What is beauty? In the last two weeks I made the case that morality - our definitions of what is "good" - can ultimately be anchored to the natural world by recognizing that morals must be rules that help all of life survive over the long term. They could not be anything else or these rules themselves would not survive. Ethics therefore have an objective measure - one that may be difficult to know over a long timescale filled with immense complexity - but an objective measure nonetheless. What about aesthetics then? The longstanding and pervasive view that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" seems to suggest that aesthetics something different, that aesthetics is a subjective field filled with personal judgments from sensitive souls set inside an influencing landscape of cultural relativism. When you travel around the world or look at the development of art through history, you see very different representations of beauty: Vogue's rail thin models, Gauguin's plump Polynesians, Japanese Zen gardens, Jackson Pollock's paint drippings, a delicate rose, a powerful stallion, a touching novel, an elegant spreadsheet. (Or am I the only one who has ever exclaimed, "That's beautiful!" during an annual budget meeting?) The obvious question arises - how can these beautiful things have anything in common? At its heart though, beauty is just a word we use to name a quality that we like, that moves us, that pleases us. If we've already defined good as "that which promotes the long term survival of life," how can we really like something that is bad, that is against that? Does beauty, does aesthetics, like morality, like good, have its roots in the natural world? Before I state my case as to why I think this is true, let's look at a few beautiful or ugly pictures.

What does this photo make you think of? Vivid colors? Cool temperatures? The fire of life? Dying leaves? Raking? Shortening daylight? Death and decay? Schmaltzy sentiment? Approaching holidays? Shallow depths of field? Derivative and ubiquitous picture blurring? All of this and more? Now tell me, is this photo beautiful or ugly?

And what about this one? Strong chin? Excellent realism? State propaganda? Revolutionary ideas? Mass murder?

Chaos? Impossible passage? Mangrove swamps as life's nursery? Rich soils dense with plants? Mosquitoes? Sun dappled vistas? Dark corners? Deadly snakes? Tasty fish?

Austere landscapes? Safe views? High ground in the distance? Hot and dry? Tasty minerals? Lack of shade? Nowhere to hide?

All four of these pictures - like most everything in life - have elements of good and bad within them. It is up to us to focus on the beautiful qualities that please us or the ugly characteristics that do not. In my Evolutionary Philosophy though, I point out what these beautiful and ugly things have in common.

What promotes the long-term survival of life? Knowledge. Health. Progress. Stability. Exploration. Efficiency. Brightness. Abundance. Comfort. Security. Fecundity. Clarity. These are beautiful and good. What threatens the long-term survival of life? Ignorance. Disease. Stagnation. Conflict. Chaos. Isolation. Waste. Darkness. Scarcity. Discomfort. Vulnerability. Barrenness. Obscurity. These are ugly and bad. Objects have many qualities. Depending on the context, focus, and cognitive appraisal of the observer, objects can be either beautiful or ugly. This is why the idea of beauty is objective to general reality, but the beauty of an object is subjective to the specific observer.

Just as morals grow in depth as timespans lengthen, beauty can be said to deepen the more it endures. Even if you believe it is better to burn out than to fade away, those are not the only two choices. Best of all is to burn strongly, providing more and more warmth as the decades or centuries roll by.

So ethics and aesthetics are intrinsically linked and objectively based on what promotes our survival. Once again, the evolutionary perspective yields deep understandings about ourselves and the world we live in. Isn't that a beautiful thing?

The iconic kangaroo. I loved seeing and just enjoying the movements of these cute animals when I lived in Australia, but besides their novelty, they always made me think of other themes from our past as well. Their newness to me reminded me of the European discovery of Australia and its strange animals in 1770 by Captain James Cook. When Charles Darwin visited Australia towards the tail end of his five year expedition aboard the HMS Beagle (1831-1836), the new branch of mammals found on this isolated continent helped firmly solidify the theory of evolution that Darwin had been contemplating. This would, of course, have major implications on our understanding of the history of the world and our place within it, but for much of Australia, this knowledge came too late after we had already irrevocably altered its giant but fragile ecosystem. Now, our evolutionary and ecological understandings make us tread much more cautiously around endemic species in isolated habitats, but did we care about that at all when red foxes were introduced in 1845 for the purposes of sport hunting? Or when Thomas Austin released 24 rabbits, also for the pleasure of hunting, in 1859? Were there any moral attitudes in societies at that time that looked out for anything larger than the tribe? Or was nature still under the dominion of man, something to just be ruled over by a benevolent or iron-fisted outsider? It's hard to say what was in the minds of men at that time, but it is certain that we know better now. Or at least we should.

Last week I discussed how morals are nothing more than rules for survival. If they contradicted this purpose, if they were rules that encouraged behavior that led to extinctions, then those rules would necessarily die out too. But through trial and error over tens of thousands of years, we've come up with a fairly robust set of rules and norms that have led to the booming survival of our species. We have been so successful at developing rules that work for us that in fact we are now in danger of becoming victims of that success. Our continued survival and expansion now threatens the survival of many other forms of life that we depend on. And luckily, some of us have noticed. Our morals, our beliefs about what is right and wrong, are changing and expanding to include new rules about our behavior towards things like recycling, animal poaching, energy conservation, wetlands protection, national parks, etc. These beliefs, these morals, did not exist 300 years ago. What changed? How do our morals evolve?

The study of life is known as biology. Within that field, like much of the rest of the world, the areas of study have subdivided and subdivided into narrower and narrower points of view. With this division of focus, with this division of the mental labor of academics, two things arose: a great increase in the production of knowledge about life, but also a great decrease in the perspective any one person has about the entire field. This results in the same "mental mutilation" of the soul of man that Adam Smith warned about in The Wealth of Nations when he first discussed the division of labor as an economic theory. This doesn't just apply to the knowledge of pin-makers (to use Adam Smith's prime example), but even in the case at hand to knowledge of life in all of its forms. This is a great danger. In his landmark 1998 book Consilience, the entomologist / zoologist / biologist E.O. Wilson issued a clarion call to find a way to unite these biological sciences, to find a way to bring broad wisdom back into a field that like so many others had become deep and separated into narrow silos. (Really, this consilience is required across all of our human endeavors - that is what an Evolutionary Philosophy strives for - but since we're just discussing ethics and morality as rules for the survival of life, we can just focus in this essay on joining together knowledge about life.) The disparate fields were at that time generally divided into two camps: the "skin ins" and the "skin outs." The skin ins look at the biological processes that occur within a single organism - the chemistry, the molecules, and the cells that churn away below the surface. The skin outs look at individuals as a whole and the interactions between individual organisms - between societies of similar individuals, between separate species who share an ecology, and how species and ecologies adapt over evolutionary timescales. The way E.O. Wilson proposed to unite these fields of biology was simply to recognize their dependence on one another across a continuum of time and space from the smallest of those units to the largest. For me, having recognized that morals are merely rules for the survival of life, this means that when considering a philosophy of morality, you must go hand in hand across this continuum with the actual study of life. Accordingly, I wrote the following piece of philosophy about this new layer of consilience:

According to the magnitude of time and space adopted for analysis, the basic divisions of biology from bottom to top are as follows: biochemistry, molecular biology, cellular biology, organismic biology, sociobiology, ecology, and evolutionary biology. I believe that morals can also be understood on the same timeline as these biological scales. For example, no real moral judgments are made at the bottom of these timelines at biochemical, molecular, and cellular levels because our bodies just react to stimulus the way they do and there's not much we can do to control or judge reactions such as metabolism, blinking, and neuronal firing. At the scale of the organism though, we have not only instantaneous reactions, but also actions separated by a lifetime, and everything in between. With free will over this time horizon, organisms can act in ways that are dangerous or harmful to themselves. To compensate, we have also developed emotional responses and morals to guide our actions along healthier paths. Some of those responses are immediate and innate - fear of heights, the thrill of the chase, disgust over rotten food, the sadness of loss, the joy of gain. These are understood by simply studying morals at the biological level of the survival of the organism. Some emotional responses take time to develop though and guide actions focused on the longer term, such as empathy, altruism, and justice. These longer-term morals can be seen to come into play over the time horizon of sociobiology. Social species have learned the power of group cooperation to beat out even the best individuals, and how creation of a society requires its own set of emotions - some innate, some taught through culture - and the enforcement of short-term individual sacrifices for the long-term benefit of the group. Animals have developed emotions, morals, hierarchies, and institutions to help reinforce these long-term focused behaviors, but they still face occasional conflict with their short-term desires that were developed earlier in the evolution of the species. How an animal handles that conflict can be said to determine its character and wisdom. While genes and environment combine to mold the personality of any animal, humans have also developed reason, which gives us another way to control our emotions and define our personality. Reason gives us a higher level of free will to choose which emotions guide our moral choices. Because of this, humans are now uniquely in the process of evolving morals for the next steps on the biological scale - the ones of ecology and evolutionary biology. Through the success of our species, we now have unprecedented ability to impact the ecosystems around us and the genes within us. We can also use our scientific tools and historical records to see and understand those impacts over timelines that are far longer than generations can remember. We must cement our sociobiological morals, but the evolution of our morals to understand right and wrong behavior over longer timescales is exactly what is necessary for the species to survive over those timescales. We must learn to keep thinking in the longest of long-terms or face extinction over the short to medium term. As morality evolves, this is where new rules will develop.

This brings us back to the story of the kangaroos and the development of new morals over the last 300 years. We are growing more and more aware of our need to look after and cooperate with all of life for longer and longer timelines if we are to have any hope of survival for ourselves as a species in general or for our successive generations as individuals. The more we can learn from the sciences that fall within the realms of biology, sociology, ecology, and evolution, the more we can inform the norms and rules of society that make up our morality and ethical systems. We will still require great wisdom to learn how to balance the competing needs of individuals, societies, species, and ecosystems over the short term of individual lives and the long term of species evolution. We will still make mistakes balancing these hard choices. But the sooner we recognize that the survival of life is the goal of morality and the life sciences can give us more information about what actions promote that survival, the less mistakes we will make and the more our morals will actually work. This is the answer to how science can, does, and will continue to play a role in morality.

In 532 AD, Emperor Justinian had Hagia Sofia constructed in Constantinople - the "new" capital of the Roman Empire. It was intended to be "the greatest church in all of Christendom" and it was for almost 1,000 years until Mehmed the Conqueror took the city for the Ottoman Empire in 1453 and changed the building into a mosque. The gold icons of saints were plastered over and arabic inscriptions from the Koran were hung on the walls instead. After a mere 500 years in this condition, the Ottoman Empire fell as a result of World War I. A few years later in 1935, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first president of the secular Republic of Turkey, transformed the building into the public museum that it is today with both Christian and Muslim symbols on display side by side. During this entire history, the rules of society as dictated by religion came and went. They also evolved and changed with the times. So if religion, which professes to have the permanent and righteous rules of morality, can come and go over the ages with the ebbs and flows of empires, where does morality really come from? Is there some other more permanent source for it?

In my last three posts (The Evolution of God, The Arguments for God, and The World Without Religion), I covered the stance on religion that I take as part of my Evolutionary Philosophy. To me, religion is clearly something we need to evolve beyond and leave behind as a relic of our superstitious, pre-scientific society. But where do we go next? What rules for morality can we come up with to replace the ancient books written by ignorant ancients? If those rules have lasted this long, shouldn't they be respected? In the ongoing journey to know thyself, it's time to turn my attention to Ethics and Morality. Here are a few things I've written about that subject:

Morality is a system of ideas about right and wrong conduct. A traditional view of social scientists has been that morality is a construct, and thus culturally relative, but cross-cultural studies of ethical beliefs find six foundations for morality: 1) harm/care; 2) fairness/reciprocity; 3) liberty; 4) ingroup/loyalty; 5) authority/respect; 6) purity/sanctity. These are merely rules to promote survival. How else would these rules survive? In essence, it is immoral to do something that is harmful to the long-term survival of life. Morality is relative simply when different cultures have different beliefs about which actions are right for the long term. Some beliefs are based on traditions and myths, others are based on scientifically discovered knowledge, and others are still being formed as the evidence comes in. We must use rational knowledge to inform our morals; otherwise we risk actions that imperil the species.

This is a key point that I want to reemphasize. If you believe that morals are simply rules that a society has invented either through formal religions or informal customs, then of course moral relativism will be the overarching conclusion you reach about how to evaluate moral systems around the world, and once they become relative, they become ungrounded, meaningless, mere traditions to either follow blindly or subvert. If, on the other hand, you believe morals are universal laws handed down to us from a god, then you either believe your god has the right rules, or you believe that the one true god is basically handing down the same rules to people all over the world and we imperfect humans have just not figured out how to reconcile the differences in their translations (from a god's language or from each other's). As I pointed out in my essays about God and Religion though, these "universal" rules of religions are at odds with each other. They have been for thousands of years, and they have spawned countless conflicts ranging from personal arguments to international wars.

If, however, we were to step back from these relativistic or religious views of morality and look not just at the rules of morality themselves, but the overall purpose of what those rules do for us as individuals and as a society, it becomes abundantly clear that systems of morality are just rules to promote cooperation and stay alive as a group in the long run. Thou shalt not kill? Well that's an obvious one. Don't eat pork or shellfish? Prudent advice before refrigeration and cooking temperatures were understood. Make a pilgrimage to Mecca? Bond with our group and cooperate with us. Incest taboos, love thy neighbor, walk a mile in their shoes, don't tread on me, the first rule of fight club, wash your hands after you pee - all of these are rules to help the survival rates of the group that obeys them. They cannot be anything else. Once this basic fact is recognized, the true basis for morality becomes obvious. In fact, we start to see it in other species that are trying to stay alive as well.

Field studies show the natural emergence in the animal kingdom of ethics and morality. Animals live in groups because the opportunities for survival and reproduction are much better in groups than alone. All social animals have to modify or restrain their behaviors for group living. Highly social mammals such as primates and elephants have been known to exhibit traits that were once thought to be uniquely human, like empathy and altruism. While other primates may not possess free will over their morality in the human sense, they do possess some traits that would have been necessary for the early stages of the evolution of morality. Anthropologist Barbara King notes that these traits include high intelligence, a capacity for symbolic communication, a sense of social norms, realization of "self," and a concept of continuity. Where these basic personality traits are held in common, the basics of sociobiological morality are also shared. As listed by science historian Michael Shermer, these include: attachment and bonding, cooperation and mutual aid, sympathy and empathy, direct and indirect reciprocity, altruism and reciprocal altruism, conflict resolution and peacemaking, deception and deception detection, community concern and caring about what others think about you, and awareness of and response to the social rules of the group. These pre-moral sentiments evolved in primate societies as a method of restraining individual selfishness and building more cooperative groups. Humans evolved to enforce their society’s moral codes much more rigorously with rewards, punishments, and reputation building. We are more successful at cooperation because of this.

Knowing now about these roots of morality - as evidenced by the recent field studies observing other animals exhibiting moral behavior - it becomes quite incontestable that morality predates religion.

Religion emerged after morality and built upon our natural needs for self-preservation and cooperation. Religion expanded the social scrutiny of individual behavior to include supernatural gods. By adding all-seeing ancestors, spirits, and gods to the mental world, humans discovered an effective strategy for restraining selfishness and building more cooperative groups. The adaptive value of religion would have enhanced group survival, thus allowing religion itself to survive. Now that we have come to an understanding of the natural basis for our morals, and learned to use reason to control our emotions, we no longer need to teach beliefs in supernatural gods to guide our behavior. Cooperation is its own reward. Transgressions will be punished. We have a fuller, more justifiable belief system for our morality.

What do you think? Is morality just a set of rules to help us survive? What if they weren't? Would they continue to survive? Wouldn't natural selection select out immoral rules of behavior? And if this is all that morals are, can science help us find better rules for morality? Next week, I'll tackle the ways in which I believe science can and will help us do exactly that. These are exciting times to be alive and thinking about philosophy!

Finally, in the quest to know thyself, I've come to the end of my thoughts on god and religion. In the last two weeks, I pointed out the historical evolution of God, and then all the arguments for god we as a society have made - all the rational and irrational ones. Reviewing these facts leads to the inescapable conclusions that atheism (the rejection of an invented theism) is the only rational answer to the question of god's existence, and that because of this, religion will one day go extinct. For me, that day can't come soon enough. Life has been pretty glorious for me since I've given up on god. The world makes more sense. I accept the bad blows of fate with more equanimity because there's no one else to blame and no "mysterious ways" to try to decipher. I feel tremendous kinship with my fellow atheists who know we are all we have for each other in this universe. I live with more purpose and determination and curiosity because I know it's all up to me and this life is all that I will ever have. And of course, my Sunday's are now for watching football in my underpants:

Now I know I'm still in the minority on this, and probably will be for another 50 years. (Nones have grown from 5% to 20% in America in the last 50 years - will that trend continue and accelerate with the Internet? Let's hope so.) So while we still must bear the cross of a religious society, we might as well make the best of it. Study the successes of religion. Continue to build the case against it. Strengthen an alternative worldview. These are some of the ideas I have written about doing that:

No evidence for supernatural intervention has ever been found so it is right to dismiss this with great certainty. As we have little understanding for how the universe came to be - why there is something rather than nothing - a belief in a supreme architect is hard to suppress. Now that much of the history of the universe is understood though, the blindness and cruelty of extinction would imply either a blind god or a cruel god. If such a god did exist, it would be better to ignore it and plot against it.

Religion played a part in keeping groups together and making them stronger while the world remained small and unknowable to a pre-scientific society. Religion had its place in the development of successful social groups who believed in something larger and longer lasting than the individual. Religion helped create groups of believers; it created groups of “us.” Unfortunately, the unspoken word behind “us,” is “them.” Religion has been used at times to promote indifference, intolerance, and conquest of “them.” Now that man knows better and needs to come together to solve worldwide problems, religion is a barrier to the unification of the species because of its insistence on the correctness and infallibility of its individual dogmas. Calls for faith in supernatural explanations are harmful to the pursuit of knowledge and self-improvement. Hope for a god is a lifelong frustration when the wishes for the future never come. The positives of religion - building a nurturing community and providing the reason for morality - can best be created elsewhere in a way that is more universal.

Religious people are afraid that with atheism, Dostoyevsky's phrase will describe our world: "without God, everything is permitted." This is not a valid fear. In fact, an examination of our violent history already shows that everything IS permitted. It is up to society alone to punish transgressions. No god has ever testified at a criminal trial or actually smitten evildoers. Atheists have the valid fear: with gods, anything is believable.

Pause for a minute. Look at this picture of the Lake District in the fall, and then continue.

Religious believers cherish the feelings of awe, wonder, and love they get from their shared gratitude for the bounty they believe god has given them. They do not want to live without these feelings. Rational arguments against ancient myths do not make these feelings of awe, wonder, and love go away - nor should they! It is simply better to explain these feelings as coming from an immense universe where life has struggled to produce a cooperative species trying to out-compete death itself. That is a truly awesome past, present, and future we can all believe in.

Amen!

The Hebrew word for "so be it" - the word shouted in agreement at the end of a prayer or sermon - that's the word that seems most appropriate for ending this series of essays about a world without religion.

Amen.

In last week's post, I entered the fray of talking about God and Religion. I gave a quick overview of the history of gods around the world and how they have evolved from numerous systems of pantheistic pagan gods underlying the natural events of the world, all the way through to the handful of monotheistic religions and eastern philosophies that dominate the world today. Can we expect this evolution to continue? Of course - evolution doesn't stop. But I don't think we will move to a universal one-world, one-God, one-Religion faith for all of humanity - not unless an actual voice appeared from the heavens and spoke to us all simultaneously one day. No, a much more likely scenario of where religion will evolve to (and should evolve to) is into ... nothingness. Religion should one day become a hollowed-out ruin like the abbey in the picture above. Why do I think that?

As I said last week, there has never been conclusive proof of a god. We have no evidence of an external being wielding supernatural powers over mankind and the rest of the universe. In all of recorded history over billions of human lifetimes combing through billions of years of evidence in the historical record, we have never found proof of anything to back up this belief in god. All offerings of evidence (and there have been many) have consistently been debunked. Some of us are noticing a pattern here. And with the rise of the information age, the world is becoming more and more skeptical, empirical, and demanding of facts. I believe the convergence of these trends accounts for the steep rise in "nones" when surveys ask people what religion they belong to.

Of course it would be nice to have something out there in the unknown looking down upon us and protecting us from the existential fears we all share. Something to love us and all of our efforts to rage against the death and decay that is an integral part of the constitution of our universe. As living beings, we are compelled to look for ways to stay alive. We seek knowledge and patterns that will help us survive. We rely on an optimistic bias to get up every morning and continue on with the struggle even though we all know the end we are headed towards if 14 billion years of history are to be acknowledged. In a sense, those of us that have been brought to life in this environment have been programmed to feel that the world holds love and meaning for us. If it didn't feel that way to our ancestors, would so many of them have bothered to continue?

And so, we race along in life, pushing the brutal facts of life aside, desperately coming up with argument after argument to prove to our fragile psyches that this world does have meaning, that it is guided by the mysterious hand of a god, that good things happen to us for a reason, and nothing too horrible will ever befall us. Throughout our religious history, we have chiefly constructed 36 rational arguments for the belief in just such a world. Unfortunately for the theologians who have dedicated their lives to this pursuit, better logic has taken all of these rational arguments apart. If you want to take the time to go through all of these arguments, here is a list of them in one of the sections I wrote about for the topic of God and Religion:

Religion has no basis for proof, but the god idea fills a gaping existential void in humanity. It is hard to accept that there is no reason or purpose in the universe. Due to this “will to believe,” religion has endured for centuries. Nothing concrete has been able to fill this amorphous void as well as the amorphous beliefs of religions. Theologians have desperately sought ideas to strengthen the arguments of their flock, but throughout history these arguments for the existence of god have all been knocked down by logic and reasoning. For further details, see the 36 chief arguments for the existence of god as collected by novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein: 1) cosmological argument, 2) ontological argument, 3) argument from design, 4) argument from the big bang, 5) argument from the fine tuning of physical constants, 6) argument from the beauty of physical laws, 7) argument from cosmic coincidences, 8) argument from personal coincidences, 9) argument from answered prayers, 10) argument from a wonderful life, 11) argument from miracles, 12) argument from the hard problem of consciousness, 13) argument from the improbable self, 14) argument from survival after death, 15) argument from the inconceivability of personal annihilation, 16) argument from moral truth, 17) argument from altruism, 18) argument from free will, 19) argument from personal purpose, 20) argument from intolerability of insignificance, 21) argument from the consensus of humanity, 22) argument from the consensus of mystics, 23) argument from holy books, 24) argument from perfect justice, 25) argument from suffering, 26) argument from survival of the Jews, 27) argument from the upward curve of history, 28) argument from prodigious genius, 29) argument from human knowledge of infinity, 30) argument from mathematical reality, 31) argument from decision theory, 32) argument from pragmatism, 33) argument from the unreasonableness of reason, 34) argument from sublimity, 35) argument from the intelligibility of the universe, 36) argument of the abundance of arguments. Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Pascal, William James, Spinoza. Many have tried. All have failed. Turning the 36th argument on its head, the abundance of arguments proves merely the need for humanity to have an explanation. The fact that a religious one cannot be found explains the proliferation of attempts. If there were a valid argument to be made for a god, evolution would have produced it by now.

So much for all of the rational arguments for god. The rest of the arguments then are merely the irrational ones that all essentially boil down to: "god exists, because I feel it to be true." But anyone who has ever had a parent or child or boss or politician tell them, "because I said so," knows that this kind of argument never persuades or holds up over time. Regarding these irrational arguments, and examining them through the lens of evolutionary systems, I wrote the following:

Another way to examine the issue of atheism vs. religion is through the idea that rational thought is a societal system for decision-making. Irrational thought cheats this system. Faith, by definition, is irrational, and as soon as one irrational belief is permitted, all irrational beliefs are allowed. If irrational thought is allowed to win arguments, then the system of rational thought is no longer evolutionarily stable. But clearly, we cannot allow irrational thought to become the norm - that leads to ignorance and the destruction of the species. Irrational thought must not be allowed to win. And yet, irrational thought does win, because it isn't playing the same game. By its own declaration, irrational thought cannot rationally lose an argument. In this way, irrational thought can never be entirely defeated through reason. Perhaps the best we can do in the short term is to stop societal decisions based on irrational beliefs. In the long term, the teaching of rational thought and the benefits of rational thought must be shown to be more attractive to individuals. The tangible, emotional benefits to shedding irrational beliefs must be improved and made better known. Control over one’s emotions, membership in beneficial social groups, better job opportunities, cooperative grants, happiness with life, lasting love - these are all areas where rational thinkers can and must outcompete irrational believers.

This is why I believe the evolution of religion is headed not towards a single surviving composite idea, but is instead heading towards extinction. Rational views are gaining strength to explain more and more of our world in a unified manner. Irrational arguments of religion on the other hand, stop progressing on purpose and stay rooted in their dogmatic texts and beliefs. The irrational views of religions are unable to adapt to the changing environment and become marooned on their own little islands of thought, unable to reach across to other religions and fuse the best of their ideas into a strategy that survives. Eventually and inevitably, sticking points are reached (the primacy of Jesus or Mohammed, the traditions of Hebrews or Hindus, the path to enlightenment from Buddha or L Ron Hubbard) and the members of competing irrational belief systems stay dissuaded and stubbornly hold on to their current irrational beliefs. But like any species or idea that is unable to adapt, it will eventually become unable to survive.

The conditions for knowledge, information, proof, authority, and belief are all changing drastically right before our eyes. After the first Enlightenment, when the invention of the scientific method also changed these conditions, religions that had been entrenched for a thousand years during the medieval middle ages from the 5th to the 15th century all splintered, competed, and adapted. But in the 15th century, the pace of change in society was slow enough that religions managed to survive - partly because early scientific attempts to replace them were too weak. Now though, after several hundred years of strengthening, the rational worldview that I call Evolutionary Philosophy is ready to outcompete religions in this new information environment.

What do you think? Are we seeing another extinction event? Not one of genes, but of memes - an extinction of a piece of our gene-culture co-evolution. If not, why not? But if so, is that ok? Is it finally time for religion to be replaced?