Finding Certainty in a Chaotic Universe: a Method for Truth Detection

"By doubting we come to inquiry; by inquiring we perceive the truth."
-Peter Abelard

Figure 1: Hypothetico-deductive reasoning

There is a simple little mental exercise, known as deductive reasoning, that is quite useful for discovering new things about how the world works. Deductive reasoning works by discovering something new based on two or more facts you already know to be true. If A=B and B=C, then A=C. Deductive reasoning can be performed mentally without evidence from nature to support the argument.  It works quite well for geometry and simple questions. People who spend 8+ hours a day and devout their lives and career to deductive reasoning are called philosophers.

Another, more powerful exercise, known as hypothetico-deductive reasoning, on the other hand, provides an extra step to support new knowledge. It is quite handy when you need to confirm or challenge a belief or claim. People who spend 8+ hours a day and devout their lives and careers to hypothetico-deductive reasoning are called scientists and engineers. There are a lot more scientists and engineers in the world then philosophers.

To make use of hypothetico-deductive reasoning, first start with a central claim and call it the hypothesis. This hypothesis is then used to develop a model or method to test it's validity. Usually this method is in the form of a controlled experiment, but not always (figure 1). Now in most situations, you generally don't start with the hypothesis. You usually need to do some background research to formulate a workable (testable) hypothesis, and now-a-days, convince people to fund your research (figure 2).

Figure 2

If you are a medical researcher and you want to find out if acupuncture induces fertility, you can do an experiment to test it (or to spare yourself the effort and money, you can read about other people who did this experiment already).  These types of controlled experiments can be complicated and expensive, but they generally involve treating to groups of randomly selected patients, one with the treatment to be tested and one with a placebo, and comparing the results.  They yield reliable, objective, and predictable results when done properly.

We don't always have the luxury of conducting controlled experiments, however, so we often have to rely on lesser methods.  If we wanted to know if smoking causes cancer for example, we could not ethically experiment on people, since that would involve randomly subjecting a group of people to take up smoking, but we can use 'observational studies' instead. We can, for example, find a group of people who already smoke and compare their health and their eventual fate with non-smokers.  If we notice that the smokers developing cancer at a higher rate than non-smokers, that would lead us to think that there is a relationship between smoking and cancer. We can not be absolutely sure, however, because there may be a unknown variable that causes cancer as well as drive people to take up smoking: stress, poverty, etc.  We can often make up for the deficiency of a controlled experiment by observing other predictable phenomena that would help support the smoking/cancer connection: laboratory studies on animals or cell cultures, for example. Building support for a claim can and often comes from more then one experimental source. If we know the biochemical mechanism that explains the development of cancer cells from particles in smoke that would help too.

 

Figure 3: Inductive Reasoning

Inductive Reasoning

Sometimes we don't need to use an experiment in the conventional sense, but can merely rely on observations for certain ideas.  We know that white light is a combination of all other colors of light because when white light is passed through a prism, it separates into all other colors of light on the way out, whereas light of one color goes through a prism without changing. Nevertheless, whether we use a controlled experiment or simple observation, we are engaged in a dialogue with nature.  The application of using nature to confirm our idea, or hypothesis, is referred to as empirical evidence, or simply empiricism.

Empiricism plays an even more important role in another type of reasoning known as generalization or argument by analogy.  When you generalize, you are actually engaged in a type of reasoning known as induction, or inductive reasoning (figure 3), that works very differently than the hypothetico-deductive method; in fact, quite the opposite. Whereas in hypothetico-deductive reasoning, you start with an idea and use nature to confirm your idea. In generalization, you start with something in nature, you assume it behaves similar to other things like it, then you classify it with those other similar things or ideas.  You can also use generalization to make predictions about how things will behave if you know their classification. For example, if you find a new animal species that has hair and mammary glands, you can classify it as mammal.  Since it's a mammal, you can predict that it will give birth to live young (if it's female) and is warm-blooded. Generalizing, however doesn't mean you will always be correct; just correct most of the time.  We can, for example, generalize that mammals have teeth and birds have beaks, but if we find a duck-billed platypus, a strange Australian creature with a duck-like beak, you would be wrong to assume it's a bird. It's actually a mammal. Further investigations would reveal that it a mammal that retained many primitive features in it's evolutionary development.

Duck-billed Platypus

Synthesis 

Biological classification is a perfect example of how generalization is liberally employed in the study of nature.  We generalize about other areas of nature as well: chemicals and materials, diseases, stars and planets, subatomic particles, etc. Like the hypothetico-deductive method, it's also a central role in our understanding of nature.  A generalization is kind of like a researched hypothesis. Both are used to build more knowledge from data.

Figure 4: The Central Dogma of Science

It is also quite convenient that the two methods are very similar.  The steps are essentially identical, except we are basically going in opposite directions. In hypothetico-deductive reasoning, we use an idea to predict a behavior in nature.  In generalizations, we observe behaviors in nature to generalize about an idea (many of types of creatures behave similar enough to create categories like mammals, birds, etc.).  The flow of information is also cyclical in both cases.  The results of a experiment creates more knowledge and the knowledge created by generalization allows us to predict the appearance and/or behavior of nature (figure 5).

Figure 5: Stream-lined Central Dogma of Science

What Lowly Artisans Taught Elite Philosophers

One of the first persons, that we know about, that described and wrote about these ideas was the Greek philosopher Plato. He was one of the people who wrote about, explored and taught the systems of obtaining knowledge through philosophical methods, although he may have been summarizing the ideas of an earlier philosopher by the name of Paramedies. Episteme was an ancient Greek word that roughly translates to knowledge. Episteme, however, wasn't any kind of knowledge, but rather a specific type of reliable, accurate knowledge that comes from logical contemplation or logos. Another type of knowledge was what the Greeks called Gnosis. This type of knowledge came from experience or emotion; from 'the gut'. It's generally considered to be less reliable but not necessarily wrong. Note also that episteme can be wrong as well, as when your logic is faulty. Aristotle for example 'reasoned' that the earth was the center of the universe, a vacuum cannot exist, men were more intelligent then women, and Greeks were the smartest people in the world, among numerous other errors.

Although the Greek philosophers loved philosophy, they never really did completely understand the hypothetico-deductive method that was to be the basis of modern science. One of the major reason Aristotle and other Greek philosophers were often wrong is because they distrusted nature.  Philosophical contemplation, for the Greeks, was a mental and spiritual activity.  It connected humans with the perfect, quintessential, and spiritual elements of heaven; the imperfect world of nature corrupted this purification ritual. Luckily though, not everyone reasoned the 'proper' way. Plato and his mentor, Paramedies, advocated this extremest perspective of logic and reason, but most everyone else found it quite difficult to learn anything new if you could not look to nature.

Aristotle himself had a falling out with the Platonic orthodoxy by claiming some observation of nature was necessary. Another group of people who relayed heavily on nature for new knowledge was a thriving community of medical professionals, or people we now-a-days call doctors or physicians. Unlike modern-day physicians, physicians of the ancient world were not formally trained in medical schools.  They were more like craftsmen, who got their training from apprenticeships.  In fact, doctors in the ancient world were in the same social class of lowly artisans. But like modern-day doctors, they conducted extensive research while treating patients.  From as early as writing was first invented, doctors were recording case studies and histories, listing diseases and ailments, and even using their reasoning skills to conduct research, long before Aristotle and Francis Bacon articulated the processes.

Sometime in the 2nd century BC after the establishment of the library at Alexandria, there were a group of physicians who were worried about the quality of research and a growing lack of experimental rigor in the medical sciences.  The past few centuries had experience a flowering of ideas that accumulated into a body of knowledge known as the Hippocratic corpus, much of which, but not all, was written by the semi-legendary Hippocrates.  This was a great thing for scientific progress, mind you, but sometimes admiration for greatness and great people morphs in to a sort of hero worship, where the heroes and their works are blindly followed as unquestionable authority. Platonic ideas about heavenly perfection were making their way in the medical sciences as well.  A system had been taken shape in which health was viewed as balance of 'humors' and restoration of health was achieved by restoring the balance. Doctors began to relay less and less on physical and natural observation and more and more on the system and the word of authority.

The concerned group of physicians became known as the Empiric school, and pushed for more emphasis on things like effective treatment, observation, and basing treatment of those observation rather an abstract reasoning process or authorized sources.  The physicians they opposed became known as the Dogmatic school. The word dogma was actually a Greek word that simply meant a doctrine or set of theories.

Some of ideas of Dogmatic school, like the philosophical reasoning process outlined by Plato and Aristotle, turned out to be quite useful, but it was the Empiric school that provided the final step: experience, or communication with nature.

Some time in the 11th century, an engineer in Cairo, Egypt by the name of Ibn al-Haytham or better known as Alhazen, who studied a lot of Greek philosophy, articulated and expanded on these methods and brought them down to earth by applying them to nature. Like the Empirics, he was particularly interested in practical application and natural phenomena . He wrote about experimental and scientific methods in a book on light and optics. When the Europeans started to emerge from the 'Dark Ages' a few centuries later, they discovered Alhazen's works, along with other ancient and Muslim scholars, and used them to change the world.

Similar Lessons

• God, Science and the Joy of Pattern Recognition (or Parmenides vs. the Naturalists) 
• The Triumph of Naturalism and the Legacy of the Weeping Philosopher
• Greek Colonies in Italy, Early Healthcare, and Guinea Worms
• A Brief History of Hunting: from Wild Animals to Subatomic Particles

Online Resources
Understanding Science: How Science Really Works - University of California Museum of Paleontology

Evaluating Scientific Claims (or, do we have to take a scientist's word for it) - Janet Stemwedel, Scientific American Blogs

How rationality can make your life more awesome -Julia Galef; Rationality Speaking blog

Further Reading
Bstan-'dzin-rgya-mtsho. 2005. The Universe in a Single Atom: the Convergence of Science and Spirituality. Morgan Road Books.

Richard Dawkins. 2011. The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True. Transworld Publishers Limited.

Susan Haack. 2005. Defending Science—Within Reason: Between Science and Cynicism. Prometheus Books.

Bradley Steffens. 2007. Ibn Al-Haytham: the First Scientist.

Edward Theodore Withington. 1894. Medical History from the Earliest Times: a Popular History of the Healing Arts. London: The Scientific Press limited.

In the beginning... (a few people responsible for discovering how the universe began)

The way we design universes today, with the observational approach of modern science, may differ from the sacred metaphors of our ancestors, but we all do it for the same reason: to comprehend the universe the way that lets us feel at home in it.   

-E. C. Krupp 

 There was disorder and there was order, one day.
-Genesis 1:13

Once upon a time, some 13 1/2 billion years ago (that's about as far back as you can possibly go, by the way, because that was the beginning of the universe), the entire universe was so small, it could fit in the palm of your hand.  Then, for some strange reason, nobody quite knows why, it expanded.  It did not really explode as some people think, but it just grew from that tiny speck and it grew and grew and grew. It is still growing to this day.

This is not a myth, legend, or another religious story about how the universe began.  This is really, truly how the universe began. How do we know? Well we have both a logical explanation and physical (empirical) evidence.  Logic and empiricism are the two central components of science, and science is the language we use to understand nature. If we have those two bases covered, we have a complete set of tools needed to uncovered nature's secrets.

*

So what is the evidence? You could say it all starts with everyone's favorite 20th century scientist, Albert Einstein.  Einstein did not discover the origins of the universe, but he came up with a logical explanation that describes how the universe is constructed. The logic here is based on math - really complicated math, like calculus.  Calculus was, in fact, invented to help describe how the Earth and Sun and other planets and stars interact and keep from crashing into each other or falling apart. In 1916, Albert Einstein wrote a paper in which he tried to correct some errors that earlier 19th century scientists, particularly Isaac Newton, made in their calculations that describe the structure of the universe. Einstein's corrections revealed the gravity is not a mysterious force, as Newton kinda thought, but yet a property of space and time rationally explained by 4-dimensional geometry. This correction was known as the General Theory of Relativity.

The related Special Theory of Relativity that made Einstein famous was developed 11 years earlier (1905) and it is from the special theory that we get the famous E = mc². This statement itself reveals some interesting facts about the universe.  Everything is either energy (E) or mass (m), and even this distinction is an illusory, because what E = mc² essentials tells us is that every piece of mass contains within it an enormous amount of energy.  All of the mass and energy currently in the universe came from that initial blast of energy released from that tiny speck 13.7 million years ago.

Einstein, however, barely missed his chance at discovering the universe's origins, because he believed what the ancient Greeks believed about the origins of the universe: that there was no beginning to the universe. It was static and eternal in both time and space.  Einstein believed the universe had always existed in the same form it exists now and will continue to exist forever.  He believed this so strongly that he incorporated a number, known as the cosmological constant, in his formulas that prevented the universe from expanding or contracting.

It was another person, a Catholic priest from Belgium by the name of Georges Lemaitre, who studied cosmology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recognized this error, removed the constant that keep the universe from expanding, and provided the theoretical framework for the origins of the universe. The paper he wrote about this was first published in 1927 in the relatively obscure Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels. Lemaitre was able to show, mathematically, that the universe began as a tiny speck that he referred to as the "primeval atom" or the "cosmic egg".

Lemaitre and Einstein*

To most physicists and astronomers at the time who believed in Einstein's 'steady-state' construction of the universe, this idea of an expanding universe was crazy. One of them, Fred Hoyle, a British astrophysicist, later mockingly referred to this idea as the "big bang theory".  Now-a-days, not only have we come to love and accept this idea, but we have come to love the mocking description as well.  Georges Lemaitre is sometimes referred to as the "father of the big bang theory" as a consequence.

When theoretical scientists, like Einstein and Lemaitre, create logical models, those models, if they are good ones, will often make predictions about the behavior of nature.  This is where the empirical evidence comes in. With science, a lot of weight is placed on evidence that one can see, hear or touch. A scientific theory is never truly accepted as fact until there is hard physical evidence.  If the universe, for example, is expanding, then one should be able to see the stars and galaxies spreading away from us.  In 1929, two years after Lemaitre's paper was first published, an astronomer by the name of Edwin Hubble at Mt. Wilson observatory near Pasadena, California did just that, sort of.  He did not actually see stars and galaxies moving away.  They are too small and too far away to observe that directly, but what he saw were galaxies behaving as one would expect them to behave if they were moving away.

Hubble, in turn, was in dept to the hard work of at least two other scientists, Vesto Slipher, the director of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona and a computer named Henrietta Swan Leavitt at the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt

Leavitt, the computer at Harvard, was responsible for formulating something called the 'period-luminosity relationship' of a particular type of stars known as Cepheid variables. This discovery essentially made it possible to determine how far galaxies are from us.  At the time, women were hired in mass to do the manual labor of recording data.  Before the non-human version of computers were invented, the word 'computer'  referred to low-paid but highly educated assistants, most often women, who performed tedious calculations for scientists and engineers. Leavitt did her observations not through a telescope (as another of the indignities placed on the lowly computers was that they didn't get to play with expensive equipment), but through thousands of photographs, primarily measuring the brightness of stars. Leavitt's familiarity with the data led her to discover the cyclically varying brightness of certain stars (Cepheid variables) providing a way to measure the distances between galaxies, a sort of cosmological yardstick. Although she published her initial data in the Annals of the Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College, Leavitt's ground-breaking discover of Cepheid variables was published by her employer, Edward Pickering, in a Harvard College Observatory Circular in 1912.  Leavitt had not been given much credit for it in her lifetime, but her discovery had played a significant role in changing our view of the universe.  Stars are not evenly spaced out from each as was thought in the 19th century, but are clustered into galaxies.

Vesto Slipher

The other person, Vesto Slipher, used a device known as a spectrometer to analyze the light coming of planets and stars.  Different elements, it turns outs, produce different wavelength patterns of light and these patterns can be measured with a simple device known as a spectrometer.  Slipher pointed this device at stars and planets and analyzed the spectral patterns (or spectral lines) coming from them. This is how we know what elements are on other planets of the solar system.  It is how we know our Sun as well as other stars are huge fusion factories were hydrogen atoms are combined to make helium.  Nobody has actually been to the Sun to find that out.  Slipher figured it out indirectly with the handy spectrometer. In 1912, Slipher also noticed that the light coming from far away galaxies 'shifts' toward the red-end of the color spectrum. This observation suggested that most galaxies are not standing still but moving away from each other at very, very fast speeds. Although he published his finding in the Lowell Observatory Bulletin in 1912 and in another article he wrote for Popular Astronomy some three years later, Slipher was somewhat of a recluse and avoided conferences that other scientists used judicially to promote their ideas and to advance their careers.

Image courtesy of USPS

When Edwin Hubble asked Slipher for his data, Slipher was more than happy to cooperate. To this day, it is Hubble who is remembered most for discovering the expanding universe, the key finding that led to the idea that universe began as a tiny speck some 13 1/2 billion years. Specifically, he discovered that a galaxy's velocity is proportional to its distance (an observation predicted by Lemaitre's mathematical theorizing). Galaxies that are twice as far from us move twice as fast. Another consequence is that the universe is expanding in every direction. This observation means that every galaxy has moved away from a common starting position at the same time in the very distant past.

Hubble is further remembered with a famous telescope currently orbiting the earth. He also has a cool postage stamp (left).  The telescope in the background is Mt. Wilson observatory, where Hubble was employed, not the Hubble Space telescope named after him. In addition, he have an astroid and a crater on the Moon named after him. Interestingly both Leavitt and Slipher also have an astroid and a Moon crater named in their honor, although Slipher has an addition crater on Mars named after him.

God seconding a sentiment once expressed by an Atheist?

Not everyone is comfortable with the big bang theory, however.  Usually the same people and the same groups of evangelical Christians who are opposed to biological evolution are also not happy with the big bang.  There is some irony to the fact that the father of the big bang is a Catholic priest.

The astronomer Fred Hoyle, the original opponent of the big bang theory who coined the phrase as an insult, was a committed hard-core Atheist, and spent a great deal of argument and effort trying to disprove it. To Hoyle, and a lot of other Atheists, the big bang was too similar to the idea of Biblical creation.

Fred Hoyle

Likewise, Pope Pius XII, the pope during and after World War II when the big bang theory was just starting to win acceptance, thought the theory was a validation of Christianity and the Biblical account of creation. Pope Pius XII would later accept evolution as well, and it all may because a Catholic priest's role in discovering the big bang theory.  Lemaitre, himself, on the other hand, did not quite think the same way as the pope. Lemaitre had a very different take on the relationship between science and religion, regarding the two as separate, incompatible but equally valid domains. To him, the big bang theory did not vindicate religious faith, but rather the two had nothing to do with each other. He was an advocate of Stephan Jay Gould's '"non-overlapping magisteria" (Noma) long before Gould coined the phrase in 1997. Shortly after the pope's incorporation of the big bang into Catholic dogma, Lemaitre wrote:

Lemaitre and Pope Pius XII

“As far as I can see, such a theory remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental Being… For the believer, it removes any attempt at familiarity with God… It is consonant with Isaiah speaking of the hidden God, hidden even in the beginning of the universe.”

Further Reading (some primary sources).

Henrietta Swan Leavitt. 1908. "1777 Variables in the Magellanic Clouds" Annals of Harvard College Observatory. LX(IV):87-110

Edward C. Pickering. 1912. "Periods of 25 Variable Stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud" Harvard College Observatory Circular 173: 1-3.

Vesto Slipher. 1912. "The radial velocity of the Andromeda Nebula". Lowell Observatory Bulletin: 2.56–2.57.

Vesto Slipher. 1915. "Spectrographic Observations of Nebulae". Popular Astronomy: 21–24.

George Lemaitre. 1927 (1931 English translations). "Expansion of the Universe, A Homogeneous Universe of Constant Mass and Increasing radius Accounting fort the Radial Velocity of Extra-Galactic Nebulae". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 91: 483-490

Hubble, Edwin. 1929. "A relation between distance and radial velocity among extra-galactic nebulae". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 15(3): 168–173

Further Reading (secondary sources)

Chris Impey. 2012. How It Began: A Time-Traveler's Guide to the Universe. W W Norton & Company

George Johnson. 2005. Miss Leavitt's Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman who Discovered How to Measure the Universe. Atlas Books

Harry Nussbaumer; Lydia Bieri; Allen Sandage. 2009. Discovering the Expanding Universe. Cambridge University Press.

Simon Singh. 2005. Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe. Fourth Estate.


*all images are from Wikimedia or Wikipedia unless otherwise noted.

Adam and Eve Loved Seafood!

...or at least they learned to love it. I'll explain later, but first a little background information.

In previous lessons on Mitochondria Eve and Y-Chromosome Adam, I took the liberty to update the Jewish creation story - at least the part dealing with the first humans - to incorporate recent scientific discoveries. The fun part about Bible stories, after all, is that they were never meant to be taken literally. They help make sense of complicated issues we can not fully comprehend given our limited intellect. Like any form of folklore, they can be edited and updated. Granted this was a lot easier to do before the priestly caste of scribes originally wrote the stories on papyrus scrolls some 600 hundred years before Christ. Storytellers before them past down the stories from generation to generation, with slight modifications with each telling and retelling, and even after they were written down, people reinterpret the stories to fit our contemporary needs. Only recently did religious reactionaries demand their literal truth as a defense against anti-religious forces. I'm digressing; back to our story...

It turns out that Adam was not created first. According to reliable scientific evidence, Eve actually preceded Adam by some 140,000 years. Both Eve and Adam, it also turns out, lived a lot earlier then we had previously thought. Instead of 4004 BC as determined by the 17th century Anglican bishop James Ussher, Adam lived and died around 60,000 years ago and Eve thrived around 200,000 years ago. They lived in small communities of about 500 to 1000 other humans somewhere in east or southern Africa. Granted, we can not be certain of the dates and number of individuals. Adam may have been older than we think and some estimates place Eve closer to Adam's lifetime. It is conceivable, although highly improbable, that this Adam and Eve lived around the same time and even more improbable that they met each other, let alone had a relationship. We can be certain, however, that they did have a mate, probably even more than one, and had plenty of children and descendants.

We know this because a tiny bit of them lives on in each and every one of us today. Every male alive today has a copy of Adam's Y-chromosome in their cells, and every person, male and female, has Eve's mitochondrial DNA is their cells.

Stone and Ice: The Ages of Adam and Eve

No one really wrote or told stories about the real Adam and Eve because they existed long before writing was invented around 5000 years ago and they probably were not noteworthy enough to be the stuff of legends; they were just ordinary member of their community or tribe. They existed long before the first humans started to build cities and farm the surrounding land 10,000 years ago. They were hunters and gatherers who used stone tools to hunt and prepare food. They most likely also used tools made of wood, bone, and other perishable materials, but we don't have a lot of evidence of that. We do know more about the stone tools because they have survived into the present.

The first tool-making humans left their tools all over the world, after which they got buried in layers of sand and other sediment. Over the course of time, the sand and sediment hardened under compression of more recent layers on top and turned into rock. These rocks are call sedimentary rocks as a consequence. Eventually rivers and streams carved valleys and rifts through the sedimentary rock layers (or 19th and 20th century humans carved out the side of hills to run roads and railways through them). Both activities exposed the rock layers containing the old stone tools. People now-a-days, often called archaeologists, dig them out and study them.

Right around the time writing was invented 5000 years ago, some people began to replace stone with metal as a primary material for making weapons and tools, although not everyone. There are people in some parts of the world today who still use stone to make tools. Nevertheless the years before 3000 BC are called the Stone Age because until then everyone in the world was making tools with stone. The Stone Age was such a long period of time that it is divided into three sections: The New Stone Age (or Neolithic) from 3000 BC to 9500 BC, the Middle Stone Age (Mesolithic) from 9500 BC to around 20,000 years ago and the Old Stone Age (Paleolithic) from 20,000 years ago to 2.5 million years ago. The Paleolithic, in turn, was such a long time it was further divided into the Upper Paleolithic (20,000 to about 40,000 years ago) and the Middle Paleolithic (the really old stone) from 40,000 to the around the birth of modern humans 200,000 years ago. There is also a Lower Paleolithic from 2.5 million years ago to 200,000 years, because modern humans (homo sapiens) were not the only creatures to make tools. There were a few other archaic human species (most notably homo habilis and homo erectus) who also made tools.

Neolithic: 3000-9500 BC (farming, writing, cities)      
Mesolithic: 9500 BC - 20,000 years ago
Paleolithic:
    Upper: 20,000 - 40,000 (post-Adam: complex language, cave art and 'Venus' figurines)
    Middle: 40,000 - 200,000 (post-Eve 'archaic' homo sapiens ) 
    Lower: 200,000 - 2.5 million ya  (homo erectus, homo habilis)

The boundaries between the Stone Age subdivisions, characterized by cultural changes, are not as clear as the table above makes them out to be. There is a great deal of argument over the dates, as they are called into question with new archaeological discoveries, but there are somewhat abrupt changes in the way tools were used and made, for example, between the Lower and Middle Paleolithic. Simple all-purpose hand-held 'knife/axes' of homo erectus gave way to more sophisticated and specialized variety of tools (i.e. spear-heads, carving knives, paring knives, etc) of modern humans.

You may have noticed that the Middle Paleolithic began at roughly the same time Eve lived, and the Upper Paleolithic began a few thousand years after Adam's lifespan. This is no accident. Both these time periods were characterized by environmental changes that placed stress on the humans alive at the time. The world human population was so low that a few individuals with genetic mutations were able to better thrive in the new environment and out-competed their un-mutated cousins for the limited resources. These 'starter' populations grow to around 1000 when Adam and Eve lived, and then expanded from there. Evolutionary biologists refer to this phenomenon as a bottleneck effect.

The 'mutated' brains of the individuals within the starter populations allowed them to think differently and build better tools. That's why we see abrupt changes in tool technology around 100,000 years ago and again around 60,000 years ago. More abrupt changes occurs in more recent time periods (use of metal, gears and pulleys, electricity) but these were all localized and due to cultural advancement, not changes in the basic brain structure, which has not changed much in the past 60,000 years. 

The root cause of the environmental stress, that led to the new brains, was the 'Ice Age'. The world was getting colder and glacial ice-sheets were making their way into southern Europe. The glaciers advanced and retreated several time during the Stone Age but they were at their maximum extent around 100,000 to 60,000 years ago. In Africa, where modern homo sapiens were located, however, the world was not covered in glaciers but desert. The Sahara desert was actually larger and dryer then it is today. Unlike the blazing hot Sahara of today, the Sahara back then would have been cool, more like the Gobi desert of central Asia or the Great Basin of north America. The animals and plants of the warm African savannas that homo habilis and homo erectus have previously survived on were dwindling. Human populations were stressed and if they were to survive they were going to have to rely on their wits.

Homo sapiens: Needy and Handicapped Misfits

Our large energy-taxing brains was precisely, and paradoxically, the mutation that gave us a selective advantage. If you were alive in the middle Paleolithic, however, you probably would not guess that homo sapiens would triumph in the end. Our over-sized heads are so big in infancy, it widened the hips of every female homo sapiens through evolutionary selection and yet childbirth still causes tremendous pain and risks to the delivering mother.

No wonder that the same scribes who first wrote about Eve and Adam also hypothesized that painful and risky childbirth was punishment for first eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. They may have been rather sexists, but they were on to something. Considering that our intellectual lifestyle all started with close-knit communities of women helping each other to give birth and raise children, Eve and her sisters truly were the first to taste the Knowledge fruit.

Knowledge and intelligence, in their most basic forms, entails the ability to perceive what others are thinking, or what we think others are thinking about us.  Hence, the ability to project thoughts, make predictions, and hypothesize is what makes humans unique in the animal kingdom.

Not only is a baby's brain massively large at birth, but it is not even finished developing upon birth. The brain will continue to develop and mature on a massive scale for the next year or so and will not stop developing well into adulthood. Unlike most other animals that see, hear, walk and even run soon after birth, human babies are physically helpless and dependent on others. This is part of the reason why humans are so social. We need others for the first few years of life for basic physical survival skills, and even then continue to need others for intellectual development. Even after we are able to leave our parents around 20 years of age, we are still dependent on the butcher, the blacksmith, the UPS delivery person, and a host of other humans with specialized knowledge for survival.

A multitude of sources - from the Bible to those omnipresent charts on human evolution showing a progression of hominids marching in a single file with the poor chimpanzee in back and the 'ideal' homo sapien leading the way - are utterly misleading. This mythological rendering may need to be updated.  Humans are not necessarily the pinnacle of creation (or evolution).  We should be thinking more in terms of the 'underdog', or the misfit who triumphs in the end by using an unknown skill.  Humans were, in fact, deformed outcasts who learned to use their deformity to their advantage.

Our Coastal Origins

One popular theory holds that small groups of surviving humans found their way to the margins of east and south Africa, along the Indian Ocean coast and great lakes of east Africa. There they found a new source of food: fish and seafood. Gathering and preparing seafood requires a new set of skills and knowledge. Anyone who has been to the ocean beach knows, for example, the sea life is more visible at low tide. So humans that can think and plan ahead had an advantage. The tides are depended on the Moon's gravity, and if one can see the connection between phases of the Moon and the tides, they could make useful predictions. This skill may have led to the first lunar calendars.

Recently, archaeologists have, in fact, found evidence that early humans were living off the sea. In 2007, a group of archaeologists led by Curtis Marean of Arizona State University discovered a cave in Mossel Bay, South Africa where early humans lived and survived by gathering and processing seafood. They also found a new set of tools and dye-processing operation where the early humans were extracting ochre from the mineral hematite. The ochre dye was probably being used for body or face paint and perhaps other forms of decorative art. Some of the sea shells recovered at the site have holes drilled through them, suggesting they were beaded through string and may have been adorned like jewelry. Interestingly, this habitation was dated to around 165,000 years ago, closer to Eve's lifetime then Adam's. It had generally been assumed that the 'great leap forward' of human intelligence was around 40,000 years ago, but apparently, we humans "got smart" a lot sooner than that.

One of things that makes humans unique is our ability to "plan ahead", see connections with seemingly unrelated phenomena, and make predictions (although not always correct) about the future. The art and culture developing around this time, or shortly there after, suggests we also had the capability for symbolic communication. Language was developing as well as other forms of communicative speculation like religion and astronomy.

Related Lessons

Eve, Adam, Neanderthal, The Garden of Eden

Further Reading

Bruce Bower. 2011."Water's Edge Ancestors: Human evolution's tide may have turned on lake and sea shores." Science News. 180:22 (Aug. 13)

Christopher S. Henshilwood. 2011. "A 100,000-year-old ochre processing workshop at Blombos Cave, South Africa". Science 334, 219-222 (Oct. 14)

Sarah B. Hrdy. 2009. Mothers and Others. The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Belknap Press.

Curtis Marean, et. al. 2007. "Early human use of marine resources and pigment in South Africa during the Middle Pleistocene." Nature 449, 905-908 (Oct. 18)

See also the PBS three part series on human evolution Becoming Human. Part 3: the Last Human Standing is especially relevant for this lesson.

God, Science, and the Joy of Pattern Recognition (or Parmenides vs. the Naturalists)

In the beginning was Logos. And Logos was with God, and Logos was God.
--John 1:1

Truly you are a God who hides himself...
--Isaiah 45:15

One of several Greek words for knowledge was Gnosis. In the 2nd and 3rd century, there was a sect of Christians who were known as Gnostics. The Gnostics believed that they possessed some special secret knowledge of God. Hence, those who did not possess it were said to be agnostic. We don't often use the word 'gnostic' these days, but the word 'agnostic' means something quite different: to describe someone who is either not certain if God exists or doesn't think it's possible to know if God exists.  To the Gnostics, it just meant a outsider, a non-believer, or someone who 'just didn't get it'.

Another Greek word with a very similar meaning is Sophia, which more directly translates to 'wisdom'. The word 'philosophy', which literally means 'lover of wisdom' has Sophia in it's root. Another derivative word 'sophists' is used to describe someone who uses clever arguments and rhetoric in a deceptive matter. In ancient Greece, it had a more specific meaning to describe a profession of teachers who use their wisdom and public speaking skills to help young and aspiring politicians and statesmen. Some people, like 4th century BC philosopher Plato, did not think too highly of sophists, so the word was often employed in a rather derogatory matter to describe anyone who charges for education; a practice quite widespread these days, but in Plato's day it was noble to give it away for free.

The Greeks had yet another word for knowledge: Episteme. The translation of Episteme varies on the context.  It's literal English translation is 'epistemology',  but a less literal and perhaps more accurate translation would be knowledge gained through logic or reasoning. Episteme was a special type of knowledge achieved only through rigorous application of the rational formula known as Logos. Episteme is the knowledge gained from the process of deductive (or inductive) reasoning, but Logos referred to the process itself.

Logos was the word St. John used in the opening sentence of his gospel. It's most often translated into English as 'the word' because 'rational formula' or 'rigorous process of deductive reasoning' doesn't sound as elegant.

The word  'science' comes from the Latin Scientia which loosely translates to knowledge. "Science" and "scientists" are relatively new concepts. The words never really took on their modern-day meaning until around the 19th century. Science, as we know the term today is more then just reasoning. It also includes finding evidence to confirm insights uncovered by reason, but this second step wasn't always applied, especially by the Greeks.

Constructing the Separation of God and Nature

People we call scientists nowadays were called natural philosophers before the mid-19th century. When the amount of knowledge in the Western world began to accumulate to a point were the 'Renaissance man' can no longer know everything, intellectuals began to specialize in specific disciplines. The first two upper-level categories of disciplines were natural philosophy (or 'unrevealed knowledge') and metaphysics (or 'revealed knowledge'). Many of those concerned with metaphysics (beyond the physical) or supernatural (beyond the natural world) were to be called theologians and they studied theology. Thus the first intellectual schism separated religion from nature.

Natural philosophers were more down to earth; they studied physics and physical world, or nature. 'Natural philosophy' itself is a relatively recent but somewhat older concept. Although Aristotle was the first person to identify a specific branch of philosophy dealing with nature, the phrase 'natural philosophy' was not used widely until the 17th century. Before 'natural philosophy', natural philosophers, or scientists, were simply "philosophers" and they studied both the natural and supernatural varieties of philosophy.

Now-a-days, one of the most hotly debated questions about the relationship between science and religion is whether science is limited in it's scope of study and if it could answer 'theological' questions, a concept that would have been unquestionable to natural philosophers and scientists up until about the late 19th century. Of course science can, and should, find the answers to theological questions, because ultimately they are interconnected. The separation between religion and nature is a human construct.

Finding God Requires Knowing Where to Look

Some of the most important questions are still unanswered: How did humans become intelligent? How did life originate? What are the fundamental laws that construct the universe? If you can not explain something by natural law, so the argument goes, then there is still a possibility that it's a supernatural phenomena. Hence, it is God, the unpredictable and somewhat temperamental being in the sky, and not the impersonal but predictable laws of nature, that constructed the universe, breathed life into the first living organisms, and gave humans intelligence and the ability to distinguish between good and evil.

God, the engineer, from the Bible moralisee (ca. 1250)

This interpretation of God is often referred to the "God of the gaps" defense. There is a danger, however, in placing God in the gaps of scientific or rationally-obtained knowledge. What is a believer to do if biologists came up with an explanation or empirical proof that life originated from nonliving substances? Would they concede that they were wrong?

St. Augustine once said that "miracles happen not in opposition to nature, but in opposition to what we know about nature." To St. Augustine, miracles - not God - were the phenomena that could not be explained by the laws of nature. St. Augustine, like many philosophers, equated God with nature and the natural laws of the universe were the laws of God. God is not in the gaps of scientific knowledge, but rather God is scientific knowledge.

Interpreted this way, some of the most committed 'atheists' in the world are actually some of the strongest believers in God. Their faith in an underlying order of the universe waiting to be discovered is quite strong. Granted the God they believe in is very different from the God that modern Christians pray to for assistance in winning football games.

Scientists (philosophers actually) like Galileo and Isaac Newton believed God created the laws of nature and it was the job of the philosopher to uncover God's workings. During the Renaissance and the subsequent era known as the Scientific Enlightenment, philosophers like Voltaire and Francis Bacon tried to remove the irrationally elements of the Christian God and reinterpreted him as a rational force rather than a sentient being (or from another perspective, they tried to eliminate the 'pagan' elements of our understanding of God and uncover a truer version). Another Enlightenment philosopher and the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, even rewrote the gospels. In the gospel according to Jefferson, Jesus is a brilliant and misunderstood philosopher who helped people achieve enlightenment through reason and a rational understanding of God.

Many scientists in the 20th and 21st century talked about this version of God, often in a metaphorical sense, as an essential part of the natural laws or structural integrity of the universe. Even atheists, like the physicist Stephen Hawking, make references to understanding the mind of God when they talk about understanding the laws that bring order to the universe. The Higgs boson, one of the last subatomic particles that would complete a table of the fundamental building blocks of the universe is often nicknamed the "God particle". Albert Einstein made so many references to this God that one would think he was a preacher or rabbi. Other scientist make references to 'Nature' as if it were a God-like entity and simply switch the gender, as in Mother Nature.

Religious folks were attracted to this rational version of God. It was no coincidence that the Enlightenment occurred during a time of radical religious reform. New religious groups from the Puritans to the Quakers were asserting that God and nature are one and the same. 1600 years earlier, when Christianity went from being a Jewish sect in the first century to the intellectual foundation of the Western world several centuries later, they incorporated ideas from Greek and Roman philosophy. By studying Greek philosophers, and particularly Plato and early philosophers whom Plato admired, early Christian intellectuals, like St. Augustine, insisted God was rational. Rabbinic Judaism was heading in the same direction.

How Greek Philosophers found God

There are essentially two seemingly opposite and complementary ways we try to make sense of the universe. One method, the most obvious method, is by dividing things into discreet units and assigning the units into categories with unique properties. We look for patterns of similarities and make predictions based on those similarities. For example, we tell different animals and plants apart by naming and categorizing them and assume they will generally behave like other animals in the same category. Mammals have hair and mammary glands, birds have feathers and beaks, etc. This method of learning is sometimes called reductionism, often in a derogatory tone. It was the primary method first used by a group of ancient philosophers often reffered to as the Ionian materialists. One of them was a man named Heraclitus., the mercantile-funded philosopher/'scientists' of the Greek isles. Reductionism plays a central role not only in commercial exploitation and technological innovation but basic science (or what we once referred to as natural philosophy) as well. You can not gather data and test ideas without dividing things up into discreet parameters. Reductionism, however, has it's critics, both modern and ancient. The Greek philosopher Plato was one of those critics, and he preferred another method of understanding the universe.

In the book Timaeus, Plato describes the universe as ordered and purposeful, as if were designed and created by a divine craftsman. This ordered and purposeful universe is Plato's evidence of God. Plato did not call the divine craftsman God. Plato's craftsman was the One, the ultimate Truth, or the unifying principle that binds all knowledge. The purpose of philosophy, according to Plato, was to purify the soul and seek union with the One. The best way to achieve union was to unlearn everything you think you know about the universe. This is not unlike Hindu practice of seeking union with Brahman. Plato or other Greeks probably had knowledge of Indian philosophers and sages and may have been influenced by them. The methods that Greek philosophers suggested for achieving enlightenment were different, however. Whereas Hindu sages meditated, Plato and other Greek philosophers contemplated.

Another book written by Plato was a book called Parmenides.  This book includes a dialogue between Socrates and another philosopher, Parmenides. This dialogue is most likely fictional or at least embellished, but Parmenides was another philosopher whom Plato admired and it was from Parmenides that Plato got most of his ideas about his alternative method of learning and contemplation.

Parmenides lived sometime in the late 5th century B.C., a generation or two before Plato. Parmenides lived most of life in the city of Elea. Elea was a Greek colony on the Italian peninsula, part of what the Romans referred to as Magna Grecia. Parmenides attracted a following in Elea. Parmenides and his followers later became known as the Eleatic school. Much of the Eleatic philosophy is summarized in a long poem written by Parmenides, the only known written source from him. This poem is lost, but because the copyright laws were rather lenient and plagiarism was not well-defined back then, it had been shamelessly copied and quoted by other writers in small and large 'fragments'. So much of the poem is known through these fragments, it can almost be reconstructed in it's entirety.

Often given the omnipotent convenient title, On Nature, it is divided into two sections: the "Way of Aletheia", and the "Way of Doxa". Actually there are 3 sections if you include a short introduction. The Greek word Aletheia, in the title of the first section after the introduction, is often translated as 'truth' or 'reality' or, even more accurately, 'unconcealed'. In the "Way of Aletheia", Parmenides uncovers the hidden truth of nature. According to the author, nothing is as it appears and we are often misled in our view of the world and reality. A variety of obstacles from emotions, prejudice, unverified opinion, what we often refer to 'common sense', and those ever-so-common gut feeling are always getting in the way.

To avoid going down the wrong path, Parmenides offered a reliable solution: reason, or Logos to be exact. Parmenides prescribed what we often call "critical thinking skills" or "higher-order thinking", a ruthless consistency on pure reasoned argument. Parmenides then went a step further and outlined some of the results obtained when you consistently and properly use logos. According, one should "... judge by means of the Logos, the much-contested proof which is expounded by me."

There are no categories or things or boundaries between places. Those are all constructions negotiated between people. All is One, and everything is part of the one whole. Since there is one simple, complete, eternal Being, nothing is really subject to alteration. All change is an illusion. Nothing comes from nothing. All of space is filled with something (there can never be a vacuum). The universe is eternal (as in a 'steady-state') and does not 'evolve'. This postulates played a role in shaping the scientific worldview. Some of them turned out to be wrong, and when science became more experimental in 16th and 17th century, they were slowly overturned, but not without a great deal of resistance. Some of them went unchallenged well into the 20th century.

In the next section of the poem, the Way of Doxa, or the Way of How Things Seem to Be,  Parmenides attacks other methods for revealing the truth, methods he believes are unreliable. One of those unreliable methods, the one method many modern folks may disagree, include the methods used by the Miletian materialists and Heraclitus; what we often refer to nowadays as reductionism. Using our senses to observe patterns was one of those misguided paths:

"The mortals lay down and decided well to name two forms, like the flaming light and obscure darkness of night, out of which it is necessary not to make one, and in this they are led astray "

The attack on reductionism may lead one to think that Parmenides and his admirers, notably Plato, were anti-science, since reductionism is an important part of science. Indeed, scientific progress was hindered for the next thousand years, it can be argued, because of the academic prejudice toward materialist and reductionist methods.

On the other hand, the ideas of Plato and other followers of Parmenides are being resurrected by modern physicists' obsession with the so-called 'Theory of Everything'. While some researchers and tinkerers were dividing nature into pieces to understand her secrets, others were finding connection and unifying elements (electricity with magnetism, electro-magnetism with other forces, space and time, energy and mass, etc.) to discover that underlying laws to describe everything. ;Everything may, in fact, be a part of One Big Thing after all. This is what Stephan Hawkings and other physics are referring when they talk about understanding the "mind of God."

How Artisans Found God

Another reason why Plato and the other philosophers looked down on materialism and reductionism is because these were methods employed by artisans, merchants, and other lowly professions. The literate and intellectual Greek philosophers were, quite frankly, snobs. They came from elite backgrounds and were patronized by wealthy politicians and aristocrats. By Parmenides' time, Greek society was slowly becoming more urban, cosmopolitan and socially stratified. Plato even wrote a book called The Republic in which he describes the ideal civilization where philosophers rule and artisans toil (and do what the smart philosophers tell them to do). Partly because of Plato influence, the literate classes of Greece and their Roman successors made considerable progress in the 'elite' disciplines of math and astronomy, but we know very little about mechanics, chemistry and the other 'dirty' artisan practices.

The artisans, on the other hand, in addition to not writing very much, lacked knowledge or interest in the rigorous application of logos. Most artisan innovation was done by trail and error. To be sure, there was a great deal of experimental research among artisans; they were just unsystematic about it. Only when the 'philosophers' got over their elitist attitudes and incorporated the methods of reductionism into the 'scientific method', did scientific progress thrive.

Artisans loved tradition, and their intellectual and spiritual needs were often taken care of by Homer, Hesoid, and the old myths of god and goddesses. Like many intellectuals today who snare at and dismiss the old-fashioned religious beliefs of the poor and working classes, ancient Greek philosophers dismissed the old-fashioned religions of the poor and working class artisans. Religion was one the ways of Doxa. Religion and myth are metaphors, and even though Parmenides uses a metaphor in his poem (he got all his information from a goddess), some of his followers did not trust metaphors.

Another Eleatic philosopher was a man named Xenophanes who lived in Elea as well, although he was not a native. Like Pythagoras, he emigrated from Asia Minor. Xenophanes wrote that the gods are projections of human qualities and had no real purpose, metaphorical or otherwise.

One may be tempted to think that Xenophanes, Parmenides, and their followers had no faith, like we often assume that scientists, rationally-minded skeptics and other naturalists today have no faith. On contrary, modern-day scientists and other intellectuals, like the Eleatic philosophers, have strong faith in the 'one true God', although they may not admit it or they call that God Nature instead, and they have faith that unseen truths can be revealed through the path of Logos and related practices like "higher-order thinking, "critical thinking", and the scientific method.

Similar Lessons

• The Ephermal Natue of Books and the Origins of Christianity
• The Wordy People (Greek Philosophers, the Usefulness of Vowels, and Power of Logos)
• Merchants of Miletus and the Origins of Greek Philosophy
• The Triumph of Naturalism and the Legacy of the Weeping Philosopher
• Why Irreligious People Like Yoga (or Philosophical Developments of Ancient India)

Online Resources

Sam Harris, 'In Defense of Spiritual' from his blog. Also see this discussion about death and spirituality at the 2012 meeting of the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, Australia.

Thomas Jefferson's  Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (Jefferson's "cut and paste" Bible), from the Electronic Text Center, the University of Virginia Library.

A good site for reading a reconstructed version of Parmenides' poem can be found at Elpenor's Home of the Greek Word. A very short fragment of Xenophanes' God is Totally Different can be found here as well. A version of Plato's Parmenides can be found on the MIT Internet Classics Archive. Or just read more about Platonic Philosophy.

Further Reading

Burnet, John. 1892. Early Greek Philosophy. A.&C. Black.

Clifford D. Conner. 2005. A People's History of Science: Miners, Midwives and "Low Mechanicks". New York: Nation Books.

Paul Davies. 1992. The Mind of God: The scientific basis for a rational world. Simon Schuster.

Patricia Fara. 2009. Science: A Four Thousand Year History. Oxford University Press

G.E.R Lloyd. 1970. Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Why Irreligious People Like Yoga (or Philosophical Developments of Ancient India)

One day, you will find yourself outside this world which is like a mother’s womb. You will leave this earth to enter, while you are yet in the body, a vast expanse, and know that the words, “God’s earth is vast,” name this region from which the saints have come.

—Jalal-ud-Din Rumi

There is a growing number of Americans who don't identify with any church or religious organization. This is a different group of people who simply do not go to church (which is much larger). When confronted with the survey question asking 'what is your religious affiliation?", people who respond "none", or something equivalent to it, is growing rapidly.  See, for example, this report based on a 2008 American Religious Identification Survey. The percentage has grown from 8% in 1990 to 15% in 2008, a figure that now includes 34 million Americans.  If "none" were a religion, it would be the fastest growing religion in north America, and quite possibly the world. The percentage is even higher in many western European nations.

Most of these "nones" are not politically radical, cynical toward religion, nor are they atheists, for the most part (although many of them describe themselves as agnostics). They tend to be well-educated, independent, and upwardly mobile; at least financially stable, if not wealthy. Lack of belief in God or frustration with the political affiliations of particular churches seem not be the major concerns of the people who don't identify with any religion, according to the surveys findings. If you were to ask many of them why they reject religion, one of the reasons often given is something like: religion stifles individual expression (here I am speculating based on anecdotal evidence, I admit; I have no knowledge of a scientific survey asking this question).  They place a lot of pride on individual uniqueness.

If that's the case, there probably isn't much any religious organization can do to attract these dissenters, because one of the primary functions of religion is to perform rituals, however repetitive and predictable, to remind us that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.  Religion, for the most part, is not for the independent spirit. Conventional religion often emphasize transcendence of the individual sense of self. The concept of the self, with it's desires and attachments, is discouraged, even if only momentarily. Communion with God is experienced through solidarity with the tribe and the collective belief that we are connected to God's incomprehensible kingdom.

The rapid growth in disenfranchised "nones" could signal a turning point in societal attitudes, beliefs and common worldviews.  Religious transformations often accompany cultural, economic and life-style changes. The rise of Christianity accompanied the fall of the Roman Empire.  That was no coincidence. Early Christianity's themes of piety, meekness, and revolutionary rhetoric ("the first shall be last, and the last shall be first") appealed to a growing number of poor, disenfranchised, and powerless urban dwellers who had little hope of upward mobility in the increasing cruel, hedonistic and spiritual lost Roman society.  The rigid disciple and organized structure of the early church provided Christians with a sense of purpose and determination, in much the same way Kingdom Halls of Jehovah's Witnesses and Pentecostal Churches provide spiritual, emotional, and sometimes material support for poor communities in the U.S. (and throughout the world)  today.

In contrast, during boom times and among upwardly mobile and educated people, religions, or irreligious worldviews, tended to be forward looking, rational, personal and internalized.  In previous lessons, we have seen how the Greek-speaking merchants of Miletus influenced, patronized, and helped perpetuate the philosophical worldview of materialism, or naturalism.  Materialism was one of many trendy worldviews popular in ancient Greece at the time. Pythagoras and other philosophers were responsible for spreading other new religious and philosophical worldviews as well.

Ancient India - a little background

In another part of world about 3500 miles to the east of Greece, along the Ganges river valley of modern-day India, and around the same time (600 to 400 BC), strikingly similar developments in both lifestyles and religious worldview had occurred.  Historians often refer to this period in history as the Axial Age because of the similarities in pivotal religious and philosophical transformations in different parts of the world: Confucius and Taoism in China, Thales and Pythagoras in Greece, Zoroastrianism in Persia. In the Middle East, exiled Jewish scribes in Babylon were rewriting the Bible to transform their tribal god into a universal omnipresent God that would be the central focus of not only Rabbinical Judaism but Christianity and Islam as well.

Map courtesy of Wikipedia editor Kmusser 

In the heart of India, a thriving civilization emerged at roughly the same time classical Greece arose from their so-called Dark Ages of Homer and Hesiod. Buildings and complex religious structures were being built with the aid of Pythagorean triplets, astronomers were measuring and predicting the movement of planets, and metals were being used to develop a sophisticated coinage system.

India at this time was divided into several independent kingdoms known as Mahajanapadas.  There were 16 at the most, but the number fluctuated from time to time as larger kingdoms conquered smaller ones.  The general trend was toward fewer and fewer larger ones, and around 400 B.C., there were four kingdoms.  Each kingdom had one or two thriving commercial centers.  Many of these cities like Varanasi and Patna are still around today, and probably just as lively and active as they were when they first developed.

At around the same time the Greeks were borrowing and modifying the Phoenician alphabet to create the Greek alphabet, the Indians were learning about the Aramaic alphabet brought over by traveling merchants from the Middle East. Indian scribes soon after used the Aramaic alphabet to develop a script tailored to the native language of Sanskrit.  This alphabet was known as the Brahmi script, and it would serve as the basis of all modern Indian alphabets. It also spread east and served as the base for all the alphabets of southeast Asia, Tibet, and Mongolia.  The only exceptions were Chinese and Japanese, which resisted the push to 'upgrade' their writing systems to completely phonetic alphabets and continue to use more complex logo-graphic systems into the present.

Some of the religious and philosophical ideas originating in India around this time resembled ideas popular in Greece, challenging the notion that the ancient Greeks were unique in their philosophical achievements. One Indian thinker by the name of Ajita Kesakambali can best be described as a materialist; he denied the doctrine of rebirth (reincarnation); all humans were wholly physical creatures that return to dust after death. Another philosopher, Sanjaya Belatthaputta, rejected the possibility of any final answer; the best one can to do is cultivate friendship and develop a peace of mind; he believed the truth is relative; discussion and logical discourse leads to acrimony.  These ideas would be taking in up later in the west by the Greek Sophists and 20th century Postmodernists.

The Vedas, a collection of ancient hymns and the most sacred texts of a variety of movements now call Hinduism, were first committed to writing around this time. The Vedas, however, are much older than their first written forms.  Much like Homer's epics and older stories of the Bible, they were transmitted orally from generation to generation for thousands of years before being written down.  The Vedas have a similar function as the Torah or church hymns; they are designed to be recited (or sang) in religious gatherings. They consist of hymns of praise to the worship of deities, directions for performances of ritual sacrifices, and explanations of the symbolic correspondences between the spiritual world of the ritual process and the material world in which the rituals are performed.

Advanced Vedic Studies

Around this time, another group of sacred texts, known as the Upanishads, were also being composed. The Upanishads are not as old as the Vedas.  They were designed for a more sophisticated and exclusive group of people then the more popular Vedas.  They contain the mystical thoughts of religious thinkers who sought meaning through meditation and other super-sensual practices.  Much like how Pythagoras and Plato believed the world we perceive through the senses is illusory, the sages of the Upanishads also believed that our senses led us astray. The sensual world we see and feel is fleeting and impermanent. There is an infinite and everlasting ultimate reality, but our memories and subjective thoughts prevent us from perceiving and understanding it. This ultimate reality is the unseen but all-pervading Brahman, or the Unknowable (or God, for westerners).

The Greek philosophers developed a system of logical deduction to better understand the real truth. The Eastern philosophers developed a different system to achieve a similar goal of knowing the Unknowable. The word Upanishad itself, means 'sitting down' with a teacher to learn lessons. Emphasis is placed not on the ritual performances and mythical stories of the early Vedic religion, but on inner experiences as a path to understanding and immortality.

One of the Upanishadic sages was a philosopher named Yaynavalkya from the kingdom of Videha on the far eastern outskirts of the Ganges valley civilizations.  Yaynavalkya spoke of an immortal spark at the core of every person.  This inner spark, what would be later called Atman (loosely interpreted as a soul by westerners) is the key to understanding the forces that sustains and gives life to the universe. Yaynavlkya, and other Upanishadic sages, replaced the external rites of Vedic ritual as a means of loosing one's sense of ego with rigorous mental discipline.  The first step is to quiet your impulses of desires (hunger, lust, material wealth) and feelings of attachment. These desires are what fix one to the material world and give us an illusion that we are autonomous individuals separate from God and the universe. The process proscribed by the Upanishads for understanding and union with the Unknowable was not quick and easy.  A teacher could not simply give the answers directly, but could only lead one through stages of introspection.

Yajnavalkya compared it to the process to dreaming.  Whereas the waking state is dominated by sense perception and rational thought, dreaming allows one to ignore the rules of the material world and create our own world.  For a short time while we dream, we are released from the constraints of the body.  Even nightmares allow us to become acutely aware of pain. It is deep dreamless sleep, however, that best exemplifies the liberated self.  Sleep, Yajnavaalkya believed, was not oblivion, but a state of unified consciousness, where our fears and desires are removed, even if only for brief time.

This state of unified consciousness is what eastern religions would come to define as Nirvana, Heaven, union with Brahman or moksha.  Heaven is not a pleasant place we are permitted to enter after we die, but rather a realization we arrive at after years of study and practice. 

Yoga

As it turns out, it is easier to began the process of comprehending the infinite if your mind is clear and you are in a state of serene, detached awareness. There are a group of practices and processes designed to help clear the mind and they are collective known as yoga. What must people now-a-days think of yoga, a series of exercises and stretches to tune the body and improve the health, is just one of several types of yoga first popularized in the west during 19th century. Ancient yoga had a somewhat different function then what most people think it's designed to do.  Yoga is believed to be a very old practice, perhaps first practiced by the Dravidian natives of India and the Indus valley before the arrival of the later Aryan nomads around 1500 BC.

Nevertheless, yoga was further developed by Upanishadic sages who built on a variety of forms, or types, of yoga that all had one common goal: to control the unconscious mind that was believed to be the source of suffering. The word yoga itself is related to the 'yoke' used to control horses.  Instead of horses, the yogis (the yoga experts) harnessed and controlled impulses of the mind: ignorance, egotism, passion, disgust, and lure of material wealth. Once you can control these impulses, you can then begin the spiritual and intellectual journey toward the bliss of moksha. 

Two components that are common to all types of yoga are sitting and breathing. The student first learns to sit with crossed legs, straight back, and in a completely still position for hours at a time. Mastering this techniques helps break the link between senses and the mind. Slowing and controlling the breath (which is very different from the arrhythmic breathing of ordinary living), produces sensations of calm and feelings of expansiveness, and it has been shown to have a neurological effect.

Yoga was an essential component of a philosophical school known as Samkhya.  The founder of Samkhya was an obscure sage named Kapila.  Very little is known about Kapila. It is unclear when he lived, or even if he was a real person. He shows up in stories such as the Mahabharata, a very popular epic poem composed between 400 BC and 400 AD about a conflict between sons of royal family. Samkhya was a radical, and somewhat heretical, take on the Vedic traditions of Hinduism. It had some superficial similarities to the Pythagorean/Platonic view of nature: there is one pure reality (the spiritual or eternal) and the other material universe we perceive with our sense which is ultimately not real.  The pure and eternal reality beyond change and beyond cause is known as Purusha.  It's a similar concept to Brahman, but Samkhya does not identify Purusha as God; in fact, some would describe Samkhya as an atheistic creed. The other reality, the false reality, is Prakriti, the world we think exists.  Other schools of thought like Buddhism call this reality Maya, the illusion that the world we perceive is real that often comes to life as demon in folktales.

In fact, Buddhism would soon come to compete with these Upanishadic practices and offer a path of enlightenment to a much broader audience. Whereas the Upanishadic practices were restricted to a select group of wealthy people in the very 'caste'-conscious society of ancient India, Buddhism provided a path available to everybody.  For few centuries in ancient India, Buddhism triumphed over Hinduism as the most widespread religious and philosophical worldview, especially during the reign of Asoka the Great who ruled over almost all of the Indian subcontinent from 269 to 232 BC.

 The Mahabharata and other epic tales were composed, in part, to win back the hearts of the masses to the Vedic and Upanishadic traditions. The Mahabharata was essentially a counter-tool to make Hinduism more accessible. The Bhagavad-Gita is the eighteenth book of the Mahabharata and it may have been an independent poem before being incorporated into the Mahabharata.  The story includes a battle that provides a lesson about the conflict between our earthly duties and our spiritual aspirations. Before the battle, the god Krishna provides instructions to one of the warriors in the art of spiritual transcendence and realization of the eternal. 

Promoters of Yoga joined the bandwagon of accessibility as well.  By 200 AD, a yoga master named Patanjali wrote a book known as the Yoga Sutras, a rather simple book with 200 terse passages about clearing the mind and achieving lasting happiness.  The Yoga Sutras was targeted at a wider audience. Patanjali provided ethical principles and easy-to-use tips for breathing and concentrating.  The western-style yoga familiar to most American, although easily dismissed by yoga purists, is very much in the spirit of Patanjali.

Related Lessons
Origins of India, God and Science


Online Resources

Ashtanga Yoga - provides information on yoga, sacred Hindu texts, including a word-for-word translation of the Patanjali's Yoga Sutras.

Internet Sacred Text Archive -the Hindu section is very comprehensive. Here you'll find Vedas, the Upanishads, the epics including the Mahabharata and Bhagavad-Gita, the Yoga Sutras, and plenty of other texts not mentioned here.

Further Reading

Karen Armstrong. 2006. The Great Transformation: The Beginnings of our Religious Traditions. New York: Knopf

Aseem Shukla. 2010. "the Theft of Yoga". Washington Post.

There is some controversy concerning the origins of Yoga, as some scholars claim it predates Hinduism.  Aseem Shukla is the co-founder of the Hindu American Foundations and takes issue with this claim.  See also the position paper "Yoga Beyond Asana: Hindu Thought in Practice" from the Hindu American Foundation website.

Karan Singh. 1998. Essays on Hinduism. New Delhi: Ratna Sagar.