The Origin of Booze

A historical look at the stuff that gets us hammered. Who’s ready for the first round?

Beer

To quote Homer Simpson, is there anything it can’t do? Most likely invented in Persia circa 7,000 B.C.E., beer’s gone on to become hugely important in almost every ancient society it’s touched. Back in Sumerian culture, the drink was considered positively divine - a fact confirmed when archaeologists dug up the 4,000-year-old “Hymn to Ninkasi.” The ode to the goddess of brewing actually doubles as a recipe for a barley-based beverage

guaranteed to make people feel “exhilarated, wonderful and blissful.”

The epic of Gilgamesh tells us a similar tale; one of the main characters, Enkidu, is said to have had “seven cups of beer, and his heart soared.” After seven rounds we can definitely see why. In ancient Egypt, wages were often paid to the poor in beer, or as they called it, hqt. It was sort of light beer, apparently, and not very intoxicating, which explains how construction workers of the day managed to drink three daily rations of it and still build their masterpiece: the not-at-all-leaning pyramids of Giza.

Wine

A wine snob will happily tell you, for hours on end, how difficult it is to make a decent wine and how many complicated steps are involved. This may be true, but it’s ridiculously easy to make basic wine. The beverage in its roughest form probably goes back thousands of years to primitive cultures who mistakenly left grapes in the sun for too long and then attempted to eat them. As it turns out, all the yeasts needed to ferment grapes actually grow on grape skin. (No additives necessary!)

Around 5,000 B.C.E., the people of present-day Georgia and Iran started making wine in clay pots. By the time of ancient Greece, wine had acquired a religious significance; perhaps in homage to Dionysus, the Greeks planted vines in all their colonies, including France and Egypt. (We’d love to know what the French make of the fact that they have the Greeks to thank for their vaunted grapes.)

California winemakers should also praise God, literally, for the fruits of their labor: when Christian missionaries arrived there, they planted the region’s first vines so they’d have something to transmogrify into

the blood of Jesus when they took Communion.

Champagne

As you probably know, bubbly comes from the Champagne region of France, a longtime center of trade (and also a region in the path of rampaging hordes: Attila the Hun, among others, left footprints there). As you may also know, Dom Perignon was in fact a real person - his first name was Pierre - and, in a sense, he’s the inventor of the sparkly stuff. A Benedictine monk, the Dom served as treasurer of an abbey in the Champagne region starting in 1688.

The region had slightly chilly weather that year, and the growing season was unusually short anyway - which meant grapes spent less time fermenting on the vine and more time fermenting in cellars. Essentially, it was this process that led to carbon dioxide being trapped inside the bottles.

At first the Dom was horrified; this was a sign that he’d failed in his duties as treasurer (which included, for some reason, winemaking). Try as he might, he couldn’t get rid of the bubbles. Finally, resigned to dealing with them, he blended grapes to make a light white wine, which suited the effervescence far better than a heavy red.

He also realized he’d have to solve another problem caused by trapped carbon dioxide: a considerable number of his bottles exploding. So, instead of stopping them with wood and oil-soaked hemp, he started using a soft material from Spain: cork.

This lovely story, by the way, doesn’t sit so well with the natives of Limoux, France. They allege that they were making sparkling wine in their backyards as early as the 1500s, and that Perignon stole their idea. We’ve got to side with the Dom on this one: After all, the guy was a monk.

Vodka

Believe it or not, the name really does come from the Russian word for “water,” which is “voda,” and the Russians have a pretty good claim to inventing the stuff. Production from grains has been documented there as far back as the 9th century. It wasn’t, however, until around the 14th century that vodka became known as the Russian national drink, and for good reasons; it was served everywhere, even at religious ceremonies.

Poland likes to boast that its own vodka production goes back even further than Russia’s, to the 8th century, but what was going made in that region at the time was more like grappa or brandy. Later Polish vodkas were called “gorzalka,” or “burnt wine,” and were used as medicines, as were all distilled liquors in the Middle Ages. Vodka was also used as an ingredient in early European formulations of gunpowder.

By the way, for those of you who turn your noses up the fruit-infused vodkas that have recently hit the market: they’re the original. Early vodkas were not quite as palatable as your average Grey Goose, so makers often masked the taste with fruits and spices.

Gin

If you’re unsurprised that vodka used to be given as medicine, you probably won’t be shocked to learn that gin was invented specifically for that purpose. 14th-century Europeans distilled juniper berries in hopes of fighting the plague (then again, almost everything they did was in hope of fighting the plague).

But gin as we know it didn’t come along until the mid-1600s. That’s when one Dr. Sylvius concocted the first formulation in the Netherlands, hoping it would serve as a primitive type of dialysis for kidney patients. (We’re guessing he didn’t particularly care about its effect on the liver.) By the end of the century, gin had become popular in Britain because it was sold at cut-rate prices, despite a very widespread rumor that it could induce abortion, which lead to it being nicknamed “mother’s ruin.” Later, when the Brits started to occupy India, they found it useful in yet another medical mixture: the gin and tonic. The quinine in the tonic water was effective in fighting malaria.

Tequila

As vodka was to Russia, tequila was to Mexico; it’s been made there since at least the 16th century and was originally used in religious rituals. (Having drunk a little too much tequila once, we can testify to its ability to cause drinkers to beseech God for mercy.) The name comes from a town founded in 1656. And while José Cuervo didn’t exactly invent the drink, he was the first to commercialize it. As for its migration northward, a fellow named Cenobio Sauza brought the stuff to the U.S. in the late 1800s; we can’t help but wonder if this is why frat boys on spring break still refer to this stuff as “the sauce.”

Rum

Yo-ho-uh-oh and a bottle of rum - the drink tastes great, but its history isn’t so sweet. The story, as far as we can tell, starts in India, where in 300, B.C.E., Alexander the Great saw some sugarcane and memorably called it “the grass that gives honey without bees.”

All well and good, until Christopher Columbus went and brought sugarcane to the Caribbean. There, it flourished and became the engine of the slave trade. Africa sent slaves to the Caribbean, which sent sugar to New England, which sent rum and other goodies to Africa, which sent more slaves to the Caribbean. Known as the triangular trade, pondering the implications of it all is enough to make a person want a stiff drink. But not, preferably, one steeped in rum. Source

Socially superior

The ability to influence how others feel - social intelligence - is the latest concept from the author who popularised emotional intelligence

It is not enough to be intelligent. It is not enough, even, to be emotionally intelligent. The rules of the game have changed: we also have to be socially intelligent. Among the cognoscenti is the nurse who can instantly comfort with a touch on the arm, the soldier who can be captured by insurgents and released with an apology, the diplomat who can defuse tensions with a well-placed word. And what happens to the socially dumb? They populate the ranks of unhappy spouses, inadequate parents, unfulfilled employees and loners.

So concludes Dr Daniel Goleman, the bestselling author who first coaxed the idea of emotional intelligence out of the academic wilderness and into public consciousness.

EI didn’t so much strike a chord as play a rousing symphony: it sold the comforting thought that there is something beyond general intelligence. It explained why supposedly clever people can rub others up the wrong way and why the pea-brained can become so popular. And it sold in its millions, allowing Goleman, who has a PhD in psychology from Harvard University, to give up his day job as a science reporter at The New York Times and to remodel the pretty, double-garaged New England home that he shares with his second wife, Tara Bennett- Goleman, two ageing horses and a copy of Emotional Intelligence in almost every publishable language.

But that was 11 years ago, and the onward march of neuroscience has given Goleman a new idea — and book — to sell. The central concept of Social Intelligence: The New Science of Relationships, which is published next week — and an extract of which appears in The Times tomorrow — is that we are “wired to connect”. Our brains are social tools, primed through evolution for promoting and guiding social interactions and relationships. Our sociable brains allow us to “infect” those around us with our emotions, and to “catch” the moods of others.

“Until now, all psychology, particularly in neuroscience, has been about one mind and one brain and one person,” Goleman explains, as he tries to pin down the “aha moment” that led to the writing of Social Intelligence. “Psychologists had begun to expand this to assess two people at the same time; the unit of measurement was becoming the dyad rather than the individual.

He expands on this further in the book: “My own model of emotional intelligence folded in social intelligence without making much of that fact . . . but, as I’ve come to see, simply lumping social intelligence within the emotional sort stunts fresh thinking about the human aptitude for relationship. The danger comes in fixating on what goes on inside us and ignoring what transpires as we interact. This myopia leaves the ‘social’ part out of intelligence.”

Goleman, 60, classifies human interactions, loosely, as nourishing or toxic; the socially intelligent will be party to very many more nourishing encounters than toxic ones (intriguing research suggests that successful marriages have a ratio, or “golden mean”, of at least five happy interactions to every rotten one; and no, he hasn’t calculated whether the golden mean is true of his own marriage). Both have a measurable effect on health: a pleasant life is a longer-lived one. Widowers die earlier than happily married men; those at the top of the management ladder suffer lower rates of heart disease than the minions on the drudgery-filled tiers beneath them.

So as well as telling us that SI plugs a gaping hole in the model of emotional intelligence, Goleman uses his new book to present a manifesto for a more compassionate, more socially interconnected, world. He implores us to reject the “inexorable technocreep” that results in so many of us conducting relationships by e-mail, which is faceless and voiceless and thus deprives the brain of vital social cues. And mirror neurons — the special brain cells that allow us to empathise and “catch” each other’s emotions (and which appear to be lacking or dysfunctional in those suffering from autism and psychopathy) — mean that human beings can wield great emotional power over others.

Goleman finds this troublesome: “Mirror neurons make us far more neurally connected than we ever knew; this creates a pathway for emotional contagion. If you really care about people, it gives a new spin to the term social responsibility: what emotional states are you creating in the people you’re with?”

Goleman, who has the composed aura of an Ivy League don, is not the first to expound the idea of social intelligence (EI was not his original idea either, but a revival of a 1990 paper by the psychologists John Mayer and Peter Salovey). Edward Thorndike, a Columbia University psychologist, beat him to it by more than 80 years, noting in a 1920 article for Harper’s Monthly Magazine that “the best mechanic in a factory may fail as a foreman for lack of social intelligence”. Thorndike, Golemnan notes, “was articulating something we all know”, ie, there is something about social adeptness that we know goes beyond professional competence, niceness or intelligence.

Thorndike’s observations were dismissed in psychology’s rush to embrace the fledgeling concept of IQ; social intelligence was judged to be general intelligence applied to social situations and, therefore, not a distinct intelligence in its own right. But the very modern science of social neuroscience — which involves peering into the brains of people during social encounters — now shows that our social behaviour is shaped as much by instinct as by rational thought. This contribution of the neural “low road” to our social behaviour — distinct from the cognitive “high road” associated with conscious mental effort — convinces Goleman that “the time is ripe for a revival of social intelligence on a par with its sister, the emotional type”.

Thorndike was also prescient in his observation that, while easy to spot, SI could not easily be measured. Goleman doesn’t think an SI quotient, akin to IQ or EQ, is around the corner, although some tests claim to measure it. “I don’t think there’s a good measure yet because the tests largely reflect what we know about social situations rather than how well we operate in social situations,” Goleman says.

“My argument is that it’s the latter that the tests should assess. And if you’re going to do that, you can’t just ask people questions about it, because that reflects their cognition. You also need to assess how well their automatic and unconscious circuitry operates, for example, the circuitry that tells me that your eyes are expressing interest and curiosity right now.”

That is not to say that unconscious circuitry can’t be refined: the psychologist Paul Ekman, the world authority on facial expressions, has devised a training programme that can help people to spot “microexpressions”, which are fleeting looks or tics that disclose a person’s true emotions. The video is widely used to improve the hit rate of airport security staff. Goleman used it to rev up his own hit rate, too. This indicates, he says, that we can hone our social intelligence.

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“I initially thought you’d either be good at it [recognising microexpressions] or not, so I find this very hopeful. I would argue that this ability to recognise emotions should be included as a dimension of SI.”

EI focused on self-awareness and self-management, ie, on internal emotional machinations. Goleman says that SI looks beyond this, at what happens when those internal machinations are acted out with other people. He plucks out social awareness (what we sense about others) and social facility (how we act on that awareness) as the two defining features of SI.

Under these headings come such skills as “primal empathy”, “attunement” (listening fully to others) and “synchrony” (appropriate body language, such as nods and smiles, that allows conversation to flow). This begins to make sense: there is little more irritating than talking to someone who seems distracted, uninterested or impatient. Where does Goleman place himself on the SI spectrum? “You shouldn’t ask me, you should ask the people around me,” he laughs. “I was once elected class president, which suggests a certain amount of SI, I suppose. But I make no claims to be a paragon of SI.” On the right of the bell curve? “Probably.”

He credits his wife, a psychotherapist and author (the Dalai Lama wrote the foreword to one of her books), with pushing up his own SI. Judging by the way the Golemans handled his divorce from his British first wife, Anasuya, this household seems to be awash with SI. He recalls: “We divorced in Boulder, Colorado. She remarried, I remarried and we had joint custody [of their two sons]. Anasuya’s husband was looking for a residency in cardiology and I needed to be in reach of New York. So all six of us — two children, four adults — moved to this town 25 years ago to keep the unit together. One could infer from this that someone involved was socially intelligent. Whether it was me, I can’t say. But it’s worked out well. It wasn’t always easy but everyone decided that it was in the best interests of the kids.” His sons remain close by and Goleman delights in his grandchildren; their photographs are pinned to corkboards near the kitchen.

The only time our largely nourishing interaction veers towards the toxic is when I question the idea that we should take responsibility for the feelings we induce in others. I suggest that this sounds a bit “touchy-feely”. It evokes a rousing response: “It’s hard to talk about emotions without being touchy-feely. The problem is that the term is dismissive, it has a connotation that I don’t feel the book justifies.”

He adds: “Touchy-feely is a put-down. It’s been used against women a lot; it’s been used within the sciences to put down psychology and other fields dealing with emotion, to dismiss it as not serious science.”

But instead of blaming others for being toxic, shouldn’t we sharpen our emotional immune system to better withstand the slights and stresses slung our way?

“It’s vitally important for people in the helping professions not to be emotionally vulnerable because this can lead to a lack of cognitive clarity and also emotional burn-out,” he admits. “You do need to be able to deal with whatever emotions come your way, but I don’t want to give a licence to people to be a son of a bitch.”

EI achieved worldwide success; Goleman clearly expects great things of its successor. “Nobody’s seen the book yet so I don’t what people will think of it, but I had an e-mail from my publisher saying that there was extreme enthusiasm at the American Sociological Association and American Psychological Association [APA]. Nobody’s said it’s a bad idea.” Then again, EI, which earned Goleman a lifetime achivement award from the APA, wasn’t a bad idea. Its universality allowed it to slip the leash of management-speak; it soon invaded everyday life. EI is to become compulsory in schools in Illinois, and has even sneaked on to the curriculum a British public school. Goleman says he would be surprised if his writings on SI don’t reach out in the same way: “Today’s touchy-feely is tomorrow’s mandated standard.”

Social circuitry can save lives

In the early days of the Iraq War some US soldiers set out to contact the local town’s chief cleric to ask for his help in organising the distribution of relief supplies. But a mob gathered, fearing the soldiers were coming to arrest their spiritual leader or destroy the mosque. Hundreds of Muslims surrounded the heavily armed platoon.

Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Hughes thought fast. Picking up a loudspeaker, he told his soldiers to kneel on one knee. Then he told them to point their rifles towards the ground. His next order was: “Smile.” At that, the crowd’s mood morphed. Most smiled in return. A few patted the soldiers on the back as Hughes ordered them to walk slowly away, backwards — still smiling.

His quick-witted move was the culmination of an array of split-second social calculations. He had to read the level of hostility in that crowd and sense what would calm it. He had to bet on the discipline of his men and the strength of their trust in him. And he had to hit the right gesture that would pierce the barriers of language and culture. That incident highlights the brain’s social brilliance even in a chaotic, tense encounter. What carried Hughes through were the same neural circuits that we rely on when we encounter a potentially sinister stranger and decide instantly whether to run or engage. This interpersonal radar remains crucial to our survival.

Our brain’s social circuits navigate us through every encounter. These circuits are at play when lovers kiss for the first time, or when tears held back are sensed nonetheless. They give a lawyer the certainty that he wants that person on a jury, a patient the feeling she can trust her physician. Now science can detail the neural mechanics at work.

Extracted from Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships by Daniel Goleman, published by Hutchinson on September 26, price £20. Available from Times Books First for £18 incl p&p: 0870 160 8080.

Darwin Misunderstood

On July 2, 1866, Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, wrote to Charles Darwin to lament how he had been “so repeatedly struck by the utter inability of numbers of intelligent persons to see clearly or at all, the self acting & necessary effects of Nat Selection, that I am led to conclude that the term itself & your mode of illustrating it, however clear & beautiful to many of us are yet not the best adapted to impress it on the general naturalist public.” The source of the misunderstanding, Wallace continued, was the name itself, in that it implies “the constant watching of an intelligent ‘chooser’ like man’s selection to which you so often compare it,” and that “thought and direction are essential to the action of ‘Natural Selection.’” Wallace suggested redacting the term and adopting Herbert Spencer’s phrase “survival of the fittest.”

Unfortunately, that is what happened, and it led to two myths about evolution that persist today: that there is a prescient directionality to evolution and that survival depends entirely on cutthroat competitive fitness.

Contrary to the first myth, natural selection is a description of a process, not a force. No one is “selecting” organisms for survival in the benign sense of pigeon breeders selecting for desirable traits in show breeds or for extinction in the malignant sense of Nazis selecting prisoners at death camps. Natural selection is nonprescient — it cannot look forward to anticipate what changes are going to be needed for survival. When my daughter was young, I tried explaining evolution to her by using polar bears as an example of a “transitional species” between land mammals and marine mammals, but that was wrong. Polar bears are not “on their way” to becoming marine mammals. They are well adapted for their arctic environment.

Natural selection simply means that those individuals with variations better suited to their environment leave behind more offspring than individuals that are less well adapted. This outcome is known as “differential reproductive success.” It may be, as the second myth holds, that organisms that are bigger, stronger, faster and brutishly competitive will reproduce more successfully, but it is just as likely that organisms that are smaller, weaker, slower and socially cooperative will do so as well.

This second notion in particular makes evolution unpalatable for many people, because it covers the theory with a darkened patina reminiscent of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “nature, red in tooth and claw.” Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s “bulldog” defender, promoted this “gladiatorial” view of life in a series of popular essays on nature “whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day.” The myth persists. In his recent documentary film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Ben Stein linked Darwinism to Communism, Fascism and the Holocaust. Former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling misread biologist Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene to mean that evolution is driven solely by ruthless competition, both between corporations and within Enron, leading to his infamous “rank and yank” employee evaluation system, which resulted in massive layoffs and competitive resentment.

This view of life need not have become the dominant one. In 1902 the Russian anarchist Petr Kropotkin published a rebuttal to Huxley and Spencer in his book Mutual Aid. Calling out Spencer by phrase, Kropotkin observed: “If we … ask Nature: ‘who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?’ we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest.” Since that time science has revealed that species practice both mutual struggle and mutual aid. Darwinism, properly understood, gives us a dual disposition of selfishness and selflessness, competitiveness and cooperativeness.

Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, the same day as Abraham Lincoln, who also struggled to reconcile our binary natures in his first inaugural address on the eve of the Civil War: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Riding the Crest of the Unknown --by Dada

You know little about yourself -– the hidden motives and blind spots, where thought actually takes its shape, where desire is subtly formed. You are not aware of the origin of thought. You recognize thought only when it comes out with its thrust in readiness for action. You know how to choose between thoughts. But you never know the real nature and basic structure of thought.

[…]

You will have to look within to find out and understand that mechanism which chooses and discriminates. How do you choose, and why do you choose? Who and what is the thing that chooses? And what is the basis for choice?

Can you take a close look at this mechanism of choice, which is based on wishful thinking, on habits, tradition and fear?

When you perceive the limitations of desires, choices, and habits, and thus come back within, you suddenly discover in your inner sanctuary a new pulse of sensitivity: uncommitted aloof energy.

What will happen if there is no choice, if this energy is allowed to function freely? Perhaps this energy, when free and on its own, will discover a new spontaneity, an expression of choiceless action, of natural internal intelligence. In that spontaneity you have no thought, no choice. It is a positive movement of inner sensitivity, which is feelingly attentive to everything around.

When you are intensely sensitive and watchful to everything within and without, you begin to see, sense and hear more sharply and closely, without thought.

This means you become alert. You become awake, sensitive and alive. You see and feel without any will of thought. Such a state of alert watchfulness, that state of choiceless perception, which is mere attention and anonymous existence, is meditation.

[…]

In meditation, there is freedom from time. Such timelessness is an invitation to the supreme, to the immaculate that resides beyond the mind.

There one remains in the present, merged with the flow of the timeless, riding the crest of the unknown, where all the seekings and choices of the mind come to an end.

--Dada

Dawkins v. Collins Debate by Gary J. Whittenberger

“God Vs. Science” was the featured debate in the November 13, 2006 issue of Time magazine between well-known scientists Dr. Francis Collins, who is a Christian, and Dr. Richard Dawkins, who is an atheist. The article reported a lively exchange between these two scientific heavyweights who answered questions from a moderator about various controversies involving religion and science. Skeptics and believers alike should read the original article. However, this essay will summarize the important points of the Time article and offer skeptical commentary.

In the first exchange, Dawkins and Collins apparently agreed that the proposition “God exists” is either true or false. Dawkins indicated that science is appropriate to the task of answering the question, but Collins disagreed: “From my perspective, God cannot be completely contained within nature, and therefore God’s existence is outside of science’s ability to really weigh in.”

Collins started on the wrong foot by doing a little question begging; he assumed God’s existence from the outset without presenting any evidence for the inference. But he also left the backdoor open for science to weigh in on God’s existence. By saying that “God cannot be completely contained within nature,” he implied that God can be partly contained within nature, which makes God open to scientific analysis. On the other hand, Collins implied that God is partly contained outside nature. Since we are part of nature, how could we ever get outside of it to see that there is anything on the other side? It is common for religious apologists like Collins to talk about things “outside nature” or “the supernatural,” but they always seem to fall short in presenting any evidence that anything “supernatural” exists. By inventing a category called “supernatural” and relegating hypothetical things to it, they apparently hope to protect those things from the requirement of evidence.

Dawkins indicated that before the theory of evolution it was thought that the idea of God was required to explain the complexity, purpose, beauty, and elegance of living things. But the theory of evolution showed that the God hypothesis was unnecessary for the explanation. Collins responded by saying that a God, being “outside of nature” and therefore “outside of space and time,” could have designed and activated evolution itself at the moment of his creation of the universe. Collins fails to consider all the consequences of inventing a realm or a being “outside of nature.” One important feature of nature is its orderliness. If God were “outside of nature,” wouldn’t he be “outside of orderliness”? If so, then this would preclude him from having all the wonderful behavioral tendencies, such as perfect goodness, which are often ascribed to him. Collins is fond of saying that God is “outside of space and time.” What does this mean? Does it make any sense to say that something exists outside space and time? When we apply the word “exists” to something, don’t we mean that we can observe it or its effects in space and time? Have we ever observed anything outside space and time? Collins seems to be caught in the quicksand of contradiction. Even if one entertains for a moment the odd notion that God could exist “outside time,” this seems to lead to a conclusion that he couldn’t do anything, including the particularly spectacular act attributed to him, i.e. creating the universe.

Time is the measure of change. If there is no time, there is no change. If there is no change, there is no action. If there is no action, there is no creation. If God were to exist outside of time, he would be impotent to do anything at all! By insisting that God exists “outside of nature,” Collins nearly makes his supernatural compartment so small that there isn’t enough room for God.

In response, Dawkins indicated that it would be odd if God chose to create humans through a 14-billion-year process of evolution. Collins responded by saying that this roundabout way of producing humans would not be an odd course of action for a God not having the purpose of making “his intention absolutely obvious to us.” Collins postulates a sort of subtle God who doesn’t want to give us too much information about his existence. Responding further to Dawkins, Collins said “If it suits him to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation?” What would be so wrong with God’s “posting obvious road signs”? Collins implies the answer, i.e. by doing so, God would simply be forcing us to believe in him!

Collins seems to endorse the dubious notion that giving clear unambiguous information to people would be forcing them to take a certain course of action. If we were to emulate the God whom Collins envisions, we would dispense with any “obvious road signs” and would withhold clear information from adolescents about the connection between smoking cigarettes and getting lung cancer so that they wouldn’t be forced to forgo smoking. Rather than addressing the subtle God that Collins imagines, Dawkins challenges the traditional God. He is certainly correct that the inefficiency of evolution, not to mention its “errors of design,” is inconsistent with the traditional idea of God as an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent being. This traditional kind of God would be more likely to operate through Creationism, but this hypothesized mode of operation is not supported by the evidence of biology, genetics, geology, and cosmology.

Collins and Dawkins then offered their differing views on the “fine-tuning” of our universe. According to this idea, if any of a half dozen of the “physical constants” of our universe had been just slightly different in value from what it actually is, then life as we know it, including human life, would not exist. The terminology gets a little confusing here. How can something that is a constant be different from what it is? When physicists and cosmologists talk about a “physical constant,” they mean a physical factor which has a certain value (represented by a particular number) which is constant throughout all times and places in our universe but which might possibly vary across different universes, if there were other universes. A physical constant would have the same value throughout any given universe, but might vary from one universe to another.

Dawkins proposed two possible explanations for the values of the physical constants we find in our universe. One is that these constants couldn’t be any different from what they are; they simply are what they are. The other is that our universe is just one of a very large population of universes. Within this great mulitverse environment, there are bound to be some universes that have the physical constants at just the right values to support the development of life, and we find ourselves in one of them. Collins dealt with the improbability of the physical constants, life, and human life by suggesting that a super-being selected the physical constants to be what they are. God “tuned” the universe to make life possible. In supporting his own explanation, Collins ignored the first hypothesis mentioned by Dawkins and attempted to dismiss the second. He said that the application of Occam’s razor leads him to favor the God-as-tuner hypothesis. Dawkins responded by saying that the God hypothesis, although not impossible, is actually more improbable than the universe which it is designed to explain. Nevertheless, he advocated keeping an open mind when he said “It’s an honest scientific quest to discover where this apparent improbability comes from.”

Although Dawkins seems to present the two best currently available alternatives to Collins’ God hypothesis to explain the life-enabling values of the physical constants of our universe, he and Collins both seem to accept without any skepticism the proposition that our universe is improbable. But how can they just assume this? In my opinion, they do this through a misapplication of probability theory. In the debate they used the “gravitational constant” as an example. They correctly noted that if the gravitational constant (G) were different by one part in a hundred million million, then life, as we know it, would not be possible in our universe. One can imagine a range of values from X to Y, within which G is included (X≤G≤Y) and within which life is possible in our universe. Conversely, one can imagine a set of values outside the range of X to Y (i.e. Y) for which life is not possible in our universe. Dawkins and Collins jump to the conclusion that, since the former range of values is so small compared to the latter set of values, our universe must be really rare or improbable.

Not only do they ignore the idea that some other kind of life (“life as we do not know it”) might be possible outside the X to Y range and the idea that there is an infinite number of values between X and Y for which life might be possible in our universe, more importantly, they also assume that they know something very important about a population of universes. In order to conclude that a particular item with some feature is improbable, one must know at least two facts about the population from which the item is drawn as a sample. One must know how many items with the feature are in the population and how many items without the feature are in that same population (or alternatively, how many items altogether are in the population). One can then draw valid inferences about the probabilities of different samples. The problem is that neither Dawkins nor Collins nor anyone else knows these facts about any possible population of universes from which our particular one might have been drawn as a sample.

In fact, we do not know that any other universes exist at all! Without knowledge of other universes, Dawkins and Collins misuse probability theory to conclude that our universe is rare. Because they start with an unwarranted assumption, their further speculations along these lines can’t go very far. Even if we knew that a universe supportive of life was improbable, which we don’t know, purposeful selection among possible universes (the God hypothesis) is a worse explanation of our particular universe than is random selection.

More must be said about Collins’ contention that the application of Occam’s razor supports the God hypothesis over the multiverse hypothesis. It doesn’t. The God hypothesis is less parsimonious than the multiverse hypothesis for two reasons:

1. it invents a totally new type of entity, a supernatural being “outside time and space,” which is not necessary with the latter hypothesis, and
2. it leads to the classic problem of infinite regress. If there must be something outside our universe, i.e. God, to explain the existence of our universe, then there must be something outside of God, i.e. “Z,” to explain God. Then something is needed to explain “Z,” ad infinitum.

At one point in the debate Collins said that those who interpret Genesis in a literal way reach conclusions at odds with the findings of science, especially on the age of the Earth and the way in which species are related. Alluding to St. Augustine and commenting on the book of Genesis, Collins said “It was not intended as a science textbook. It was intended as a description of who God was, who we are and what our relationship is supposed to be with God.” It is just as likely or more likely that the writer of Genesis intended his narrative to be an accurate account of what happened during creation than that he intended his narrative to be metaphorical, figurative, or allegorical. Collins is able to avoid the conclusion that the Bible is very likely not the “word of God” by adopting a nonliteral interpretation. Dawkins suggested that in defending evolution from his fundamentalist colleagues Collins was simply having an in-house quarrel, something he should just avoid.

The debate then turned to a discussion of miracles. The Time moderator asked: “Dr. Collins, the Resurrection is an essential argument of Christian faith, but doesn’t it, along with the virgin birth and lesser miracles, fatally undermine the scientific method?” It would have been better had he phrased his questions the other way around and asked if the scientific method undermines or throws off the claims of the Resurrection, the virgin birth, and other miracles. Nevertheless, Collins responded that if one accepts God’s existence, then it is not unreasonable to expect that God might occasionally intervene in the world in a miraculous way, and that if one accepts that Jesus was divine then the Resurrection is “not a great logical leap.” But these are big “ifs,” and although Collins tries to show that they are plausible, he offers no good evidence to show that they are probable.

The debaters expressed different views on the origin of altruistic feelings and behavior. Collins said that there is a good explanation for some altruism; it either involves helping family members who share our DNA or it involves helping others whom we expect to help us later in return. But he said that there is not a good naturalistic explanation for altruism of the type exhibited by people such as Oskar Schindler who provided safety to Jews during the reign of the Nazis. It appears that people sometimes risk their lives and in the process also their genes in order to help strangers from whom they have no expectations of help in return. Collins implied that this altruism is a sign of God’s existence and a gift from him. Dawkins asserted that altruism in these cases is a kind of carry-over from ancient times when altruism had survival value for people living in small clans. Going beyond altruism, Collins then pointed to the existence of “moral law” or the “absolutes … of good and evil” within the human species as evidence for the existence of God. This morality among humans is supposed to show that beyond just being a creator of the universe, God cares about us. Dawkins responded that good and evil don’t exist as independent entities but that good and bad things simply happen to people.

Collins’ “moral law” argument is another variation on the “God of the Gaps” theme. If science doesn’t yet have a complete description of a phenomenon, then there must be a super-being behind the scenes who is responsible for whatever is in the gaps. A big problem with this approach is that it tends to put a damper on further investigation. Besides that, Collins has an obligation to present a positive case for God’s existence and not just rely on the current apparent weaknesses of rival hypotheses. Collins’ idea of a “moral law” is premature and far too rigid when one considers the variability in moral rules across different geographic areas, cultures, ethnicities, and religions. There are moral principles because humans are constantly deciding on how they should behave, especially towards each other, and there are some commonalities in these moral principles, but there is hardly a “moral law.” In fact, the absence of a “moral law,” a universally agreed upon set of moral rules, is more compatible with God’s nonexistence than with his existence. Wouldn’t an all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good God have revealed a universal moral code to all peoples from the very beginning of our species and reinforced it with booster training sessions each generation?

When he tried to explain why he supports the opening of new stem cell lines, in contrast to a great many other religious people, Collins presented a confusing, almost incoherent discussion of the relationship of faith and reason: “Faith is not the opposite of reason. Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation.” Part of the difficulty here is that “faith” has several different meanings and unfortunately Collins isn’t clear about which meaning he intends. “Faith” may refer to a religion or worldview, as in “My faith is Islam.” It may refer to an attitude of trust or confidence, as in “I have faith in my physician.” Or it may refer to believing propositions without evidence or out of proportion to the available evidence. It is this latter meaning that goes against Collins’ platitude that “Faith is not the opposite of reason.” Reason involves believing propositions on the basis of evidence or in proportion to the available evidence. Thus, if not strictly the opposite of one another, faith and reason are certainly incompatible. And how does adding revelation to the mix help at all? Revelation is not a separate way of knowing immune from the light of reason. One must still look at the evidence to evaluate a claim that a “holy book” contains “revelations” from a supreme being.

In his concluding remarks Collins indicated that he is interested in many “why” questions for which he believes answers may not come from science but from the “spiritual realm.” In his concluding remarks Dawkins indicated his doubt that the future discoveries of science would support any of the beliefs of the traditional religions, beliefs that he regards as parochial, but nevertheless worthy of some respect. And on that conciliatory note, the debate was concluded.

Who won the debate? From the perspective of style or mode of expression, perhaps Collins won. At times, Dawkins seemed to come across as a bit testy and abrasive. He not only referred to fundamentalists as “clowns,” but several times he accused Collins of presenting “cop outs.” Collins, on the other hand, seemed more self-assured and gentlemanly in his interpersonal style. From the perspective of content or validity of argument, Dawkins won the debate hands-down. He made many points that Collins seemed helpless to rebut. Collins failed to show that he has found a satisfactory conciliation between religion and science, between faith and reason, or even that such a project is possible. Overall, the debate provided useful insights into the currently hot, but perennial issue of science versus religion.

Investigating Untrue Thoughts --by Byron Katie

I have never experienced a stressful feeling that wasn’t caused by attaching to an untrue thought. Behind every uncomfortable feeling, there’s a thought that isn’t true for us. "The wind shouldn’t be blowing." "My husband should agree with me." We have a thought that argues with reality, then we have a stressful feeling, and then we act on that feeling, creating more stress for ourselves. Rather than understand the original cause –- a thought –- we try to change our stressful feelings by looking outside ourselves.

[...]

Investigating an untrue thought will always lead you back to who you are. It hurts to believe you are other than who you are, to live any story other than happiness. If you put your hand into the fire, does anyone have to tell you to move it? Do you have to decide? No: when your hand starts to burn, it moves. You don’t have to direct it; the hand moves itself. In the same way, once you understand, through inquiry, that an untrue thought causes suffering, you move away from it. Before the thought, you weren’t suffering; with the thought, you’re suffering; when you recognize that the thought isn’t true, again there is no suffering.

[...]

Inquiry is a way to end confusion and to experience internal peace, even in a world of apparent chaos. Above all else, inquiry is about realizing that all the answers we ever need are always available inside us. Inquiry is more than a technique: it brings to life, from deep within us, an innate aspect of our being. When practiced for a while, inquiry takes on its own life within you. It appears whenever thoughts appear, as their balance and mate. This internal partnership leaves you free to live as a kind, fluid, fearless, amused listener, a student of yourself, and a friend who can be trusted not to resent, criticize, or hold a grudge. Eventually, realization is experienced automatically, as a way of life. Peace and joy naturally, inevitably, and irreversibly make their way into every corner of your mind, into every relationship and experience. The process is so subtle that you may not even have any conscious awareness of it. You may only know that you used to hurt and now you don't.

--Byron Katie

Releasing Your Specifications --by Gary Zukav

When you depend entirely upon the ability of your personality to determine what is best for you, you may stand in the way of a richness that is waiting for you. How do you know what the Universe has waiting for you if you take off your restrictions? If you are determined to have your life unfold in a particular way, and none other -– if you have your heart set on using your creativity only to accumulate money, for example -- consider that you build your entire reality around that. The Universe cannot help you in the same way that it can if you are trusting of it, because it can neither overshadow nor penetrate your choice. Yet what if what you are doing is more appropriately regarded in a social sphere rather than an economic one? In other words, what if the enterprise that you seek to develop is more appropriately a way to an avenue that you have not yet recognized? It is now deadlocked because it cannot go down its appropriate path, for you have your hand on a door that you insist upon opening that will go nowhere.

Can you see? Let go of what you think is just reward. Let go. Trust. Create. Be who you are. [...] Take your hands off the steering wheel. Be able to say to the Universe, 'Thy will be done,' and to know it within your intentions. Spend time in this thought. Consider what it means to say, 'Thy will be done,' and allow your life to go into the hands of the Universe completely. The final piece of reaching for authentic power is releasing your own to a higher form of wisdom.

[...]

Try looking at life as a beautifully well organized dynamic. Trust the Universe. Trusting means that the circumstance that you are in is working toward your best and most appropriate end. There is no when to that. There is no if to that. It is. Release your specifications ...

--Gary Zukav, From "The Seat of the Soul"

How little we know ourselves! We need limitations and temptations to open our inner selves, dispel our ignorance, tear off disguises, throw down old idols, and destroy false standards. Only by such rude awakenings can we be led to dwell in a place where we are less cramped, less hindered by the ever-insistent External. Only then do we discover a new capacity and appreciation of goodness and beauty and truth.

-- Helen Keller

The Greatest Danger Before You --by Granny D

In the end -- and it will end -- your life will seem to have sped by like a fleeting dream. Much of your story will be the age-old but ever joyful human experience: romance, family, satisfying work, and happy completion. I wish you a great fountain of successes. You will also be provided with all the failures and tragedies necessary to deepen and widen your soul -- sufficient, I hope, to make you wise and forgiving of all human frailties. I pray that these necessary troubles will never long crush your optimism nor your love for this magical life.

The greatest danger before you is this: you live in an age when people would package and standardize your life for you -- steal it from you and sell it back to you at a price. That price is very high.

You have already been selected for this program. You have its credit cards and designer labels already expensively around you. In the months ahead, you will find yourselves working long hours, too exhausted for community life or even good friendships -- too compromised to take a stand against the abuses of the system you serve. A great treadmill has been devised for you, and its operators do not care much if it wears you out or kills you. A system is in place to steal your life from you, if you will let it. Don't let it.

Read, study, meditate and think for yourself. Let your most serious education now commence, if it has not already done so. Refine and hold your own values, and pay the high price necessary to live those values. Decide what is important to you, and hold your ground against all temptations and tortures. From the pink granite of your own values, build a fortress against the world's ethical compromises, or you will soon be among those dead of eye who stand next to you in elevators but who are not alive. Don't let them steal your life. This is the only warning you will receive.

--Granny D

Un-learning the Ways of Un-love --by Swami Chaitanya Keerti

When you are absolutely happy in your aloneness, when the other is not a need, it is then that you are capable of love. If the other is your need, you can only exploit, manipulate, dominate but cannot love.

Because you depend on the other, possessiveness arises -- out of fear. "Who knows? The other is with me today; tomorrow he/she may not be with me. Who knows about the next moment?" [...] Out of that fear of the future, you become very possessive. You create bondage around the person you think you love.

But love cannot create a prison. If love creates a prison, then what is left for hatred to do? Love brings freedom -- love gives freedom. It is non-possessiveness. But that is possible only if you have known a totally different quality of love, one not of need but of sharing.

Love is sharing of overflowing joy. You are too full of joy, you cannot contain it, you have to share it. Then there is poetry, then there is something tremendously beautiful which is not of this world, something that comes from the beyond.

Often I say, learn the art of love. What I really mean is: learn the art of removing all that hinders love. It is a negative process. It is like digging a well -- you go on removing layers of earth, stones, rocks and then suddenly there is water. The water was always there as an undercurrent. When you remove all barriers, the water is available. So with love. Love is the undercurrent of your being. It is flowing, but there are many rocks, much earth to be removed. That's what I mean when I say: learn the art of love. It is really not learning love but un-learning the ways of un-love.

--Swami Chaitanaya Keerti

This World is Perfect --by Swami Vivekananda

Is it not a blasphemy to say that the world needs our help? We cannot deny that there is much misery in it; to go out and help others is, therefore, the best thing we can do, although in the long run, we shall find that helping others is only helping ourselves. […]

Life is good or evil according to the state of mind in which we look at it, it is neither by itself. Fire, by itself, is neither good nor evil. When it keeps us warm we say, "How beautiful is fire!" When it burns our fingers, we blame it. Still, in itself it is neither good nor bad. According as we use it, it produces in us the feeling of good or bad; so also is this world. It is perfect. By perfection is meant that it is perfectly fitted to meet its ends. We may all be perfectly sure that it will go on beautifully well without us, and we need not bother our heads wishing to help it.

Yet we must do good; the desire to do good is the highest motive power we have, if we know all the time that it is a privilege to help others. […]

[And] one must first know how to work without attachment, then one will not be a fanatic. When we know that this world is like a dog's curly tail and will never get straightened, we shall not become fanatics. If there were no fanaticism in the world, it would make much more progress than it does now. It is a mistake to think that fanaticism can make for the progress of mankind. On the contrary, it is a retarding element creating hatred and anger, and causing people to fight each other, and making them unsympathetic. We think that whatever we do or possess is the best in the world, and what we do not do or possess is of no value. So, always remember the instance of the curly tail of the dog whenever you have a tendency to become a fanatic. You need not worry or make yourself sleepless about the world; it will go on without you. When you have avoided fanaticism, then alone will you work well. It is the level-headed man, the calm man, of good judgment and cool nerves, of great sympathy and love, who does good work and so does good to himself.

--Swami Vivekananda, From "The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda," Vol. 1