How We Believe, 2nd Ed.

by Michael Shermer

  The concept of Heaven on Earth is part of the larger mythic theme represented in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man: “The soul, uneasy, and confin’d from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come.” Sometimes that future state of bliss is to be found in another place entirely, as in “the firmament”—an overarching vault resting on pillars at the end of the Earth with windows to view God and the angels above, and from whence the rains come. But as often as not Heaven is a state on Earth, or sometimes even a state of mind. The most famous Heaven on Earth metaphors, of course, come from the Bible in numerous books. In Isaiah 65:17–18, for example, following God’s creation of “new heavens and a new earth,” after which “the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the voice of crying,” the people are to “rejoice” (Isaiah 65:20–23, 25) because:

  There shall be no more thence an infant of days, nor an old man that hath not filled his days: for the child shall die a hundred years old; but the sinner being a hundred years old shall be accursed.

  And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them.

  They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat: for as the days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands.

  They shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble; for they are the seed of the blessed of the Lord, and their offspring with them.

  The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock: and dust shall be the serpent’s meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord.

  According to The Interpreter’s Bible, in these Isaiah passages “the meaning is not that the present world will be completely destroyed and a new world created, but rather that the present world will be completely transformed … there is no cosmological speculation here.” Indeed, in the Hebrew Bible it is not until the book of Daniel—the latest addition to the canon—that one can find reference to humans ascending to heaven. For mortals, heaven generally meant a new Kingdom on Earth, not a place to go where God resides. The shift from earthly paradise to cosmological firmament began in Daniel and was reinforced especially by Jesus who portrayed to his oppressed peoples that redemption was just around the chronological corner. Yet even Jesus made intriguing references to the Kingdom that “has come upon you” (Luke 11:20), that has suffered violence since the time of John the Baptist (Matthew 11:12), and especially in Luke 17:20–21, where he seems to infer that heaven is a state of mind: “And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”

  SECULAR HEAVENS

  In a biocultural model of religious thought and spirituality, the idea of a Heaven on Earth or a Kingdom of God within should not be restricted to Judaeo-Christian theology, or even to religious traditions of the West and East. Indeed, it is not. The myth of the golden-age past or future can also be secularized, and it has been by modern environmentalists who construct mythical epochs like the one above, where beautiful people have lived or will live in eco-harmony with their environment, which resembles, for all intents and purposes, the heavenly states of world religions.

  I first encountered the beautiful people myth as a graduate student in a course co-taught by an anthropologist and a historian in the late 1980s, when both fields were being “deconstructed” by literary critics and social theorists. Anticipating the study of customs, rituals, and beliefs of indigenous preindustrial peoples around the world, I was instead bogged down in books such as Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, which explicates “Fetishism and Dialectical Deconstruction” or “The Devil and the Cosmogenesis of Capitalism.” The anthropologist soon announced that his was a Marxist interpretation of history, seeing the past in terms of class conflict and economic exploitation. The beautiful people lived before capitalism.

  Old-line Marxists see communism as the liberating climax of a six-stage evolutionary process that requires the collapse of capitalism. Capitalism is The End. Communism is The New Beginning. Liberal democrats, meanwhile, have their bard in Francis Fukuyama, whose book, The End of History and the Last Man. pronounced that the cold war was won by democracy and capitalism. Libertarians’ messiah is John Galt, the hero of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, who leads a massive worldwide strike by the men of the mind, forcing civilization to collapse into chaos and anarchy, out of the ashes from which the heroes resurrect the Kingdom of Galt on earth. In the book’s final apocalyptic scene, in fact, the heroine, Dagny Taggert, turns to Galt and pronounces: “It’s the end.” He corrects her: “It’s the beginning.” The fire that will cleanse.

  Radical feminists foresee a day when patriarchy will collapse and men and women will live in egalitarian harmony—the Second Coming is actually a return to an imagined golden age before there were wars, violence, rape, slavery, and the subjugating “isms” that go with male domination. In Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade, for example, the author goes back 13,000 years to find history’s bogeyman. Before patriarchy there was “a long period of peace and prosperity when our social, technological, and cultural evolution moved upward: many thousands of years when all the basic technologies on which civilization is built were developed in societies that were not male dominant, violent, and hierarchic.” As Paleolithic hunting, gathering, and fishing gave way to Neolithic farming, this “partnership model” of equality between the sexes gave way to the “dominator model,” and with it came wars, exploitation, slavery, and the like. The solution, says Eisler, is to return to the equalitarian partnership model where “not only will material wealth be shared more equitably, but this will also be an economic order in which amassing more and more property as a means of protecting oneself from, as well as controlling others will be seen for what it is: a form of sickness or aberration.”

  Environmentalist, Marxist, libertarian, and feminist Armageddons are being fought with the belief that the survival of the species is at stake. Either men will lead us into nuclear obliteration, or corporations will sink our environmental lifeboat, or capitalists will spend us into oblivion, or the state will destroy us. But in the end the Antichrist will be defeated, replaced by the Kingdom of Bliss. The fire that will cleanse.

  HOLDING THE CENTER

  The fact that such diverse apocalyptic visions can proliferate on the cultural landscape tells us that they are deeply rooted in the human mind. There is something going on here that cries out for an explanation. We saw in the last chapter that sometimes apocalypticism is prevalent among the oppressed, disenfranchised, or marginalized—the Jews oppressed by Romans at the time of Jesus’ evangelism and promise of the Kingdom of God on Earth that was soon to come; the 1890 Ghost Dance among the Native Americans who were on the brink of extinction when the prophet Wovoka preached that the Great Spirit would come to destroy the whites and return the buffalo; or the belief among some members of the Nation of Islam (including Farrakhan himself) that a messianic mothership is in orbit around earth that will soon bring deliverance. Hold a people down long enough and learned helplessness arises, leading to feelings of utter futility, which gives rise to fatalism, and that end in apocalypticism, with a hoped-for paradisiacal state to come.

  But this is not true for all millennial groups. As the Time/CNN poll showed, millions of white, middle class, American Christians believe that the world is soon coming to an end. It would be a long stretch to classify these folks as oppressed, disenfranchised, or marginalized. Likewise, the people who purchased over thirty million copies of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth are anything but in a state of learned helplessness or cognitive dissonance. Indeed, some recent polls and studies indicate that religious people, on average, may be both physically and psychologically happier and healthier than nonbelievers. Apocalypticism r
equires a different explanation here.

  Perhaps it has something to do with the need for justice, where the evils of events like the Holocaust are lessened by the fact that the Lord will mete out retribution in the end. Bad things do happen to good people, but in the end the good will triumph (the fire that will cleanse). This is an ancient theme that even predates the Bible. In the third millennium B.C., for example, the prologue of the Hammurabi law code explains its purpose:

  to cause justice to prevail in the land,

  to destroy the wicked and the evil,

  that the strong might not oppress the weak

  to rise like the sun over the black-headed [people]

  and to light up the land.

  The normal ups and downs of life may be more tolerable if you believe that Someone Up There is keeping score and that the tally will be presented to all participants when the game is over (with appropriate rewards and punishments doled out).

  More than making things right with the world, millennial visions also help us make sense of the world. Recall that the literal meaning of apocalypse is “unveiling,” or “revelation.” For some people, a millennial apocalyptic vision, like that of St. John the Divine in the book of Revelation, unveils the secret pattern of life that must lie behind the confusing array of history’s events. These visions reveal to us the secret pattern set up by God or destiny. Texts like Revelation reveal the hidden scheme of life, thoughtfully and purposefully set up by a God who cares about us and who, perhaps more importantly, is in control. There is a beginning and an end to history, and the events in between fit a larger cosmic design. How much easier it is to suffer the slings and arrows of fate when you know that it is all really part of a deeper, unfolding plan. We may feel like flotsam and jetsam on the vast rivers of history, but the currents are directed toward a final destination in which we play a meaningful role.

  Here we see a striking difference between 1000 and 2000. A thousand years ago the world was a relatively simple place where the church was the dominant social structure that provided an inchoate but comprehensive model of the world. Today we face a confusing panoply of competing power structures and explanations virtually impossible to wrap our minds around. If we do not experience an apocalyptic terror, there will at least be some millennial angst, from both religious and secular conceptions of the end. We need restitution and restoration. We want to feel that no matter how chaotic, oppressive, or evil the world is, all will be made right in the end. The millennium as history’s end is only acceptable with the proviso that there will be a new beginning. The people in 1000 were given it, and with it they created the Middle Ages. What will we do?

  Will the fire cleanse? Will Yeats’s anarchy be loosed upon the world and innocence drowned, or will we see ourselves through this historical fissure and arise to create the next epoch, whatever it may be? Perhaps this time the falcon will hear the falconer, the centre will hold back the blood-dimmed tide, the best, and even sometimes the worst will retain conviction. And may we all be full of passionate intensity in anticipation of our future, whatever it holds.

  Chapter 10

  GLORIOUS CONTINGENCY

  Gould’s Dangerous Idea and the Search for Meaning in an Age of Science

  Through no fault of our own, and by dint of no cosmic plan or conscious purpose, we have become, by the grace of a glorious revolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life’s continuity on earth. We, have not asked for that role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.

  —Stephen Jay Gould, A Glorious Accident, 1997

  In one of his final public addresses before his death, recorded live at the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, the astronomer Carl Sagan waxed poetic about our place in the universe and its profound implication for the relationship of science and religion:

  One of science’s alleged crimes is revealing that our favorite, most reassuring stories about our place in the universe and how we came to be are delusional. Instead, what science reveals is a universe much older and much vaster than the tidy, anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors. We have found from modern astronomy that we live on a tiny hunk of rock and metal third from the sun, that circles a humdrum star in the obscure outskirts of an ordinary galaxy, which contains some four hundred billion other stars, which is one of about a hundred billion other galaxies that make up the universe, and according to some current views, a universe that is one among an immense number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. In this perspective the idea that our planet is at the center of the universe, much less that human purpose is central to the existence of the universe, is pathetic.

  In his 1977 book, The First Three Minutes, the physicist Steven Weinberg speculated on the human need for centrality, but he was even more direct in his assessment of where we actually fit in the cosmic scheme of things:

  It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning. It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

  Was our existence foreordained from the beginning, or are we nothing more than a “farce,” a fluke product of a “chain of accidents?” Modern astronomers and physicists may be the theologians of science, but these questions date back at least to the ancient Greek historians and philosophers who, twenty-five hundred years ago, identified a central tension in the nature of change, as to what must be versus what may be—that which happens necessarily versus what happens contingently. Is our existence a necessity—that is, are things such that it could not have been otherwise? Or is our existence a contingency —something that need not have been? Must we choose between contingency and necessity? Is there not an interactive middle ground that more adequately describes the history of the universe, the world, and life? There is.

  One of the most common reasons people give for believing in God is that the universe, the world, and life appears to be designed—in other words, it looks necessary, not contingent. If the universe, the world, and life were not necessary, however, it would imply that there is no designer. And without a designer there is no necessary meaning to life other than what we humans impose upon it. If life is contingent, then we might not have been: Rewind the tape of life and play it again and we would not be here. This is what makes contingency such a “dangerous” idea. Most people find the prospects of this worldview existentially devastating. In fact, contingency can be both liberating and empowering.

  IF THE TAPE WERE PLAYED TWICE

  I first discovered the notion of contingency in 1987 when I entered a doctoral program in history at Claremont Graduate School. In preparation for a course in the philosophy of history, I turned to the Syntopicon (109 “great ideas”) of the Great Books of the Western World and read what the great minds of history said about fate and chance, universal and particular, and especially necessity and contingency . Here were the grand and timeless debates about history and the nature of change. To my surprise and disappointment, however, not only did we not discuss what these great minds said about these great ideas, we did not even study these great ideas. Instead we explored the possibility that it was not possible to know any ideas, or understand any authors, great or not. Later I realized I was caught squarely in the middle of the postmodern, deconstructionist movement. I abandoned hope for the future of the philosophy of history.

  Two years later, however, my flame of optimism was rekindled by the publication of a book that would help launch a resurgence in thinking about the nature of history. But it was not written by a historian. It was written by a paleontologist. Stephen Jay Go
uld’s Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, has become something of a watershed for those who study contingency and complexity, especially applied to organisms, societies, and history, and discussions of it can be found in many works. Walter Fontana and Leo Buss, for example, ask in the title of their chapter “What Would Be Conserved If ‘The Tape Were Played Twice’?” This is a direct reference to Gould’s suggestion in Wonderful Life that if the tape of life were rewound to the time of the organisms found in the Canadian outcrop known as the Burgess Shale, dated to about 530 million years ago, and replayed with a few contingencies tweaked here and there, humans would most likely never have evolved. So powerful are the effects of contingency that a small change in the early stages of a sequence can produce large effects in the later stages. Edward Lorenz calls this the butterfly effect and by now the metaphor is well known: A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, producing a storm in Texas. The uncertainty of our past and unpredictability of our future created by contingency is what makes this such a challenging idea to historians and scientists, whose models and laws call for a search for unifying generalities, not capricious happenstances.

  Gould’s dangerous idea, therefore, did not go unnoticed. Stuart Kauffman,, one of the pioneers of complexity in explaining the self-organization of complex systems, references Gould and Wonderful Life and asks about the Cambrian explosion of life: “Was it Darwinian chance and selection alone … or did principles of self-organization mingle with chance and necessity”? Mathematicians Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart published a feature story on “Chaos, Contingency, and Convergence” in Nonlinear Science Today, centered around Wonderful Life. Wired magazine’s Kevin Kelly devotes several pages to Gould’s contingency. Philosophers also got in on the discussion. Murdo William McRae published a critique entitled “Stephen Jay Gould and the Contingent Nature of History.” And, most exhaustively, Daniel Dennett devoted a Brobdingnagian chapter to Gould and this idea in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.