The Transactional Primate and Transactional God

This post examines the transactional nature of people, and our presumption of transactions with unseen gods and spirits.  One of the presumed transactions is the biblical sacrifice of Jesus Christ in exchange for the forgiveness of human sins.  The post asks why a loving god would require a transaction involving a blood sacrifice rather than granting unconditional forgiveness to humanity.

This image of the crucifixion site was generated by AI.

Some animals understand transactional relationships.  Crows are well-known for transactional behaviors, bringing shiny objects in response to being fed.  There’s a delightful, documented story of a squirrel which spontaneously began stealing cookies and bringing them to someone who had been feeding the squirrel.  Animals can have a sense of gratitude and empathy, presume that something is valuable and giving it in trade for benefits received.  But an animal’s sense of what is valuable may differ from what humans appreciate, as cat owners who find a dead mouse on their pillow can attest.

Humans are among those animals with a natural capacity to understand trade.  Humans have the most complex social lives in the animal kingdom.  We have the ability to communicate, understand, and participate in exchanges.   Transactions are a necessary part of human social behavior, well illustrated in pop-psychology books Games People Play and I’m Okay, You’re Okay.  The books are correct that transactions are among our core social behaviors, and are necessary in society.  We are transactional creatures by default.  

Transactional Programming
Our faith in transactional fairness is borne out our daily experiences.  Over-indulgence often carries negative consequences, and self-denial often conveys benefits.  Sweets and fatty foods cause tooth decay and unwanted weight gain, and perhaps more serious consequences of diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.  Exercise requires a cost of time and effort but produces health benefits.  Working hard may result in a promotion or more pay; saving money usually results in more money later.  Going out of our way to help someone may result in a new friendship, a reciprocated favor, or simply the pleasure of doing a good deed.  Time spent in picking up, cleaning, personal hygiene, seeing the doctor and dentist all have an immediate personal cost, but we expect a better quality of life in those transactions.

We are so programmed to expect fair transactions that we often fail to verify that a transaction yields a benefit.  We expect that a large package will be a bargain without checking the unit price.  Or we choose an expensive product, presuming that the cheaper option is of lower quality.  We usually assume that what is easily obtained is less valuable than something that requires more effort and personal cost, without requiring proof.

Religious Transactions
Humans apparently conducted transactions with spirits for as long as we’ve had the unique quality of being human.  All cultures offered prayers, worship and sacrifices to invisible, unresponsive spirits in exchange for presumed material benefits, either in this life or the next.  Sacrifices included food and drink, coins and jewelry, animals and human lives.  James Michener writes that as Polynesian cultures struggled with priests representing competing gods, it was presumed that the gods which demanded the most extreme sacrifices must be the strongest gods.  So the culture adopted more extreme practices of human sacrifice to appeal to the strongest god.  It is incredible that cultures throughout history participated in sacrificial transactions without ever requiring an audit to verify that promised material benefits were actually delivered.

The Judeo-Christian religion anthropomorphizes God and presumes that God wants things that humans want – praise, faithfulness, obedience, trust, conversation, connection and love.  But our religious leaders never ponder the question of why God would want those things.  Does God really want our worship and offerings, any more than we want the dead mouse generously given to us by the cat?  Why would God care about praise from humans any more than the praise from flatworms?  What good is human worship to the creator of two trillion galaxies?

In the movie “Men in Black”, miniature aliens living in a locker in Grand Central Station worship Agent Jay in a transaction for his gift of a wristwatch, to Agent Jay’s annoyance.

I previously wrote a brief post about the transactional nature of God in the Old Testament, here: https://sensibledisbelief.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-old-testament-rarely-heard-bible_29.html.

Sacrifice is featured prominently in Old and New Testament Judaism.  Second Chronicles 4-5 details the sacrifices to God offered by King Solomon for the dedication of Solomon’s temple, including 22,000 cattle and 120,000 sheep, plus offerings of grain mentioned a little later.  Nearly 1000 years later, sacrifices of animals was still a central part of Jewish religious observance, with the Gospels noting sacrifices of doves, pigeons, oxen, and sheep in ordinary worship. 

Some religions represent that the reward for transactions with spirits is not in this life but the next, removing the need to prove that benefits are received through the religious transaction.  This requires several levels of unfounded assumptions.  The first assumption is that unseen spirits exist.  The second assumption is that there is a life after death in some place, in some way that has meaning to a human individual.  The third is that unseen spirits desire what is sacrificed by humans, and fourth, that unseen spirits have agency over outcomes in the afterlife.  It’s hard for me to decide which of these is the most preposterous.  

Human Sacrifice
Judaism was one of the first religions to eschew human sacrifice.  Genesis 22 tells of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.  Abraham obediently prepares for the sacrifice, but before he can complete the act, God intervenes in the form of an angel, providing a ram to be killed in place of the son.  This sets a precedent for Judaism and later Christianity, that human sacrifice is not a transaction desired by God.  

Historian Thomas Cahill claims that every human culture practiced human sacrifice before the arrival of Christianity (Cahill ignores two millennia of Jewish precedent before Christianity in rejecting human sacrifice.)   It’s good that religions eventually recognized the immorality of such practices and brought them nearly to an end in the modern world.  Perhaps there is a slow improvement in human behavior, as Steven Pinker argued in “The Better Angels of Our Nature”.  The topic of human sacrifice is broad enough that it deserves a separate post.  

But in the general rejection of human sacrifice in Christianity, there is one striking exception.  It is the central tenet of Christianity - the transactional sacrifice of the life of Jesus Christ in payment for the sins of humanity.  

Sacrifice of Christ
It’s clear from scripture that the crucifixion of Christ is a transaction.  The death of Jesus is a payment demanded by God in exchange for the forgiveness of human sins.  This is the central tenet of Christianity.  The transaction is explained clearly in the prophecy of Isaiah, in the last supper in the gospels of Luke and Matthew, in the first letter of Paul to the Corinthians, and in the Apostles’ Creed.   It somehow matters to God that blood must be shed to earn divine forgiveness for the sins of humanity.  For an ineffable reason, unconditional forgiveness of human sin is just not in God’s rule book.  Like the pagan gods of old, the Christian God demanded a blood sacrifice.

We’re told that Jesus is God’s only son.  Among two trillion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of planets, God chose to place his son here on Earth, with the expectation that Jesus would be tortured and killed to complete the necessary transaction for the eternal salvation of humanity.  God brought his mortal son Jesus to teach mercy and forgiveness to humanity, but the transaction here seems contradictory to the message.  

I think it’s important for us to ask why God would do any of that.  Why would God demand the life of Jesus in a transaction to forgive human sins, when God created humans to be inherently sinful?  Why does God not grant unconditional forgiveness to humanity, especially in the case of the teacher who taught forgiveness and to turn the other cheek?  Echoing Martin Luther, if God's grace is not freely given, is it really grace?  At what point do religious teachings strain our credulity to the breaking point?  When does a reasonable person say aloud “This doesn’t make any sense.  It cannot be true.”? 

Conclusion
Humans are transactional creatures by nature.  Our life experiences program us to expect transactional exchanges with nature and with other humans.  People project their transactional expectations onto the unseen spirit world, with no evidence that the spirit world exists or responds to the traces offered by people.  

In the Christian religion, doctrine teaches that the life of Jesus Christ was exchanged for the forgiveness of humanity’s sins.  This transaction is the central tenet of the religion.  Christians should question why God demanded this exchange, which runs counter to the idea of divine grace and unconditional forgiveness.  
It doesn’t make any sense.

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

Carl Sagan popularized the phrase “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (ECREE), in his 1979 book “Broca’s Brain” and the Cosmos television mini-series in 1980.  Sagan was drawing on previous use of the concept by Marcello Truzzi in the 1970s, Thomas Jefferson and Pierre-Simon LaPlace in the early 1800s, and ultimately by philosopher David Hume in his 1748 essay “On Miracles”. 

 

“Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence”
Carl Sagan, 1979

To make sense of the aphorism, we should first ask what qualifies as an extraordinary claim.  There are three classes of extraordinary claims:

• Statistically improbable claims.
• Claims outside the range of prior experience, with unknown probability.
• Claims contrary to the body of established scientific knowledge or preponderance of existing evidence.

Religious ideas are of the third kind, assertions that are contrary to established scientific knowledge.  (I will discuss other kinds of extraordinary claims and evidence in my science blog.)  Religious or spiritual claims are closer to Hume’s original idea about extraordinary claims in 1748 than the other kinds of extraordinary claims.  

                        “What is a miracle?”
                        “A miracle is something that happens contrawise to the will of nature.”
                                            Source is forgotten, likely to be Robert Heinlein or A.C. Clarke

Social scientist Marcello Truzzi, who founded an organization to investigate paranormal claims, coined a similar wording of the ECREE aphorism that Sagan later used.  In 1978, Truzzi wrote, “extraordinariness must be measured against theoretical expectations provided by the general body of scientific knowledge at the time...claims require extraordinary evidence if they entail the falsehood of established scientific results that are themselves extensively tested and well understood.... A black swan is one thing; a swan that visits you from beyond the grave is something else.”

Religious Claims
Let’s try to summarize religious and spiritual claims.  It won’t be easy.  There are about 3000 distinct religions followed by some group of people, now or in the past.  From this variety, it may be difficult to compile a simple list of religious claims, but I will try, using parallel ideas in a number of religions.  

God and Gods, each having many of the following characteristics:
    Non-corporeal, invisible, silent spirits.
    Immortal.
    Capable of magic or miracles.
    Interested in humanity.
    Intervening in human affairs.
    Responsible for creation of the world, or parts thereof.
    Often engaged in conflict with other gods, spirits, or beings.
    Protecting humans from evil spirits, people or natural disasters, often in exchange for worship.
    All-powerful.
    All-knowing.
    All-good. (In some traditions, not all.)
    
Divine Creation of the World
    Creation of the universe or world by gods or other spiritual beings.
    Creation of the living world.
    Distinct creation of people, separately and above the living world, and endowment of people with sentience, knowledge or wisdom.
    Creation of the spiritual realm, of heaven and hell.

Sacred Gifts
    Gifts of knowledge or other gifts to humanity, including positive and negative gifts.

Immortal Souls
    Spiritual, immortal extension of the human self, capable of existing without the body after death.
    Includes self-awareness, memory, will, thoughts and emotions.
    Generally believed to travel to non-material spiritual places after death -- Heaven, Hell, Limbo, Valhalla, Folkvangr, the seven Samaawat, Alma d-Nhura, Deva Loka, Narka Loka, etc.

Human Spirits
    Ghosts existing after life in the physical world (but not necessarily immortal).  May include malevolent spirits.

Divine Superior Beings
    Demi-gods, including Jesus, Maui, and Heracles, and divine relatives, including the Virgin Mary.  Often considered the offspring of god or gods, sometimes through parthenogenesis, sometimes the offspring of humans and gods.  Often believed to have a previous physical life, but currently are non-corporeal spirits.  Prayer for intercession is often directed toward divine superior beings rather than to God.

Spiritual Superior Beings
    Angels, demons, animal or natural spirits with greater magical power than humans or human spirits.
    May include antagonistic spirits such as Satan.

Afterlife Places
    Heaven, limbo and hell.  Places without a physical presence or contact with the physical world, where one can meet people from one's former life.

Miracles
    Extraordinary events, contrary to expected behavior of natural systems, generally for the benefit of people experiencing difficulty.

Divine Causation
    Routine natural events, seasons, tides, eclipses.
    Routine human events, birth, death.
    Movement of heavenly bodies.
    Extraordinary events as reward or punishment (usually punishment), including natural disasters, virgin birth, ascension to heaven.

Natural Spirits
    Attribution of living identity, will or sentience to animals, plants, places and objects; anthropomorphism of nature.  

Sacred Places
    Attribution of sacred living identity to mountains, rivers, and lands.  Sacred objects and places are believed to enable religious miracles.     

Spiritual Inanimate Objects and Places
    Religious icons, relics of saints, churches, temples, springs and objects or places believed to have magical powers or enable miracles.

Reincarnation
    The belief that souls are recycled into new people or animals.  Some religions attribute a “leveling-up” process of attaining higher or lower status according to moral behavior during life.

Divination and Prophecy
    Belief that the future can be determined by religious ritual or by religiously endowed individuals. 

Saints and Spiritual Intermediaries
    Belief that the spirits of sacred humans can intervene and influence God’s actions, or parallel beliefs in non-Christian religions.

Sacred Texts
    Belief that the Bible, Devi Bhagavatam, Quran, Book of Mormon or other sacred texts are divinely inspired, contain divine revelation, are literally true, and have an absolute obligation to be obeyed.
    
Prayer
    The belief that humans can communicate with gods and higher beings, to give thanks and ask for divine help.

Ancestor Worship
    Belief that deceased ancestors actively intervene and protect their descendants.

Human Religious Intermediaries Priests, Pastors, Popes, and Shamen
    Belief that special humans possess magical powers or can intervene to influence divine action.

Divine Humans
    Egyptian, Roman and Japanese societies held that their leaders were gods, or became gods when assuming office as emperor or pharaoh.  Chinese and other cultures believed that their leaders were semi-divine descendants of gods.

Belief in Transcendent Reality, and/or denial of physical reality.
    Belief that physical reality is corrupt and is superseded by a transcendent reality.

Karma
    Belief that good or bad actions have real-world consequences in luck or future events.

Ordinary Scientific Evidence

The scientific method systemized the search for truth and standardized the criteria for truth, beginning in the 17th century.  Scientific evidence involves the following elements.

• Empirical observation.
• Identification of processes and developing hypotheses about processes.
• Experiments designed to fulfill predictions or invalidate the hypotheses.
• Clarity of data from experiment.
• Repeatability.
• Relevance of evidence, often measured by statistical tests.
• Peer review and publication.

In general, religious claims fail most or all of the standards for scientific truth (or as it is otherwise known, truth).  Stories of 14th century BCE conversations with a burning bush or visions by a 15th-century French girl do not qualify as evidence.

 
Moses and the Burning Bush, Holman Bible, 1890

Vision of Joan of Arc (1428), artist and date unknown to me.

With religious claims, there are few repeatable observations with objective observers.  There are no identified processes.  There are no experiments to invalidate the claims.  There is little clarity of the data.  There is often little relevance of the evidence, and little critique of the claims.  We see that religious claims fail to meet standards for ordinary evidence before even considering the need for extraordinary evidence,

Why Are Religious Claims Extraordinary Claims?
Religious claims are extraordinary claims because they violate known scientific knowledge about processes.  The list of religious claims is too long for a complete rebuttal, but fall into four general categories.  First are claims involving spirits, second are claims involving higher classes of beings, third are claims involving miracles and fourth are claims of future knowledge or predestination.

Spirits represent disembodied beings, with self-awareness, memory, will, ability to communicate and other powers.  But scientific knowledge places the seat of sentience in the brain.  Through observation of patients with brain injuries (as described well in the books by Oliver Sachs) we know which parts of the brain enable these aspects of sentience.  We can observe patients in which memory, will and communication are gone, and have established that the brain performs those functions of humanity.  Without a physical brain, spirits cannot have sentience; souls cannot persist after death.  To claim otherwise is an extraordinary claim, and requires extraordinary evidence.  

The same reasoning applies to the existence of higher beings, gods, demi-gods, angels and demons that are believed to exist in the spiritual world.  Without a brain, how do they think?  How do they persist as self-aware entities?  To claim that an angel or demon possesses sentience without a brain violates our scientific understanding of sentience.

Religious claims of miracles and magic are also extraordinary claims.  We know how physics, chemistry, and life sciences work.  A miraculous event, by definition, is contrary to the expectations from those natural processes.  As such, every miracle or magical claim requires extraordinary evidence.

Claims of prophecy and predestination violate the scientific understanding of time.  In all well-documented experience, information can not flow backwards through time.  Future events are fundamentally uncertain, despite high precision in prior conditions and known processes.

Extraordinary Evidence
What is extraordinary evidence, as compared to the normal scientific evidence described above?  

I return to David Hume, who first established the ECREE standard in 1748.  “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish”.  

In essence evidence of a miraculous event must be strong enough to invalidate the scientific knowledge precluding that event.  To be considered true, a miracle involving levitation must be supported by evidence sufficient to invalidate our well-established notions about gravity.  To be considered true, the claim of a soul, ghost or spirit must demonstrate disembodied sentience in some unquestionable, observable, repeatable form.  The claim that God exists needs to be demonstrated by apparently unlimited power – perhaps by moving thousands of galaxies overnight to spell out, “I am God” in every language on earth.  Of course, none of those things have ever happened or ever will happen.

Conclusion
Religious claims are extraordinary claims, defying our existing body of scientific knowledge.  Religious claims fail to meet even the lowest standards of scientific evidence, much less the extraordinary evidence required for such claims to be regarded as truth.  
----
Afterword
Non-Religious Paranormal Beliefs
There are also a substantial number of non-religious paranormal beliefs, some of which overlap with religious beliefs.  Some (telekinesis, telepathy, extraterrestrial visitors) do not involve spiritual elements, while others (ghosts) do not involve higher spiritual powers.  These also require extraordinary evidence, but are irrelevant to the discussion of atheism.

Non-Interventionist God
Albert Einstein said, "I'm not an atheist, and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist... I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings”  The Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) framed a special case of the non-interventionist God.  Spinoza held to a physical sense of reality, but viewed all of creation as a sub-set of God.  According to commentator Paul So, Spinoza “rejected the existence of Soul, Angels, Demons, Miracles, Divine Creationism, the possibility of Afterlife, Divine Revelation, validity of Prophecy, Biblical literalism, Tradition, Scriptural authority, and last but not least the existence of a personal God.”

Giordano Bruno in the 16th century rejected many of these same religious claims, while introducing revolutionary speculative cosmological ideas that are today held as true.  He speculated that stars were far-away suns, that planets might orbit those suns, and that intelligent beings might live there.  He also made contributions to the study of memory, mathematics, geometry and language.  Bruno may have been approaching the rationalist’s idea of a non-interventionist God, but was burned at the stake for heresy in 1600.

Giardano Bruno, 1548-1600, portrait from 1830 biography.

Execution of Giardano Bruno, source unknown to me.

Spinoza’s non-interventionist God eliminates most, but not all, of the unsupported religious claims.  Spinoza’s God presumes that God is the creator; that God is reality, and that God is greater than reality.  These claims are also unsupported by evidence. 

Baruch Spinoza, 1632 - 1677.

Spinoza tried to rationalize religion by removing the most fantastic claims, and altering the definition of God to equate God with our observed reality.  But God is unnecessary to explain our observations, and equating God with reality brings no additional understanding.  There’s also no evidence, extraordinary or otherwise, that God is greater than our reality.  The central claim that God exists is completely unsupported.  According to Occam’s razor, the best explanation of our reality is that God does not exist.

God as Judge: Heaven and Hell -- The Afterlife, Part II

The Afterlife, Part II, Heaven and Hell
Do the concepts of Heaven and Hell pass the test of reason and justice?

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

“Imagine” – John Lennon

Please don’t tell what train I’m on, so they won’t know which route I’ve gone.

                                “Freight Train” – Elizabeth Cotten, modified by various folk singers.

Death

Death is perhaps the most unsettling aspect of our existence as sentient beings.  We exist.  As Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.”  We know our existence had a beginning at conception or at birth, although we do not remember it.  And we know that our existence (as we know it) will cease at death, although it may be impossible to actually contemplate our own non-existence. 

The question of what happens at death has been with us for a long time.  Socrates had something to say about it after receiving his death sentence for impiety and corruption of the youth.  Socrates always had something to say.  That was part of his problem.

“….we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is good, for one of two things: - either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another.”

“if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an wondrous gain…for eternity is then only a single night.”

“….if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this? If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, and he has escaped from those who call themselves jurymen in this world, and finds the true jurymen who are said to give judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making. What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again.”

                                                                                Socrates, 399 B.C. in Plato’s “Apology”

“Apology” is the account of Socrates self-defense in his trial for impiety and corruption of the young, in which he was sentenced to death.

American Views about the Afterlife

Socrates framed the question of what happens at death as a duality; either nothingness, or judgment in another place.  In Socrates’ view, judgment was not given by God, but by men who had been righteous in life.  The question of punishment for the sins of this life is not considered. 

In the 2417 years since Socrates, we are no closer to a consensus about what happens at death.

A large majority of Americans believe in life after death, though the specifics of their beliefs varies considerably.   Somewhere between about 70% and 90% of Americans believe in some kind of life after death.  Only a small minority of Americans do not believe in an afterlife.  There is wide divergence of belief in the details of life after death, with a number of inconsistencies in the range of beliefs about immortality. 

Most Americans (about 80%) believe in Heaven.   Curiously, according to one survey, a higher percentage believe in Heaven than those who believe in life after death.  A smaller number (about 60%) believe in both Heaven and Hell.  A minority group believes that a person exists after death and lives on in a spiritual form in another dimension, but not heaven or hell.  About 50% of Americans believe in ghosts here on earth.  About 20% believe in reincarnation.  There is considerable overlap among individuals’ various beliefs about the afterlife, whether about heaven, hell, a separate spiritual existence, ghosts, reincarnation, or some combination of these.

Dante: Inferno, Purgatory, and Heaven

The Divine Comedy, an epic poem written by Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321), set much of the popular imagery about heaven and hell.  The poem tells of an allegorical journey through hell, purgatory and heaven, as guided by the Roman poet Virgil, and Dante’s life-love, Beatrice.  Each realm of the afterlife is divided into ten circles, representing gradations of sin, circumstance, and merit.  The construct is an attempt to render the afterlife comprehensible from the standpoint of justice.  The simple duality of damnation and paradise is too stark and simple as judgment for the complexity of human experience.  Thus, the souls of pre-Christian philosophers and babies who died before baptism were sent to limbo, in purgatory, according to tradition. 

Illustration of Hell from the 11th century manuscript Hortus Deliciarum (Garden of Delights).

The Christian View of Heaven and Hell

The remainder of this post will focus on the mainstream American Christian belief in Heaven and Hell as destinations in the afterlife.

Jesus will come again with glory to judge the living and the dead.

                                                                -- Nicene Creed

He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty:

From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

                                                                -- Apostles’ Creed

It is interesting to note that in the language of the creeds, judgment does not occur at the moment of death, but happens later, at the second coming of Christ.  This is contrary to a common belief about the immediate disposition of the soul at the time of death. 

The ideas of Heaven and Hell are cornerstones of traditional Christian belief.  These beliefs are directly rooted in the teachings of Christ.   In the Parable of the Sheep and Goats, Jesus says that people who ignore the needs of the poor are cursed, and will be thrown “into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels”.  Jesus also spoke directly of heaven, saying to one of the thieves crucified with him, “Today you will be with me in Paradise”.

The fundamental question here is whether the concepts of heaven and hell pass the test of reason.  Why do we briefly live on earth, if we are to exist for eternity after we die?   And if existence has such an asymmetrical duration, why did God create the realms of life and death? 

Heaven

The Heaven of the Old Testament is quite different than the Heaven of the New Testament.  The Old Testament (Genesis, Daniel, Nehemiah, Kings, Ezekiel, Exodus, Psalms) describes Heaven as the skies above, and the place where God and angels dwell.  Except for Elijah, who was specifically chosen to rise to heaven, it is not described as a place where humans go after death. 

Heaven in the New Testament is quite different.  Jesus speaks often of heaven, of God the Father in Heaven, and of the Kingdom of God in Heaven.  Jesus tells his disciples that they can aspire to Heaven, although he cautions that rising to heaven is not easy.  Jesus says that unless his followers are more righteous than the Pharisees and teachers of the law, they will not enter Heaven (Matthew 5:20), and says that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God (Matthew 19:24).   

Gustave Dore, Paradise, 1892

But what is heaven, when we get past the cartoons of popular culture -- the pearly gates of Saint Peter and the white-winged angels standing on puffy clouds and holding harps.  What would eternal life be like?  What would it be like after one hundred years?  After the first million years?   After the first billion years?  After the hundredth billion years?  Would any aspect of the human personality persist over such lengths of time?  What is the meaning of eternal life, as promised by Jesus Christ? 

We’ve previously considered the qualities of the human soul, as expressions of the human self: memory, will, self-awareness, thoughts and emotions.  How could these persist for a billion years?  What would remain after these things fade?  Why did God create the realms of life and death, if life in Heaven resembles life on earth?  What does the survival of the soul mean if life in Heaven is different for eternity?  We might consider that the human soul could transform into something else, into a higher kind of being, but for what purpose?  Certainly, whatever might remain after a billion years would no longer be human.  What would such a being do?  What would it think?  Why would it exist, and why would it have begun its existence as a mortal human life? 

Hell

Our idea of Hell as a place of fire and torment is drawn directly from the Bible and the words of Jesus.  It is also clear from the words of Jesus that heaven is reserved for only the exceptional few, the most worthy in the sight of God.   What, then, happens to the rest?  By default, they are consigned to hell, or the middling realm of purgatory, as described by Dante in 1320.

Purgatory, Gustave Dore

Theologians and others have spent considerable mental energy in trying to rationalize the justice implicit in consignment to Hell.  Dante’s Inferno is typical of these rationalizations, where different levels of Hell are allocated according to differing levels of sin.  (I have not read Dante, to my regret.)  For example, pre-Christian philosophers such as Socrates was assigned to the relative comfort of the first circle of Hell, because they lived their lives with honor, virtue and integrity, but were not given the opportunity for baptism or salvation.  Dante’s vision of Hell continues in incremental fashion through moderate levels of torment to the deepest levels, reserved for the greatest sins.   Botticelli’s painting of Hell follows this pattern, with the caverns of hell connected vertically by staircases.  Tormented souls lie prostrate along the halls, and the dungeons become smaller with depth.  [The model implies a skewed statistical distribution of wickedness, with relatively mild sinners greatly outnumbering deeply evil human souls.  The model is intuitively correct.]

The Map of Hell, Botticelli, circa 1480 -1490.

But there is limited fairness in this.  Why did God design a world where honorable men had no opportunity for salvation, simply because Christ arrived too late?  

Calvinists take this idea to a horrifying level based on the presumed omniscience of God.  In the Calvinist view, each soul is predestined at conception for either salvation or damnation.  Indeed, since all is known, each soul is predestined for heaven or hell at the beginning of creation.   What kind of justice is this?   What kind of God would call souls into existence, knowing they are doomed for eternal torment and suffering?  What does this say about free will of humans, individual morality and judgment?  What does this say about the goodness of God?  I am reminded of a scene from Disney’s “Fantasia”, during the piece by Mussorgsky, “Night on Bald Mountain”.  The Ukrainian demon Chernobog (literally “Black God”, representing Satan) conjures a handful of flames into beautiful flaming dancing women.   He then torments them through several transformations, each uglier than the last.  Finally, bored with his game, he crushes them out of existence in his fist.   What is the difference between this and the Calvinist view of God, except that the Chernobog eventually ends the torment of his victims, and the Calvinist God torments his created souls for all of eternity?

Summary

What kind of God would construct hell?  Do the ideas of Heaven and Hell pass the tests of reason and justice?

An Eskimo hunter asked the local missionary priest, 'If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?'

'No,' said the priest, 'not if you did not know.'

'Then why,' asked the Eskimo earnestly, 'did you tell me?'

We tend to rationalize our visions of divine judgment by constructing models which meet our standards of reason and justice.  Thus, we have Dante’s concentric circles of Hell, with degrees of punishment aligned to degrees of sin.  We have the vision of Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates, checking his list like a bouncer at an exclusive nightclub.  But what basis do we have for imagining reward or punishment?   We have scripture, scripture contains none of the detail which is needed to answer questions of justice.  Further, Judeo-Christian scripture is only one of 3000 competing visions of what divine justice means.   We also have our human instinct for fairness, which we share with many higher creatures.   But to construct models of judgment which meet our standards of reason and justice, and then justify those models based on our instinct for sense and fairness is circular reasoning. 

The idea of Hell fails the standard of justice, because the punishment of eternal torment is disproportionate to any conceivable sin.  The idea of hell is also incompatible with the idea of a good and loving God.  Christians who embrace the idea of a loving God must logically reject the idea of eternal damnation, torment and suffering.  Eternal torment is an asymmetric and unjustified punishment for any temporal sin.  And yet we have no basis for ameliorating the model, simply to satisfy our desire for fairness.  The idea either meets the standard of justice, or not.  And it doesn’t.  Either God is not a loving God, or there is no hell.

William Blake, The Book of Urizen

The idea of Heaven fails the standard of reason.  The immortal existence of the soul, extending into infinite time as a coda to our brief lives, also has an illogical asymmetry.  Why is life in the material world so brief, if the soul lives in Heaven so long?   I have a lot of things to do.  There are a lot of things I should do, but I lack the lifetimes to do what needs to be done.  And I could pass eternity in Heaven with a harp, but that will not allow me to take care of real problems here on earth.  A loving and omniscient God working with intelligent design would have given me a little more time on earth and a little less time in Heaven.

Judging God, rather than being judged, is a revolutionary idea.  I freely admit I stole the idea from physicist David Deutsch, in the book “The Beginning of Infinity”, which I highly recommend.  As reasoning beings, we are obligated to judge God (and our beliefs) according to the standards of reason, justice and goodness.   Belief in Heaven fails the standard of reason.  Belief in Hell fails the standards of reason, justice, and the goodness of God.  A reasoning person must reject these beliefs. 

--

Illustrations:

http://www.the-culture-counter.com/a-closer-look-at-hell/

http://www.cvltnation.com/all-things-in-heaven-and-hell-william-blake/

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Illustrations_to_Dante's_Divine_Comedy_object_13_Butlin_812-13_Second_Version_of_Cerberus.jpg

References:

Elizabeth Cotten (1893-1987), grandchild of American slaves, was self-taught on guitar and became a recognized folk artist in her 60s.  Cotton composed “Freight Train” at the age of 11, performed it in public for the first time at the age of 67, and won a Grammy award for the song at the age of 93.

Like many folk songs from 1850 - 1900, the song is an allegory of death, represented as a train.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUK8emiWabU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZrb-ao5v3M

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25%3A31-46&version=ESV

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/10/most-americans-believe-in-heaven-and-hell/

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-health/fewer-americans-believe-god-yet-they-still-believe-afterlife-n542966

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathleen-weldon/paradise-polled-americans_b_7587538.html

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2015-06-15-1434388666-5668257-Beliefsaboutheavenhelllifeafterdeath.gif

Ghosts, Spirits, and Reincarnation -- The Afterlife, Part I

“You don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost.

“I don’t,” said Scrooge.

“What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?”

“I don’t know,” said Scrooge.

“Why do you doubt your senses?”

                                                            “A Christmas Carol” – Charles Dickens

Some questions occurred to me as I considered the question of life after death. 

• If we are to believe in the afterlife, why did God create the realms of life and death?  
• For what purpose do we exist while we briefly live, if we are to endure for an eternity after we die?

I will consider these questions in greater depth in my next post, about Heaven and Hell.  In this post I will consider more prosaic concepts of life after death.  This post will consider souls that remain in our own world and walk among us as ghosts or reincarnated individuals.

The Contemplation of Non-existence

People are reluctant to admit the reality of personal death.  It is somehow counter-intuitive to conceive of ceasing to exist, despite the ready analogues of sleep, which we use so frequently as a euphemism for death.  Perhaps we cannot contemplate non-existence, because the contemplation itself presupposes existence.  How could we imagine the feeling of non-existence?  We cannot.  And so, people have developed beliefs based on the continuation of the human self, because we are unable to imagine actual death.

But, for the sake of argument, suppose we accept the idea that people possess an immortal soul.  What do we think about the afterlife?  What conclusions can we reach by thinking about the traditional ideas of ghosts, spirits, heaven and hell? 

A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” is an absolute masterpiece.  Often performed in film and on stage, "A Christmas Carol" is essential reading for everyone, because of its clarion call for human kindness.  [If you haven’t read it, go read it now.  Seriously, right now.  I’ll wait.]   “Christmas Carol” is also noteworthy for its unflinching look at the dark side of human character, in negligence and cruelty. 

The story is filled with non-human spirits, as well as human ghosts.  The human ghosts suffer for their misdeeds during life – not in hell, as is usually presumed, but through daily coexistence with a world they can no longer touch.  The souls of those who were good in life are not seen floating above the streets of London; presumably they are in a better place.  “A Christmas Carol” is a work of fiction, but it draws on beliefs that are still held by many people.   I suppose if such ghosts were real and sometimes perceived, as by Mr. Scrooge, they would play a rational role in the world, as a warning to others to treat others well during life, exactly as in the story.

Ghosts

I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts!
                                                            Ray Parker, Jr. ,“Ghostbusters”, song

Ghosts conveniently appear when there is no way to document the occasion, and leave no trace, direct or indirect, of their existence.  Some might ask why it is so hard to believe in the unseen, when physicists’ descriptions of reality include such concepts as dark matter and dark energy, which have never been observed in direct interaction with ordinary matter.  Another kind of unseen reality is contained in physicists’ description of the multiverse – an infinite number of alternate realities, existing in parallel with our own universe.   What is the difference between those versions of reality and the idea of ghosts?  The answer lies in the repeatable evidence of the weak interaction of those phenomena with our own physical reality.  Dark matter and dark energy are apparent, even inescapable conclusions, based on the variance of the motion of galaxies from the motion predicted by the theory of gravity.  And evidence for the multiverse is clear and repeatable in the interaction of quantum particles with unseen shadow particles outside of our reality.  What is lacking in the search for ghosts is repeatable evidence.   Is it possible that reality contains elements which are capricious, lacking in physical evidenced, taunting our logic and reason?  It may be possible, but I choose not to believe in such a perverse vision of reality.  (Or in a God who would create such a perverse reality.)   In my opinion (and this is only opinion), there will always be stories of earthbound ghosts, and those stories will always be false.

Reincarnation

And I feel…

Like I've been here before.
And you know it makes me wonder
What's going on under the ground. 
Do you know? Don't you wonder?
What's going on down under you?
We have all been here before, we have all been here before.

                                                                        David Crosby, “Déjà vu”, song.

Reincarnation is another common belief, across many cultures, religions and individuals.  Reincarnation is one of the easiest answers to the question of how the individual self can continue after death.  When the ephemeral body expires, the immortal soul that dwelt within that body moves to another body.    It sometimes provides a rationale for visibly unfair events in an individual life; these are justified according to good or bad deeds in previous life. 

Many religions accept some form of reincarnation as part of the general belief in the eternal life of the soul.  Many of these accept the idea that people may be reincarnated as animals.  The soul’s progress towards perfection depends on willful actions of the individual and resulting karma during each life.   The doctrinal narrative that explains the process of reincarnation is very detailed and complex, and of course, is completely different from one religion to the next.  These narratives are contradictory and cannot all be true.

Some versions of reincarnation are attributed to only people.  For example, actress Shirley McClain believes that she has lived many previous lives, beginning sometime in our pre-human past.  (The fact that McClain’s version has no resemblance to archeological or biological evidence doesn’t dissuade her from her belief.)  There are books and websites on how to find and remember our previous lives. 

The on-line literature regarding reincarnation is filled with tangential ideas, equally without a basis in evidence, and contrary to known facts in established science.  The literature references extraterrestrials; the possibility of extraterrestrial past lives; fabricated and incorrect cosmology, evolution, and geology.

When I researched this topic, I found, somewhat to my surprise, that many more people have died than are living today.  In rough numbers, about 100 billion people have lived and died since 50,000 B.C.*, and roughly 7.5 billion people are alive today.  So, for every person living today, about 14 people lived and died before that us.  In concept, enough prior humans existed that all of us could have lived a previous life, or many lives.  Most of those lives were lived sometime between about 200 B.C. and 1950 A.D. 

*There is an open question about when humanity began.  The demographer who produced this research chose 50,000 B.C. arbitrarily, whereas anthropologists might choose 100,000 to 250,000 years ago.  The truth is there is no clear dividing line between humans and pre-human progenitors.  We cannot say “This being has a soul, but its parents did not.”  This was the point of my childhood question, “Does a virus have a soul?”

Many people believe in reincarnation today, including about one-quarter of American Christians, although reincarnation is not part of Christian theology. 

The possibility of reincarnation is even the subject of serious academic research at the University of Virginia.  For over 40 years, researchers there have been gathering evidence that young children remember previous lives.  According to the researchers, these memories fade by the age of six. 

But if only a few children out of millions remembers a previous life, and if those memories fade by the age of six, can we even say that the previous soul survives?  If we have no memory of our previous selves, do those souls still exist, or have they evaporated, to be replaced by the soul of the presently living individual?

Further, why should memories of past lives only occur in a tiny handful of cases, in children?  Isn’t it possible that parents have misconstrued things said by children, or unconsciously planted ideas in the children’s heads, that later appear to be memories?  Is it possible that all of these stories are some kind of fraud?   The evidence for reincarnation is sparse, not systematic or repeatable, and of questionable authenticity. 

Carl Sagan advocated a principle which should be part of the foundation for any system of belief.  That principle was first proposed by French mathematician Laplace, in 1812: “The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.”  Sagan’s formulation is more succinct: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”  The claim that an immortal soul exists for each human, leaves the body at death, and resumes its existence in another person, or an immaterial place, is certainly an extraordinary claim.  And the evidence for that claim is weak.

Conclusion

Most modern people have stopped believing in ghosts.  There are always legends, and there are always things that startle us in the dark.  But those things have more to do with our human senses, and our brain’s tendency to fill in the blanks when deprived of sensory input.   No clear, repeatable evidence for ghosts has ever been gathered. 

Similarly, there is no convincing evidence of reincarnation.  Accounts of individuals remembering previous lives are very sparse and poorly documented.  The instances of remembered past lives are not sufficiently abundant to rule out fraud, or unwitting communication of information to the “reincarnated” individual.  The idea lacks the robust evidence required to validate belief in something unseen.

The idea of life after death, whether as a ghost, or reincarnated soul, fails the basic test of reason.  Why should life of the soul continue after death?   At some point, early human individuals must have possessed “original” souls.  Why would later individuals receive “recycled” souls?  If reincarnation were an actual phenomenon, perceptible to humans, then the beliefs of various cultures and religions would be expected to be parallel, because they are describing the same real phenomenon.  But world beliefs about reincarnation are not at all parallel, and for that reason, we must conclude they are false.

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Does a Virus Have a Soul? -- Summary

An earlier post in this series explored the question of the immortal soul.   (“Does a Virus Have a Soul? http://sensibledisbelief.blogspot.com/2016/07/does-virus-have-soul.html).   To summarize the earlier inquiry, there are qualities of life which give us personal identity -- memory, will, self-awareness, thoughts and emotions.  There is considerable evidence that these capacities are located in the brain, and are erased at death.  There is no compelling evidence that the components of the individual self exist past the moment of death.  There is no evidence of any other receptacle for the self which can hold the self beyond the moment of death.  So the existence of the soul, which is considered the immortal continuation of our self, our personal identity, is without basis.  Further, when we consider the connectedness of life, through evolution and the complexity of the human organism, the notion that only humans possess a soul develops logical contradictions.

--

References:

Reincarnation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reincarnation

http://www.hinduwebsite.com/reincarnation.asp

http://www.aetherius.org/karma-and-reincarnation/past-lives/

Scientific research into reincarnation:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/feeling-too-much/201412/children-who-seemingly-remember-past-lives

http://uvamagazine.org/articles/the_science_of_reincarnation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_B._Tucker

History of past lives:

http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx

6.5 % of the people who have ever lived are alive today.

https://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpop/table_history.php

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-are-the-demographics-of-heaven/

God as Sustainer of All Things

In the book The Beginning of Infinity, physicist David Deutsch imagines the following dialogue between the philosopher Socrates and the Greek God Hermes:

Hermes, speaking to Socrates: “How many [Athenians] are willing to criticize a god by the standards of reason and justice?”

Socrates, [ponders]: “All who are just, I suppose.  For how can anyone be just if he follows a god of whose moral rightness he is not persuaded?  And how is it possible to be persuaded of someone’s moral rightness without first forming a view about which qualities are morally right?”

“A Dream of Socrates”, in The Beginning of Infinity, by David Deutsch, 2011
The dialogue was drawn from themes in Plato's "Apology", the account of Socrates' self-defense in his trial for impiety and corruption of the youth.

In the traditional Christian view of God, God is creator of all things, sustainer of all things, and judge of all people.  From Scripture, particularly John 1:3, we learn that nothing was made without God; nothing exists without God.  God is in all things, rules all things, determines all things.  In this post we will consider the role of God the sustainer of the world. 

I recently attended a session of Alaska’s excellent story-telling forum, Arctic Entries.  The monthly programs allow people in the community to tell stories of their lives.  In the most recent show, a story-teller told of an improbable and horrific accident.  While swimming in a lake with other young people, a rope from a boat somehow became wrapped around his neck, just as the boat departed at high speed.  The young man survived, but suffered a stroke which left half of his body paralyzed.  The young man was a church leader in a mentoring program for high-school students; he had given of his time and wisdom to make their lives better.  So why, of the eleven people on stage, was he the one to suffer a physically and mentally crushing random injury?  Where is the God who is in all things, determines all things, and rules all things?

If we take David Deutsch’s dialogue of Socrates to heart, we are not only permitted, but obligated to question God’s performance as the sustainer of all things, according to rational standards of justice and goodness.

God the Father, Julius Schnorr, 1860

Making Excuses for God -- When Bad Things Happen to Good People

Everybody knows that bad things happen to good people.  Theologians and religious people acknowledge that this is one of the most difficult issues with faith.  There is a huge volume of religious literature dedicated to the topic of explaining the injustices of life to those who have suffered pain, injury, and tragedy.  The literature tries to help people make sense of their loss, to reconcile the evil they have suffered with the fundamental goodness of God. 

People make excuses for God.  When bad things happen, people can always provide an explanation.  Here is a short sampling of the excuses I have heard for why God allows suffering to exist.  I have taken many of these verbatim from religious websites; others I remembered from sermons and teachings from childhood.  The essence of these excuses is that bad things happen, but it is never God’s fault.

• God has a higher purpose.
• God is testing our faith.
• God is not responsible for all the evil that is happening around us; Satan is. 
• People are wicked.  The innocent suffer, along with the wicked.
• God always answers your prayers, just not always in the way that you want.
• God allows suffering because troubles make you stronger.
• God allows suffering because people have been granted free will.  Other peoples’ sins and decisions cause the innocent to suffer, but it isn’t God’s fault.
• Good people suffer on Earth, because the reward is in Heaven. 
• God wants the loved one in Heaven.
• Suffering in this world doesn’t matter, because eternity makes the difference.
• Pain awakens us to God.
• If we understood why innocents suffer, we would be unmoved, and that would be unthinkable.
• God is able to restore the life of the child, so from God’s perspective, there’s no loss.
• All people have sinned, and people share the sins of others, so there are no good people.
• God allows bad things to happen to good people to teach them lessons, to discipline them, to improve their character, to encourage them to depend on him, etc.
• God did not create people to suffer, but sometimes we do suffer because we live in a fallen world.
• Evil entered the world when Adam and Eve disobeyed God.  We live with suffering as a consequence of their disobedience.
• Trust in God; God knows what he is doing.

The sheer number and variety of excuses for God suggest to me that there is no appropriate answer for God’s apparent indifference to human suffering.

If we continue along the path suggested by David Deutsch, we should question God according to the standards of reason and justice.  It is easy to frame responses to each excuse for God’s indifference, as follows:

• Is God, the omnipotent, unable to accomplish his higher purpose without causing suffering?
• Is God unable to differentiate the good from the bad, and treat each accordingly?
• Why does the reward in Heaven require suffering on Earth?
• What kind of kindness is represented by testing humans with cruelty?
• God has all of eternity; if he wants somebody in Heaven, why can’t he wait?
• If a prayer is for mercy and goodness, why would it be denied?
• Why is it necessary to cause suffering in order to teach someone?
• What kind of relationship relies on punishment to enforce loyalty and obedience?
• Why should anyone suffer for the sins of others?

Despite promises in the Bible and liturgy, God doesn’t intervene to provide justice in human affairs.  As I have done in other posts on this blog, I could provide examples; lists of injustices in human experience.  But that is unnecessary.  For every article about faith repaid by divine intervention in Guidepost magazine, everyone knows there are innumerable examples of undeserved tragedy, throughout history.  Many of those tragedies are of human doing, but many are natural disasters – in legal parlance, Acts of God.  And if natural disasters inflicted on the innocent are in fact, acts of God, should we not judge God according to the standards of reason and justice?

Mercy is innate, through-going and consistent behavior.  God’s mercy should not be capricious or biased, threatening or conditional.  We should criticize God according to the standards of reason and justice when we consider the problem of suffering in the world.

When Good Things Happen to Bad People

Good things also happen to bad people.  This is the converse of the usual paradox, although it is examined less often.  In fact, we know that good things happen to all kinds of people, and bad things happen to all kinds of people.  Throughout history, the innocent and good have suffered equally with the wicked; the wicked have prospered as much as the deserving and just.  It’s pretty clear that ethical or moral merit just doesn’t matter when it comes to cancer, debilitating illness, and early death.  And wicked leaders such as Ivan the Terrible, Josef Stalin, Robert Mugabe, Muammar Gaddafi, Idi Amin and others survive and prosper, unless brought down by the concerted efforts of men, not God.

Conclusion

In the course of writing this post, I realized that Hans Christian Anderson’s story “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is perhaps about religion.  People generally believe what they are told by a person of authority.  When people are taught from birth, they will fiercely believe in those things despite evidence from their own experiences and senses.  In Anderson’s story, only a child could acknowledge what was plainly seen by all – that there was nothing there. 

People stubbornly hang on to what we were taught as children.  Some people who were taught that Pluto is a planet are deeply distressed by the scientific re-classification which changes that status.  People are taught to trust in God, as they trust in their parents.  Some psychologists even say that that we are pre-wired to believe in God.  And so, people retain their belief in God, regardless of their life experiences, and regardless of how contradictory those experiences may be compared to the teachings about God from childhood.  Gaining release from those beliefs requires critical, objective thought, contrary to some of our earliest instruction.  It isn’t easy.

Human experience is incompatible with the traditional concept of God – omniscient, omnipotent, infinitely good, Creator and Sustainer of the world and mankind.  The suffering which mankind endures is simply incompatible with such a God.  God, if he exists, is either not infinitely good, not infinitely powerful, or not interested in mankind.

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References:
David Deutsch, 2011, "A Dream of Socrates", pp. 223 - 257, in The Beginning of Infinity, p.496.
Plato, Apology, c. 399 BC.  (Apology is Plato's account of Socrates' speech at his trial for heresy and corruption of the youth.  The trial ended in Socrates death sentence, which was carried out some months later.  In my view, Socrates was approaching the idea of monotheism, and used the term "the god", whenever he spoke of his own faith.), in Plato, Five Dialogues, translated by G. Grube and J. Cooper.
The Bible, John, 1:3.