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.