedding of hair and skin cells, and the daily turnover of blood and intestinal cells.  Adam would not have thought of these as "death", of course, but cell death is death nonetheless.  At a larger scale, Adam would surely have seen insects die, some with short lifespans, and possibly by stepping on or swatting some himself.  Plants too go through cycles of life and death.  Certainly plants would die when eaten as specified in Gen. 1:29-30.  Thus, there must have been some forms of death inside Eden.

More importantly, I believe the death God warned against was spiritual rather than physical.  Adam and Eve did not physically die immediately upon eating the forbidden fruit.  Indeed, Adam lived rather a long time afterward (Gen. 5:5).  However, after the Fall, Adam and Eve lived apart from God.  They avoided him (Gen. 2:8), and except for his initiatives, they lived away from his presence.  As God's image bearers, Adam and Eve had spirits from God.  Spiritual death is usually understood to mean separation from God, which describes what happened to this couple when they were evicted from the garden (Gen 3:23).  Thus, the role of death in the fall ,may be seen as spiritual rather than physical.  Indeed, God banished them partly so that they would not physically live forever by eating the fruit of the tree of life (Gen. 3:22).  It is clear therefore, that Adam at least had the potential of dying physically, even before the Fall.

By the way, the description of the fruit trees and the rules for what they might and must not eat (Gen. 2:9 & 16) suggest that Adam and Eve had not been in Eden very long before the Fall.  They were told not to eat of the one tree, but could eat of any others, including the tree of life.  The fact that they had not yet eaten of that tree (Gen. 3:22 again), suggests that they were still in the early stages of living in Eden.  They must have been there a few days at least (Gen. 2:15-23) since Adam had time to be lonely, name the animals, sleep, tell Eve about the rules, and have some fellowship with both Eve and God.  But if they had been in Eden for many months or years, they would surely have tried every tree's fruit to see what it tasted like, including the tree of life.  One could argue that the tree of life had no fruit for a long time, I suppose, but that would surely not hold for more than a year or two at most.

The serpent's half-truths:
In tempting and tricking Eve (and hence, Adam) in Gen. 3:1-4, the serpent (identified as Satan) was not lying.  Rather, he may have used the ambiguity of "death" noted above, to fool her.  He meant (verse 4) that Eve would not die (physically) upon eating the forbidden fruit, while God likely meant spiritual death in his warning.  Eve, being naïve (without the knowledge of good and evil) took Satan at his word, and overlooked God's rule, which she must have learned from Adam since she was not yet in the picture when God gave Adam the rule.  Being tempted by the serpent's promise of becoming like God, she ate the forbidden fruit and gave some to Adam, who also knowingly ate it.  Moreover, Satan did not lie about the other effects of eating the fruit; "you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (verse 5).  After all, God admits the same in verse 22.  This does not mean, however, that Satan is to be trusted!  The father of lies is most successful when he tells half-truths and twists meanings.

The Garden of Eden:
Genesis 2:8 clearly says that God planted the garden of Eden.  This suggests that the rest of the world was not a garden, and therefore was natural wilderness, complete with the thorns and thistles encountered by Adam after his banishment (Gen 3:18).  This wilderness might, perhaps, include the wild and more dangerous animals as well.  Once evicted from the garden, with no one to look after it (Adam's job in Gen. 2:15), it would have reverted to wilderness and disappeared.  Thus, there is no Eden today, and the angel put there to guard it (Gen. 3:24) could have left after a few decades.

There are doubtless other aspects to discern in these first few chapters of Genesis.  Many books have been written, underscoring the importance of the early parts of Genesis for our understanding of God, people, and the world.  While many dismiss Genesis chapters 1-10 as mere myths for primitive man, the stories and ideas included there form the basis for a significant portion of western civilization and human history.  Even non-believers can gain insights from reading these chapters with an open mind.  The above suggestions and interpretations are not intended to be gospel truth by any means - even I do not necessarily believe them all.  Rather, they are offered here to promote thinking about the Bible and how we might understand Genesis.