Making Sense of “God”: What God-Talk Means and Does

By Norman Solomon

All over the world people talk about God and argue endlessly about what God said and what, if anything, we should do about it. Do they know what are they talking about? Do they ever seriously consider what it might look like or feel like if God actually spoke to you? How could you tell, if someone said God spoke to them, whether they were deluded, bluffing, or high on drugs? The reflections, dialogues, and arguments in this book address such questions, often with humor, sometimes provocatively as when the author suggests the ancient gods have returned to invade the institutions of our great religions, or when two spirits, William and James, viewing the world from afar, voice their doubt as to whether the human species will ever attain the pinnacles of cooperation, reason, beauty, and love. Ancient texts from the Mayan Popol Vuh through the Bible to the Chinese classics are invoked, and the discoveries of modern science from anthropology to zoology are brought into play as the reader is gently led to an appreciation of the role of religious language in modern society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: May 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666761467

Norman Solomon

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include War Made Easy, Made Love, Got War, and War Made Invisible (The New Press). He lives in the San Francisco area.

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Preface

This book has been more than half a century in the making. Admittedly, I found time while I was pondering it for other things such as raising a family, earning a living, and publishing several other books and smaller pieces. But ever since I was teenager, I have wondered how it is that people all over the world talk about God and argue endlessly about what He (masculine, uppercase) said and what if anything we should do about it, but when I inquire as to what they mean I rarely get a coherent reply. When I was a child people could simply tell me to shut up, but as I got older they were polite and respectful and did not object when I read books of religion and philosophy. Many of these were interesting and some were informative, but none yielded answers that fitted comfortably with what I was learning elsewhere about science and human nature. So I got on with life regardless; more important than finding a definitive answer was adjusting to life’s multiple uncertainties, of which this was just one instance.

Eventually I felt the urge to gather my thoughts into a coherent whole. I then faced a dilemma well known to medics: should I aim to become a specialist (who gets to know more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing) or a generalist (who gets to know less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything)? For this book I have attempted a balance between specialism and superficiality; the specialist in me examines the trees, the generalist observes as a whole the wood in which they thrive. Now and then some detail—say, a vein on a leaf—might catch my eye, and I stop to peer more closely.

Many disciplines are brought into service—philosophy, theology, anthropology, psychology, history, neurology, evolutionary biology, and linguistics, among others—and I have done my best to balance their frequently competing claims.

Several chapters take the form of dialogues, articulated by members of the (fictional) Crumpet Club or, in one case, put into the mouths of philosophers of the past. At times I seek to stand aside and imagine what an observer free from petty human concerns might think, so I report the (again, fictional) conversations of two timeless spirits, William and James, who observe the world as an experiment the success of which is uncertain.

Ultimately, I speak in my own voice, personal, not institutional. Although the book concerns religion in general rather than specifically Judaism, when I make mention of Christianity (or Islam or Indian or Native American religion) it is of Christianity (or whatever) as seen from my personal perspective, which is broadly Jewish. The history of Christianity (or whatever—or for that matter of Judaism itself) is treated as objectively as possible (is it ever possible?).

Eventually a synthesis emerges, built around the idea that religious language (words, symbols, rituals) remains constant, binding a community, while the meaning assigned to its terms, God included, is maneuvered by theologians in step with changing intellectual and social horizons. Three eras of god-talk (ancient, medieval, modern) are outlined, and I inquire whether these have kinship with paradigm changes in science. Finally, my spirits William and James look in on their experiment but remain unimpressed by progress so far.

Some readers might find sections of the book contentious. Conventional adherents of most religions (including my own) will most likely be annoyed by chapter 11 (Return of the Gods), in which I argue that the ancient gods return to contaminate the monotheistic religions in the form of angels, demons, saints, and a mass of superstitions and ideologies.

There is much irony, especially with reference to the unshakeable certainties of some of those who have dealt with the topic before me. Life is anything but certain.

I wrote what I felt I had to write, as honestly and readably as I could. If anyone would like to use my musings as a text for a course in the philosophy of religion, they will find that it covers the essential topics. But the reader I had in mind when the time came to assemble my reflections is an educated member of the public who, like myself, is simply trying to make sense of it all. To such a reader I offer no final answers, no bland reassurances, just a little company in navigating the mysterious universe in which we find ourselves.

Part One

Orientation

1

How the Journey Began

And can you blame me, Cleanthes, if I here imitate the prudent reserve of Simonides, who, according to the noted story, being asked by Hiero, What God was? desired a day to think of it, and then two days more; and after that manner continually prolonged the term, without ever bringing in his definition or description? Could you even blame me, if I had answered at first, that I did not know, and was sensible that this subject lay vastly beyond the reach of my faculties.

¹

I don’t remember learning to talk. Evidently, I did learn, because I can talk now and couldn’t when I was born. (But then, I don’t remember being born.) If I was like other children, the first words I said were something like Da-da or Ma-ma, and even before I could produce those sounds I must have heard them, placed them in context, and so learned to associate them with two people who were of special significance in my life.

I also learned fairly early on to associate my older brother with the hard-to-articulate sound Jack. Occasionally the process went wrong, as when I thought a favorite aunt who came to stay with us was called Auntie Me because she always said, Come to me. The error was duly corrected—her name was Bessie, not Me—and my circle of nameable acquaintances broadened.

Another name was occasionally dropped into the conversation but was difficult to attach to anybody or anything I could see. He—it was definitely he, not she—was called God. My brother, according to what my mother told me later, had been seriously confused; he thought God lived in the sky and that one day he (my brother) could climb up a long ladder and tickle God’s toes. Fine, I could see that was a mistake; the anecdote taught me what God wasn’t, but it didn’t help me to know what God was. (Later on I learned that medieval philosophers, too, suffered this dilemma; they could confidently state what God wasn’t but not what God was.)

My parents had a strong sense of being Jewish but not much theology. They mentioned God indifferently—God bless you if you sneezed or God forgive you if you had been really naughty—but didn’t invoke him to explain events. If they ever tried to tell me what a thunderstorm was, they would have said that clouds were crashing against one another to make thunder, lightning, and rain, not that an angry Being was punishing evildoers (like me?) by making a frightening noise and chucking water down. I doubt I ever asked them who made the world; if I had done, I might have been told that God made it, but in a tone of voice that sounded as if they couldn’t think of a better answer, so kindly be a good boy and shut up!

Ernestine Rose (1810–92), daughter of a Polish rabbi, emigrated to the USA where she became an abolitionist and feminist; she died in Brighton, England. According to an online source I have been unable to confirm,² she remarked, It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so. Interesting, maybe, but it’s not demonstrable; it rather depends on what you mean by God—or atheist—or religious.

The psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) maintained that children conceive all objects, even natural ones, as man-made; even if they use the word god, they are thinking of a man; they conceive of only one kind of causality. Olivera Petrovich rejected Piaget’s artificialism; she maintains that, on the contrary, infants are innately able to distinguish natural from man-made (artificial) objects; in effect, they are hardwired to believe in God (or some equivalent supernatural agency); atheism, rather than theism, has to be learned. Her evidence for this comes from getting preschool children to look at pictures of objects, animals, and the like and to say which could have been made by people and which not. In a further experiment, they were asked if they thought certain objects (sky, earth, rocks) were made by people or whether nobody knows.³

It is very difficult to assess what Dr. Petrovich, or the English preschool children on which her early research was based, mean by God, even if we agree with her that Piaget was mistaken in thinking that children did not distinguish between God and humans. If what she has documented is that children have an innate sense that the world around them is designed rather than chaotic and is run by some intelligent being different from ordinary people, that is a valuable result. However, it is more significant for biology than for theology. An operating assumption that the world is rational and is guided by a mind or minds other than my own is useful; it is a heuristic, a device that is likely to work in situations that make for survival and reproduction. But it can also go badly wrong, and the great survival trick of us humans is that we can question our inbuilt heuristics and make corrections when needed. Of course, it is useful when you see an arrangement of stones in the jungle to be able to reason that someone has been that way before (though you could be mistaken); on the other hand, to conclude from an apparent pattern of clouds in the sky that some intelligent being up there is sending you a message could be a disastrous error.

In sum: it makes sense for children to start on the assumption that someone up there is running the show, but it also makes sense that as they grow up, they question this assumption.

To return to my own recollections of childhood—I was sent to Hebrew and religion classes and to the synagogue, where God was apparently more significant than at home, though still not to be encountered in person. Thousands of years ago, I was informed, he had dictated a book, called the Torah, which we now read out from a Hebrew scroll; it told you some history and how to behave. You could pray to him, asking him for what you needed or wanted, and he might grant your request—though I was also warned that on occasion he might say no, which did nothing for my confidence.

If this was mysterious, it was no more mysterious than the general workings of the world around me; it offered a plausible model of how it all fitted together, and it told me unambiguously what to do. Coherence appealed, and so did the sense of certainty as to the correct way to behave; I didn’t get those things at home. So I rebelled and turned religious. I started to believe, which was not particularly annoying, and to act accordingly, which was decidedly annoying, especially to my parents, since it got in the way of comfortable domesticity.

Believing was also controversial in the wider world. Some people claimed to believe in God, others didn’t; some claimed to believe in the Bible, others didn’t.

Believers quarrelled among themselves. If—like most of the people I met at school and out and about—you were a Christian and believed in God, you could still argue about how believing in God squared with believing in Jesus; if you were a Jew, you didn’t have that problem. If you were a Christian and believed in the Bible, you said that all the books in the Old Testament and the New Testament were divinely revealed truth—God’s own words; if you were a Jew you believed in the Old Testament (henceforth, less contentiously, the Hebrew Scriptures) but knew that the New Testament was false. I didn’t meet well-informed Muslims or Hindus until I was much older; I expect Muslims, even if they reckoned Jesus was a prophet, would have agreed with me that he wasn’t God. Christians and Muslims would, like me at that time, have placed Hindus in the category of idolaters, though contrary to what I now know to be the traditional teaching of all three religions, we would have seen this as interesting rather than as the abomination that is how our Scriptures portray idolatry.

Wales in those days (I was born and grew up in Cardiff) was fairly accepting of religious diversity—provided, that is, you were not Catholic. I won’t say there was no antisemitism, but it was not as palpable as anti-Catholicism, definitely not a factor in everyday life. You might argue about religion if you thought it worthwhile, but if you were the combative sort, it was politics that was worth fighting over, not religion. I was dismayed, when I learned some history, to discover that in the past people had very often fought violently about religion, even about rival definitions of God or interpretations of Scripture. This was disconcerting. Religion was really hard to understand or to make up your mind about, which was why you basically went along with family custom, so how could anyone be so certain they were right and that everybody who disagreed with them was not just wrong but evil and certainly in danger for their immortal soul (whatever that might be)?

Religion wasn’t like science where, if you disagreed, you would devise an experiment to find the right answer or, if not, simply carry on with the job until some evidence turned up one way or the other. This is not to deny that individual scientists can be dogmatic or that scientific disputes can and do arouse personal animosities and strong collective emotions. They can also get tied up with political or religious ideologies, as when the Nazis rejected Jewish science, the Soviets supported Lysenko, or the Catholic Church condemned Galileo. However, these disputes were not so much about science per se as about religious or political ideology and authority.

There were other ways in which science and religion were different. In science, it would not make much sense to make a general statement that, e.g., Physics is true or Chemistry is false; you might say Newton’s laws of motion were correct or Avogadro’s hypothesis was false, but never that physics or chemistry as a totality was either true or false. Religious people, on the other hand, are apt to go for all or nothing; they expect you to commit to The Bible is true or The Qur’an is true, meaning every single verse in all respects.

Another difference. In principle, scientific statements have clear and definite meaning, though you may have to learn their special language before you can appreciate that. Religious statements are not like that. People, even when thoroughly at home in religious language, debate endlessly the meaning of verses of Scripture or of key terms in religious discourse. Great and terrible wars have been fought over the correct interpretation of Scripture, over who has the right to interpret Scripture, or over the meaning of basic terms such as God. How very remarkable this is! If people don’t have a clear grasp of what they are talking about, how can they be so certain that they are right as to justify slaughtering people who disagree with them? And anyway, what could possibly justify them in murdering or otherwise oppressing people who do not seek to harm them, merely because they happen to disagree on some abstruse intellectual issue?

Put that aside for a while. I had committed myself to believing in the Bible, so it seemed logical to read it, as far as possible in the original language (yes, it would have been more logical to read it first, then to believe). I quickly acquired sufficient Hebrew to translate the phrase, frequent in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, The Lord spoke to Moses, saying. Translation accomplished, I still had to grasp what it meant. I tried to imagine (1) what it would be like if you were Moses and the Lord spoke to you, and (2) what it would look like if you were watching Moses and the Lord spoke to him. I still don’t know, and I am not sure that anybody else does, however glibly the words roll off their tongues, but at the time I took comfort in the thought that really wise, intelligent people, like chief rabbis or archbishops, understood such things. (Few, if any, do, but it took me a long time to figure that out, and even longer to acknowledge it.)

So I embarked on a quest. It would be too pretentious as to call it a quest for God. My quest was simply to find out what people were talking about when they used the word God seriously (as opposed to God bless you when you sneezed) in their conversations. If you already know, there is no point in reading further. But I don’t expect you do know, whatever religion you sign up to; indeed, I’m pretty sure you don’t (even if you think you do), so please join me in the exploration.

1

. Philo, in Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,

149

.

2

. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/ernestine_rose_

187359

.

3

. Petrovich, Examination of Piaget’s Theory, ch.

7

.

2

William and James

The View from Beyond

Let us make humankind in our image. (Gen 1:26)

And the man became a living being. (Gen 2:7)

And the man became a speaking being. (Aramaic paraphrase of Gen 2:7)

Towards the end of World War II—I was eleven or twelve years old—I was dispatched to Croydon (then south of London, now a London borough) to spend part of the summer with one of my mother’s sisters. Aunt Bella (sister of Bessie who figured in the last chapter) would pack me off for the afternoon to some elderly neighbors (at least they seemed elderly to me—they must have been at least in their forties) who were the proud possessors of bound volumes of The Strand Magazine. Here I encountered Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories of Sherlock Holmes in their original form, fresh from the author’s pen; they were endlessly fascinating and occasionally frightening. Conan Doyle earned his place among the immortals, but no such reward was reaped by another writer whose imaginative tales graced the same volumes and who stimulated my imagination to the same extent, but whose work has sunk into oblivion. James Frank Sullivan (1853–1936), draughtsman, trenchant social satirist, strip cartoonist, and children’s author, hasn’t even achieved a biography in Wikipedia (perhaps that will be remedied by the time you read this), though the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography allots him a page or two; otherwise, he is remembered only by historians of the cartoon, if at all.⁴

Sullivan introduced two spirits who, as he put it, strolled amid the monotonous ether of space long before planets were formed:

In aspect the two companions differed in the most pronounced way. On the brow of the one, who might have passed for the elder, appeared the cold and passionless calculation of science; the eye was deeply reflective, but unimpassioned; the demeanour was grave and deliberate. We may as well speak of this spirit henceforth as William. The younger, whom we will call James, was of a very different stamp, for in him the quick and well opened eye, the mobile brow and mouth, and the eager voice, denoted enthusiasm and enterprise.⁵

We will forgive Sullivan his references to ether. The article was published in 1892; Michelson and Morley had demolished the ether in 1887, but even they thought their experiment had failed, and several more years were to elapse before Einstein refashioned our concepts of time and space in such a way as to accommodate their result.

James, the young, adventurous spirit, conceived the idea of making a world, with people, to relieve somewhat the monotonous boredom of space. William, in the name of science and reason, thoroughly debunked the proposal:

Look here, my poor boy, said William, rising, don’t muddle your head with any more of these preposterous plans. Science and Reason utterly confute the possibility of such a world as you describe. To begin with, the world itself could not exist for five minutes; then your people couldn’t live in it if it did; if they could live, they couldn’t move; if they could live and move, they would not have a moment for anything but eating; they could not recognise or identify each other; and so on, and so on. The whole thing is a farrago of hopeless and impossible bosh, and couldn’t hold water for a single instant. Science and Reason prove it!⁶

In another episode James himself worries about the evil tendencies with which he proposes to endow his creations:

The two spirits William and James—whose previous argument touching the possibility of the existence of worlds it is the reader’s duty to recollect—were again wandering through the desolation of unoccupied space, when James, the young and fanciful, suddenly once again broke the oppressive silence.

William, said he, I have been thinking more about that system of creation of which I spoke.

William chuckled a rumbling chuckle of unmannerly raillery, and said You have, of course, in thinking it over again, perceived the wild impracticability of the whole thing; and are about to unreservedly admit that neither universes, worlds, man, or anything else could possibly exist—

I have perceived nothing of the kind, replied James, somewhat irritably. But the phase of the subject which has just been occupying my mind is war.

Yes, said William in his nasty way, that assuredly would be the most prominent—nay, the engrossing—phase of any existence in which those phantastically imaginary creatures you call ‘human beings’ might take part. War—extermination—the end. Well?

Well, I admit the preponderance of war, but not the sequel you are pleased to suggest. I have dreamed the whole thing in its sequence. There would be war—war becoming ever more and more devastating—to a certain point.

But, interrupted William, before you go on wasting valuable eternity with your speculations, let me just ask you one question. You will, I take it, at once admit that the predominant characteristic of these human beings of yours is—foolishness bordering on idiotcy?

Well, ye—es, said James, communing with himself. Ye—es. I see them universally agreeing to abolish all self-respect and establish a complicated system of mutual fraud which they will call ‘commerce.’ I see them heaping all their wealth upon howlers of drivelling comic songs, while allowing great writers to die of starvation. Ye—es, I admit the predominant characteristic.

Very well, then, said William, are these ‘human beings’ worth inventing?⁷

Young James may have had his forebodings, but he evidently proceeded with his experiment, or else we wouldn’t be here. As Sullivan never completed his documentation of the spirits’ speculations, it falls to me to add an instalment. This is no easy task. Such spirits as William and James have no need to communicate, as we do, with the aid of that cumbersome human tool language, let alone in the richly polyvalent form of it we call English; their conversation transcended the merely verbal, and no attempt to capture it in words can be adequate. Indeed, so far are such beings from anything we can conceive, that even talking about them as two rather than as one is a questionable if convenient device—are our concepts of number strictly applicable at this level?

Now, it might occur to a reader that as I am a religious sort of person, William and James are some sort of allegory or substitute for God; it might be noticed that I occasionally associate them with qualities, such as justice and mercy, conventionally attributed to God, and a well-informed reader might even recognize that I have occasionally applied to them some biblical expression used of God. So let me say categorically that, no, William and James are not God; they are simply a device to enable me now and then to stand aside and look dispassionately at the progress or otherwise the human race has achieved in the few million years it has been around.

By the time—I speak figuratively, for neither time nor space existed—by the time the discussion I am reporting took place, William had mellowed somewhat (for even spirits mellow with age, if one may use that term of timeless beings); though still hesitant, he had embraced James’s proposal and was offering cautionary advice.

WILLIAM: Young James, you are determined to go ahead with this precarious experiment, and you accept that you cannot generate people of your design at a stroke, but must allow some billions of years, once you have formed elements and stars and a suitable planet, to evolve them through a host of other life forms, most of which will have disappeared and their substance been recycled innumerable times to make way for your superior beings, though some of which—species of archaea and bacteria, for instance—will remain and be vital to human life.

JAMES: I accept that.

WILLIAM: And at the end of this process, when your human beings finally emerge, they are in some sense to be superior, despite all they have in common with their fellow creatures, and all the inevitable failings I have pointed out—superior to all the other life forms you have generated?

JAMES: That is so.

WILLIAM: How will that superiority be manifest? Will they be larger, more powerful, longer lived, better at locomotion, or what?

JAMES: Well, I am not clear on the details, but I think part of their superiority may lie in their ability to communicate—put it another way, to share and process information. There could be another area of superiority, too, to do with moral values or behavior, though admittedly this would be difficult to accomplish as they have such a lot in common with their nonhuman ancestors—unavoidable, since I cannot create them by special design, but shall have to wait for them to evolve through simpler life forms.

WILLIAM: Very well, then. Let’s focus for now on the communications aspect. It’s pretty inevitable that they will communicate. The way you propose to set up your universe everything will communicate; you have decided that no information is ever to be lost, though I have warned you that you cannot guarantee that if you insist on allowing black holes—

JAMES: Which I certainly do.

WILLIAM: You have photons travelling from one end of the universe to another carrying information; you have gravity warping space in such a way that that any mass—even dark matter—affects everything else in the universe. As to life forms, your most primitive living things communicate with their environment and with each other. Bacteria will use electrical signals; your disgusting slime molds need some form of communication to ensure that they slither around together in mats, find food by the shortest route, and don’t get detached from one another;⁸ your trees read messages (whether from the environment or from each other, perhaps through fungal networks) to know when to produce chemicals that will help them to resist fire. Your animals communicate in ever more complex and efficient ways; you have a blackbird, for instance (not, indeed, an ancestor of your humans), that has different songs to attract a mate, to defend its territory, to warn of dangers above or below, as well as companion calls and juvenile begging calls. Are humans going to sing too?

JAMES: Why not indeed? If I can get their vocal cords to shape up the right way they might communicate by singing even more beautifully than blackbirds, and I’ll have females equally with males singing—they could sing to communicate reassurance to their young, or to attract males, and the males could sing to bond together for hunting, or for work, to warn enemies off their territory or to fight them.

But really I was thinking of something more subtle, something that no other animal can do, something that will demonstrate the superiority of humans and show that my experiment is worth doing. Maybe—I hope this is not going too far—they will become just a little bit like us. I propose to call this mode of communication speech. Yes, humans will excel other life forms because they will have speech. Yes—speech will equip them to communicate and to store and process information and enable them to understand and control their world and all that is in it. Better still—they will actually know what they are doing, and exercise conscious choice!

WILLIAM: And what does this speech consist of?

JAMES: Why, sounds, gestures, facial movements, behaviors—all of which will have been tried and tested in other animals, if at a less sophisticated level. Together, they make what I call language, and which will exist in diverse forms, each of which will fit the knowledge and needs of a particular population.

WILLIAM: My dear James, you have again come up with the impossible and contradictory. It’s all very well for a blackbird to sing to defend its territory, but even that, as you’ve already admitted, demands a complicated arrangement of sensory inputs, interpretation, learning by association, development of vocal organs, and a capacity to encode the system in such a way that it can be passed on to the next generation. I have conceded that you might accomplish this with the aid of that ingenious DNA stuff you invented, but now you are proposing a whole new level of complexity.

And the contradictions! On the one hand, you tell me that the purpose of language is communication; on the other hand, you say that language will exist in diverse forms. Surely, if the purpose is to enable communication, everybody should have exactly the same form of language, or else they will fail to understand each other!

JAMES: Well, of course, evolution is a bit of a gamble, so there will be difficulties; that’s why I’ve designed a universe large enough to run the experiment over and over again until it comes out right. I will have billions of galaxies with billions of stars in every one and planets around most stars, and I need only one planet to work. If I run the system for billions of years it’s pretty likely that humans will evolve at least once, and if I’m lucky, it will happen lots of times and at least one of those species should turn out not to be self-destructive, though that may be the biggest gamble of all. If all else fails, I could always generate an infinite series of parallel universes . . .

WILLIAM: No way! That’s not playing the game! I’m not denying that your universe is one of an infinite number of possibilities. What I’m saying is that even with your billions of years and billions of galaxies with billions of stars in every one, the outcome you describe is pretty unlikely.

JAMES: OK. But to return to this question of diverse languages. My original thought was indeed that one universal, comprehensive, precise language might evolve. But I soon realized that that was a fantasy, entirely incompatible with the plan I put forward in our very first conversation to populate my world with millions of individuals, all distinguishable from one another. Of course, the first group to develop language will have only one language, and a very basic one at that; but as language spreads, it will diversify. Language is rooted in people and their broad experiences—danger, territory, love, and the like—rather than in atomic facts,⁹ though they will get down to these when they start doing science. Personal experiences are in the first place what they want to communicate, and if the people are all different so are their experiences, and so are the associations they form with each bit of their language. There will be groups of people—families, tribes, nations—who share a lot of experiences, and they will talk in similar ways, in what they think of as the same language—English, for instance, or Chinese—though there will still be minor differences from one locality to another (dialects) and also gender differences—males and females experience the world slightly differently.

WILLIAM: You just referred to bits of language?

JAMES: Yes—sound and gesture groups, words, phrases, and the like.

WILLIAM: How will they know how to string them together?

JAMES: Ah—now that is an ingenious device I have thought up, called grammar. Bits will have their meaning determined—for instance, whether they link to things (nouns) or actions (verbs), or whether they are about past, present, or future, or instructions or reports—by the way they are strung together in sentences, or linked with gestures or otherwise inflected, or related to the context in which they are spoken.

WILLIAM: Ingenious indeed! A sure recipe for confusion, misunderstanding, and plain deceit! Different bits, mostly imprecise, different ways of stringing them together, and different languages! I can see that if a few of your humans band together to do something—say, to build a tower—the whole enterprise will (literally) come crashing down when one asks for bricks and the other gives him rope, or thinks he has been sent to fetch a cup of tea!¹⁰ Perhaps you will have a group of professional translators, skilled in more than one language, to interpret (or deceive, as the case might be). But as your languages are all tied up with experience and culture, it is unlikely that accurate translation will be possible or that anything at all said in one language will have an exact equivalent in another.

JAMES: Now hold on, William. Don’t think those thoughts haven‘t crossed my mind, too, and I can’t deny the dangers you warn of. People certainly won’t fully understand each other, even if they speak the same language, and all the more if they don’t. But if they really want to do things together, they will overcome this problem, make intelligent guesses, forgive mistakes, be flexible, and trust each other. I anticipate that when I have run the experiment enough times, evolution will do its work and favor the success of those humans who are most willing to cooperate. I have thought up this little game called The Prisoner’s Dilemma¹¹—

WILLIAM: Yes, yes, I know all about that. Cooperation and trust win, and blind pursuit of self-interest loses. Two accomplices are locked in separate cells. Each is offered three choices by the police: (1) if both confess to the charges, both will be jailed for five years; (2) if only one confesses, he will be freed, but the non-confessor will be jailed for ten years; or (3) if neither confesses, both will be tried for a minor offense and will be jailed for one year. If both know that the other will not be selfish and will take the collective interest into consideration, neither will confess, but both will serve one year in jail. Otherwise, where one cannot depend on the other, the best choice for each is to confess and risk serving five years.

But surely this game rests on the assumption that humans will act rationally in their own self-interest. Yet you yourself have pointed out that evolution often favors those who act irrationally. Look at bees, for instance. It makes no sense at all, from the point of view of the individual worker bee, to sting an enemy and die; flight would be a better option. So, in the interests of the gene pool of the swarm, the individual is programmed to sacrifice its own life, contrary to what reason, if it had that faculty, would tell it to do. And among your humans, who have a modicum of reason, you have had to allow young men, entirely contrary to rational self-interest, to murder each other and be ready to sacrifice their own lives in war, and young women to give themselves over to strong and violent men and to risk childbirth, and both sexes to engage in sexual activity with all the social and physical hazards it gives rise to—all in flagrant opposition to reason!

JAMES: Precisely. In that way the strongest and most cunning men and the most beautiful, seductive, and fertile women will survive. Cunning and seduction, of course, rely heavily on the conscious processing of information, or reason, so in this way a premium is set on intelligence, and the most intelligent of both sexes will be selected. But if men and women were to rely on reason alone, they would be less successful at reproduction and the species would atrophy and possibly even die out. And all the while reason is being honed (if for dubious purposes), the species is increasing in physical fitness and competitiveness, and altruistic and other cooperative tendencies are strengthened.

WILLIAM: Mm! Perhaps after all there is something in your plan, James, devious as it sounds on first hearing. You are achieving a