Homo sapiens is not this planet’s first experiment in big brains. Prior to our arrival on the scene 200,000 years ago, a number of other Homo species preceded us and, for the most part, survived many times longer than we have before becoming extinct. It remains to be seen how long we will survive. Although there is still considerable lack of consensus regarding their lines of ancestry and progeny, they have been identified from their fossil remains as:
Homo habilis (2.6 – 1.4 million years ago)
Homo ergaster (2.5 – 1.7 million years ago)
Homo erectus (1.9 million – 100,000 years ago)
Homo antecessor (1.2 million – 800,000 years ago)
Homo heidelbergensis (600,000 – 230,000 years ago)
Homo neanderthalensis (230,000 – 24,000 years ago)
In this post I want to look briefly at three of them.
Homo habilis (2.6 – 1.4 million years ago)
About 2.6 million years ago, at Turkana in northwest Kenya, a species of Australopithecus (probably A. africanus) evolved into the first species of the Homo genus. A hunter and meat-eater, Homo habilis or “handy man” is so named because of his use of flaked stone tools for killing and dissecting other animals. It was the beginning of the Stone Age. The remnants of tools found at a mass production site at Lokalalei, west of Lake Turkana, and dated to 2.35 million years ago, suggest that the tool makers there had enough smarts to plan their raw material procurement and manage the production process.
The male of the species stood about 5’0” tall and weighed about 100 pounds. His face was still primitive, but his brain size (660-700 cc) was 50% larger than his australopithecine forbears. His brain shape is also more humanlike, suggesting that he may have been capable of rudimentary speech. Despite the many theories that have been proposed, we still have no idea why hominid brains suddenly began to grow. Anthropologist Ian Tattersall says: “There is simply no compelling reason we know of to explain why human brains got large.”
Their life would have centred on survival, with energy devoted primarily to meeting their physical needs. They never learned to harness fire. Their sense of time probably did not extend much beyond tomorrow. Nor is there any hint of the death denial that later emerged in Neanderthals in association with burial rituals. For habilis, no food is death, and a full stomach is as much immortality as they hoped for.
Homo erectus (1.9 million – 100,000 years ago)
Homo erectus and Homo habilis probably shared a common ancestor and co-existed in Africa for about 500,000 years. But unlike habilis, erectus quickly migrated out of Africa. His fossilized remains, dated to 1.8 million years ago, have been found from the Atlantic coast of Europe to the Pacific coast of China.
The nearly complete skeleton of a 9 – 12 year old boy (“Turkana boy”), who died 1.54 million years ago, gives us the best picture of H erectus. Though still sporting protruding jaws and thick brow ridges, he looks more human than his predecessors – long-limbed and lean, very strong, and intelligent enough to spread successfully over a vast area. Brain size averaged 1000 cc – 50% larger again than that of habilis – and may have included a Broca’s area in the frontal lobe associated with speech.
Almost wherever erectus went, he left behind his signature tool – a teardrop-shaped, flint hand-axe. A recent excavation at Olorgesailie in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley has revealed a 10-acre site where these so-called Acheulean tools were mass produced in incalculable numbers from 1.2 million to 200,000 years ago. For a million years it operated as a well organised “factory” for fashioning new axes and re-sharpening blunt ones. Strangely, no human bones have ever been found there. It seems that H erectus went somewhere else to die.
They lived in small self-sustaining bands of 15-30 people in semi-permanent cave shelters, began using animal skins for clothing, and were the first to harness fire – perhaps as early as 1.6 million years ago and certainly since 800,000 years ago. Since there is no evidence that they cooked food, a fire in the hearth may have contributed both to physical warmth and to a sense of unity and intimacy within the group. The bones of a 1.7 million year old woman reveal that she had lived for months with an agonizing condition before dying, indicating that someone had looked after her – perhaps the first evidence of tenderness in human evolution. And the oldest known remains of a purpose-built hut, found north of Tokyo and dated to 500,000 years ago, testifies to their evolving technology and cognitive ability.
When Homo sapiens emerged in Africa 200,000 years ago, with a brain yet another 50% larger than that of erectus, they simply out-competed their smaller-brained predecessors. And by the time sapiens arrived in China c. 50,000 years ago, there was no longer any evidence there of H erectus. In fact, there are no erectus remains in China after 100,000 years ago. It seems likely that a deep freeze either drove them away or killed them off before sapiens arrived. Whatever happened, this now-extinct predecessor deserves our respect, for they walked the Earth for close to two million years.
Homo neanderthalensis (230,000 – 24,000 years ago)
In 1856, three years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a skull was discovered in the Neander Valley of western Germany. It belonged to the first hominid ancestor to be discovered – Neanderthal Man. Recent evidence indicates that they shared a common ancestor with modern humans – probably Homo erectus. They dominated Europe, the Middle East, and parts of western and central Asia for some 200,000 years until H sapiens arrived and displaced them. Indeed, current genetic evidence suggests that interbreeding took place with H sapiens 80,000 – 50,000 years ago, resulting in 1 – 4% of the genome of Eurasian people having been contributed by Neanderthals.
Males stood about 5’6” in height; females were about 6” shorter. Like erectus, they had a protruding jaw and receding forehead. Their brain size of 1450 cc was equivalent to that of modern humans. What distinguished them anatomically were their heavy bones and powerful muscles. They would have been extraordinarily strong by modern standards. Almost exclusively carnivores, they hunted large animals such as mammoths and endured brutally hard lives. As a species they were magnificently resilient and practically indestructible.
Neanderthal culture is identified with its cave dwellings, extensive use of fire, personal ornaments, well-wrought stone implements, and skin-covered huts more advanced than those of any preceding peoples. Painted scallops and cockleshells found recently in Spain suggest that they had a capacity for symbolism, imagination, and creativity similar to H sapiens.
The Neanderthals lived in a dramatic universe filled with spirit powers that required symbolic rituals and sacrifice – the earliest signs of a religious mode of consciousness. Almost inaccessible sanctuaries in high mountain caves show cave-bear skulls ceremonially disposed in symbolic settings. The bear is a venerated beast whose powers survive death and are effective in the preserved skull. The burial of their own dead also suggests a life to come. A 10-month-old Neanderthal baby, whose remains were discovered in a cave in northern Israel, was deliberately laid to rest in a small niche in the cave. The jawbone of a red deer that had been offered as a sacrifice was lying on the infant’s pelvis – clearly an attempt to cope with the imprint of death on the Neanderthal psyche.
Neanderthals were competitively replaced by Homo sapiens within the past 50,000 years. They disappeared from Asia 50,000 years ago, from Europe 30,000 years ago, and finally from Gibraltar 24,000 years ago. It was probably natural selection that did them in. Modern humans were much more efficient hunters and would have gradually excluded them from their food resources. What Neanderthals could only do with brute force, modern humans accomplished with tools and brains.
Monday, September 6, 2010
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Our Primate Ancestors
Before commencing an account of how our worldviews evolved over the course of human history, I want to orient us in terms of an evolutionary timeline and summarise what we know of our ancestral forbears.
We are members of the species homo sapiens,
of the genus homo,
in the family of hominids (or hominidae)
in the order of primates,
in the class of mammals.
67 million years ago, the first family of primates emerged from mammals and, over millions of years, evolved into many different species throughout the Eurasian continent. Distinguished by their opposing thumbs and big toes, they were forest dwellers who lived extensively in trees. One of these was Ida – about the size of a cat and looking somewhat like a modern lemur – who lived c. 47 million years ago and whose fossilized remains were discovered in 1983 in Germany
43 million years ago, these early primates diversified into anthropoids (leading eventually to monkeys, apes, and humans) and prosimians (leading to lemurs, lorises, and tarsiers).
37 million years ago, the anthropoids diversified into New World and Old World monkeys, with the latter marking the first arrival of primates in Africa. One of these, known as “the Dawn Ape”, who lived in Egypt 35-33 million years ago, was a fox-sized anthropoid with an anatomy and teeth that would later characterise fully developed apes.
25 million years ago, apes diversified from Old World monkeys. One of the earliest of these, named Proconsul, appeared in the fossil record in Kenya. With no tail, a weight of 84 lbs, and a brain capacity of 150 cc, he was the predecessor of all the later great apes.
20 million years ago, the great apes began to disperse around the world. Those that went east into Asia evolved into the gibbon and later the orang-utan. Those that stayed in Africa evolved still later (9 million years ago) into gorillas, and then (5-6 million years ago) into hominids, chimpanzees and bonobos. Given our relatively recent common ancestry, it is not surprising that humans are 98.4% genetically the same as chimps. In fact, there is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and a modern chimpanzee.
A particularly dry spell in Africa at that time appears to have driven some tree-dwelling apes out of the forest and into the grasslands, to which they adapted by standing upright on two legs, learning to hunt other mammals, and gradually developing bigger brains. These were the hominids, among whom the dominant species (from 4.1 to 1.9 million years ago) were the australopithecines. They consisted of half a dozen species that lived in Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia, with enough brainpower to live in groups of up to 70.
One of these was the now-famous Lucy – a 3.18 million year old australopithecine whose remains were found in Ethiopia in 1974. A three-year-old girl, 3 ½ feet tall, she was bipedal and a good climber, but her brain size was only slightly larger than that of a chimpanzee. Her shoulder blades resembled a young gorilla’s, as did the hyoid bone in the throat, suggesting that speech had not yet begun to evolve. Two years later, in Tanzania, Mary Leakey found footprints from two individuals from the same family of hominids, dated to 3.6 million years ago
The African Rift Valley stretches for 2000 miles from Ethiopia in the north to Malawi in the south. It was here that the first species of the homo genus – homo habilis – made its appearance some 2.5 million years ago, probably evolving from a smaller-brained australopithecine. The still larger-brained homo erectus emerged some 500,000 years later, and our own species, homo sapiens, with a brain 50% larger again, emerged 200,000 years ago.
We do well, I think, to remember our origins – and, with an appropriate measure of humility, recognise that this big-brain experiment in self-awareness has been in operation for not much more than the twinkling of an eye. If we shrink the evolution of life on this planet to a time-span of just one year, homo sapiens has been here since only 26 minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve. Even our australopithecine forbears survived 10 times longer than that before they became extinct, and our chimpanzee cousins have been around for 30 times as long. We should only be so lucky!
We are members of the species homo sapiens,
of the genus homo,
in the family of hominids (or hominidae)
in the order of primates,
in the class of mammals.
67 million years ago, the first family of primates emerged from mammals and, over millions of years, evolved into many different species throughout the Eurasian continent. Distinguished by their opposing thumbs and big toes, they were forest dwellers who lived extensively in trees. One of these was Ida – about the size of a cat and looking somewhat like a modern lemur – who lived c. 47 million years ago and whose fossilized remains were discovered in 1983 in Germany
43 million years ago, these early primates diversified into anthropoids (leading eventually to monkeys, apes, and humans) and prosimians (leading to lemurs, lorises, and tarsiers).
37 million years ago, the anthropoids diversified into New World and Old World monkeys, with the latter marking the first arrival of primates in Africa. One of these, known as “the Dawn Ape”, who lived in Egypt 35-33 million years ago, was a fox-sized anthropoid with an anatomy and teeth that would later characterise fully developed apes.
25 million years ago, apes diversified from Old World monkeys. One of the earliest of these, named Proconsul, appeared in the fossil record in Kenya. With no tail, a weight of 84 lbs, and a brain capacity of 150 cc, he was the predecessor of all the later great apes.
20 million years ago, the great apes began to disperse around the world. Those that went east into Asia evolved into the gibbon and later the orang-utan. Those that stayed in Africa evolved still later (9 million years ago) into gorillas, and then (5-6 million years ago) into hominids, chimpanzees and bonobos. Given our relatively recent common ancestry, it is not surprising that humans are 98.4% genetically the same as chimps. In fact, there is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and a modern chimpanzee.
A particularly dry spell in Africa at that time appears to have driven some tree-dwelling apes out of the forest and into the grasslands, to which they adapted by standing upright on two legs, learning to hunt other mammals, and gradually developing bigger brains. These were the hominids, among whom the dominant species (from 4.1 to 1.9 million years ago) were the australopithecines. They consisted of half a dozen species that lived in Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia, with enough brainpower to live in groups of up to 70.
One of these was the now-famous Lucy – a 3.18 million year old australopithecine whose remains were found in Ethiopia in 1974. A three-year-old girl, 3 ½ feet tall, she was bipedal and a good climber, but her brain size was only slightly larger than that of a chimpanzee. Her shoulder blades resembled a young gorilla’s, as did the hyoid bone in the throat, suggesting that speech had not yet begun to evolve. Two years later, in Tanzania, Mary Leakey found footprints from two individuals from the same family of hominids, dated to 3.6 million years ago
The African Rift Valley stretches for 2000 miles from Ethiopia in the north to Malawi in the south. It was here that the first species of the homo genus – homo habilis – made its appearance some 2.5 million years ago, probably evolving from a smaller-brained australopithecine. The still larger-brained homo erectus emerged some 500,000 years later, and our own species, homo sapiens, with a brain 50% larger again, emerged 200,000 years ago.
We do well, I think, to remember our origins – and, with an appropriate measure of humility, recognise that this big-brain experiment in self-awareness has been in operation for not much more than the twinkling of an eye. If we shrink the evolution of life on this planet to a time-span of just one year, homo sapiens has been here since only 26 minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve. Even our australopithecine forbears survived 10 times longer than that before they became extinct, and our chimpanzee cousins have been around for 30 times as long. We should only be so lucky!
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Eras, Worldviews, and Stages of Development
Our changing worldviews reflect the changing circumstances and conditions of life during Homo sapiens' 200,000 year history. Tracking our development through identifiable eras, we can see how the worldviews that prevailed in any particular era were shaped by the interplay of certain key factors:
(1) our knowledge of the world – especially our cosmology;
(2) our population density and social structure;
(3) our stage of technological and economic development;
(4) the level of our cognitive and emotional development; and
(5) our sense of time and awareness of death
In subsequent posts I want to focus on each historical era and how these factors shaped the worldviews that were dominant at that time. In particular I want to highlight how these eras and their worldviews parallel the stages in our individual development as described by developmental psychologists.
The following is an overview of these eras, the stages of individual cognitive and emotional development that each era reflects, and the worldviews that prevailed in each. The names that describe the developmental stages are chosen to make evident the link between each stage and its corresponding historical era.
Historical Eras Individual Developmental Stages
1. Hunter-Gatherer Bands (200,000 – 60,000 BCE) The Innocent Nestling (2-3 years)
2. The Migratory Era (60,000 – 10,000 BCE) The Curious Explorer (4-6 years)
Worldview: Nature Spirits and Goddesses
3. The Neolithic Village (10,000 – 3,000 BCE) The Responsible Participant (7-12 years)
Worldview: The Mother Goddess
4. Civilizations and Empires (3000 BCE to the present) The Conquering Hero (13-17 years)
Worldviews: Cosmic Order, Kingship, and Polytheism
The Emergence of Monotheism
The Axial Age
The Materialist and Idealist Worldviews of Greek Philosophy
The Christian Worldview
5. The Age of Reason (1500 CE to the present) The Rational-Reflective Seeker (18-20 years)
Worldviews: The Clockwork Universe
The Accidental Universe
The Technological Wonderland
6. The Age of Globalization (1950 CE to the present) The Soul-Centered Co-Creator (21 years +)
Worldview: The Emerging Worldview
(1) our knowledge of the world – especially our cosmology;
(2) our population density and social structure;
(3) our stage of technological and economic development;
(4) the level of our cognitive and emotional development; and
(5) our sense of time and awareness of death
In subsequent posts I want to focus on each historical era and how these factors shaped the worldviews that were dominant at that time. In particular I want to highlight how these eras and their worldviews parallel the stages in our individual development as described by developmental psychologists.
The following is an overview of these eras, the stages of individual cognitive and emotional development that each era reflects, and the worldviews that prevailed in each. The names that describe the developmental stages are chosen to make evident the link between each stage and its corresponding historical era.
Historical Eras Individual Developmental Stages
1. Hunter-Gatherer Bands (200,000 – 60,000 BCE) The Innocent Nestling (2-3 years)
2. The Migratory Era (60,000 – 10,000 BCE) The Curious Explorer (4-6 years)
Worldview: Nature Spirits and Goddesses
3. The Neolithic Village (10,000 – 3,000 BCE) The Responsible Participant (7-12 years)
Worldview: The Mother Goddess
4. Civilizations and Empires (3000 BCE to the present) The Conquering Hero (13-17 years)
Worldviews: Cosmic Order, Kingship, and Polytheism
The Emergence of Monotheism
The Axial Age
The Materialist and Idealist Worldviews of Greek Philosophy
The Christian Worldview
5. The Age of Reason (1500 CE to the present) The Rational-Reflective Seeker (18-20 years)
Worldviews: The Clockwork Universe
The Accidental Universe
The Technological Wonderland
6. The Age of Globalization (1950 CE to the present) The Soul-Centered Co-Creator (21 years +)
Worldview: The Emerging Worldview
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
A Summary of August’s Posts
For readers of this Blog who have joined us only recently and may have neither the time nor inclination to read all that has been posted thus far, the following is a summary of what has gone before. If it tempts you to check out some particular post(s) and perhaps respond with your own comments, you are most welcome.
Each species has its own way of experiencing the world – its own way of extracting meaningful information in order to survive and play its part. Each, in other words, has its own worldview. As species and their awareness systems (their sensory receptors and nervous systems) evolved, so did their worldviews.
For humans, our worldview consists of a set of high-level, abstract mental categories into which we sort the raw data of our experience. Our meaning-system is not limited to identifying what something is or whether it is beneficial or toxic. We want to know what’s happening and why it’s happening – which can only be answered in a narrative, made possible by language.
Fundamentally, our worldview answers three questions: (1) What game is the universe playing? (2) Who am I and where do I fit in the overall scheme of things? (3) How then should I live my life? Our answers comprise a largely unconscious set of beliefs and values that shape our experience and help us make sense of it. They orient us. They tell us who and where we are in the larger scheme of things, provide a map to guide our behaviour, and give us a satisfying sense of meaning and purpose.
These questions and our search for answers arise inevitably from our uniquely human level of self-awareness, our ability to symbolically objectify our world, and our consequent need to understand the role we play in the cosmic drama. This mode of consciousness is linked to the relative size and complexity of our brain, which is the product of evolution’s movement in the direction of ever greater complexity and heightened awareness. That movement over four billion years of life on this planet is marked by a spectrum of awareness – ranging from simple awareness (possessed by the simplest organisms) to consciousness or perceptual awareness (possessed in varying degrees by all animals with nervous systems), to self-awareness (possessed in varying degrees by a few animals, including us, with more elaborate nervous systems). It is this self-awareness that requires us to make sense of our world by creating a meaningful worldview.
It also carries with it an insatiable curiosity and a very great sense of wonder. We are surrounded by mystery. The more we learn, and the more sophisticated our worldviews become, the deeper runs the mystery and the greater is our wonderment. It is, for me, part of the huge privilege of being human.
More than an individual requirement, however, worldviews are culturally created and essential for a society’s survival. They enable members of a society to share a similar experience of their world and a common sense of meaning and purpose. Only by agreeing with one another on what we and the world are about can we have human societies and cultures.
The narratives with which a culture’s worldview is presented – the stories about what’s happening in the universe and why – always have a mythic as well as a rational-scientific component. The mythic component, which should complement and never contradict the scientific, is required because the questions addressed cannot be answered by science alone. Science is a limited mode of inquiry that looks at repetitive aspects of the empirical world and is unable to say what the meaning or intention of anything may be. So we need as well a metaphysical or spiritual mode of inquiry, recognising that our answers to the BIG questions of our existence are always beliefs that can neither be proven nor refuted.
It is through the mythic component, often enshrined in religion and expressed in rites and rituals, that a worldview is imprinted on the psyche of children. By absorbing the cultural myths and participating in its rites, children internalise the worldview that qualifies them to become full-fledged members of their society.
Whatever worldview we adopt is never the final truth. It is always and only a construction of our minds. The test of its validity is not its truth but its usefulness as a perceptual and interpretive filter that generates adaptive behaviour and delivers a satisfying sense of meaning and purpose. So our worldviews themselves are continually evolving. Under pressure to adapt to changing circumstances, how we experience our world changes accordingly. In fact, it’s how we adapt. Human cultures adapt by changing their worldview – whether to mitigate some threat or to incorporate new knowledge that will make our worldview a more reliable map to the future we want.
This is precisely the situation in which we find ourselves today. Driven by evolution’s relentless movement towards greater diversity and more inclusive communities, humanity, with its huge diversity of cultures, is now being drawn together into a global community. And yet we remain deeply divided. It is a highly volatile situation in which our globalization heightens the danger arising from colliding worldviews. More than this, the dominant Western worldview continues to promote behaviour resulting in global crises of potentially catastrophic proportions.
So we find ourselves confronted with an urgent need to adapt. Our old worldviews no longer serve us well. Can we together create a shared worldview that can unite our global community while still leaving room for a rich diversity of cultural expressions? Can we reach consensus on at least the foundational pillars or core architecture of such a worldview? It is the adaptive imperative of our time.
_____________________________________
Each species has its own way of experiencing the world – its own way of extracting meaningful information in order to survive and play its part. Each, in other words, has its own worldview. As species and their awareness systems (their sensory receptors and nervous systems) evolved, so did their worldviews.
For humans, our worldview consists of a set of high-level, abstract mental categories into which we sort the raw data of our experience. Our meaning-system is not limited to identifying what something is or whether it is beneficial or toxic. We want to know what’s happening and why it’s happening – which can only be answered in a narrative, made possible by language.
Fundamentally, our worldview answers three questions: (1) What game is the universe playing? (2) Who am I and where do I fit in the overall scheme of things? (3) How then should I live my life? Our answers comprise a largely unconscious set of beliefs and values that shape our experience and help us make sense of it. They orient us. They tell us who and where we are in the larger scheme of things, provide a map to guide our behaviour, and give us a satisfying sense of meaning and purpose.
These questions and our search for answers arise inevitably from our uniquely human level of self-awareness, our ability to symbolically objectify our world, and our consequent need to understand the role we play in the cosmic drama. This mode of consciousness is linked to the relative size and complexity of our brain, which is the product of evolution’s movement in the direction of ever greater complexity and heightened awareness. That movement over four billion years of life on this planet is marked by a spectrum of awareness – ranging from simple awareness (possessed by the simplest organisms) to consciousness or perceptual awareness (possessed in varying degrees by all animals with nervous systems), to self-awareness (possessed in varying degrees by a few animals, including us, with more elaborate nervous systems). It is this self-awareness that requires us to make sense of our world by creating a meaningful worldview.
It also carries with it an insatiable curiosity and a very great sense of wonder. We are surrounded by mystery. The more we learn, and the more sophisticated our worldviews become, the deeper runs the mystery and the greater is our wonderment. It is, for me, part of the huge privilege of being human.
More than an individual requirement, however, worldviews are culturally created and essential for a society’s survival. They enable members of a society to share a similar experience of their world and a common sense of meaning and purpose. Only by agreeing with one another on what we and the world are about can we have human societies and cultures.
The narratives with which a culture’s worldview is presented – the stories about what’s happening in the universe and why – always have a mythic as well as a rational-scientific component. The mythic component, which should complement and never contradict the scientific, is required because the questions addressed cannot be answered by science alone. Science is a limited mode of inquiry that looks at repetitive aspects of the empirical world and is unable to say what the meaning or intention of anything may be. So we need as well a metaphysical or spiritual mode of inquiry, recognising that our answers to the BIG questions of our existence are always beliefs that can neither be proven nor refuted.
It is through the mythic component, often enshrined in religion and expressed in rites and rituals, that a worldview is imprinted on the psyche of children. By absorbing the cultural myths and participating in its rites, children internalise the worldview that qualifies them to become full-fledged members of their society.
Whatever worldview we adopt is never the final truth. It is always and only a construction of our minds. The test of its validity is not its truth but its usefulness as a perceptual and interpretive filter that generates adaptive behaviour and delivers a satisfying sense of meaning and purpose. So our worldviews themselves are continually evolving. Under pressure to adapt to changing circumstances, how we experience our world changes accordingly. In fact, it’s how we adapt. Human cultures adapt by changing their worldview – whether to mitigate some threat or to incorporate new knowledge that will make our worldview a more reliable map to the future we want.
This is precisely the situation in which we find ourselves today. Driven by evolution’s relentless movement towards greater diversity and more inclusive communities, humanity, with its huge diversity of cultures, is now being drawn together into a global community. And yet we remain deeply divided. It is a highly volatile situation in which our globalization heightens the danger arising from colliding worldviews. More than this, the dominant Western worldview continues to promote behaviour resulting in global crises of potentially catastrophic proportions.
So we find ourselves confronted with an urgent need to adapt. Our old worldviews no longer serve us well. Can we together create a shared worldview that can unite our global community while still leaving room for a rich diversity of cultural expressions? Can we reach consensus on at least the foundational pillars or core architecture of such a worldview? It is the adaptive imperative of our time.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Worldviews evolve and change
As species evolve, so do their awareness systems (i.e. their sensory receptors and nervous systems) and their consequent experience of their world. In other words, species and their worldviews evolve together.
The same is true of humans. Under pressure to adapt to changing circumstances, how we experience our world changes accordingly. In fact, it’s how we adapt. Human cultures adapt by changing their worldview. Ever since Homo sapiens emerged some 200,000 years ago, human cultures and their worldviews have evolved together. Changes in our mental representations of the world underlie all the major events in our evolutionary history. Every revolution begins with a new way of seeing the world. Every cultural transformation is born of a new understanding of how things are and what is possible.
Such changes, however, do not happen easily. Because our worldviews hold everything together and enable us to make sense of the world, we are understandably reluctant to change them. Over the course of history, worldviews have usually changed only when people with one worldview conquered and imposed their worldview on those with another. In some instances, such changes have occurred by persuasion, as when missionaries or scientists persuaded people to adopt a new worldview. In every case, however, the change can be seen as an adaptation – whether to mitigate the threat presented by a conquering and occupying power, or to incorporate new knowledge that will make our worldview a more reliable map to the future we want.
That cultures adapt by changing their worldview further underlines the fact that there is no one, true, and complete worldview. It is not a question of truth but of utility. Yes, our worldview should reflect our best knowledge of the world. But we always have only partial knowledge, and what we do have is continually changing. Our understanding of the universe and of our place within it has altered greatly over the millennia. So the final test of any worldview can only be how well it enables us to get along in the world when we use it as a map to guide our behaviour.
Even when we suspect that our worldview may be a less than useful or accurate map, we usually find it very hard to let it go or reconstruct it. We cling tenaciously to what has for so long provided a stable and meaningful understanding of our world, and even twist new information to fit it. It is usually only when the new and anomalous information is so overwhelming, or when we can no longer avoid seeing that our worldview is maladaptive, that we are prepared to consider something new. Indeed, we are usually so accustomed to assuming that our worldview is reality that we aren’t even conscious of it. Its fundamental precepts are so taken for granted that we remain quite oblivious to them until some cultural or individual life crisis forces us to see how maladaptive our behaviour has become. Only then is the worldview that has generated this behaviour likely to surface and become available to us for critical review.
We are precisely at this point in our history now. Our traditional religious worldviews seem so anachronistic, so out of synch with contemporary scientific views, that they have become quite untenable to a great many people who want cognitive consistency among their beliefs. The claims of these various worldviews to be the sole repository of divinely revealed truth, moreover, has become dangerously divisive in an emerging global community. Nor is our scientific-secular worldview any less hazardous. With the universe stripped of purpose and our lives reduced to nothing more meaningful than the accidental collisions of atoms or mutations of genes, we try vainly to assuage our unease in an orgy of entertainment and consumerism – with only now some dawning awareness that, in the process, we are despoiling our planet and sabotaging the very systems on which our life depends. It seems often to require some measure of cultural decline before we can recognise and challenge the maladaptive nature of our dominant worldviews.
Only when a prevailing worldview is thrown into crisis are new ideas, or previously discarded ones, seriously considered. As a new worldview begins to emerge, an intellectual battle takes place between proponents of the new and defenders of the old. The worldview finally changes when a certain critical mass is reached. When it can no longer explain the nature of reality in a credible way, or enable us to adapt, or guide us toward goals that satisfy, it recedes and eventually becomes extinct. The transition can be painful, however, since we are often left, for a time at least, without shared values or a common sense of purpose.
When all is said and done, it may simply require time. What the great physicist Max Planck said about changing scientific paradigms applies equally to evolving worldviews: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
The same is true of humans. Under pressure to adapt to changing circumstances, how we experience our world changes accordingly. In fact, it’s how we adapt. Human cultures adapt by changing their worldview. Ever since Homo sapiens emerged some 200,000 years ago, human cultures and their worldviews have evolved together. Changes in our mental representations of the world underlie all the major events in our evolutionary history. Every revolution begins with a new way of seeing the world. Every cultural transformation is born of a new understanding of how things are and what is possible.
Such changes, however, do not happen easily. Because our worldviews hold everything together and enable us to make sense of the world, we are understandably reluctant to change them. Over the course of history, worldviews have usually changed only when people with one worldview conquered and imposed their worldview on those with another. In some instances, such changes have occurred by persuasion, as when missionaries or scientists persuaded people to adopt a new worldview. In every case, however, the change can be seen as an adaptation – whether to mitigate the threat presented by a conquering and occupying power, or to incorporate new knowledge that will make our worldview a more reliable map to the future we want.
That cultures adapt by changing their worldview further underlines the fact that there is no one, true, and complete worldview. It is not a question of truth but of utility. Yes, our worldview should reflect our best knowledge of the world. But we always have only partial knowledge, and what we do have is continually changing. Our understanding of the universe and of our place within it has altered greatly over the millennia. So the final test of any worldview can only be how well it enables us to get along in the world when we use it as a map to guide our behaviour.
Even when we suspect that our worldview may be a less than useful or accurate map, we usually find it very hard to let it go or reconstruct it. We cling tenaciously to what has for so long provided a stable and meaningful understanding of our world, and even twist new information to fit it. It is usually only when the new and anomalous information is so overwhelming, or when we can no longer avoid seeing that our worldview is maladaptive, that we are prepared to consider something new. Indeed, we are usually so accustomed to assuming that our worldview is reality that we aren’t even conscious of it. Its fundamental precepts are so taken for granted that we remain quite oblivious to them until some cultural or individual life crisis forces us to see how maladaptive our behaviour has become. Only then is the worldview that has generated this behaviour likely to surface and become available to us for critical review.
We are precisely at this point in our history now. Our traditional religious worldviews seem so anachronistic, so out of synch with contemporary scientific views, that they have become quite untenable to a great many people who want cognitive consistency among their beliefs. The claims of these various worldviews to be the sole repository of divinely revealed truth, moreover, has become dangerously divisive in an emerging global community. Nor is our scientific-secular worldview any less hazardous. With the universe stripped of purpose and our lives reduced to nothing more meaningful than the accidental collisions of atoms or mutations of genes, we try vainly to assuage our unease in an orgy of entertainment and consumerism – with only now some dawning awareness that, in the process, we are despoiling our planet and sabotaging the very systems on which our life depends. It seems often to require some measure of cultural decline before we can recognise and challenge the maladaptive nature of our dominant worldviews.
Only when a prevailing worldview is thrown into crisis are new ideas, or previously discarded ones, seriously considered. As a new worldview begins to emerge, an intellectual battle takes place between proponents of the new and defenders of the old. The worldview finally changes when a certain critical mass is reached. When it can no longer explain the nature of reality in a credible way, or enable us to adapt, or guide us toward goals that satisfy, it recedes and eventually becomes extinct. The transition can be painful, however, since we are often left, for a time at least, without shared values or a common sense of purpose.
When all is said and done, it may simply require time. What the great physicist Max Planck said about changing scientific paradigms applies equally to evolving worldviews: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Friday, August 27, 2010
The Limitations of Science
In my most recent post I suggested that no worldview can be regarded as “the truth.” It is always and only a construction of our minds. The best we can do is fashion a tentative framework of meaning, acknowledge that it isn’t written in heaven, and bet our life on it nonetheless.
But what about a scientific worldview? Rather than speculate about questions that are fundamentally unanswerable or cook up explanations based on no firm evidence whatsoever, why not stick with what we know scientifically to be true. From such evidence-based truths could we not construct a worldview with which any reasonable person in our global community would agree? It seems an attractive option.
But before we hail science as the bearer of all truth, we should remember what science is. It is not a set of ideas, true or false. It is a method of inquiry – a hugely successful method that involves learning by experience, remaining ever open to new ideas, and striving to remain value-free so that we can see what is rather than what we want to see or think we should see. As such, it could not be more different from systems of belief based on speculation, wishful thinking, or some unchanging truth thought to be revealed from on High.
Science looks closely at the world, searches for the simplest possible description of what’s happening, proposes possible explanatory hypotheses or educated guesses, and then decides between them on the basis of careful measurement and controlled experiments. In essence, it asks nature to decide which is the better hypothesis. Those that can be confirmed by repeated experiments gain the status of theories and may be expressed as laws – i.e. concise statements that express a causal relationship between two or more elements. But even these are not regarded as “the truth.” Theories regularly change and laws are broken by new evidence for which they cannot account. So there is no absolute truth in science. The closest we get are facts that are regarded as indisputable observations – such as the date of my birth or the reality of the holocaust.
Despite the tentative nature of scientific findings, they are nonetheless widely accepted because of their utility. So long as they work, we’re inclined to think they are true – even though truth and utility are not the same thing. Newton’s theories have been superseded by Einstein but are still very useful when it comes to building skyscrapers. And though Einstein’s E = MC2 may itself one day be superseded, it was sufficiently useful to create a bomb that wiped two cities off the face of the planet. Scientific laws have in fact given us enormous power to control the phenomena which these laws describe.
Because of this, many believe that scientific theories, if not the final truth, are at least approximations to the truth. As our understanding advances, so the fit between theory and reality improves. And one day we will arrive at a set of equations that finally embody the “true laws” in their entirety. Not all scientists, however, subscribe to this. Physics, they say, is not about truth but about “models of nature” that are useful in relating one observation to another in a systematic way. The task of science is to construct models that are simplified representations of “real” phenomena. Such models are never right or wrong, but only more or less useful. Newton’s theory is not wrong; it merely has a limited range of validity. The special theory of relativity gives us a more useful account of high-speed systems. The idea of a final, perfect theory that cannot be improved is as meaningless as the idea of a perfect picture or a perfect symphony.
One such model that has been fundamental to science since its inception is the machine model - a model that likens the universe to a giant machine. It was a metaphor that made perfect sense in the early years of science when Western society became enamoured of machines. It was the early days of the Industrial Revolution and our success in creating ever more efficient machines was intoxicating. If the universe too is a machine, maybe we could discover the bits and pieces that comprise it and how they fit together. So that’s what we set out to do. And, lo and behold, that’s what we found. Our assumptions determined our findings. It was then only a short step from saying “The universe may be likened to a machine” to saying “The universe is a machine.” It’s so tempting to confuse our maps, models, and metaphors with the reality they are meant only to represent.
More than this, the entire scientific enterprise is built on assumptions about the nature of the universe that cannot themselves be proved. One of these stems from 17th century Christian theology when science was first being launched as a discipline – namely the concept of God beyond space and time, whose mind is full of changeless mathematical ideas that govern the universe. The notion had originated in the much earlier neo- Platonic and Pythagorean mystery schools of ancient Greece. Since then, all that has really changed is that we no longer call it God, but the laws of nature. Today’s leading physicists continue to believe that there’s a sort of timeless mind underlying the universe, essentially mathematical in nature.
We assume that we live in an ordered universe, that physical systems comply with simple mathematical laws, and that these laws are unchanging. Everything else in the universe may evolve and change, but the laws that govern it do not. The job of the scientist is to observe and catalog this orderliness and discover its laws. There is no empirical evidence whatsoever for this assumption, but science could not exist without it. So although our understanding of these supposedly unchanging laws has fluctuated wildly over the past century, we have no option but to dismiss such fluctuations as experimental errors. We are committed to discovering a kind of Platonic order in the universe and are compelled by our belief in the mathematical beauty and simplicity of nature. “All of these endeavours,” Einstein said, “are based on the belief that existence should have a completely harmonious structure.”
One more limitation deserves mention. Science confines itself to the empirical sphere – to the realm of things that can be observed and measured. If you can’t put a number to it, science can’t consider it. And that leaves vast areas of human experience outside the realm of scientific inquiry. Each of us, for example, lives according to certain values. All our choices are ultimately value choices. But since science deals with numbers, and because one number is not intrinsically better than any other, science can offer no guidance regarding values or the conduct of our lives. For the same reason, science can say nothing about the purpose or intention of anything. Everything can be explained in physical terms and determined by natural laws.
There is nothing wrong with this so long as we acknowledge it as a limitation. It becomes a problem only when we claim, as some do, that if science cannot measure it, it doesn`t exist – that the material realm is the only reality because that`s the only realm for which there is scientific evidence – or that, because science cannot consider questions of purpose or intention, the universe must therefore be devoid of either. Certainly when it comes to the BIG questions regarding why the universe happens as it does, science must remain silent. That is not its business. But neither can it legitimately denigrate those who offer mythic answers to these questions simply because they are not evidence-based.
Once again, here’s Albert Einstein: “The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the language in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan to the arrangement of the books – a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.” (Words of Wisdom from Albert Einstein)
But what about a scientific worldview? Rather than speculate about questions that are fundamentally unanswerable or cook up explanations based on no firm evidence whatsoever, why not stick with what we know scientifically to be true. From such evidence-based truths could we not construct a worldview with which any reasonable person in our global community would agree? It seems an attractive option.
But before we hail science as the bearer of all truth, we should remember what science is. It is not a set of ideas, true or false. It is a method of inquiry – a hugely successful method that involves learning by experience, remaining ever open to new ideas, and striving to remain value-free so that we can see what is rather than what we want to see or think we should see. As such, it could not be more different from systems of belief based on speculation, wishful thinking, or some unchanging truth thought to be revealed from on High.
Science looks closely at the world, searches for the simplest possible description of what’s happening, proposes possible explanatory hypotheses or educated guesses, and then decides between them on the basis of careful measurement and controlled experiments. In essence, it asks nature to decide which is the better hypothesis. Those that can be confirmed by repeated experiments gain the status of theories and may be expressed as laws – i.e. concise statements that express a causal relationship between two or more elements. But even these are not regarded as “the truth.” Theories regularly change and laws are broken by new evidence for which they cannot account. So there is no absolute truth in science. The closest we get are facts that are regarded as indisputable observations – such as the date of my birth or the reality of the holocaust.
Despite the tentative nature of scientific findings, they are nonetheless widely accepted because of their utility. So long as they work, we’re inclined to think they are true – even though truth and utility are not the same thing. Newton’s theories have been superseded by Einstein but are still very useful when it comes to building skyscrapers. And though Einstein’s E = MC2 may itself one day be superseded, it was sufficiently useful to create a bomb that wiped two cities off the face of the planet. Scientific laws have in fact given us enormous power to control the phenomena which these laws describe.
Because of this, many believe that scientific theories, if not the final truth, are at least approximations to the truth. As our understanding advances, so the fit between theory and reality improves. And one day we will arrive at a set of equations that finally embody the “true laws” in their entirety. Not all scientists, however, subscribe to this. Physics, they say, is not about truth but about “models of nature” that are useful in relating one observation to another in a systematic way. The task of science is to construct models that are simplified representations of “real” phenomena. Such models are never right or wrong, but only more or less useful. Newton’s theory is not wrong; it merely has a limited range of validity. The special theory of relativity gives us a more useful account of high-speed systems. The idea of a final, perfect theory that cannot be improved is as meaningless as the idea of a perfect picture or a perfect symphony.
One such model that has been fundamental to science since its inception is the machine model - a model that likens the universe to a giant machine. It was a metaphor that made perfect sense in the early years of science when Western society became enamoured of machines. It was the early days of the Industrial Revolution and our success in creating ever more efficient machines was intoxicating. If the universe too is a machine, maybe we could discover the bits and pieces that comprise it and how they fit together. So that’s what we set out to do. And, lo and behold, that’s what we found. Our assumptions determined our findings. It was then only a short step from saying “The universe may be likened to a machine” to saying “The universe is a machine.” It’s so tempting to confuse our maps, models, and metaphors with the reality they are meant only to represent.
More than this, the entire scientific enterprise is built on assumptions about the nature of the universe that cannot themselves be proved. One of these stems from 17th century Christian theology when science was first being launched as a discipline – namely the concept of God beyond space and time, whose mind is full of changeless mathematical ideas that govern the universe. The notion had originated in the much earlier neo- Platonic and Pythagorean mystery schools of ancient Greece. Since then, all that has really changed is that we no longer call it God, but the laws of nature. Today’s leading physicists continue to believe that there’s a sort of timeless mind underlying the universe, essentially mathematical in nature.
We assume that we live in an ordered universe, that physical systems comply with simple mathematical laws, and that these laws are unchanging. Everything else in the universe may evolve and change, but the laws that govern it do not. The job of the scientist is to observe and catalog this orderliness and discover its laws. There is no empirical evidence whatsoever for this assumption, but science could not exist without it. So although our understanding of these supposedly unchanging laws has fluctuated wildly over the past century, we have no option but to dismiss such fluctuations as experimental errors. We are committed to discovering a kind of Platonic order in the universe and are compelled by our belief in the mathematical beauty and simplicity of nature. “All of these endeavours,” Einstein said, “are based on the belief that existence should have a completely harmonious structure.”
One more limitation deserves mention. Science confines itself to the empirical sphere – to the realm of things that can be observed and measured. If you can’t put a number to it, science can’t consider it. And that leaves vast areas of human experience outside the realm of scientific inquiry. Each of us, for example, lives according to certain values. All our choices are ultimately value choices. But since science deals with numbers, and because one number is not intrinsically better than any other, science can offer no guidance regarding values or the conduct of our lives. For the same reason, science can say nothing about the purpose or intention of anything. Everything can be explained in physical terms and determined by natural laws.
There is nothing wrong with this so long as we acknowledge it as a limitation. It becomes a problem only when we claim, as some do, that if science cannot measure it, it doesn`t exist – that the material realm is the only reality because that`s the only realm for which there is scientific evidence – or that, because science cannot consider questions of purpose or intention, the universe must therefore be devoid of either. Certainly when it comes to the BIG questions regarding why the universe happens as it does, science must remain silent. That is not its business. But neither can it legitimately denigrate those who offer mythic answers to these questions simply because they are not evidence-based.
Once again, here’s Albert Einstein: “The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the language in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan to the arrangement of the books – a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.” (Words of Wisdom from Albert Einstein)
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Do we ever have the truth?
When Jesus was on trial for his life before the Roman Procurator, Pontius Pilate, Pilate reportedly asked him, “What is truth?” To which Jesus gave no answer. Perhaps he didn’t have the energy to explain such a weighty matter to a Roman bureaucrat. After all, it had been a difficult week. Or perhaps there isn’t any answer to be given. I prefer the latter option. Certainly I’m not about to stick my neck out very far on an issue that Jesus side-stepped and that centuries of philosophical debate have failed to settle. But I’ll stick it out just far enough to say that whatever worldview we adopt is not the final truth.
We humans have a dangerous tendency to assume that our particular culture’s worldview is more right than any other and that the whole world would be better off if everyone believed as we do. In fact we’ve proven only too willing to wage war and slaughter countless millions in an effort to persuade them that “I’m right and you’re wrong” – especially if our particular deity gives us any encouragement in that direction.
Worldviews with a strong religious component – (and that includes the vast majority of worldviews throughout history) – seem the most likely to generate such behaviour, born of the conviction that God Himself has ordained this particular set of beliefs and practices, revealed through His chosen prophet and subsequently inscribed in a Holy Book. Such worldviews do indeed claim to be “the truth”, however bizarre that truth may seem to non-believers. So Zionist Jews genuinely believe that the Creator of this universe has decreed that, for all eternity, the bit of ground on this planet known as Palestine belongs to His chosen people, regardless of who else may have occupied it for the past 2000 years. Conservative Christians actually pray for Armageddon – that final cataclysmic end-of-the-world battle when Jesus will return to destroy the forces of evil and take his faithful followers with him in a bodily ascension up through the clouds into heaven. And Muslim jihadists have no qualms about blowing up innocent men, women and children in the name of Allah. All these believers, whatever their tradition, have no doubt that their worldview is the absolute, final, and eternal truth.
I can only imagine that clinging to such a claim yields a measure of comfort in the face of life’s uncertainties and enables those who feel blessed with such truth to regard themselves as special and superior to those who adhere to a different truth. I’m not about to argue that their worldview is false – after all, who knows what the truth really is – but surely this claim is extremely dangerous in today’s global community. It seems to me that a core tenet of any emerging worldview must be the recognition that no one – not the prophets of old nor the scientists of today – has the truth wrapped up. Yes, we each need a worldview to frame our experience and give meaning to our lives. Can we embrace whatever worldview makes sense to us, acknowledge that it isn’t written in heaven, and bet our life on it nonetheless? Surely what is required in today’s world is a heaping does of humility, together with a deep respect for all those whose worldview is different than our own.
Can anything be regarded as the truth? There are those, quite the opposite of hard-core religious believers, who say that our experience of the world is shaped by our sensory equipment and the mental constructs into which we fit the data. Since we can never be sure that our perceptual constructs accurately represent any out-there reality, perception is all there is. The world that we experience is always our own construction. Who then can say what the truth is?
It’s a position that seems impractical to me. Trusting the evidence of our senses, we once believed that the world was flat and that the sun revolved around it. Now, thanks to telescopes, from Galileo to Hubble, we see the world as a sphere that revolves around the sun. Is that true? It’s certainly more true than what we used to believe. And its truth seems confirmed by the fact that we can make very accurate predictions based on it. Our mental construction of what exists is a sufficiently true and accurate representation of what really does exist out there that we can send men in rockets to the moon and back. For all practical purposes, we can say that our current picture of our solar system is absolutely true.
Lots of things can be said to be true based either on consensual validation or sufficient supporting evidence. Is it true that I was born in Montreal on 19 November 1934? Absolutely! Not simply because my parents said so but because there is ample documentary evidence to support it. Is it true that a Jewish holocaust took place in Europe in the 1940s? Absolutely! – despite the denials of Neo-Nazis for whom this fact does not sit comfortably with their agenda. Okay, how about the Big Bang? Well, the supporting evidence is looking pretty good, but we may be reluctant yet to proclaim it as the final truth. After all, only 50 years ago we had very good evidence to support the idea that the universe is eternal.
Deciding what’s true or not becomes much more difficult regarding why something happened or is happening. Why, for example, is that apple falling from the tree? Newton called it gravity – a force between two objects that is proportional to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between them. Pushing the why question further, he speculated that the Earth, like a sponge, drinks up a constant stream of fine aethereal matter that falls from the heavens and causes physical bodies located above the Earth to descend. Wow! But that was over 300 years ago. No one today is likely to accept that explanation as true. Einstein proposed a different explanation in which gravity is due to the effects of material bodies on the shape of four-dimensional space-time. And presently some physicists are proposing that gravity is caused by one-dimensional “strings” or filaments vibrating in an 11-dimensional universe. Double-Wow! So do we know the truth of why an apple falls from a tree? We’re not even close.
So too when it comes to our worldviews – those over-arching systems of belief that frame our lives in the context of the BIG questions – not questions about which we can decide the truth, such as when I was born or whether the holocaust really happened, or even about what causes apples to fall from trees, but the really BIG questions about why is there anything at all, and is the evolution of this universe going anywhere, and what if anything are the implications of this for what we human beings are doing here and what may be the purpose of our lives, etcetera? Concerning such issues, we will never know “the truth”. The best we can hope for are working hypotheses that we can test in the course of our living, that will guide our behaviour in ways that are both creative and benign, and that will yield a satisfying sense of meaning.
Therefore be humble, ever curious, and always tolerant of those who see things differently than you.
We humans have a dangerous tendency to assume that our particular culture’s worldview is more right than any other and that the whole world would be better off if everyone believed as we do. In fact we’ve proven only too willing to wage war and slaughter countless millions in an effort to persuade them that “I’m right and you’re wrong” – especially if our particular deity gives us any encouragement in that direction.
Worldviews with a strong religious component – (and that includes the vast majority of worldviews throughout history) – seem the most likely to generate such behaviour, born of the conviction that God Himself has ordained this particular set of beliefs and practices, revealed through His chosen prophet and subsequently inscribed in a Holy Book. Such worldviews do indeed claim to be “the truth”, however bizarre that truth may seem to non-believers. So Zionist Jews genuinely believe that the Creator of this universe has decreed that, for all eternity, the bit of ground on this planet known as Palestine belongs to His chosen people, regardless of who else may have occupied it for the past 2000 years. Conservative Christians actually pray for Armageddon – that final cataclysmic end-of-the-world battle when Jesus will return to destroy the forces of evil and take his faithful followers with him in a bodily ascension up through the clouds into heaven. And Muslim jihadists have no qualms about blowing up innocent men, women and children in the name of Allah. All these believers, whatever their tradition, have no doubt that their worldview is the absolute, final, and eternal truth.
I can only imagine that clinging to such a claim yields a measure of comfort in the face of life’s uncertainties and enables those who feel blessed with such truth to regard themselves as special and superior to those who adhere to a different truth. I’m not about to argue that their worldview is false – after all, who knows what the truth really is – but surely this claim is extremely dangerous in today’s global community. It seems to me that a core tenet of any emerging worldview must be the recognition that no one – not the prophets of old nor the scientists of today – has the truth wrapped up. Yes, we each need a worldview to frame our experience and give meaning to our lives. Can we embrace whatever worldview makes sense to us, acknowledge that it isn’t written in heaven, and bet our life on it nonetheless? Surely what is required in today’s world is a heaping does of humility, together with a deep respect for all those whose worldview is different than our own.
Can anything be regarded as the truth? There are those, quite the opposite of hard-core religious believers, who say that our experience of the world is shaped by our sensory equipment and the mental constructs into which we fit the data. Since we can never be sure that our perceptual constructs accurately represent any out-there reality, perception is all there is. The world that we experience is always our own construction. Who then can say what the truth is?
It’s a position that seems impractical to me. Trusting the evidence of our senses, we once believed that the world was flat and that the sun revolved around it. Now, thanks to telescopes, from Galileo to Hubble, we see the world as a sphere that revolves around the sun. Is that true? It’s certainly more true than what we used to believe. And its truth seems confirmed by the fact that we can make very accurate predictions based on it. Our mental construction of what exists is a sufficiently true and accurate representation of what really does exist out there that we can send men in rockets to the moon and back. For all practical purposes, we can say that our current picture of our solar system is absolutely true.
Lots of things can be said to be true based either on consensual validation or sufficient supporting evidence. Is it true that I was born in Montreal on 19 November 1934? Absolutely! Not simply because my parents said so but because there is ample documentary evidence to support it. Is it true that a Jewish holocaust took place in Europe in the 1940s? Absolutely! – despite the denials of Neo-Nazis for whom this fact does not sit comfortably with their agenda. Okay, how about the Big Bang? Well, the supporting evidence is looking pretty good, but we may be reluctant yet to proclaim it as the final truth. After all, only 50 years ago we had very good evidence to support the idea that the universe is eternal.
Deciding what’s true or not becomes much more difficult regarding why something happened or is happening. Why, for example, is that apple falling from the tree? Newton called it gravity – a force between two objects that is proportional to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between them. Pushing the why question further, he speculated that the Earth, like a sponge, drinks up a constant stream of fine aethereal matter that falls from the heavens and causes physical bodies located above the Earth to descend. Wow! But that was over 300 years ago. No one today is likely to accept that explanation as true. Einstein proposed a different explanation in which gravity is due to the effects of material bodies on the shape of four-dimensional space-time. And presently some physicists are proposing that gravity is caused by one-dimensional “strings” or filaments vibrating in an 11-dimensional universe. Double-Wow! So do we know the truth of why an apple falls from a tree? We’re not even close.
So too when it comes to our worldviews – those over-arching systems of belief that frame our lives in the context of the BIG questions – not questions about which we can decide the truth, such as when I was born or whether the holocaust really happened, or even about what causes apples to fall from trees, but the really BIG questions about why is there anything at all, and is the evolution of this universe going anywhere, and what if anything are the implications of this for what we human beings are doing here and what may be the purpose of our lives, etcetera? Concerning such issues, we will never know “the truth”. The best we can hope for are working hypotheses that we can test in the course of our living, that will guide our behaviour in ways that are both creative and benign, and that will yield a satisfying sense of meaning.
Therefore be humble, ever curious, and always tolerant of those who see things differently than you.
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