Morning for the Loss of a Friend

Within hours of my October 31 posting New candidate for Darwin Awards, which is the case of a who pastor who used a microphone while standing in water to do a baptism, Shaun Groves wrote to me about it. His main objection was that my posting was callous. This is my response.

Dear Shaun:

I am saddened by the loss of this person and I'm particularly unhappy that he had a wife and children. It is certainly a tragedy.

However, the simple facts are:

• In case you are making a connection with the date of the posting, there is none, I blogged the day it appeared in CNN.
• I was reporting the facts, though I did mention that the case was sad. But facts themselves are often callous. This is a hint about how the universe runs.
• According to their web site, the Darwin Awards are verified, not fictional.
• Many electrical devices come with warnings that caution one not to use them while in contact with water, hair driers in particular. The tag on my little travel one says

  "KEEP AWAY FROM WATER DANGER--- AS WITH MOST ELECTRICAL APPLIANCES, ELECTRICAL PARTS IN THIS DRYER ARE ELECTRICALLY LIVE EVEN WHEN SWITCHED OFF: TO REDUCE RISK OF DEATH BY ELECTRIC SHOCK: 1. ALWAY "UNPLUG IT" AFTER USE. 2. DO NOT PLACE OR STORE WHERE DRYER CAN FALL OR BE PULLED INTO TUB, TOILET OR SINK. 3. DO NOT USE WHILE BATHING. 4. DO NOT USE NEAR OR PLACE IN WATER. 5. IF DRYER FALLS INTO WATER, UNPLUG IMMEDIATELY. DO NOT REACH INTO WATER"

  Everybody must have seen these warnings not to use electrical devices in water. One might argue (as the Darwin Awards review committee did) that microphones are supposed to have low voltage. Perhaps, but any electrical device can fail and it apparently did in this case.
• The physics of electricity is fully understood. The fact that you can read this is stunning evidence of our full mastery of this physics.
• A god did not teach us anything about how electricity works, nor did any even say it exists. At best we have the story of the god Zeus, with some confusion about him holding lightning bolts. (You would probably need a magnetic confinement system in addition to the hand to confine the bolt the way it is normally depicted.) No, it wasn't a god who helped us, it took generations of hard work by scientists to figure electricity out.
• Natural selection occurs all the time. To some degree, we can avoid being killed by understanding how the universe works and flowing with that.
• Prayer is obviously ineffective or this person would have been immediately revived by all the people watching.

To prevent further needless deaths, you could use a radio transmitter microphone. Google for radio transmitter microphone or wireless microphone and you will find many sources for as little as $25 (www.techbuys.net).

Finally, we come to the philosophical problem of 'why' this good person died if there is a God. Here are some possibilities for solving the puzzle:

• God hated this good person and is a murderer, causing the electrical fault. Unfortunately there is plenty of heresay 'evidence' in the Bible for this.
• God knew this was going to happen but didn't come to the rescue. This is either heartless or impotent, certainly not omniscient.
• God didn't know this was going to happen. (Maybe God doesn't understand how electricity works?) This is incompetent, not all-seeing.
• God wasn't watching. Then we must conclude that he is not omniscient. Also, this person was conducting a special ceremony for God and God was not polite enough to watch?
• God moves in mysterious ways. Sorry, that's a cop-out. It doesn't cut it compared to the science we now understand.
• There is no god. This hypothesis fits all the facts of this case and it is simple. It also fits thousands of other facts we know about how the universe works. Why would a god make human eyes have blood vessels in front of the light sensing parts? You can apparently see this sometimes. The octopus has a better design than we do. So we are not the favored species ... or there is no favored species. Why do we have bad backs and bad knees? Why don't women just unzip at the abdomen instead of squeezing our heads (which are too big) through the tiny cervix? That would be a better design and it would avoid untold pain. Why do our DNA polymerases fail to replicate our DNA properly, giving our children horrible genetic diseases? Etc. etc.

From these points (and thousands of other facts) I conclude that it is highly unlikely for there to be a God. Given modern scientific knowledge, all the old arguments fail. At best, Jesus was a person. In his article The World's Most Dangerous Book, Alan Watts proposed that Jesus was like Buddha, and that Jesus understood how we are all 'godlike'. Watts thought that the things Jesus said were misunderstood, perhaps intentionally.

So (apparently) the answer to "Why Did This Happen?" is: that's an incorrect question, there is no why. The physics of the universe is consistent, and if one choses to ignore the physics, then there may be consequences one doesn't like.

But that means that, if there is no external guide, we are more responsible for what happens on this planet, not less. It means that if we choose kindness and being ethical, that leads to a pleasant place to live. Morality comes from within us.

How did morality come to be within us? I think we can make a pretty good case that we evolved that way. (You are welcome to do the genetic studies to test this hypothesis! It will probably be done in the next 50 years at the rate we are going.) Those who disagree, by chosing violence, will be selected against by being thrown in jail or killed - this has been true of societies for a long time and so we have selected ourselves to be [mostly] pleasant! While on a trip to Finland this fall I learned that the word berserk comes from Berserker - a person who would go wild when the vikings were invading. They were great for raides but caused a problem when they got back home. There are stories about how the town's people would have to gang up on these guys - get them drunk and then kill them. So exceptionally nasty people get eliminated from the gene pool by other people. (This suggests that there could be genetic forces towards peaceful people. Unfortunately the reverse may also be true: war leads to rape which spreads genes around the planet.)

All that's irrelevant in the face of the loss of a friend and family member. I am sad that this happened. My deepest condolences to you and your friends.

Tom