John G. Messerly's Blog

Superintelligence And Religion

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Progress in machine classification of images. The error rate of AI by year. Red line – the error rate of a trained human

A staff writer from the online news magazine The Daily Dot is writing a story at the intersection of computer superintelligence and religion, and asked me a few questions. I only had one day to respond, but here are my answers to his queries.

Dear Dylan:

I see you’re on a tight deadline, so I’ll answer your questions off the top of my head. A disclaimer, though, all these questions really demand a dissertation-length response.

1) Is there any religious suggestion (Biblical or otherwise) that humanity will face something like the singularity?

There is no specific religious suggestion that we’ll face a technological singularity. In fact, ancient scriptures from various religions say virtually nothing about science and technology, and what they do say about them is usually wrong (the Earth doesn’t move, is at the center of the solar system, is 6,000 years old, etc.)

Still, people interpret their religious scriptures, revelations, and beliefs in multiple ways. So a fundamentalist might say that the singularity is the end of the world as foretold by the Book of Revelation or something like that. Also, there is a Christian Transhumanist Association and a Mormon Transhumanist Association, and some religious thinkers are scurrying to claim the singularity for their very own. But a prediction of a technological singularity—absolutely not. The simple fact is that the authors of ancient scriptures in all religious traditions obviously knew nothing of modern science. Thus, they couldn’t predict anything like a technological singularity.

2) How realistic do you personally think the arrival of superintelligence (SI) is? How “alive” would it seem to you?

The arrival of SI is virtually inevitable, assuming we avoid all sorts of extinction scenarios—killer asteroids, out-of-control viruses, nuclear war, deadly climate change, a new Dark Ages that puts an end to science, etc. Once you adopt an evolutionary perspective and recognize the exponential growth of culture, especially of science and technology, it is easy to see that we will create intelligences that are much smarter than ourselves. So if we survive and science advances, then superintelligence (SI) is on the way. And that is why smart people like Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil, and others are talking about SI.

I’m not exactly sure what you mean by your “How alive would it seem to you” question, but I think you’re assuming we would be different from these SIs. Instead, there is a good chance we’ll become them through neural implants or by some uploading scenario. This raises the question of what it’s like to be superintelligent, or in your words, how alive you would feel as one. Of course, I don’t know the answer since I’m not superintelligent! But I’d guess you would feel more alive if you were more intelligent. I think dogs feel more alive than rocks, humans more alive than dogs, and SIs would feel more alive than us because they would have greater intelligence and consciousness.

If the SIs are different from us—imagine, say, a super smart computer or robot—our assessment of how alive it would be would depend on: 1) how receptive we were to attributing consciousness to such beings; and 2) how alive they actually seemed to be. Your laptop doesn’t seem too alive to you, but Honda’s Asimo seems more alive, and Hal from 2001 or Mr. Data from Star Trek seem even more alive, and a super SI, like most people’s god, is supposed to be really alive.

To reiterate, I think we’ll merge with machine consciousness. In other words, SIs will replace us or we’ll become them, depending on how you look at it.

3) Assuming we can communicate with such a superintelligence in our own natural human language, what might be the thinking that goes into preaching to and “saving” it? 

Thinkers disagree about this. Zoltan Istvan believes that we will inevitably try to control SIs and teach them our ways, which may include teaching them about our gods. Christopher J. Benek, co-founder and Chair of the Christian Transhumanist Association, argues that AI, by possibly eradicating poverty, war, and disease, may lead humans to become more holy. But other Christian thinkers believe AIs are machines without souls, and cannot be saved.

Of course, like most philosophers, I don’t believe in souls, and the only way for there to be a good future is if we save ourselves. No gods will save us because there are no gods—unless we become gods.

4) Are you aware of any “laws” or understandings of computer science that would make it impossible for software to hold religious beliefs?

No. I assume you can program a SI to “believe” almost anything. (And you can try to program humans to believe things too.) I suppose you could also write programs without religious beliefs. But I am a philosopher and I don’t know much about what computer scientists call “machine learning.” You would have to ask one of them on this one.

5) How might a religious superintelligence operate? Would it be benign?

It depends on what you mean by “religious.” I can’t imagine a SI will be impressed by the ancient fables or superstitions of provincial people from long ago. So I can’t imagine a Si will find its answers in Jesus or Mohammed. But if by religious you mean loving your neighbor, having compassion, being moral, or searching for the meaning of life, I can imagine SIs that are religious in this sense. Perhaps their greater levels of consciousness will lead them to be more loving, moral, and compassionate. In this sense, you might say they are religious.

But again, they won’t be religious if you mean they think Jesus literally rose from the dead, or an angel led Joseph Smith to uncover and translate gold plates, or that Mohammed flew into heaven in a chariot. SIs would be too smart to accept such things.

As for “benign,” I suppose this would depend on its programming. For example, Eliezer Yudkowsky has written a book-length guide to creating  “friendly AI.” (As a non-specialist, I am in no position to judge the feasibility of such a project.) Or perhaps something like Asimov’s three laws of Robotics would be enough. This might also depend on whether morality follows from super-rationality. In other words, would SIs conclude that it is rational to be moral? Most moral philosophers think morality is rational in some sense. Let’s hope that as SIs become more intelligent, they’ll also become more moral. Or, if we merge with our technology, let’s hope that we become more moral.

Finally, let me say that I don’t believe that traditional religion will save us, and it will disappear in its current form like so much else after SIs arrive.  In the end, only we can save ourselves.

E. O. Wilson: Science Explains Religion

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Edward O. Wilson (1929 – 2021) was a biologist, theorist, naturalist, and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author for general non-fiction. He was the father of sociobiology and the Pellegrino University Research Professor in Entomology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He was also a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and one of the world’s most famous and important scientists.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book On Human Nature, Wilson extends sociobiology, the study of the biological basis of human social behavior, into the realms of human sexuality, aggression, morality, and religion. Deploying sociobiology to dissect religious myths and practices leads him to affirm: “The predisposition to religious belief is the most complex and powerful force in the human mind and in all probability an ineradicable part of human nature.”[i] Religion is a universal of social behavior, recognizable in every society in history and prehistory, and skeptical dreams that it will vanish are futile.

Scientific humanists, consisting mostly of scholars and scientists, try to discredit superstition and fundamentalism, but “Their crisply logical salvos, endorsed by whole arrogances of Nobel Laureates, pass like steel-jacketed bullets through fog. The humanists are vastly outnumbered by true believers … Men, it appears, would rather believe than know. They would rather have the void as purpose … than be void of purpose.”[ii]

Other scholars have tried to compartmentalize science and religion—one reads the book of nature, the other the book of scripture. However, with the advance of science, the gods are now to be found below sub-atomic particles or beyond the farthest stars. This situation has led to process theology, where the gods emerge alongside molecules, organisms, and mind, but, as Wilson points out, this is a long way from ancient religion. Elementary religions sought the supernatural for mundane rewards, such as long life, land, food, avoiding disasters, and conquering enemies; whereas advanced religions made more grandiose promises. This is what we would expect after a Darwinian competition between more advanced religions, with competition between sects for adherents who promote the survival of the religion. This leads to the notorious hostility between religions, where “The conqueror’s religion becomes a sword, that of the conquered a shield.”[iii]

The clash between science and religion will continue as science dismantles the ancient myths that gave religion its power. Religion can always maintain that gods are the source of the universe or defend esoteric arguments, but Wilson doubts the strategy will ultimately succeed due to the power of science.

It [science] presents the human mind with an alternative mythology that until now has always, point for point in zones of conflict, defeated traditional religion … the final decisive edge enjoyed by scientific naturalism will come from its capacity to explain traditional religion, its chief competitor, as a wholly material phenomenon. Theology is not likely to survive as an independent intellectual discipline.[iv]

Still, religion will endure because it possesses a primal power that science lacks. Science may explain religion, but it has no apparent place for the immortality and objective meaning that people crave and religion claims to provide. To fully address this situation, humanity needs a way to divert the power and appeal of religious belief into the service of scientific rationality.

However, this new naturalism leads to a series of dilemmas. The first is that our species has no “purpose beyond the imperatives created by its genetic history.”[v]In other words, we have no pre-arranged destiny. This suggests the difficulty human society will have in organizing its energy toward goals without new myths and new moralities. This leads to a second dilemma, which is the choice that must be made among the ethical premises inherent in man’s biological nature.”[vi] Ethical tendencies are hard-wired, so how do we choose between them? A possible resolution to the dilemmas combines the powerful appeal of religion and mythology with scientific knowledge. One reason to do this is that science provides a firmer base for our mythological desires because of:

Its repeated triumphs in explaining and controlling the physical world; its self-correcting nature open to all competent to devise and conduct tests; its readiness to examine all subjects sacred and profane; and now the possibility of explaining traditional religion by the mechanistic models of evolutionary biology.[vii]

When the latter has been achieved, biology will explain religion as a product of evolution, and religion’s power as an external source of morality will wane. This leaves us with the evolutionary epic and an understanding that life, mind, and the universe are all obedient to the same physical laws. “What I am suggesting … is that the evolutionary epic is probably the best myth we will ever have.”[viii]  (Myth here means grand narrative.) None of this implies that religion will be fully eradicated, for rationality and progressive evolutionism hold little affection for most, and the tendency for religious belief is hard-wired into the brain by evolution. Still, the pull of knowledge is strong—technologically skilled people and societies have tremendous advantages, and they tend to win out in the struggle for existence. This all leads to another dilemma:

Our burgeoning knowledge of human nature will lead in time to a third dilemma: should we change our nature? Wilson leaves the question open, counseling us to remain hopeful. The true Promethean spirit of science means to liberate man by giving him knowledge and some measure of dominion over the physical environment. But at another level, and in a new age, it also constructs the mythology of scientific materialism, guided by the corrective devices of the scientific method, addressed with precise and deliberately affective appeal to the deepest needs of human nature, and kept strong by the blind hopes that the journey on which we are now embarked will be farther and better than the one just completed.[ix]

Brief commentary

Genes and environment largely explain human beliefs and behaviors—people do things because they are genomes in environments. The near-universal appeal of religious belief suggests a biological component to religious beliefs and practices, and science increasingly confirms this view. There is a scientific consensus that our brains have been subject to natural selection. So what survival and reproductive roles might religious beliefs and practices have played in our evolutionary history? What mechanisms caused the mind to evolve toward religious beliefs and practices?

Today, there are two basic explanations offered. One says that religion evolved by natural selection—religion is an adaptation that provides an evolutionary advantage. For example, religion may have evolved to enhance social cohesion and cooperation—it may have helped groups survive. The other explanation claims that religious beliefs and practices arose as by-products of other adaptive traits. For example, intelligence is an adaptation that aids survival. Yet it also forms causal narratives for natural occurrences and postulates the existence of other minds. Thus, the idea of hidden Gods explaining natural events was born.

In addition to the biological basis for religious belief, there are environmental explanations. It is self-evident from the fact that religions are predominant in certain geographical areas but not others that birthplace strongly influences religious belief. This suggests that people’s religious beliefs are, in large part, accidents of birth. Besides cultural influences, there is the family—the best predictor of people’s religious beliefs in individuals is the religiosity of their parents. There are also social factors affecting religious belief. For example, a significant body of scientific evidence suggests that popular religion results from social dysfunction. Religion may be a coping mechanism for the stress caused by the lack of a good social safety net—hence the vast disparity between religious belief in Western Europe and the United States.

For more, see my essay from Salon magazine some years ago. ______________________________________________________________________

[i] Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979) 169.
[ii] Wilson, On Human Nature, 170-71.
[iii] Wilson, On Human Nature, 175.
[iv] Wilson, On Human Nature, 192.
[v] Wilson, On Human Nature, 2.
[vi] Wilson, On Human Nature 4-5.
[vii] Wilson, On Human Nature, 201.
[viii] Wilson, On Human Nature, 201.
[ix] Wilson, On Human Nature, 209.

For more, see my essay from some years ago in Salon magazine.

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Are The Gods Evil?

[Here is a summary of B.C. Johnson’s, “Why Doesn’t God Intervene to Prevent Evil?]

Are there any good excuses for someone (or a god) not saving a baby from a burning house if they had the power to do so? It will not do to say the baby will go to heaven since one suffers by burning to death. The key is suffering. If the suffering was not necessary, then it’s wrong to allow it; if the suffering is necessary, the baby’s going to heaven doesn’t explain why it’s necessary.

It doesn’t make sense to say that a baby’s painful death will be good in the long run, and that’s why the gods allow it. For that is to say that whatever happens, in the long run, is good; since if something happened, it was allowed by the gods, and it must, therefore, be good in the long run. We could test this idea by burning down buildings to kill innocent people.  If we are successful, then we know that this was part of some god’s plan. But this is absurd.  Moreover, this doesn’t show why the gods allow babies to burn to death; it merely says there is some reason for this suffering, a belief we have since we assume the gods are good. But this argument is circular; it merely assumes what it is trying to prove. (That the gods are good.) “It is not unlike a lawyer defending his client by claiming that the client is innocent and therefore the evidence against him must be misleading—that proof vindicating the defendant will be found in the long run.”

In conclusion, we simply cannot excuse a bystander who could save the child but who doesn’t.

We might say that we ought “to face disasters without assistance,” so as not to become dependent upon help. But this suggests that the work of doctors and firefighters, for example, should be abolished. But if this kind of help is good, then good gods should help like this. But they do not. If this kind of help is bad, then we ought to abolish it.

Similarly, we could say that the gods would reduce the moral urgency to make the world better if they intervened in evil. But should we abolish modern medicine and firefighting since they help people, but thereby reduce our urgency to help people? Of course not.  Moreover, this argument suggests that the gods approve of these disasters as a means to encourage the creation of moral urgency.” 85 And if there were not sufficient baby burnings, the gods would have to bring them about. But this too is absurd. We shouldn’t create moral urgency by burning babies.

Maybe suffering is necessary for virtues like compassion, mercy, sympathy, and courage to be exercised. But even if this is true, the non-believer is simply claiming that we could do without burning babies and still have plenty of suffering to elicit these virtues. Furthermore, we value efforts to improve the world, and we don’t consider the possible reduction in opportunities to practice virtue a good reason not to improve it. If we can’t use this as an excuse not to improve the world, then neither can the gods. Developing virtue “is no excuse for permitting disasters.” The argument that the gods allow suffering to humble us is open to the preceding objections.

One could claim that evil is a by-product of the laws of nature, and a god’s interference would alter the causal order to our detriment. But lives could be saved if serial killers had heart attacks before committing their crimes. Such occasional miracles wouldn’t necessitate changing the laws of nature.  How often should the gods do this? Johnson says often enough to prevent particularly horrible disasters like child torture.

As for the claim that the gods have a higher morality such that what seems bad to us (child torture) is really good, and what seems good to us (modern medicine) is really bad, it is hard to make any sense of this. You could say we just don’t understand a god’s ways like children don’t understand their parents’ ways, but as adults, we might conclude that some of our parents’ actions were bad.

The main reason all these arguments fail is that they are abstract. None of them really explains why all good, all-powerful beings watch helpless infants burn to death, since none of the excuses such beings would offer seem convincing. One could claim that the gods just can’t prevent evil, but it is strange to believe in gods less powerful than fire departments and medical researchers.

At this point, one may retreat to faith, simply believing the gods are innocent, like you might believe in the innocence of your friends, even if the evidence is against them. But Johnson argues that we don’t know the gods well enough to trust them like friends. In addition, we have good reason to believe the gods are not good since in the past they have allowed so much evil.  You could still claim that you trust in the gods and nothing anyone can say will undermine your belief, “but this is just a description of how stubborn you are; it has no bearing whatsoever on the question of God’s goodness.”

Furthermore, all the reasons offered as to why the world’s evil is consistent with good gods could be used to show why it’s consistent with evil gods. For example, we could say that an evil God gives us free will so we can do evil things. Or we could say that evil exists to make people cynical and bitter (instead of compassionate and courageous), or it exists so that we quit caring about others (instead of becoming morally urgent.)

In short, there are 3 possibilities concerning the gods: 1) they are more likely to be all bad (theists don’t want this to be true; 2) they are more likely to be all-good (but this can’t be true since any evidence for this thesis will also support #1); or 3) they are equally likely to be all-bad or all-good. But if 3 is true, then what excuses do the gods have for allowing evil? They have none. And the reason is that for any excuse for evil’s existence to be justified, it must be highly probable that the excuse is true. But note that option 3 rules this out, since according to 3, there is no more reason to think the excuse is valid than that it is not valid.

Why then don’t the gods intervene, according to Johnson? Because they don’t exist.

(Of course, explaining evil without positing gods is easy—humans do bad things.)

If They Exist: The Gods Are Evil

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[Here is a summary of B.C. Johnson’s, “Why Doesn’t God Intervene to Prevent Evil?” It offers a devastating critique of classic theism.]

Are there any good excuses for someone (or a god) not saving a baby from a burning house if they had the power to do so? It will not do to say the baby will go to heaven since one suffers by burning to death. The key is suffering. If the suffering was not necessary, then it’s wrong to allow it; if the suffering is necessary, the baby’s going to heaven doesn’t explain why it’s necessary.

It doesn’t make sense to say that a baby’s painful death will be good in the long run, and that’s why the gods allow it. For that is to say that whatever happens, in the long run, is good; since if something happened, it was allowed by the gods, and it must, therefore, be good in the long run. We could test this idea by burning down buildings to kill innocent people.  If we are successful, then we know that this was part of some god’s plan. But this is absurd.  Moreover, this doesn’t show why the gods allow babies to burn to death; it merely says there is some reason for this suffering, a belief we have since we assume the gods are good. But this argument is circular; it merely assumes what it is trying to prove. (That the gods are good.) “It is not unlike a lawyer defending his client by claiming that the client is innocent and therefore the evidence against him must be misleading—that proof vindicating the defendant will be found in the long run.”

In conclusion, we simply cannot excuse a bystander who could save the child but who doesn’t.

We might say that we ought “to face disasters without assistance,” so as not to become dependent upon help. But this suggests that the work of doctors and firefighters, for example, should be abolished. But if this kind of help is good, then good gods should help like this. But they do not. If this kind of help is bad, then we ought to abolish it.

Similarly, we could say that the gods would reduce the moral urgency to make the world better if they intervened in evil. But should we abolish modern medicine and firefighting since they help people, but thereby reduce our urgency to help people? Of course not.  Moreover, this argument suggests that the gods approve of these disasters as a means to encourage the creation of moral urgency.” 85 And if there were not sufficient baby burnings, the gods would have to bring them about. But this too is absurd. We shouldn’t create moral urgency by burning babies.

Maybe suffering is necessary for virtues like compassion, mercy, sympathy, and courage to be exercised. But even if this is true, the non-believer is simply claiming that we could do without burning babies and still have plenty of suffering to elicit these virtues. Furthermore, we value efforts to improve the world, and we don’t consider the possible reduction in opportunities to practice virtue a good reason not to improve it. If we can’t use this as an excuse not to improve the world, then neither can the gods. Developing virtue “is no excuse for permitting disasters.” The argument that the gods allow suffering to humble us is open to the preceding objections.

One could claim that evil is a by-product of the laws of nature, and a god’s interference would alter the causal order to our detriment. But lives could be saved if serial killers had heart attacks before committing their crimes. Such occasional miracles wouldn’t necessitate changing the laws of nature.  How often should the gods do this? Johnson says often enough to prevent particularly horrible disasters like child torture.

As for the claim that the gods have a higher morality such that what seems bad to us (child torture) is really good, and what seems good to us (modern medicine) is really bad, it is hard to make any sense of this. You could say we just don’t understand a god’s ways like children don’t understand their parents’ ways, but as adults, we might conclude that some of our parents’ actions were bad.

The main reason all these arguments fail is that they are abstract. None of them really explains why all good, all-powerful beings watch helpless infants burn to death, since none of the excuses such beings would offer seem convincing. One could claim that the gods just can’t prevent evil, but it is strange to believe in gods less powerful than fire departments and medical researchers.

At this point, one may retreat to faith, simply believing the gods are innocent, like you might believe in the innocence of your friends, even if the evidence is against them. But Johnson argues that we don’t know the gods well enough to trust them like friends. In addition, we have good reason to believe the gods are not good since in the past they have allowed so much evil.  You could still claim that you trust in the gods and nothing anyone can say will undermine your belief, “but this is just a description of how stubborn you are; it has no bearing whatsoever on the question of God’s goodness.”

Furthermore, all the reasons offered as to why the world’s evil is consistent with good gods could be used to show why it’s consistent with evil gods. For example, we could say that an evil God gives us free will so we can do evil things. Or we could say that evil exists to make people cynical and bitter (instead of compassionate and courageous), or it exists so that we quit caring about others (instead of becoming morally urgent.)

In short, there are 3 possibilities concerning the gods: 1) they are more likely to be all bad (theists don’t want this to be true; 2) they are more likely to be all-good (but this can’t be true since any evidence for this thesis will also support #1); or 3) they are equally likely to be all-bad or all-good. But if 3 is true, then what excuses do the gods have for allowing evil? They have none. And the reason is that for any excuse for evil’s existence to be justified, it must be highly probable that the excuse is true. But note that option 3 rules this out, since according to 3, there is no more reason to think the excuse is valid than that it is not valid.

Why then don’t the gods intervene, according to Johnson? Because they don’t exist.

(Of course, explaining evil without positing gods is easy—humans do bad things.)

Cybernetic Immortality

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Many years ago, the research center in Belgium with which I’m affiliated imagined a future form of cybernetic immortality: uploading your mind into the cloud. Thanks to the recent advances in LLM AI agents, we now appear to have reached a point where people are actively pursuing this goal. Here is a brief description of cybernetic immortality.

The successes of science make it possible for us to raise the banner of cybernetic
immortality. The idea is that the human being is, in the last analysis, a certain form of organization of matter. This is a very sophisticated organization, which includes a high multilevel hierarchy of control. What we call our soul, or our consciousness, is associated with the highest level of this control hierarchy. This organization can survive a partial— perhaps, even a complete—change of the material from which it is built.

Most of the knowledge acquired by an individual still disappears at biological death. Only a tiny part of that knowledge is stored outside the brain or transmitted to other individuals. It is a shame to die before realizing one hundredth of what you have conceived and being unable to pass on your experience and intuition. It is a shame to forget things even though we know how to store huge amounts of information in computers and access it in split seconds. Further evolution would be much more efficient if all knowledge acquired through experience could be maintained, in order to make place only for more adequate knowledge. This requires an effective immortality of the cognitive systems defining individual and collective minds: what would survive is not the material substrate (body or brain), but its cybernetic organization.

One way to reach this ideal has been called “uploading”: the transfer of our mental organization to a very sophisticated computer system. Research in artificial intelligence, neural networks, machine learning, and data mining is slowly uncovering techniques for making computers work in a more “brain-like” fashion, capable to learn billions of associated concepts without relying on the rigid logical structures used by older computer systems. See, for example, our research on learning, brain-like webs. If these techniques become more sophisticated, we might imagine computer systems that interact so intimately with a human user that they would “get to know” that user so well that they could anticipate every reaction or desire. Since user and computer system would continuously work together, they would in a sense “merge”: it would become meaningless to separate the one from the other. If at a certain stage the biological individual of this symbiotic couple were to die, the computational part might carry on as if nothing had happened. The individual’s mind could then be said to have survived in the non-organic part of the system.

Through such techniques, the form or organization with which we identify our “I” could be maintained infinitely, and, which is important, evolve, become even more sophisticated, and explore new, yet unthought of, possibilities. Even if the decay of biological bodies is inevitable, we can study ways of information exchange between bodies and brains which will preserve the essence of self-consciousness, our personal histories, our creative abilities, and, at the same time, make us part of a larger unity embracing, possibly, all of humanity: the social superorganism. We call this form of immortality cybernetic because cybernetics is a generic name for the study of control, communication, and organization. It subsumes biological immortality.

At present, our ideas about cybernetic immortality are still abstract and vague. This is inevitable; long-range notions and goals may be only abstract. But this does not mean that they are not relevant to our present concerns and problems. The concept of cybernetic immortality can give shape to the supreme goals and values we espouse, even though present-day people can think realistically only in terms of creative immortality (although — who knows?). The problem of ultimate values is the central problem of our present society. What should we live for after our basic needs are so easily satisfied by the modern production system? What should we see as Good and what as Evil? Where are the ultimate criteria for judging social organization? Historically, great civilizations are inseparable from great religions, which gave answers to these questions. The decline of traditional religions appealing to metaphysical immortality threatens to degrade modern society. Cybernetic immortality can take the place of metaphysical immortality to provide the ultimate goals and values for the emerging global civilization.

AI-Generated Art, Should We Prefer It?

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I read a recent article that begins, “Pick up an August 2025 issue of Vogue and you’ll come across an advertisement for the brand Guess featuring a stunning model. Yet tucked away in small print is a startling admission: She isn’t real. She was generated entirely by AI.”

It was written by Professor Tamilla Triantoro, who is an Associate Professor of Business Analytics and Information Systems, Quinnipiac University. She studies human-AI collaboration, specifically how AI influences decision-making, trust, and human agency. So what is the significance of our being unable to distinguish human from machine-generated art?

Triantoro begins by drawing an analogy to the Turing Test, which is theoretically passed if we can’t distinguish between machine and human conversation.s wondered whether a machine could exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human. Today, it seems that “the original Turing Test for conversation has arguably been passed.” Moreover, Triantoro argues that AI has likely passed an “aesthetic Turing Test.” People now struggle to distinguish AI can generate music and images from human creations.

In music, platforms like Suno and Udio can produce original songs, complete with vocals and lyrics, in any imaginable genre in seconds. Some are so good they’ve gone viral. Meanwhile, photo-realistic images are equally deceptive. In 2023, millions believed that the fabricated photo of Pope Francis in a puffer jacket was real, a stunning example of AI’s power to create convincing fiction.

We are being fooled for a number of reasons. First, AI search gigantic libraries of human-made art. Second, AI art now generates human faces that we can no longer distinguish from real ones.  Finally, “AI does not just copy reality; it creates a perfected version of it. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called this a simulacrum – a copy with no original.” For example, the AI model in Vogue is not a picture of or a copy of a real woman.

But Triantoro argues that something is lost with AI-generated art.

the “aura” of an original artwork – the sense of history and human touch that makes it special. A painting has an aura because you can see the brushstrokes; an old photograph has an aura because it captured a real moment in time.

AI-generated art has no such aura. It is infinitely reproducible, has no history, and lacks a human story. This is why, even when it is technically perfect, it can feel hollow.

So the question is, what do we really want from art? Triantoro concludes with some questions.

If a machine creates a song that brings a person to tears, does it matter that the machine felt nothing? Where does the meaning of art truly reside – in the mind of the creator or in the heart of the observer?

We have built a mirror that reflects our own creativity back at us, and now we must decide: Do we prefer perfection without humanity, or imperfection with meaning? Do we choose the flawless, disposable reflection, or the messy, fun house mirror of the human mind?

My Brief Reflections

(I’ll begin with a caveat; I know almost nothing about the philosophy of art or aesthetics.)

There is clearly something special about a one-time historical production of some work of art or music as opposed to multiple AI-generated paintings or songs that are just as good or better. But should we really prefer humans to produce a great painting or write a great song over the millions of better songs or paintings produced by AI? I don’t know.

Perhaps the meaning of art does lie in the observer. Maybe we prefer, or should prefer, perfection without humanity. And why does perfection imply meaninglessness? What is so meaningful about imperfection?

_________________________________________

I would like to thank Sylvia Jane Wojcik for sending me the original article. 

In Memoriam: Philip Appleman

Philip D. Appleman (1926 – 2020) was an American poet and Professor Emeritus at Indiana University. I first became acquainted with him in graduate school when I read his edited collection, Darwin (Norton Critical Editions). I have discussed his book on the meaning of life, and posted a few of his poems in four recent posts. After his death, he was survived by Majorie, his wife of almost 67 years, but she died shortly after he did. Below is an interview he did with Bill Moyers.

In Memoriam: Philip Appleman, 1926-2020

 

 

Poems by Philip Appleman

Pursuant to previous posts that discussed Philip Appleman’s work, I present a few of his short poems. (I love how they rhyme.) The first one about the death of his mother is particularly moving.

“GERTRUDE” ( Gertrude Appleman, 1901-1976)

God is all-knowing, all-present, and almighty. — A Catechism of Christian Doctrine

I wish that all the people
who peddle God
could watch my mother die:
could see the skin and
gristle weighing only
seventy-nine, every stubborn
pound of flesh a small
death.

I wish the people who peddle God
could see her young,
lovely in gardens and
beautiful in kitchens, and could watch
the hand of God slowly
twisting her knees and fingers
till they gnarled and knotted, settling in
for thirty years of pain.

I wish the people who peddle God
could see the lightning
of His cancer stabbing
her, that small frame
tensing at every shock,
her sweet contralto scratchy with
the Lord’s infection: Philip,
I want to die.

I wish I had them gathered round,
those preachers, popes, rabbis,
imams, priests – every
pious shill on God’s payroll – and I
would pull the sheets from my mother’s brittle body,
and they would fall on their knees at her bedside
to be forgiven all their faith.

God’s Grandeur from Karma, Dharma, Pudding & Pie.

“God will laugh at the trial of the innocent.” -Job, 9:23

When they hunger and thirst, and I send down a famine,
When they pray for the sun, and I drown them with rain,
And they beg me for reasons, my only reply is:
I never apologize, never explain.

When the Angel of Death is black wind around them
And children are dying in terrible pain,
Then they burn little candles in churches, but still
I never apologize, never explain.

When the Christians kill Jews, and Jews kill the Muslims,
And Muslims kill writers they think are profane,
They clamor for peace, or for reasons, at least,
But I never apologize, never explain.

When they wail about murder and torture and rape,
When unlucky Abel complains about Cain,
And they ask me just why I had planned it like this,
I never apologize, never explain.

Of course, if they’re smart, they can figure it out—
The best of all reasons is perfectly plain.
It’s because I just happen to like it this way—
So I never apologize, never explain.

“O Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie,” from Selected Poems (University of Arkansas).

“Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie,
gimme a break before I die:
grant me wisdom, will, & wit,
purity, probity, pluck, & grit.
Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, kind,
gimme great abs & a steel-trap mind,
and forgive, Ye Gods, some humble advice—
these little blessings would suffice
to beget an earthly paradise:
make the bad people good—
and the good people nice;
and before our world goes over the brink,
teach the believers how to think.

An excerpt from “The Skeletons of Dreams” from Darwin’s Ark (2009).

…Back home in his English garden,
Darwin paused in his pacing,
writing it down in italics
in the book at the back of his mind:
     When a species has vanished
     from the face of the earth,
     the same form never reappears…
So after our millions of years
of inventing a thumb and a cortex,
and after the long pain
of writing our clumsy epic,
we know we are mortal as mammoths,
we know the last lines of our poem.
And somewhere in curving space
beyond our constellations,
nebulae burn in their universal law:
nothing out there ever knew
that on one sky-blue planet
we dreamed that terrible dream.
Blazing along through black nothing
to nowhere at all, Mastodons of heaven,
the stars do not need our small ruin.

A Universal Principle Within Morality’s Ultimate Source

[image error] Mark Sloan

“Properly understood, morality is not a burden; it is an effective means for increasing the benefits of cooperation, especially emotional well-being resulting from sustained cooperation with family, friends, and community.”

There is a dilemma that must be solved by all beings that form highly cooperative societies. This dilemma is how to obtain the benefits of cooperation without future benefits being destroyed by exploitation, such as by free riders accepting a benefit but not reciprocating. Solving the cooperation/exploitation dilemma is difficult because exploitation is virtually always the ‘winning’ strategy in the short term and can be in the longer term.

Fortunately for us, our ancestors came across solutions that have enabled us to become the incredibly successful social species we are. Evolution encoded some of these solutions in our moral sense and cultural moral codes as “morality”. The science of the last 50 years or so reveals human morality to be elements of cooperation strategies2,3,4,5,9 which have made us “SuperCooperators”6.

Cultural moralities are solutions to the cooperation/exploitation dilemma, but they are also diverse, contradictory, and sometimes strange. Exploitation of out-groups (such as slaves, women, and “others”) has been common. Strange markers of being a moral person such as circumcision, dress and hairstyle, and food and sex taboos have been required.

Could there be a universally moral subset of these “descriptively moral” behaviors (behaviors described as moral in one culture but perhaps not in others)? Even when cooperating to exploit or make war8 on out-groups, we must necessarily begin by solving the cooperation/exploitation dilemma within an in-group. To sustainably obtain these benefits of cooperation, people within this in-group “circle of moral concern”7 are not exploited.

This defines a universal moral principle: “Solve the cooperation/exploitation dilemma without exploiting others in your circle of moral concern”. This principle is universal because it is a necessary component of all cultural moralities, even sub-cultures which restrict in-groups to family or friends and exploit everyone else. We can simplify this universal principle as “Increase the benefits of cooperation without exploiting others”, leaving “others” undefined for the moment.

This universal moral principle is an attractive reference for refining moral codes to better meet shared needs and preferences. It advocates increased cooperation which both increases material goods benefits and triggers the emotional rewards evolution encoded that motivate further cooperation. Because our moral sense was selected for by the benefits of cooperation, these cooperation strategies are innately harmonious with our moral sense. This moral principle is practical. Following common moral norms such as the Golden Rule is universally moral when the benefits of cooperation are increased. But when following such norms would not solve the cooperation/exploitation dilemma, as when dealing with criminals and in wartime, following them would not be moral. Since this universal moral principle defines only moral ‘means’ (actions that increase cooperation’s benefits without exploiting others) and is silent on moral ‘ends’ (what those benefits are), societies are free to define what those benefits of cooperation ought to be and change them as circumstances change.

The universal moral principle also sheds light on the morality of two human invented solutions to the cooperation/exploitation dilemma: money economies (which efficiently enable cooperation that produces material goods) and rule of law (which effectively uses force to punish exploiters). Finally, because universally moral means are accurately tracked, this moral principle is a useful objective reference for resolving many moral disputes. (Disputes can persist about how “others”, “exploiting”, ultimate moral ‘ends’, and other implementation details are defined even among people who accept the principle.)

Individuals can benefit from this science by realizing that, properly understood, morality is not a burden; it is an effective means for increasing the benefits of cooperation, especially emotional well-being resulting from sustained cooperation with family, friends, and community. Also, cultural moral norms are best understood not as moral absolutes but as heuristics (usually reliable, but fallible, rules of thumb) for sustainably increasing the benefits of cooperation. Further, if “others” are defined as all people, then all ‘moral’ norms that exploit out-groups contradict the universal moral principle. These include economic systems based on the unfettered pursuit of self-interest leading to exploitation and prohibitions against homosexuality that exploit homosexuals as imaginary threats.

This purely science-based definition of what ‘is’ universally moral appears to be culturally useful independent of any arguments for mysterious1 sources of obligation or moral authority. However, the principle does not answer all moral questions. What benefits for acting morally ought we seek and who ought to be included in “others” who are not to be exploited? Common preferences might be “increased well-being” and “everyone”. But here objective science goes silent; answers to these questions are in the domain of moral philosophy.

References:

Blackford, Russell (2016). The Mystery of Moral Authority. Palgrave Macmillan.
2. Bowles, S., Gintis, H. (2011). A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution. Princeton University Press.
3. Curry, O. S. (2007). The conflict-resolution theory of virtue. In W. P. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral Psychology (Vol. I, pp. 251-261). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
4. Curry, O. S. (2016). Morality as Cooperation: A problem-centred approach. In T. K. Shackelford & R. D. Hansen (Eds.), The Evolution of Morality. Springer.
5. Harms, W., Skyrms, B. (2010) Evolution of Moral Norms. In Oxford Handbook on the Philosophy of Biology ed. Michael Ruse. Oxford University Press.
6. Nowak, M., Highfield, R. (2011). SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed. Free Press.
7. Singer, Peter (1981) The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress. Princeton University Press.
8. Tooby, J., and Cosmides, L. (2010). Groups in Mind: The Coalitional Roots of War and Morality, from Human Morality & Sociality: Evolutionary & Comparative Perspectives, Henrik Høgh-Olesen (Ed.), Palgrave MacMillan, New York, pp. 91-234.
9. Tomasello, M., & Vaish, A. (2013). Origins of Human Cooperation and Morality. Annual Review of Psychology, 64(1), 231-255.

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This article and others addressing the question of whether there is a universal morality are from TVOL’s project titled “This View of Morality: Can an Evolutionary Perspective Reveal a Universal Morality?” Reprinted with permission of the author.

Summary of Phillip Appleman’s: The Labyrinth: God, Darwin, and the Meaning of Life

[This post is a continuation from the past two posts with an outline of the book’s argument and my commentary at the end.]

Philip D. Appleman (1926 – 2020) was an American poet, a Darwin scholar, and Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University. His final book was: The Labyrinth: God, Darwin, and the Meaning of Life[image error].[image error]

Outline

Here is my reconstruction of the basic points from Appleman’s book. It does not contain a philosophical argument in the traditional sense, but rather resembles a final lecture or statement of his creed. (For more about the idea of a last lecture, see Randy Pausch’s moving book, The Last Lecture.) [image error]

Part 1 – We Invented Religion

As we move through the labyrinth of life, we wonder, Who are we?We are not some god’s chosen people; we are primates with big brains.These brains invent gods who we believe tell us to conquer the earth.Believing in gods is easy; thinking for ourselves is hard.The gods promise immortality, thereby breeding contempt for the world.

Part 2 – Religion is a Horrible Thing

Believers are often horrible people, fanatical and antisocial.Religions don’t want to be judged by their deeds, but by their rhetoric.Religions want to preserve themselves.Religions have been, and still are, a terrible force in human history.If taken seriously, religion leads to turning your back on the world.But most don’t take it seriously; they want the things of this world.

Part 3  – We Create Meaning in Life in the Face of Death

By relinquishing our attachment to religion and immortality, we can discover meaning in this world.We create our own meaning; we don’t get it from absurd theology.Instead, we should realistically assess our situation.If we do, we’ll find that we are products of evolution.We will die, but we can die with dignity like Darwin did.Darwin rejected the sadism and superstition of religion, as should we.Religion consoles us with promises of the afterlife, but provides no evidence.We have a right to rage against death because life is precious.

Part 4 – Morality is a Biological Phenomenon

We find the origins of morality in the desire for self-preservation.In evolutionary history, we find that to survive, we must cooperate.But religion co-opted morality, uniting it with dogma.To get people to be moral, religion promises heaven and hell.But this doesn’t work. For morality, we must look to science.

Part 5 – Science Can Play a Role in Morality

Science explains human nature and how we can flourish.Science reveals that we are interconnected with the entire ecosystem.Knowledge is an important ingredient of conscience.Most won’t engage in rigorous thought, but a few of us can try.

Part 6 – The Law and the World Are Human-Made

The law progresses to the extent that it distances itself from religion.By abandoning religion, we can live better lives and make a better world.We can make a heaven on earth. [image error]

Review

It is a short book, only about 60 pages, but it is carefully and conscientiously crafted, so I will quote extensively from its beautiful prose. Here are its first sentences:

The simpler the society, the cruder the problems: we can imagine Neanderthals crouching in fear—of the tiger, of the dark, of thunder—but we do not suppose they had the leisure for exquisite neuroses. We have changed all that. Replete with leisure time and creature comforts, but nervously dependent on a network of unfathomable technologies, impatient with our wayward social institutions, repeated betrayed by our spiritual” leaders, and often deceived by our own extravagant hopes, we wander the labyrinth asking ourselves: what went wrong? The answers must begin with our expectations. What is it we want? And why? What kind of people are we? (11)

We are, as Appleman knows, “A beast condemned to be more than a beast: that is the human condition.” We know our lineage; we are brothers of primates, sharing over ninety-eight percent of our DNA with chimpanzees. The legacy of more than one hundred and fifty years of scientific research confirms this central fact—we are modified monkeys who came to dominate other animals because of our large brains. But the brains that created tools also imagined they were the chosen people of the gods, that all other flora and fauna were expendable. This was our true loss of innocence. The notion that “God wills it” serves aggressor nations and species alike. The assault on nature came with the god’s permission, but it was an arrogant assumption, dissociated from reality, unstable, and self-destructive. “In our fantasies of godlike superiority are the seeds of neurosis, and when they bear their dragon fruit, we run for the mind healers.”(14)

God is an invention of our imagination and for many people a seductive idea. (Appleman has in mind the Judeo-Christian God, but this idea would apply to other gods as well.) “People in general have never exhibited much passion for the disciplined pursuit of knowledge, but they are always tempted by easy answers. God is an easy answer.” (16) A brain capable of asking questions without any answers forthcoming satisfies itself that some god is the answer, even though this is no answer—the term god only hides our ignorance.

But belief in the gods survives because it is useful. Gods sanction war and, given that they are omnipotent and omniscient, a multitude of evils, too. And they receive undeserved praise for saving our lives when, for example, thousands have just died in natural disasters. After all, there must be some reason why we were saved; we think because our brains see patterns everywhere. In the stars, they see Aquarius and Capricorn; in the heavens, they see angels and archangels. No wonder religion hates knowledge—the gods depend upon our ignorance.

Learning is hard work; imagining is easy. Given our notorious capacity for indolence, is it any wonder that school is so unpopular, faith so attractive? So we fumble through the labyrinth of our lives, making believe we have heard answers to our questions, even to our prayers. And yet, deep down, we know that something is out of joint, has always been out of joint. (18)

Beginning as infants, selfish and full of desire, we soon realize that growing up means limiting our desires. By contrast, theologies offer infinite delight—it’s all so tempting. Of course, we can’t be sure we’ll win the eternal prize because that depends on God’s grace, given or withheld according to the capriciousness of the gods. Still, most assume we are favored by the gods. Thus religion panders to childish wishes, leaving us unfit to deal with reality. It turns our attention away from this world toward the afterlife, and it often leads to horrific behavior.

Appleman says that the immoral people he has known were mostly believers, whereas his agnostic and atheist friends were quite virtuous. This is because religious people can afford to be immoral; all they need to do is ask forgiveness. “If God exists, as the old saying should go, then anything is permissible. Nonreligious people have no easy way out. Their moral accountability is not to some whimsical spirit in the sky, famous for easy absolutions … They must account to themselves and live with their own conduct…” (23)

Appleman also argues that unbelievers “are less perverted by the antisocial tendencies of religious thinking, including the seductions of fanaticism … To the fanatical mind, the act of pure religion has always been an act of pure violence …” (24-25) He provides numerous examples of religious wars and cruelty to buttress his argument, making his point in powerful prose: “Religion stalks across the face of human history, knee-deep in the blood of innocents, clasping its red hands in hymns of praise to an approving God.” (27) Yet we are all supposed to approach religion with deference, despite the fact that in the holy people “we encounter a veritable Chaucerian gallery of rogues and felons.” (27-28) Appleman provides a long list of such characters from just the last few years alone.

The religions of the world don’t wish to be judged by their deeds. They are not interested in their victims but in “the towering cathedral, and soaring rhetoric, and official parades of good intentions.” (29) Appelman attributes this public relations success to the organizational ability of religions. Beginning with visions, prophecies, and other subjective experiences, the priesthoods became organized. Subsequently, the original vision, whether it was for good or ill, is forgotten:

… and the organization itself becomes the object of self-preservation, aggrandizing itself in monumental buildings, pompous rituals, mazes of rules and regulations, and a relentless grinding toward autocracy. None of the other priesthoods managed all this as successfully as the early Christian clergy … Thus the “Roman” Church created for itself a kind of secular immortality sustained by a tight network of binding regulations, rigid hierarchies, and local fiefdoms, which people are born into, or are coerced or seduced into—and then find that confining maze almost impossible to escape from.” (30-31)

Large religious organizations create great problems—crusades, inquisitions, war, genocide, and burning scientists at the stake. Today, the Roman Catholic Church, to take one example, has used its power and influence to oppose birth control. Needless to say, this policy leads to hunger, poverty, disease, death, the degradation of the environment, and more. Under the guise of doing good, the religious wreck lives. “There is a word for this kind of activity, talking about love while blighting people’s lives: it is hypocrisy.” (32-33)

The result of this fascination with otherworldly concerns manifests itself in our distaste for the satisfactions of this world. If we truly believed in the gods, then we wouldn’t care about art, music, love, sex, money, and power. But most people only give lip service to their religion; almost no one sacrifices the things of this world for the afterlife. “… few people are abjuring the world; we are taking the cash and letting the credit go …” (34). Still, many can’t let go of worrying about the afterlife or rejecting their native religion. But Appleman counsels us to reject “the bribes of the afterlife” and our childish longing for gods; we can truly find meaning in this world precisely because what’s here is not eternal.

Doomed to extinction, our loves, our work, our friendships, our tastes are all painfully precious. We look about us, on the streets and in the subways, and discover that we are beautiful because we are mortal, priceless because we are so rare in the universe and so fleeting. Whatever we are, whatever we make of ourselves: that is all we will ever have—and that, in its profound simplicity, is the meaning of life. (35)

We are beasts that ponder the meaning of life. We were not designed by gods; there is no design outside of us, only the design we create. From our self-chosen actions, we get our happiness, our truth, our freedom, our wisdom, and our meaning. But how can there be meaning if there is death? Our brains provide the reasons. Rejecting the “mumbo-jumbo of theologians,” we search for the truth.

Cosmic evolution gave birth to our sun and planet; chemical evolution brought forth atoms, molecules, and cells; biological evolution led to us.  The process ran itself; there was no intelligent designer. But consciousness emerged, we are here, and within limits, we are free. And yet we will die.

Charles Darwin died the night of April 18th, 1882. A biographer says that his last words were: “I am not in the least afraid to die.” How do we account for his courage? Appleman gives two reasons.

First, he was a mature man no longer frightened by superstitions. He once studied for the clergy, but he had “gradually come … to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow at sign, etc., etc., and from it’s attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.” (42) He also believed religion was sadistic. “I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.” (43)

Darwin knew that death is natural; we die like all the other animals. The non-religious don’t fear death, but they rage at being mortal. Religion responds differently.

Religion says: console yourself, there will be another chance, another life. Two things are wrong with this. First, there is not a shred of evidence for it and, second, it is a sop, consciously intended to blunt our rage and regret, thus dehumanizing us. Our anger at death is precious, testifying to the value of life; our sorrow for family and friends testifies to our devotion. (45-46)

Confronted with death, we should see that meaning is found in what we have done, and what we have created—meaning can’t be imposed on us from the outside. Darwin was thus content, for “Darwin on his deathbed could look back on forty-three years of devotion to a loving wife, forty-five years of devotion to a grand idea … He had made his commitments and he had kept them.” (46-47)

If the meaning of life is simply the fabric of our whole existence, then no wonder our brief careers seem so illogically precious to us, so worth clinging to. Self-preservation … it’s always there, the fundamental imperative of life: survival. Preachers may sneer at this, but notice: they continue to pass the collection plate. (47)

To understand morality, we begin with self-preservation. However, we soon find that to survive, we must extend the sphere of our moral concerns beyond self to family, tribe, nation, and to the planet itself. Fortunately, cooperation is in our DNA. Darwin knew that “our social behavior might be to some extent inherited.” (49) He knew that our social instincts contain tendencies to be both selfish and altruistic.

“Once our species evolved to social consciousness and communal morality, people naturally began to express their social approval with praise, and to enforce their disapproval with contempt, anger, and ostracism.” (50) Long before religion codified morality, secular communities enforced it. Then we invented God, “thousands of years after evolution had developed our social instincts, religion co-opted our socially evolved good impulses and encumbered them with myriad disparate, controversial, and contradictory gods, priesthoods, scriptures, myths, and dogmas.” (51)

Still, many are motivated by their more base instincts. Religion tries to deal with this problem with eternal reward or punishment.

But neither of these sanctions has ever worked very well, which is why (among other things) totally immersed Southern Baptists always performed the lynchings for the Ku Klux Klan; why nice Catholic boys have always run the Mafia; why a devout Jew murdered his peace-loving prime minister; and why, in a notorious American election, pious white churchgoing Christians voted two to one for a declared Nazi. (52)

The problem isn’t that people don’t know about right and wrong, but that they don’t care about it. How can people be taught to care? By social and political leaders? We know that survival depends ultimately on cooperation, but powerful politicians, financiers, and business people are among the most selfish people in society. Appleman’s sarcasm is caustic. The ruling class is strong; they “… all have enough strength to bear the misfortune of others.” (54-55)

For morals, we might look instead to science:

… science strictly speaking has no ethics … But our ethics … can hardly emerge from a vacuum … Scientific knowledge has at the bare minimum a selective ethical function, identifying false issues that we can reasonably ignore: imagined astrological influence on our moral decisions, for instance. Science offers us the opportunity of basing our ethical choices on factual data … rather than on misconceptions or superstitions … (55)

Of course, we can misuse scientific knowledge, but generally, the growth of science corresponds to social progress. Moreover, the scientific mind discovered that we are one species on one planet, connected to other living things on whom our survival depends. We should replace the arrogant claim that humans have dominion over the earth with a recognition that we can’t survive without the ecosystem.

The idea of the connection between all living things is particularly aroused by evolutionary biology. From this connection can spring a new ethics. As Darwin put it:

The moral faculties are generally and justly esteemed as of higher value than the intellectual powers. But we should bear in mind that the activity of the mind … is one of the fundamental though secondary bases of conscience. This affords the strongest argument for educating and stimulating in all possible ways the intellectual faculties of every human being. (60)

Appleman contrasts this intellectual outlook with the religious one. Religions often look at the evil in the world as acts of the gods or signs of the end of the world. (Think of those today who claim their god will take care of climate change.) Darwin understood such people: “To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful.” (61)

Today, we live in a world where people are comforted by “sensational crime, sporting events, the sexual behavior of celebrities, and religious escapism. Nourished on such pap, many people find themselves lost in the labyrinth of neurosis and succumbing to easy answers and seductive promises: the priests need not soon fear for their jobs.” (61-62) Most people won’t be converted to rigorous thought, but Appleman believes there is value in speaking out.

Every small light in the pervading darkness, from Giordano Bruno and Galileo to Thomas Paine and Charles Darwin to Margaret Sanger and Elizabeth Cady Stanton is valuable and necessary. Like characters in a perpetual Chekhov drama, we can imagine a more enlightened future age looking back on our time with distaste and incredulity but nevertheless acknowledging those voices in our wilderness who kept the Enlightenment alive until humanity in general became worthy of it. (62)

Moreover, the entire history of the law, Appleman says, records our transition from barbaric religious punishment and religiously sanctioned slavery to a more humane secular law. The basis of morality is a social contract. However, if some don’t benefit from the contract, they will resent the current order. In the long run, they will not be satisfied with the claim that all will be well in heaven. “What is required is a secular solution, which works the other way around: Improve the society, and most people will behave better.” (Look at the Scandinavian countries.)

In the past, slavery was defended by “conservatives, slave-owners, and most religions.” We look back with horror, as our future descendants will at the way we treat blacks, women, and other minorities.

Humane and liberal societies gradually come to a more sensitized understanding of the plight of the less fortunate and devise sensible ways of assisting them; the underclass then feels less trapped, becomes less confrontational, and is less motivated to break the social contract. Good laws and good customs precede good behavior. (67)

In short, morality is in everyone’s self-interest. A more moral society would encourage people to reflect about their own lives, to learn about the world, to reject superstition, and to assess human problems with reason and compassion.

Free from the racking fear of deprivation and from the labyrinth of brutal religious animosities, free from holy nonsense and pious bigotry, living in a climate of openness, tolerance, and free inquiry, people would be able to create meaning and value in their lives: in the joy of learning, the joy of helping others, the joy of good health and physical activity and sensual pleasure, the joy of honest labor; in the richness of art and music and literature and the adventures of the free mind; and in the joys of nature and wildlife and landscape—in short, in the ephemeral but genuine joy of the human experience.

That joy does not depend upon mysticism or dogma or priestly admonition. It is the joy of human life, here and now, unblemished by the dark shadow of whimsical forces in the sky. Charles Darwin’s example, both in his work and in his life, helps us to understand that that is the only “heaven” we will ever know. And it is the only one we need. (68-69)

Commentary 

That humans created religion is self-evident. I suppose that doesn’t falsify all of its claims, but it certainly sheds doubt on them. Generally, religion is a horrible thing, the cause of an untold amount of suffering. Still, I admit to having known some good religious persons, although on the whole I have found them morally and intellectually inferior to non-believers. That has been my experience; no doubt others have had theirs. But I’m amazed by how many truly horrific people that I’ve known have been believers.

The question of creating meaning is one I’ve addressed at length in my recent book. Suffice it to say that I think subjective meaning is a part of, but not all of, the answer to the question of life’s meaning. If it were all of the answer, then one who enjoys torturing children could be said to have a meaningful life. The question of our attitude toward death is one of the most vexing I have ever faced. I don’t know if I should accept it, rage against it, or get a cryonics policy. But I do believe that death should be optional.

Morality is a biological phenomenon, and you cannot have a good moral theory without knowledge of human nature. Biology is the science that tells us about human nature. Law, too, is a human invention, and we are better off distancing ourselves from religious moralities. (Having said that, the penal system in the United States is extraordinarily barbaric. It will stain the historical view of this country for generations.) Finally, I believe that abandoning religion and other superstitions is a first step to making a better world.

I thank Professor Appleman for his beautifully written and passionate prose, as well as for sharing the depth of his thought.