ASU Origins: Something from Nothing

You'll have to forgive my little bit of hero worship. I went to the previously mentioned ASU Origins talk with Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss. My seat was great (despite the iffy photo I took with my phone).

Something from Nothing was mostly as an informal talk about each of their current books: Dawkins' children's book The Magic of Reality and Krauss' Something from Nothing. The talk was unmoderated and bounced around quite a bit from evolutionary biology to cosmology to religion and politics. It was erudite and humorous and as has happened with the previous talks I've went to, I had a great time. Taking place in a packed Gammage Auditorium (the last public commission of Frank Lloyd Wright) on the campus of Arizona State University, it was gratifying to see so many smart people (young and old) who were willing to pay money to hear other smart people talk. I was lucky enough to speak to many of them before after the show. Getting to have a real conversation with rational people was an experience I don't often get. There may yet be hope for my generation and beyond.

During the last talk I attended, I was able to meet, talk with and get an autograph from Lawrence Krauss. This time, I made sure to stick around and speak to Mr. Dawkins. I had him sign the Magic of Reality book that I had bought for my son Alex for Christmas.

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Update: You can view this talk online here: Something from Nothing

Book Review: The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking

I have to admit, I was more than a bit miffed at one of my favorite scientists, Stephen Hawking, after reading a quote on God attributed to him recently,

"I am not claiming there is no God. The scientific account is complete, but it does not predict human behaviour, because there are too many equations to solve. One therefore uses a different model, which can include free will and God."

Now, I don't want to give the wrong impression. Complete agreement with those I admire is not a requirement. There are several political points that I fundamentally disagree with Christopher Hitchens on, but those beliefs of his are consistent with his own logic. I'm OK with that. He's otherwise brilliant and one of my favorite writers and thinkers. Hawking's the same for me. The above quote, however, seemed to go contrary to everything I knew of Hawking. And after reading The Grand Design, I have to feel that the quote was misleading or taken out of context. I realized quite early that my reservations about Hawking's quote were probably unfounded when I saw this in the first chapter,

" ... this book is rooted in the concept of scientific determinism which implies … that there are no miracles, or exceptions to the laws of nature"

Continuing on, The Grand Design serves as a good recap of the history of physics and scientific thought ranging from Kepler and Descartes to Newton and Laplace:

"It is Laplace who is usually credited with first clearly postulating scientific determinism: Given the state of the universe at one time, a complete set of laws fully determines both the future and the past. This would exclude the possibility of miracles or an active role for God. The scientific determinism that Laplace formulated is the modern scientist’s answer to question two. It is, in fact, the basis of all modern, and a principle that is important throughout this book. A scientific law is not a scientific law if it holds only when some supernatural being decides not to intervene. Recognizing this, Napoleon is said to have asked Laplace how God fit into this picture. Laplace replied: ―Sire, I have not needed that hypothesis.""

And we don't need it either. The Grand Design (co-written by Leonard Mlodinow) is quite a beautiful book with color artwork and photography. Far from being some dry, technical tome stretching for a thousand pages, the book is a quick moving refresher on the drive to unify the various theories of physics (gravity, electromagnetic, etc.) into one Grand Unified Theory. Besides being probably impossible, it is also untestable within our current level of understanding. But it doesn't stop people from trying. Clocking in at 180 pages, you can polish off The Grand Design in a night. There is no math and just a few Feynman Diagrams to wrap your noodle around.

Don't expect The Grand Design to provide in-depth explanations of the string theory and M-theory with mathematical proofs.  Hawking (and Mlodinow) assume the reader either already has a deeper understanding or doesn't need one.  I come somewhere in between.  I have read much deeper explanations in some of Hawking's other books and by other scientists.  But, I would be lying if I said that I completely understood them.  I don't think (and Hawking as well) that it's required to get the gist of the concepts.  The supposition, however, did give me a little pause because Hawking seems to want to wrap up M-theory as the Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. You're just flying along in this short book, getting whisked from the microscopic to the unbelievably humongous and all of a sudden you end up at M-theory ... answer to everything ... The End. I couldn't help getting the feeling that a few steps were skipped and that Hawking might be a little presumptuous to say that it is "the" answer.

There are other books of this nature that give an overview of modern theory. I read Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe not too long ago, just to name one. New theoretical ground is not broken in The Grand Design, and that is probably just as well, as most normal people like us wouldn't understand it. I certainly wouldn't. Science geeks are not the only ones that will get something from the book as philosophical concepts such as the anthropic principle are discussed as well. When you are getting into the field of extra dimensions, it's really approaching philosophy. Perhaps not coincidentally, scientists used to be called natural philosophers. Anyway, if you are curious about how the universe works ... or if you are just curious, The Grand Design is not a bad starting point.

What to do when meeting an alien ...

From Roger Ebert's Journal:

click to enlarge

ASU Origins Great Debate: What is life?

I was lucky enough to have attended the ASU Origins Great Debate: What is Life? at Arizona State University's Gammage Auditorium (a great venue designed by Frank Lloyd Wright) this past Saturday. Fittingly, February 12th is Charles Darwin's birthday. I had a great seat, front row off to the side a bit.

Project director Lawrence Krauss (theoretical physicist and famous author) spoke for about 10 minutes introducing each of the panelists: noted atheist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, Nobel Prize winning chemist Sidney Altman, Nobel Prize winning Lee Hartwell, NASA planetary scientist Chris McKay, theoretical physicist and author Paul Davies, and Biologist and entrepreneur J. Craig Venter. The debate began with each of the 6 panelists speaking for 5 to 10 minutes on their own, ostensibly to define what life meant in their opinion. Each of them took a different tact, predictably. Some said what differentiates life from something inanimate. Other explained how you would look for life.

Richard Dawkins spoke first, defining life it as that which can not only reproduce but also pass along its genetic code. Altman followed Dawkins and did not differentiate significantly from his definition. The next speaker, Lee Hartwell,a physician by profession, was perhaps the most out of place. His expertise is in cancer research and he was obviously intelligent but, self-admittedly, he did not have particular insight to this subject.

McKay was next and was perhaps my favorite of the speakers. The area at NASA which he works on pertains to looking for life on other planets (and moons). He spoke on several criteria that they look for to try and detect life but the most interesting to me was in how life affects other things on a planet. The geology and weather of Earth are completely different because of the existence of life. Oxygen wouldn't exist without plant life. Geologic characteristics such as fossil fuels and limestone would not exist without organic life. Maybe because of my education (aerospace engineering) and childhood dream to be an astronaut, McKay spoke to a lot of my aspirations.

Davies talked about the fact that life that would not necessarily be the carbon-based forms we know of. He even went out on a limb and said that non-carbon-based life would be discovered on Earth within 10 years. The study that was released last year was misinterpreted to have indicated that such life had already been found. Rather, the study indicated that a life form was found that scientists were able to substitute phosphorus for arsenic and it adapted. It's still significant in that it shows that life doesn't have to be carbon-based but nothing like this has been found natively.

The last to speak was Venter and he didn't really try to define what life was but seemed more intent on talking about how he was going to create artificial life. The relationship between Venter and the other scientists here is much like it is anywhere else ... contentious. He does not hide his disdain for theoretical scientists. If you can't experiment with something in the lab, it's not worthy of Venter. Research for knowledge's sake is not really his modus operandi but rather will it give him publicity. I don't want it to sound like I'm completely down on Venter. I'm not. People like him definitely have a place and I do believe his research is going to lead to advancements in curing of diseases. But he needs to be tempered by others lest he turn into a modern Dr. Frankenstein. Venter, for those that don't already know, was the first to map the human genome.

The event ended with a round-table between the panelists and Krauss. Nothing earth-shattering was revealed except for the general disdain that Venter has for regular scientists and they for him. Krauss brought up artificial intelligence to get the others take on whether that is life. It was his belief that that A.I. is the future of the human race. With no real concerted effort to advance space exploration, the problems of population growth and depleted resources are going to make our own planet unlivable in less time than some would believe (or blindly hope).

The amount of people attending what one would expect to be a dry scientific forum among erudite crusty professors with primarily British accents gives one hope that our youth value things other than reality TV and mysticism. This was not a talk about religion but it is hard for any discussion on science or the nature of life to not address that elephant in the room. When discussing the age of the Earth, Krauss made a joke about those states that lean towards the Creationist view of the age of the planet. And judging by the thunderous applause for his joke, I'd suspect that there was not a single soul in attendance with the belief that the Earth is 6,000 years old.

The real rock star of the panel, Dawkins, attracts adulation that seems incongruous for a distinctly middle-age Oxford type. And, I'm not making this up, I am convinced that several attractive young ladies in dresses and high-heels in the front row were Dawkins groupies. They even ducked out of the talk a few minutes early to assure themselves a spot near the front of the line to get their books signed. I would have liked to have gotten my book signed as well, but by the time I got out, his line was about 500 deep. We're not talking about Peyton Manning or Derek Jeter here. We're talking about an atheist evolutionary biologist. I settled for getting Lawrence Krauss' autograph and he was exceedingly gracious, talking to me a for a bit, shaking my hand and personalizing his signature.

I figure I'll get another shot at Dawkins as he's already been to ASU Origins symposiums at least three times and seems to be a friend of Krauss. My seat was on the side of the stage where Dawkins was and when he stepped to the podium, he was no more than 10 feet from me. Pretty heady stuff for an evolution and atheist nerd like myself.

I find it gratifying to go to places where smart people speak honestly and politely disagree on some points when necessary but agree on larger ones. Most importantly:
- the need for rational thought
- the need for math and science education
- the need to honestly address the issues of our planet
- to have our investigations and research lead us where they may instead of having a result pre-ordained and fit the facts to it

I'm looking forward to more of the ASU Origins events and plan on attending the next one in April, ASU Origins Project 2011 Science & Culture Festival.

Life Looks for Life - Carl Sagan

Life Looks for Life - Carl Sagan. Best viewed at YouTube at 720p.

"It’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness." -– Carl Sagan

Origins

I took the afternoon off on Monday and attended the Origins Symposium at ASU's Gammage Auditorium. This is a great venue that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Not wanting to pay for parking or to worry about traffic, I rode the Light Rail from it's westernmost point near Christown Mall down to Tempe. Some observations:

- For being a huge baseball fan, specifically of the Diamondbacks, I was apparently unaware of the fact that home opener was an afternoon game (12:40). Wisely, everybody and their mother were riding the light rail to the park. Wise for them, not me. I had to put up with a full train until we go to the park and about 80% of the people got off. I did strike up a great conversation with a guy in a wheelchair who was not going to the game. He was from New York and we chatted about the Mets and their new bullpen. Nice guy.

- Everybody needs to ride mass transit more often. And I'm not talking about the obvious, good-for-the-environment blah-blah-blah stuff. The majority of the people that ride trains and buses are not white, are not rich, are not "proper". The world of mass transit may not always be pretty, but it's real. I'll take real over pretty any day.

Before the conference, I picked up a couple of tacos at a new place called Hippie's Cove on Mill Ave in downtown Tempe. Good stuff.

Got to Gammage, which was about a half mile walk from the Light Rail stop on Mill. There was about a half hour until the afternoon session began, so I sat in the hall outside the auditorium with other attendees. Now, I consider myself fairly nerdy, but I'm frickin' the coolest guy in the world compared to this crew. But I meant that in the most positive sense. I wish I hung out with more of these types.

The main point of the conference was to discuss the following questions:

How did the Universe Begin?
How did life arise?
How does life evolve?
What is the Origin of Human Uniqueness?
What is the origin of disease?
How does consciousness arise?
How do human institutions arise and develop?
What will be the technologies of the future?

The conference started and the first speaker was introduced and came out. This was the main person I was coming for, Richard Dawkins. Nowadays, most people know him for his book, The God Delusion, but he was a hugely influential evolutionary biologist and that is what he was speaking on this day. He spoke for about an hour and took some questions at the end. They primarily dealt with evolution but one questioner tried to bring up atheism and was rebuffed by the moderator. This symposium was to deal with the "origins" of the universe, of life, etc. If you opened up the can of worms of religion, you could fill several more symposiums. Dawkins was funny, conversational, intelligent and I'm glad I finally had the chance to see him in person.

The second speaker was Craig Venter. He is generally considered to be the first to map the human genome. There is some controversy on this point, but Venter is very active in genomic research and we haven't heard the last from him. He has a non-profit organization with over 400 scientists that continue to work in this field. His talk was a bit dry for my taste, not as funny as Dawkins. And I wasn't as nearly interested in his subject matter as the other speakers. The questioners at the end of his talk generally seemed to ask about the ethics of genomic research and of patenting of genomes.

Lawrence Krauss, the head of the Origins Initiative at ASU and a world-renowned author and theoretical physicist, was the third speaker. I didn't know a a lot about him going in but was very impressed. He was very charismatic and funny. He organized the symposium and was able to assemble a large number of Nobel winning physicists and chemists plus a collection of some of the most popularly known scientists and intellectuals in the world (Dawkins, Brian Greene, Christopher Hitchens, Venter, Stephen Pinker, etc.) He primarily talked about the origins of the universe, its age, and its expansion. Though it was a scientific conference, he couldn't resist a gentle dig -- Krauss commented that the universe has been measured to be about 13.7 billion years old, except for those people in Texas at the school board he just spoken to the previous week.


The last presentation was a round table of 6 Nobel Prize winning scientists moderated by Ira Flatow of NPR's Science Friday. Flatow led the sometime contentious discussion by the following scientists: Sheldon Glashow, David Gross, John Mather, Frank Wilczek, Walter Gilbert and Baruch Blumberg. Though they were all courteous and generally amusing, you can sense some fundamental differences in how they viewed popular physics subjects such as string theory, supersymmetry, and the Large Hadron Collider. It was all incredibly fascinating and I wish I could listen to people like this all the time.

This presentation again ended with some audience questions and you knew someone would just have to put a fly in the ointment. Flatow had begun the presentation with a comment about how it was nice for science to now be viewed in a more positive sense and for it to have a seat at the table, unlike the last 8 years. This is a point that no rational person could disagree with and I would guess that 99.9% of the audience agreed with. Well, that one person that disagree had to ask a question. A lady came up and said that she had no idea what he was talking about when he said that science has not been appreciated politically or popularly recently. And even before she said it, I knew she was going to somehow dovetail this into a religious question. She brought up Francis Collins as a means of saying that religion and science can coexist. For those who don't know who he is, he is a geneticist very instrumental in the mapping of the human genome, a contemporary of Venter. Christians love him because he is the one scientist in a 1,000 who will admit to being a Christian. It's sad really ... kinda like saying there are Republican actors by bringing up Stephen Baldwin or Angie Harmon. If you have to bring up Stephen Baldwin or Angie Harmon in any discussion, your argument is already lost.


Flatow was polite with the lady but opened up the discussion to the scientists in the panel who, to a man, brought up how science was the search for truth, where ever it may lie. They were all gracious, intelligent and profound and were met with raucous applause ... answer enough to the lady whose intent was to reconcile faith and science, at least in her own mind.

Overall, the conference was very enjoyable. It's encouraging that a show with a bunch of crusty old scientists talking can sell out a 3,000 seat theater in a conservative, largely religious and sometimes distinctly anti-science state. Maybe times are changing.

The God That Failed

Mother: We didn't know sick daughter was terminally ill

Gannett Wisconsin Newspapers
and The Associated Press

WESTON -- The mother of an 11-year-old girl who died of untreated diabetes said Wednesday that she did not know her daughter was terminally ill as she prayed for her to get better.

The parents of Madeline Kara Neumann called 911 three minutes after police and EMS crews already had been sent to their home by the girl's aunt, who lives in California.

Neumann died Sunday from an undiagnosed form of diabetes. The family told police they chose to pray for her to get better, rather than seek medical assistance.

Neumann's mother, Leilani Neumann, told The Associated Press Wednesday she never expected her daughter, whom she called Kara, to die. The family believes in the Bible, which says healing comes from God, but they are not crazy, religious people and have nothing against doctors, she said.

The aunt from California told a Marathon County sheriff's dispatcher Sunday afternoon that the girl was thought to be at home in a coma. She advised the dispatcher in a recorded phone call that the family was religious and refused to take the girl to the hospital, despite the aunt's urging them to do so for at least three days.

When the dispatcher asked if an ambulance should be sent to the Neumanns' town of Weston home, the aunt replied, "Yes. She's refusing. She's going to fight it," in reference to the girl's mother.

A few minutes later, at 2:38 p.m., a male caller from the home told a sheriff's dispatcher that a child there was not breathing, according to the 911 call, a copy of which was obtained by a Gannett Wisconsin newspaper. The dispatcher informed the caller that an ambulance already was on its way.

He then attempted to instruct the family how to perform CPR. Family members sounded panicky, and cries and screaming could be heard in the background.

Officers met with the Neumann family Wednesday, and Everest Metro Police Chief Dan Vergin said he hopes to complete the investigation late this week or early next week.

Child protective services interviewed Kara Neumann's three older siblings Wednesday night to determine whether it was safe to return them to the home, Vergin told CNN's Nancy Grace.

The Marathon County district attorney's office is working with police to determine whether criminal charges should be filed. Vergin said officers still are trying to determine a timeline of Neumann's decline during her final days.

Marathon County Medical Examiner John Larson said Kara Neumann was quite ill Friday and Saturday and became gravely ill Sunday, the day she died.

"I think this young girl was sick for some time; she just progressed into a situation where she needed medical attention and did not get it," Larson said. "At some point, they should have recognized she was very, seriously ill."

The family does not belong to an organized religion or faith, Leilani Neumann said.

She said the family is not worried about the police investigation into her daughter's death because "our lives are in God's hands. We know we did not do anything criminal. We know we did the best for our daughter we knew how to do."

For a little more on the case, see this video. I'm reluctant to reference this video because it's from Nancy Grace's show. I hate Nancy because her trumped-up indignation has less to do with actual compassion for the victim and more to do with her ego and her sense of theatrics. I think she might be the only person that might cause me to feel sorry for a serial killer.

When does "freedom of religion" go too far? I believe when it endangers someone else's life or health. Obviously, Christianity is not the only religion whose tenets infringe upon innocents, but it's the pertinent one here. So, just because I'm not listing all the others doesn't mean I don't hold them just as accountable. One could argue that indoctrinating your children to creationist beliefs is cruel and unusual punishment, but we'll leave that subject for another day. I grant that it's probably correct to allow parents to use their best judgement when educating their kids. After all, recovering from an inferior education is a lot easier than recovering from an unnecessary death.

Though the family in question do not say they adhere to a specific religion, their beliefs are certainly similar to those of Christian Science. After reading some of the rights afforded people merely in the name of religion, I get the distinct impression that we are just a country of backwoods country bumfucks. Case in point - from Wikipedia:

Christian Scientists have been controversial for their failure to provide conventional health care for children (Asser and Swan, 1998). In the United States, the constitutional guarantee of protection of religious practice from intrusion by government has been used by Christian Scientists and other religious groups to seek exemption from legislative or regulatory requirements regarding child abuse and neglect, including medical neglect in more than three quarters of the states. There are now statutes in 44 states which contain a provision stating that a child is not to be deemed abused or neglected merely because he or she is receiving treatment by spiritual means, through prayer according to the tenets of a recognized religion. Although these exemptions take different forms and interpretations in different state jurisdictions, the overall effect has been to limit the ability of the state to prosecute parents for suspected or alleged abuse or medical neglect of children when such occurrences may be the result of religious practice. Severe (even fatal) physical discipline, failure to seek medical care, or refusal of a proven efficacious treatment of a critically ill child may be protected from prosecution because of the religious exemption clauses now found in a majority of state codes. (However, most of these cases do not involve Christian Scientists.)

The band Metallica, whose lead singer James Hetfield was raised as a Christian Scientist, wrote this song after Hefields's mother died of cancer because of not seeking treatment:

The God that Failed by Metallica

Pride you took
Pride you feel
Pride that you felt when you'd kneel
Not the word
Not the love
Not what you thought from above

It feeds (it feeds)
It grows (it grows)
It clouds all that you will know
Deceit
Deceive
Decide just what you believe

I see faith in your eyes
Never you hear the discouraging lies
I hear faith in your cries
Broken is the promise, betrayal
The healing hand held back by the deepened nail
Follow the god that failed

Find your peace
Find your say
Find the smooth road on your way
Trust you gave
A child to save
Left you cold and him in grave ...

In our laws, we are actually protecting people who neglect their children because of their religious beliefs. Do you think that people who claimed that aliens told them not to seek treatment for their sick children would get the same protections? Of course not. A system of laws that should be based on reason is being influenced by superstition. And yet we are viewed as a model democracy. Perhaps it's not a God that failed but rather a government based on superstition that failed.

Darwin’s God

I read an interesting article in the NY Times recently that takes a slightly different tact on the whole God/atheism issue. Instead of debating whether there is a God or not -- an issue that most of us have pretty strong views on already -- let's look at why some people believe in God:

"...Call it God; call it superstition; call it ... “belief in hope beyond reason” — whatever you call it, there seems an inherent human drive to believe in something transcendent, unfathomable and otherworldly, something beyond the reach or understanding of science. ..."

"... Atran is Darwinian in his approach, which means he tries to explain behavior by how it might once have solved problems of survival and reproduction for our early ancestors. But it was not clear to him what evolutionary problems might have been solved by religious belief. Religion seemed to use up physical and mental resources without an obvious benefit for survival. Why, he wondered, was religion so pervasive, when it was something that seemed so costly from an evolutionary point of view? ..."

Some say that it has to do with the earliest humans, " ... that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history ...". CK reviewed a book that says something to that effect.

The subject of the article makes the startling (to some) assertion that a belief in God may be the most natural state because the brain is hardwired for it:

"... Why, he wondered, did people work so hard against their preference for logical explanations to maintain two views of the world, the real and the unreal, the intuitive and the counterintuitive?

Maybe cognitive effort was precisely the point. Maybe it took less mental work than Atran realized to hold belief in God in one’s mind. Maybe, in fact, belief was the default position for the human mind, something that took no cognitive effort at all...."

Another interesting note, if we assume a Darwinian evolution of religion, is that religion may have once served a practical purpose for human survival or may have just been a side note to something else:

"... Darwinians who study physical evolution distinguish between traits that are themselves adaptive, like having blood cells that can transport oxygen, and traits that are byproducts of adaptations, like the redness of blood. There is no survival advantage to blood’s being red instead of turquoise; it is just a byproduct of the trait that is adaptive, having blood that contains hemoglobin.

Something similar explains aspects of brain evolution, too, say the byproduct theorists. Which brings us to the idea of the spandrel.

Stephen Jay Gould, the famed evolutionary biologist at Harvard who died in 2002, and his colleague Richard Lewontin proposed “spandrel” to describe a trait that has no adaptive value of its own. They borrowed the term from architecture, where it originally referred to the V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. The structure is not there for any purpose; it is there because that is what happens when arches align.

In architecture, a spandrel can be neutral or it can be made functional. Building a staircase, for instance, creates a space underneath that is innocuous, just a blank sort of triangle. But if you put a closet there, the under-stairs space takes on a function, unrelated to the staircase’s but useful nonetheless. Either way, functional or nonfunctional, the space under the stairs is a spandrel, an unintended byproduct.

“Natural selection made the human brain big,” Gould wrote, “but most of our mental properties and potentials may be spandrels — that is, nonadaptive side consequences of building a device with such structural complexity.”

The possibility that God could be a spandrel offered Atran a new way of understanding the evolution of religion. But a spandrel of what, exactly?..."

The fact that this "byproduct" has stuck around is common in evolution:

"... Atran ascribes the persistence to evolutionary misdirection, which, he says, happens all the time: “Evolution always produces something that works for what it works for, and then there’s no control for however else it’s used.” On a sunny weekday morning, over breakfast at a French cafe on upper Broadway, he tried to think of an analogy and grinned when he came up with an old standby: women’s breasts. Because they are associated with female hormones, he explained, full breasts indicate a woman is fertile, and the evolution of the male brain’s preference for them was a clever mating strategy. But breasts are now used for purposes unrelated to reproduction, to sell anything from deodorant to beer. “A Martian anthropologist might look at this and say, ‘Oh, yes, so these breasts must have somehow evolved to sell hygienic stuff or food to human beings,’ ” Atran said. But the Martian would, of course, be wrong. Equally wrong would be to make the same mistake about religion, thinking it must have evolved to make people behave a certain way or feel a certain allegiance. ..."

As I mentioned earlier, the belief in God may be a standard position for the brain at birth:

"...The bottom line, according to byproduct theorists, is that children are born with a tendency to believe in omniscience, invisible minds, immaterial souls — and then they grow up in cultures that fill their minds, hard-wired for belief, with specifics. It is a little like language acquisition, Paul Bloom says, with the essential difference that language is a biological adaptation and religion, in his view, is not. We are born with an innate facility for language but the specific language we learn depends on the environment in which we are raised. In much the same way, he says, we are born with an innate tendency for belief, but the specifics of what we grow up believing — whether there is one God or many, whether the soul goes to heaven or occupies another animal after death — are culturally shaped. ..."

The article goes in to many different things (it's 19 pages long). It touches on the possible benefits of religion in an evolutionary sense if you assume that it served a purpose instead of being a byproduct.

It talks of the conflicts between scientists who both believe in evolution (Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, for example).

One final thing that the author said that I found intriguing was how it was hard to be an atheist because it is not the default position of the brain. I don't agree with this view, but I found it interesting nonetheless:

"...What can be made of atheists, then? If the evolutionary view of religion is true, they have to work hard at being atheists, to resist slipping into intrinsic habits of mind that make it easier to believe than not to believe. Atran says he faces an emotional and intellectual struggle to live without God in a nonatheist world, and he suspects that is where his little superstitions come from, his passing thought about crossing his fingers during turbulence or knocking on wood just in case. It is like an atavistic theism erupting when his guard is down. The comforts and consolations of belief are alluring even to him, he says, and probably will become more so as he gets closer to the end of his life. He fights it because he is a scientist and holds the values of rationalism higher than the values of spiritualism. ..."

I find it easy to not believe in God, but I do find myself being superstitious at times for no apparent reason. Is it because the brain is set up to be that way, regardless of whether you believe in God or not?

I'm curious what all of you will take from the article (Christian and atheist).