Church of the Churchless

Science and religion share a sense of purpose

What makes life meaningful? How is it that we can wake up in the morning and feel like jumping out of bed, rather than hiding beneath the covers?

A sense of purpose. Our life seems like it has a direction. We have a reason for being. Goals, intentions, to-do's.

In the "Faith" chapter of his book, On Being Certain, Robert Burton, M.D. (a neurologist) says:

By now it should be apparent that deeply felt purpose and meaning are exactly that -- profound mental sensations. Though the underlying brain mechanisms that create these sensations aren't known, the biggest clue comes from those who've undergone "mystical" moments.

A common thread of such descriptions is the sudden and unexpected appearance of a "flood of pure meaning" or an inexplicable feeling of knowing of what life is about without the awareness of any preceding or triggering thought.

Whether or not it is appropriate to use the word faith to describe a feeling of "now I know why I'm here," or "this must be what it's all about," it is impossible to overlook the shared qualities of the feeling of knowing, a sense of faith, and feelings of purpose and meaning.

All serve as both motivation and reward at the most basic level of thought. All correspond to [William] James's idea of felt knowledge -- mental sensations that feel like knowledge.

(This visceral sense of faith is not to be confused with the cognitive potpourri of conscious but unsubstantiated ideas that become articles of faith, such as beliefs in religion, alien abduction, blueberries as a prevention for Alzheimer's disease, and a six-thousand-year-old universe.)

I love Burton's way of looking at science and religion. And anything else that offers up a sense of meaning in someone's life. Like he said, that sense is like any other sense -- such as sight, hearing, touch.

It's just there. Or, not.

A second line of evidence comes from descriptions of when the feeling isn't present. Though not necessarily aware of when we feel purpose and meaning, we are nearly always aware of the sickening feeling when we don't possess them. This isn't an intellectual misapprehension; it is a gut sense of disorientation and a loss of personal direction.

Scientifically-minded people have a sense of purpose and meaning just as much as religiously-minded people do.

Burton talks about how Richard Dawkins, a noted atheist scientist, is ferociously dedicated to debunking mythologies and irrationality -- such as a denial of how evolution has guided the course of life on Earth.

Dawkins lives for this, just as the Pope lives to serve the cause of Catholicism, or a woman lives to raise her children, or a man lives to become the best at some sport.

So a felt sense of meaning and purpose is the root out of which grow stalks of action and commitment. Scientists do science because it is meaningful to them. Religious people do religion for the same reason.

Different strokes for different folks. Whatever turns you on.

We should force ourselves to distinguish between separate physiological categories of faith -- the basic visceral drive for meaning that has real purpose versus the unsubstantiated cognitive acceptance of an idea. Compassion, empathy, and humility can only arise out of recognizing that our common desires are differently expressed.

Nicely said, Dr. Burton. Both science and religion need to recognize that their common ground is a sense of meaning and purpose.

Fairly frequently a commenter on this blog will argue, "science is a form of religion." That's wrong. He or she says that because scientists are deeply devoted to the pursuit of truth about the physical universe.

But devotion grows from a sense of meaning. It doesn't need religion. People can be devoted to all sorts of non-religious things, such as improving one's golf game.

So religious believers should differentiate between the cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of their faith. Meaning, the feeling they have toward divinity, the meaning they derive from religiosity, is shared by scientists (and everyone else on Earth aside from the deeply clinically depressed).

However, the cognitive side of their faith is something different. These are the concepts that accompany the feelings. "Jesus is the Son of God." Well, you think so. But where is the proof?

I'm not justified in questioning the meaning someone gets from his or her religion. I am justified, though, in questioning their purported facts about the cosmos.

Burton ends his chapter with some good suggestions:

We can strive for objectivity; we cannot reach the shores of dispassionate observation. The problem is that to play according to the rules of scientific method, we must concede the possibility that we cannot know if one day contrary evidence might appear and overthrow a cherished theory.

Faith-based arguments, by invoking irrefutable divine authority that will always be right, do not have to make this concession. This uneven playing field isn't going to go away.

...If science is to carry on a meaningful dialogue with religion, it must work to establish a level playing field where both sides honestly address what we can and cannot know about ourselves and the world around us.

...If possible, both science and religion should try to adopt and stick with the idea of provisional facts. Once all facts become works-in-progress, absolutism would be dethroned. No matter how great the "evidence," the literal interpretation of the Bible or Koran would no longer be the only possibility.

Let's give thanks to the big bang, plus...

It's Thanksgiving Day here in the United States. Almost everybody is into thankfulness, whether sincere or feigned.

Myself, I'm thankful that I was able to get a HP wireless printer working with my wife's new iMac this afternoon. It was touch and go for a while but I finally figured it out.

My philosophical problem, though, is who or what I should offer my thanks to.

This quandary is common to every exclamation of gratitude, including religious ones such as  "Thank you, Jesus" or "Thank you, God." Where the heck do you stop?

I read some reviews of the Photosmart C4780 that pointed me toward the need to download Snow Leopard compatible software from the HP web site. I'm thankful to the people who took the time to share their experience with getting the printer to play nicely with a Mac.

They wouldn't have been able to do this if they hadn't been born.

So I also need to thank their parents. Along with every relative, human, animal, or whatever, along the several billion-year timeline of life's evolution on Earth.

Which wouldn't have been possible if the universe didn't exist, of course. Fourteen billion or so years ago the big bang started everything off. About ten billion years later the Earth formed.

And here we are.

Now, scientifically minded religious believers don't want to stop with thanking the big bang for making everything exist. They assume that God or some other supernatural entity was responsible for the big bang.

(Fundamentalists, of course, don't accept that the big bang and evolution even happened, but that's so crazy I'll ignore them in my thankfulness analysis.)

I get blog comments on this subject fairly frequently. Someone will say, "There had to be something before the big bang, because something can't come from nothing." Well, who says?

The human mind is doing that saying, using human cognition based on human perceptions. Why, though, should we believe that the cosmos operates in accord with the limitations of the human mind?

We're certain about all kinds of things that we shouldn't be. Including who to thank for existence. Such is the central message of Robert Burton's "On Being Certain," a book I like a lot (and blogged about here and here).

Burton is a neurologist. He points out that reason can't be separated from bodily sensations, since "any notion of space -- no matter how abstract -- must be filtered through our bodily perceptions of space. In our mind's eye, emptiness occupies space."

So our notions about the big bang get confused by our perceptual conditioning.

Close your eyes and try envisioning a face. You will see it against some kind of contrasting background, whether it is a neutral color or a vague grayness or blackness. Now try to visualize a perfect vacuum.

Even if I know that a vacuum contains nothing, there is still an "it," a nothingness that must exist within some type of space. My mind serves up a dim empty darkness as it simultaneously tells me that this can't be so. Empty space is a visual non sequitur; there is no visual counterpart of nothingness.

Let's move on to cosmology. Try to visualize the big bang -- a single infinitely dense point that suddenly explodes. To see this object in our mind's eye, we place this dot against some contrasting background.

Most people, when questioned, will offer that they see a dim darkness against which the initial singularity is framed. This problem of borders isn't confined to spatial considerations; time is equally impossible to visualize as either always existing or suddenly beginning.

We see a beginning in contrast to what was present just before the beginning. The cruel irony is that a mind's eye representation of no surrounding space or time occupies some space and suggests a prior time.

To relieve the resulting tensions, we feel compelled to ask a key question shared by science and religion -- what, if anything, was present before the beginning?

However, Burton says, we have no way of knowing whether this question is even meaningful. It could just be a product of our all-too-human way of perceiving things.

So in the end I'm thankful to...mystery.

Because nobody knows what, if anything, is at the end (or beginning) of existence. Our thanks directed toward ultimacy echo into the seeming infinity of time and space, landing nowhere.

Yet maybe also, everywhere.

Whichever or whatever, I'm thankful for being alive and able to ponder the wonder of being able to wonder.

There are no signs of God. So why believe?

You'd think that an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and/or omnibenevolent being would leave some evident trace, given all this omni'ness.

Yet God, whether considered from an impersonal Eastern perspective or a personal Western viewpoint, has left no demonstrable signs of his/her/it's existence.

Why?

A theologian would answer, "It isn't possible to know the mind of God, or comprehend the essence of divinity." Well, OK.

But if this is the case, let's do away with religions, mystic paths, spiritual philosophies, and the like, and simply admit that if God is real, this is a mysterious ultimate reality never to be known.

Since true believers won't go for this, I won't accept no answer to Why? Yet I haven't come across a convincing one in my sixty-one years.

The India-based meditation system I belonged to for a long time, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, taught that the ruler of the lower realms of creation, including the physical universe ("Kal") got his job by standing on one leg for countless eons, demonstrating to
God ("Akal") that he had the right stuff to be a ruler.

Part of the deal with God involved a promise from the Big Guy Upstairs that god-realized gurus couldn't perform miracles to attract disciples who, after being initiated, would be able to learn how to leave Kal's domain and return to God, thereby depleting Kal of some souls.

(Yeah, I know it sounds crazy. I never bought into this particular bit of theology, though. Plus, it really isn't any crazier than the notion that God sent his only Son to die on the cross and absolve the sins of humanity.)

Other religions come up with equally unbelievable explanations for why God hasn't left any supernatural traces in the natural world, don't even attempt an answer to the "Why no trace?" question, or consider that God did leave evidence of a divine presence in the past, as related in scripture.

Carl Sagan addresses this issue in his book, "The Varieties of Scientific Experience." 

You have to ask, "What is the evidence?" And it's insufficient to say, "Well, there is this extremely charismatic person who said that he had a conversion experience." Not enough.

There are lots of charismatic people who have all sorts of mutually exclusive conversion experiences. They can't all be right. Some of them have to be wrong. Many of them have to be wrong. It's even possible that all of them are wrong. We cannot depend entirely on what people say. We have to look at what the evidence is.

And that's lacking. Sagan notes that people will say, "God is love, and I feel this love, so I know God exists."

Well, atheists feel love also. So do adherents of every religion, many of which have extremely different conceptions of God -- Hindus vs. Christians, for example.

Sagan wonders, as have I, why God hasn't left some indisputable sign of divinity lying around the creation for us to marvel at. Why no giant cross orbiting the Earth? Or an immense Islamic crescent on the moon if Allah is the real deal?

Then there's the puzzling reality that none of the supposed prophets of God or God-realized sages have told humanity any hitherto unknown fact about the physical universe.

If these people are in touch with a supernatural consciousness, why don't they know something no one else does? Carl Sagan says:

Imagine that there is a set of holy books in all cultures in which there are a few enigmatic phrases that God of the gods tell our ancestors are to be passed on to the future with no change.

Very important to get it exactly right. Now, so far that's not very different from the actual circumstances of alleged holy books. But suppose that the phrases in question were phrases that we would recognize today that could not have been recognized then.

The Sun is a star. Now, nobody knew that, let's say, in the sixth century B.C., when the Jews were in the Babylonian exile and picked up the Babylonian cosmology from the principal astronomers of the time. Ancient Babylonian science is the cosmology that is still enshrined in the book of Genesis.

Suppose instead the story was "Don't forget, the Sun is a star." Or "Don't forget, Mars is a rusty place with volcanoes. Mars, you know, that red star. That's a world. It has volcanoes, it's rusty, there are clouds, there used to be rivers. There aren't anymore. You'll understand this later. Trust me. Right now, don't forget."

This never happened, though. Sages, prophets, mystics, gurus -- all of them have known no more about the universe than the scientists of their time (and usually a lot less).

Thus God not only doesn't leave traces of divinity in the physical creation, God also doesn't leave any demonstrable evidence of divine knowledge in the minds of those who supposedly have come in contact with him/her/it.

Ken Wilber is wrong about Plotinus

I've got a love-hate thing going with Ken Wilber, a prolific writer and creative thinker who relentlessly preaches the marvels of an Integral approach to understanding reality.

Sometimes I like what Wilber says (see here and here). Sometimes I don't (see here and here).

His misunderstanding of Plotinus, a Neoplatonist Greek philosopher, is especially irritating to me. I wrote a book about Plotinus, "Return to the One." I spent several years reading just about every book in English that describes and analyzes Plotinus' teachings.

So when I saw how Ken Wilber mangled Plotinus in an attempt to demonstrate that Plotinus' outlook is on the same page as Wilber's nondual perspective, I was filled with righteous philosophical indignation.

Which made me eager to write an expose of "What Wilber Gets Wrong About Plotinus."

Frank Visser asked me if he could post this piece on his Integral World web site. Naturally I said sure. (It also is included in a recently published book of Wilberian essays, "Spheres of Awareness.")

I re-read my piece yesterday. It's pretty damn good, if I say so myself (and why shouldn't I?). I was impressed with how much I knew about Plotinus and Wilber when I wrote it, since my ponderings since have drifted in other directions.

Ken Wilber gets nailed to a non-scholarly wall by his failure to go beyond a superficial reading of Plotinus. This is typical Wilber behavior.

In an effort to cram all of human knowledge into his Integral framework, a lot of distortions have to be made so that everything fits together into, well, a Theory of Everything.

Wilber is notoriously touchy about criticism. This helps explain why his writings haven't gotten much attention in academia, where "just trust me" doesn't fly with skeptical scholars.

Instead, Ken Wilber mostly preaches to the choir of his faithful followers through the EnlightenNext magazine and countless seminars, workshops, and such. I've got no problem with this. Wilber has some interesting things to say.

But his sayings shouldn't distort facts. Plotinus is one of Wilber's key Western philosophical mainstays who offers some balance to the generally Eastern/Buddhist thrust of the Integral viewpoint.

However, I demonstrate that Plotinus is a monist, not a non-dualist.

If you read those Wikipedia articles, it's hard to tell the difference between monism and non-dualism. My essay, though, shows that Wilber's description of non-dualism is markedly different from Plotinus' One.
Download Wilber and Plotinus article2

As I say at the end of it, obviously I don't know what ultimate reality is like. Nobody does, Ken Wilber included. All we can do is look at evidence and come to the best conclusions we can.

I've got a strong scientific bent. It seems to me that understanding the observable universe is the best first step (and maybe the last step) toward grasping unseen mysteries.

In Carl Sagan's "The Varieties of Scientific Experience" he writes:

Contrast this [anthropomorphic view] with a quite different version of God, one proposed by Baruch Spinoza and by Albert Einstein. And this second kind of god they called God in a very straightforward way. Einstein was constantly interpreting the world in terms of what God would or wouldn't do.

But by God they meant something not very different from the sum total of the physical laws of the universe; that is, gravitation plus quantum mechanics plus grand unified field theories plus a few other things equaled God.

And by that all they meant was that here were a set of exquisitely powerful physical principles that seemed to explain a great deal that was otherwise inexplicable about the universe.

Laws of nature, as I have said earlier, that apply not just locally, not just in Glasgow, but far beyond: Edinburgh, Moscow, Peking, Mars, Alpha Centauri, the center of the Milky Way, and out by the most distant quasars known.

That the same laws of physics apply everywhere is quite remarkable. Certainly that represents a power greater than any of us. It represents an unexpected regularity to the universe. It need not have been. It could have been that every province of the cosmos had its own laws of nature.

So it's reasonable to look upon the laws of nature as "God." Many of these laws can be formulated in mathematical terms. And most mathematicians are Platonists of one variety or another -- as is Plotinus.

Here's how I put it in my essay:

Shimon Malin, a physicist, has written about the relationship between science and Plotinus's teachings in his book, "Nature Loves to Hide: Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality, a Western Perspective." Malin says:

For Plotinus, the sensible world is a mere reflection of the noumenal; for science, the sensible is the real thing, the only reality there is. The world of science is the world as given by the senses. Oddly, however, the Nous [Intellect] is not entirely absent from it. The Nous did lose its life, but not its presence. The idea that the sensible world is sustained and directed by an invisible substratum is the fundamental premise of science. This invisible substratum is called “the laws of nature.”

...So if I had to place a bet on which conception is closer to the truth, Wilber's non-duality or Plotinus's hierarchy of being (soul, spirit, and source—the One), I'd put my philosophical money on Plotinus. For the existence of the well-structured and seemingly unchanging laws of nature argues against Wilber's holonic, shape-shifting belief that the One is the Many.

There seem to be levels of being in the cosmos, some more real, permanent, and substantial than others. At the least, there are (1) laws of nature and (2) what is governed by those laws. Plotinus goes further and says that those laws are transmitted by soul from a transcendental Intellect that gets its power and wisdom from a even higher reality—the One.

As Wilber says, Plotinus's vision is coherent and compelling. I only wish that Wilber had presented that vision more accurately in "Sex, Ecology, Spirituality." Plotinus deserves better.

Most inspiring message in a movie

When I ponder what line spoken by a character in a movie has inspired me the most, here's my answer (share yours in a comment, if you like).

Jodie Foster, playing Ellie Arroway, a scientist searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence, in Contact -- a movie based on Carl Sagan's novel.

Strapped into a machine whose construction was made possible by technical drawings contained in mysterious messages from the Vega star system, not knowing what the machine does or if she'll be killed when it is activated, enduring violent shaking as The Machine is first turned on, Ellie tells mission control...

I''m okay to go! I'm okay to go! I'm okay to go!

That's the courage of scientific inquiry. Also, of spiritual seeking, mystical meditating, and full-bodied living of every variety.

Being okay to go. To follow one's passion wherever it takes you.

Throwing caution to the winds when a stronger force -- truth, love, exploration, artistry, creativity, whatever -- courses through your consciousness and whispers "this way...this way."

Carl Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan, wrote an introduction to "The Varieties of Scientific Experience," a book that describes Sagan's personal view of the search for God.

He believed that the little we do know about nature suggests that we know even less about God...he never understood why anyone would want to separate science, which is just a way of searching for what is true, from what we hold sacred, which are those truths that inspire love and awe.

HIs argument was not with God but with those who believed that our understanding of the sacred had been completed. Science's permanently revolutionary conviction that the search for truth never ends seemed to him the only approach with sufficient humility to be worthy of the universe that it revealed.

The methodology of science, with its error-correcting mechanism for keeping us honest in spite of our chronic tendencies to project, to misunderstand, to deceive ourselves and others, seemed to him the height of spiritual discipline. If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just a palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic.

I've just started to read this book. Today I couldn't resist jumping ahead to a final chapter which has some after-talk Q & A's between Sagan and members of the audience.

In these spontaneous interchanges, I got a feel for how strongly Sagan sought the truth in whatever form it might appear. He was eminently "okay to go."

But only if there was some chance of finding truth in a particular direction. He wasn't big on wild goose chases, forays into Beliefland that weren't based on some demonstrable evidence of a hitherto unknown reality.

One questioner tried to get Sagan to admit that the pursuit of psychic phenomena was worthwhile, even if someone hadn't experienced such, just as it is possible to know that it is possible to play the piano without currently knowing how.

I like Sagan's response.

But I can require, at least, before I start practicing the piano that I see that a piano exists, that I see someone sit down at the piano, move his or her fingers, and produce music.

That then convinces me that there is such a thing as a piano, there is such a thing as music, and it is not hopelessly beyond the ability of humans to produce music from a piano.

But when I ask for something comparable in the psychic world, I am never shown it. I never have someone come up and produce an -- I don't know -- a twenty foot-high psychic dragon. Or have someone come and write down on the blackboard the demonstration of Fermat's last theorem.

There simply is never anything that you can get your teeth into. You understand why I feel a little frustrated about this?

Oh, yes. I do.

I've been meditating every day for forty years. I've been okay to go wherever and whenever a metaphysical reality beckons. 

So far I haven't come across any convincing evidence of it. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Just that, as Sagan said, those wanting to chomp on truth aren't able to find it at the table of psychic phenomena.

Ann Druyan said:

And in all things, even when it came to facing his own cruel fate -- he succumbed to pneumonia on December 20, 1996 after enduring three bone-marrow transplants -- Carl didn't want just to believe.

He wanted to know.

Guide to creating scientific controversy

Don't like facts? Hate science? There's a handy four-step guide to generating your very own scientific controversy. I think some religiously-minded commenters on this blog already know #3.

When people point out that the facts don’t back up your claim, ignore them. As those people get angry and shouty at you, smugly say, “They’re persecuting me! They’re so closed-minded that they won’t let anyone ask questions!” Bonus points for saying that science is now a religion.

Evolution shows why reality can't be categorized

The natural world doesn't come with names attached.

Look up at the full moon. Do you see a label on it, "moon"? (Leaving aside the question of what language that word would be written in.)

Both religion and science make the mistake of confusing human thoughts about what is real with reality itself. Religions make the most egregious errors, of course, since they intellectualize about entities -- God, heaven, angels, and such -- that can't be shown to even exist.

Scientists, though, can also forget that nature is flowingly continuous, not discretely categorized.

This morning I read the "Missing Persons? Missing No Longer" chapter in Richard Dawkins' marvelous book about why evolution is true, The Greatest Show on Earth. It contains lessons for both the churchless and churched.

Namely, that when we divide things into categories (such as good/bad) we shouldn't forget that the divisions fade away the closer we look at details.

We humans are members of the species Homo sapiens. "Homo" is a genus; "sapiens" a species within the genus. Neanderthals, says Dawkins, sometimes are called Homo neanderthalsis (a different species within the genus "Homo") and sometimes Homo sapiens neanderthalsis (a subspecies of us).

Whatever, Neanderthals are what they are -- or were: part of a continuous process of evolution where small, barely noticeable changes accumulate over time. Dawkins says:

I wish we really did have a complete and unbroken trail of fossils, a cinematic record of all evolutionary change as it happened. I wish it, not least because I'd love to see the egg all over the faces of those zoologists and anthropologists who engage in lifelong feuds with each other over whether such and such a fossil belongs to this species or that, this genus or that. Gentlemen -- I wonder why it never seems to be ladies -- you are arguing about words, not reality.

The reason is that if we could see each of our ancestors, if I could follow my family tree far back into prehistory and beyond, there never would be a time when I could point to a particular animal (yes, we humans are animals) and confidently categorize it as the first member of a certain species.

As we trace the history of modern Homo sapiens backwards, there must come a time when the difference from living people is sufficiently great to deserve a specific name, say Homo ergaster. Yet, every step of the way, individuals were presumably sufficiently similar to their parents and their children to be placed in the same species.

Beautiful! A scientific koan: how can things that are always the same be so different?

Think about the first specimen of Homo habilis to be born. Her parents were Australopithecus. She belonged to a different genus from her parents? That's just dopey! Yes, it certainly is. But it is not reality that's at fault, it's our human insistence on shoving everything into a named category.

In reality, there was no first specimen of any species or any genus or any order of any class or any phylum. Every creature that has ever been born would have been classified -- had there been a zoologist around to do the classifying -- as belonging to exactly the same species as its parents and its children.

Yet, with the hindsight of modernity, and with the benefits -- yes, in this one paradoxical sense benefit -- of the fact that most of the links are missing, classifications into distinct species, genera, families, orders, classes and phyla becomes possible.

Interesting. Think about it.

Dawkins is reminding us that if we could see the entire course of evolution, every detail, it would be impossible to cleanly divide the history of life on Earth into familiar categories. Plants and animals. Reptiles and mammals. People and apes. Whatever. 

Because we'd realize that there never were any clear distinctions between any entities lying next to each other on an evolutionary path.

Run the movie of evolution backward along any series of branches on the tree of life and you'd be watching slow, silky-smooth transitions, not rapid, jerky poppings into existence. No Hey, look! I just saw a giraffe!

I found this chapter of Dawkins' book inspiring. And moving. I love to ponder my connections with everything alive. He says:

Relatively recently, perhaps less than 100,000 years ago, roving bands of Homo sapiens looking pretty much like us left Africa and diversified into all the races that we see around the world today: Inuit, native Americans, native Australians, Chinese, and so on.

Yet we forget that we're related to every human on Earth, and indeed every creature -- bacteria included -- living today. There are no genuine divisions in nature, only in our categorizing minds.

Religions are wrong: in the cosmos, humans aren't special

It's a burden to believe that you're special.

Especially when it isn't true. Feeling special places you in a starring role. You're at the center of a script that has a marvelous ending -- with you at center stage taking bows.

Religions appeal to people because dogma leads them to feel special.

God has a plan, for you. Enlightenment is going to happen, for you. The heavens and earth were created, for you. A guru will appear, for you. Jesus died on the cross, for you. 

Christianity likes to speak of the "good news."

The Christian message of good news is described in the Bible. It relates to the saving acts of God, centred upon the person of Jesus and his substitutionary death on the cross and resurrection from the dead. Its context is the storyline of the Christian Bible as a whole, which tells of the creation of humanity, humanity's rebellion against God, and how people from all nations are restored to relationship with God through the person of Jesus. A key theme of the Christian good news is that God offers a new life and forgiveness through Jesus.

Hmmmm.

This reminds me of a sleazy con artist who preys on gullible homeowners by knocking on their door, telling them he can see their roof is in terrible shape, and if they don't hire him to do the repairs right away terrible things are going to happen the next time it rains hard.

Except, the roof is fine.

Similarly, religions tell people that their soul is endangered by sin, maya, karma, or whatever, and if they don't sign up for some salvation, they're heading for a lousy afterlife (and presentlife).

Except, where's the evidence that any salvation is needed? Yes, every human being has problems. Life isn't perfect.

But those imperfections are hugely magnified when we perceive them as unjust, unwarranted, or unnecessary because we are meant for much better: heaven, eternal life, satori, enlightenment, sitting at the right hand of God.

Those are nice stories that contain a lot of good news. However, stories aren't reality. Fiction isn't factual.

Here's the real overarching story. It doesn't put us human beings at the center of the tale. I much prefer it to the religious fables, though. Because it is true, to the best of science's current knowledge (which is pretty darn persuasive).

Some 14 billion years ago the big bang brought the universe into existence. A whole lot has gone on since; none of which bears the mark of anyone or anything supernatural.

Some 4.5 billion years ago the Earth formed. It didn't take very long for life to appear -- simple cells about 3.9 billion years ago. Evolution took care of the rest of the story. 

Looking at our place in the cosmos from this vast perspective, it's difficult for this human to feel special. And that makes me happy. I experienced enough sensations of specialness during my thirty-five years of religiosity.

Now, it's relaxing to simply be part of a universe that is vastly beyond my, or anybody else's, comprehension.

Earth orbits the Sun, which is one of 200 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. There are an estimated 100 billion to 200 billion galaxies in the universe, each with an average of hundreds of billions of stars.

If this isn't mind-blowing enough, the multiverse notion is gaining increasing credibility among scientists. It posits that our universe may be only one of countless universes in an essentially infinite physical reality.

Yet earthly religions tell us things like, "You're special. God created the cosmos for the benefit of people. The divine plan is for human souls to return to divinity." Yeah, right. All the evidence points to us being a infinitesimal speck of the cosmos, with no specialness attached to Homo sapiens.

I've become comfortable with this seeming fact. If we're so special, why did God take 14 billion years to get around to us? If we're so special, why did God create such an unimaginably vast universe, almost all of which has nothing to do with us?

Life is what it is. Why pretend that it is something else? We are born; we live; we die. Just like stars do. Just like galaxies do. Just like the entire universe may do. We aren't special.

Recognizing this, we can feel ourselves as part and parcel of the cosmos. And that sensation of non-specialness is pretty damn special.

Don't worry about yourself. You don't have one (a self).

Ah, I love instant enlightenment.

OK -- not exactly instant, because I had to watch 54 minutes of a You Tube video before I got to Thomas Metzinger's philosophical "money shot" right at the end.

But I had enjoyed Metzinger's book, "The Ego Tunnel," which I blogged about here, here, and here.

So when I saw a mention of the video on my Twitter feed, I figured that it would be worth watching. I'm a sucker for a Zen-titled talk, "Being No One," from someone who specializes in scientific perspectives on the philosophy of mind.

Most of Metzinger's presentation is pretty darn boring. I listened to it more than I watched it, dividing my attention between his ideas and browsing my habitual morning web sites.

One of his basic notions is that our self-model, our sense of "me," is a simulation. I don't claim to completely understand Metzinger's explanation of how this comes about, which is rather complicated.

However, I could grasp his point that evolution, via natural selection, favored humans who could simply recognize the presence of a wolf -- no need to also know how the brain processes sensory and cognitive data behind the scenes of conscious awareness.

So we have a naive realism. Metzinger said, "We didn't need to distance ourselves from ourselves." And...

We are systems, which are not able to recognize their own sub-symbolic self-model as a model. Therefore we operate under the condition of a naive-realistic self-misunderstanding.

We necessarily experience ourselves as being in direct and immediate epistemic contact with ourselves.

Metaphorically speaking, you are a system that continually confuses itself with the content of its own self-model.

This avatar doesn't know it has a visual cortex; it just sees with its eyes. It doesn't know it has a motor cortex; it just acts with its hands.

Meaning, I think, that it just seems so obvious "I" am the center of my "self."

That there is an ethereal being I call "me" who seemingly is separate and distinct from all of the crude physical goings-on in my body, neurons firing chemically/electrically, food being digested and crapped out, etc., etc., etc.

Given this assumption, which is almost universal among human beings, the quest for our true self becomes all-important.

People want to be self-fulfilled. They seek self-realization. They wonder what happens to the self after death. They yearn for enlightenment, which often is considered to involve ego-loss or becoming selfless.

Metzinger, however, dissolves these notions in some wonderfully intriguing closing remarks.

Given all this, isn't it true that the self is an illusion? I think it is not true, because it contains a logical mistake.

On the level on which we are talking, there is no such thing as truth or falsity yet. There is nobody who could have an illusion in this system.

So if you really wanted to stay with the idea that the self is an illusion, you would have to say that it is an illusion which is no one's illusion.

Then he addresses the big question: immortality of the soul.

If it is true that the self is not a thing, but a process, as I have described it, then it is also true that the tragedy of the ego dissolves. Because strictly speaking, nobody is every born and nobody ever dies.

Good news. I guess. Not that there is an "I" who guesses. But I'm still guessing.

Here's the video:

Should science have an opinion on the supernatural?

Some people think that science and religion operate in two different spheres, with never the twain meeting.

This often is called NOMA, non-overlapping magisteria -- a term coined by biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who said:

The magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty).

I disagree, unless "religion" is defined so broadly as to include philosophy in both the scholarly and commonsense meanings of this word. People can ponder the ultimate meaning of the cosmos, and what is right or wrong within it, without being traditionally religious.

Also, science seems to have a role to play in evaluating certain religious claims. If God or some other supernatural power produces effects in the physical universe, these should be observable. And thus testable.

However, movie critic Roger Ebert disagreed in his essay, "Darwin survives as the fittest," written in commemoration of Darwin's two hundredth birthday last February. Even though Ebert is strongly pro-science, he said:

Science has no opinion on the supernatural. It cannot. Science deals with that which can be studied or inferred by observation, measurement, and experiment. Supernatural belief is outside its purview, except in such social sciences as sociology, anthropology, and psychology, where even then not the validity of the beliefs but their effects are studied.

Ebert's piece is interesting for what he says about evolution and the varieties of responses to the Theory (better termed Fact) of Evolution. These include "species" such as the True Believers, Reasonables, Metaphysicians, and New Agers.

But what got science blogger P.Z. Myer's attention was Ebert's contention that science can't invade religion's supernatural turf. Otherwise he mostly approved of what Ebert had to say.

In "Effectively non-existent" Myers wrote:

The premise that science can't have a stance on the validity of a religion is like the tranquilizer dart of the debates with religion; someone is thinking and questioning, and suddenly, swooosh, thock, ouch…they hear this argument that you can't question the premises of religion, they get all sleepy and soporified, nod a few times, and piously agree. Gould succumbed to this, too, and here's Roger Ebert, hit by the same dart.

WAKE UP.

Think about it. Why can't science address the existence of gods? Why should we simply sit back and accept the claim of apologists that what they believe in is not subject to "observation, measurement, and experiment"?

Good question.

Myers correctly points out that religious believers make all sorts of statements about who or what God is, how God acts in the world, what God approves of, and so on. Many of these claims have implications that are amenable to observation (such as whether prayer produces the outcomes asked for).

Yet when scientists ask for demonstrable evidence of religious claims, suddenly this God that was so well understood is said to "work in mysterious ways" and is beyond knowledge as we know it.

Well, which is it? Either a religion can say something true about God and the supernatural, or it can't. If nothing can be said, then why do all the saying? Just shut up.

However, if some truths can be spoken, then they should be able to be tested. Myers gets it right:

So where did these confident promoters of god-business get their information? Shouldn't they be admitting that their knowledge of this elusive cosmic beast is nonexistent? It seems to me that if you're going to declare scientists helpless before the absence and irrelevance of the gods, you ought to declare likewise for all of god's translators and interpreters. Be consistent when you announce who has purview over all religious belief, because making god unobservable and immeasurable makes everyone incapable of saying anything at all about it.

...This is where the "Science has no opinion on religion" argument leads us: to an atheist's world, where there are no activities by a god that matter, where at best people can claim that their god is aloof and unknowable, admitting in their own premises that they have no knowledge at all of him.

I can accept that, as long as these people are aware of the import of what they are actually saying.

Evolution reflects the beauty of science

Reality is so much more attractive than illusion. This is why science is so much more beautiful than religion.

It just takes an open (and humble) mind's eye to see. Science places us within an interconnected cosmos where we are part and parcel of everything in existence.

This is akin to the "oneness" of religion and mysticism. Except, it is demonstrably real. Behold:

I'm a couple of chapters into Richard Dawkins' new book, "The Greatest Show on Earth." Which happens to be evolution.

Great read. A spine-tingle on just about every page for those, like me, who get turned on by scientific facts.

Yes, all life is one -- since every species is related to all the rest, sharing a common ancestor.

On the 'population-thinking' evolutionary view, every animal is linked to every other animal, say rabbit to leopard, by a chain of intermediates, each so similar to the next that every link could in principle mate with its neighbors in the chain and produce fertile offspring.

To illustrate this non-essentialist view of life, where there isn't an unchangeable Platonic form of a rabbit or leopard, Dawkins relates a marvelous image of how evolution works.

Take a rabbit, a female for convenience. Envision her mother next to her. Then, her grandmother. And so on, back through megayears, "a seemingly endless line of female rabbits, each one sandwiched between her daughter and her mother."

Walking along the line, you can't discern any meaningful generational differences between the rabbits for a very long time. But...

Nevertheless, steadily and imperceptibly, as we retreat through time, we shall reach ancestors that look less and less like a rabbit and more and more like a shrew (and not very like either). One of these creatures I'll call the hairpin bend, for reasons that will become apparent.

This animal is the most recent common ancestor (in the female line, but that is not important) that rabbits share with leopards. We don't know exactly what it looked like, but it follows from the evolutionary view that it definitely had to exist.

Now, Dawkins says, you keep on walking. Except, you've turned the bend in the hairpin and now are moving forward in time.

...aiming towards the leopards (among the hairpin's many and diverse descendants, for we shall continually meet forks in the line, where we consistently choose the fork that will eventually lead to leopards). Each shrew-like animal along our forward walk is now followed by her daughter.

Slowly, by imperceptible degrees, the shrew-like animals will change, through intermediates that might not resemble any modern animal much but strongly resemble each other, perhaps passing through vaguely stoat-like intermediates, until eventually, without ever noticing an abrupt change of any kind, we arrive at a leopard.

This tale is so much compelling than the bullshit of Genesis in the Bible. Truth has a vibrancy that lies can't match.

Dawkins presents us with a vision of life on earth marked by continual change -- of the natural variety, not God-inspired. We humans are a culmination of those changes. And also linked to countless changes in speciation yet to come.

(Some speculations here and here.)

Evolution takes away our uniqueness. But it offers human understanding something better: a sense of commonality with each and every life form on the planet.

The Beatles got it right: "I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together."

The point is that for any two animals there has to be a hairpin path linking them, for the simple reason that every species shares an ancestor with every other species: all we have to do is walk backwards from one species to the shared ancestor, then turn through a hairpin bend and walk forwards to the other species.

Second, notice that we are talking only about locating a chain of animals that links a modern animal to another modern animal. We are most emphatically not evolving a rabbit into a leopard.

I suppose you could say we are de-evolving back to the hairpin, then evolving forwards to the leopard from there. As we'll see in a later chapter, it is unfortunately necessary to explain, again and again, that modern species don't evolve into other modern species, they just share ancestors. They are cousins.

This, as we shall see, is also the answer to that disquietingly common plaint: 'If humans have evolved from chimpanzees, how come there are still chimpanzees around?'

O'Reilly vs. Dawkins shows why I'm churchless

A friend of mine is fond of saying, "No one's life is ever completely wasted. He can always serve as a horrible example for others."

This adage came to mind as I watched a video of Bill O'Reilly showing his ignorance in an interview with Richard Dawkins.

Dawkins is an eminent scientist who has just published a well-reviewed book about evolution, "The Greatest Show on Earth." O'Reilly is a right-wing talk show host who is fond of mangling facts.

And, in this case, making up facts when they are lacking.

The fundamentalist mindset is on display beautifully at the beginning of the interview. O'Reilly says that since science isn't sure about how life began on Earth, he embraces Christianity -- which does provide an answer to this question.

Dawkins is appropriately incredulous.

He can't understand why a gap in human knowledge has to be filled by make-believe. Why not just leave the gap as it is, while working to fill it?

O'Reilly demonstrates the true believer's fear of uncertainty.

It's just too damn scary not to know what happens after death, how the universe came to be, or what led life to arise from inorganic matter.

Science, as Dawkins points out, has made great strides in expanding the horizons of human knowledge, especially in the past century. There's no reason not to think that this will continue, likely at an ever-increasing pace.

Biologist Craig Venter is working on creating artificial life. If he and his team succeed, this will help to fill the gap with facts that O'Reilly wants to have Christianity plug up with mythology.

Here's the interview.

Ex-Mormon blasts blind faith...wonderfully

Proving that my ego loss has quite a ways to go, one of my greatest compliments is "Hey, that guy is brilliant. He sounds just like me!" Or, in this case, even more me that I am.

Because I aspire to some of the great writing and thinking that Jonathan Montgomery churns out as the "Salt Lake City Freethinking Examiner," but I've got to bow down before some of the posts that I just read.

Example: in Why praying for confirmation of truth cannot work, he throws in a flowchart of faith-based belief. Two big churchless thumbs-up, Jonathan!

You moved away from a Western religion, while I distanced myself from an Eastern faith, but your take on blind belief is the same as mine.

Like the Emperor's New Clothes, the religious test presumes its answer, and then blames the individual if their conclusion is different.

The Emperor's clothes are presumed to exist and are magical, just as God and the Holy Ghost are presumed to exist and can confirm truth.  Anyone who can't see the clothes is stupid or incompetent, just as anyone who doesn't realize the truth of the Book of Mormon is insincere, sinning, being tested, or didn't listen the first time when God did provide the answer.

I found Montgomery via a Twitter tweet from one of the people I follow. It pointed me to an essay on How religion abuses language and analogy to sound reasonable. Right on.

I frequently hear this same argument from true believers who try to claim that religious faith is just like the confidence we have in everyday life that something will happen as expected:

"Faith" becomes interchanged with "realistic expectation based on experience and evidence" in this substitution of terms:

Faith is knowing the sun will rise, lighting each new day.  Faith is knowing the Lord will hear my prayers each time I pray.

These are two different levels of "faith."  One is built upon a lifetime of experience and an understanding of the physical sciences of the rotation of the earth, the position of the sun, and so on.  The moment the sun rises can be predicted to the second.  Barring some abrupt change to the planet, we can be reasonably confident that the sun will rise again.  That's not a leap of faith.  Suggesting the sun will NOT rise tomorrow is the unproven and unlikely scenario, something that would require either a leap of faith or an overwhelming body of new evidence.

The existence of an uncreated supreme being who builds universes is, likewise, an unproven and unlikely scenario.  As is the existence of a man-god who walked on water and rose from the dead.  But with a subtle shift of the meaning of words, it is implied that the existence of God is as reasonable as the sun rising.  Faith in a Savior who died for my sins 2,000 years before I committed them so I can go to heaven is the same kind of faith as expecting my car to start in the morning.

Which, of course, it isn't.

Likewise, this blog often gets comments from devotees of a guru who argue that a teacher is needed in the "science" of spirituality, just as one is needed to learn physics or chemistry. This is another abuse of analogy.

Worldly science has a vast amount of demonstrable evidence backing it up. Spirituality and religion don't. The precepts of worldly science can be tested for truth or falsity. Almost always, spiritual or religious dogmas can't. Worldly science is founded on open debate and discussion, plus a healthy dose of skepticism. Spiritual "science" isn't.

Analogies and metaphors are the refuge of those who don't have a firm footing in reality.

When a god or guru has to be likened to something known to be true, that "liken" testifies to how flimsy the evidence is for a purported metaphysical truth. A rose is a rose is a rose. But almost always religion is about something that isn't an obvious "is."

Here's a couple of other Jonathan Montgomery posts that I enjoyed.

A scientist's evidence for belief in God.
What's to be gained by criticizing faith?

From the latter:

We criticize faith because we believe we can reach a greater potential without it.  Eliminating faith rids us of an unnecessary conflict between what the real world looks like, and what we wish it were.  Eliminating faith frees us from a questionable moral authority who makes unusual demands, and lets us be good just for the sake of being good.  Eliminating faith permits us to tackle the world on its own terms, without preconceptions.  Where would we be today if the Catholic Church hadn't tried so hard for so long to force reality to fit it's presumptions about the universe?

We stand to gain authentic morality, intellectual integrity, useful knowledge, and humbling wonder as we learn about the universe.  Dealing with reality resonates.  It sings.  Eliminating faith may well let us fully embrace that.

Are auras real? Yes and no.

Recently Maggie sent me a scanned photo of her aura that was taken 10-15 years ago. She asked for a particular caption when I shared it on my blog: Maggie's Radiant Form. Glad to oblige.

Maggie wanted me to point out:

"There are two types, one like mine which shows the colours of your personal energies (everyone's is different) and the second Kirlian photos which is a lot of squiggles and lines. Only experts can read those with any accuracy. The first type you have to have the gift of sight or clairvoyance."

I told her that I didn't know much about aura photography and was skeptical that what is shown has any spiritual or metaphysical significance.

I've seen aura booths at the Oregon State Fair. My wife has had several people tell her that they could see a blue/green aura surrounding her, which happen to be her favorite colors. Freaky! (I asked Laurel, though, if she was wearing blue and green at the time -- she couldn't remember.)

And that's just about the extent of my exposure to auras. So I engaged in some Googling of the subject, which leads me to this admittedly quickly-arrived-at conclusion:

Auras are real. And also not.

I'm speaking here of the kind that can be photographed. Obviously something is producing the halo-like imagery around Maggie. Since we can see it, it's real. The question is, "what is it?"

The Aura Imaging web site offers up a lot of information on the subject. Here's how the AuraCam 6000 camera works.

The Auracam 6000 consists of one or two hand sensors which are connected through cables with the camera. Polaroid instant film is put into the camera and is adjusted and aligned to the customer. Once the customer puts their left and right hand onto hand sensors, the AuraCam 6000 begins to gather standardized biofeedback parameter data through the hand sensors.

The measured points of resonance are connected with certain organs and the electromagnetic field of the person; this information about the energetic and auric qualities of a human being are then delivered to the camera. Through a patented operation, these parameters are projected as a radiant, colorful aura field around the body onto the Polaroid film, along with the image of the person.

Several words caught my attention: "standardized biofeedback," "patented operation," "parameters are projected." And, of course, "customer."

Here's an interesting description of a skeptic's visit to a psychic fair, where he forked out $40 for two aura photographs. They turned out radically different. He says:

Indeed, a look at the actual process employed-described by Coggins [inventor of the Auracam 6000] "intensified Kirlian imaging"-shows it to be not the actual image of the body's unseen image field but the imitation of such a field based primarily on something called skin resistance. That is one of the physiological variables measured by a galvanometer as part of a polygraph or "lie detector," whereby an unfelt electrical current passes through the subject's hands and detects sweat-gland activity associated with nervousness.

Again, something real is happening here.

But what it seems to be is an electronics engineer making a gadget that lets entrepreneurs charge people for having their "aura" photographed. [Note: as the skeptic's article points out, Kirlian photography uses a different technology that doesn't involve a camera.] 

Ever the diligent investigator, I invested 14 minutes of my time into watching a You Tube'd video from a Sci-Fi channel program that supposedly showed the validity of aura photography.

Not really. Not even close.

A supposed aura reader told a few people some things about themselves that made them go "why, yes, that's me!" I wasn't impressed, especially since the reader was looking right at the individuals and could gauge their personality from obvious clues (appearance, demeanor, style of dress, etc.)

Some aura readers, such as those my wife encountered, claim to be able to see auras directly, without the aid of any technology.

This article demolishes that notion pretty persuasively. Of course, believers will say that the failure of a few aura readers to demonstrate their ability in a controlled experiment doesn't mean that nobody can.

True.

But until somebody presents demonstrable evidence that auras are a manifestation of a person's subtle etheric body, and not just manipulated electronic imaging or imagination, I'll remain an aura skeptic.

I defend science against an unfair attack

I enjoy reading every comment posted on my blogs. Even those I strongly disagree with.

Hey, especially those, in this sense: When what we value is attacked, our reaction tells us a lot about ourselves.

Before I read the comment that Jayme posted yesterday, I knew that I loved science and the scientific method. But experiencing what I felt when I read his unfair attacks on science made me realize this more deeply.

So, thank you, Jayme. I respect the passion with which you ripped into science and scientists. Now I'll exercise my right to respond with some of the same energy.

Some key quotes from Jayme's rather lengthy comment on the post "Science bashers, read this before you comment" (which I hope he did!) are indented in italics. My responses are un-indented plain type.

According to Brian's theory of scientific truth (as best as I can understand) the mainstream science is de facto true until changed on the rest of us by those given (or who have taken) authority to change it. Most of us who do not agree with mainstream scientists are, by definition, wrong.

No, not "by definition." By practice, by evidence, by observation. Since the Enlightenment science has made great advances in understanding the natural world -- especially in the past hundred years or so.

Mainstream science is humankind's most valid and complete repository of facts about the outer world of shared reality (as contrasted with the inner world of private reality that is an individual's conscious experience alone).

Given all the effort that has gone into gathering, analyzing, testing, and debating these facts, it is unlikely that any single person is going to come up with a fresh finding that will immediately make scientists jump up, clap, and yell "Bravo! What an amazing discovery!"

Everyone has the ability to change the truths of mainstream science. But this doesn't come just by saying "Believe me." That's how religion operates, by belief. Science demands evidence.

If you've got it, almost certainly science eventually will say "You're right." Until that proof is provided and run through the skeptical grinder of the scientific method to test its solidity, you'll be met with a "Show me."

It forces others who don't believe in the mainstream to meet in secret and discuss these fringe topics out of earshot of the mainstream who will cry "HERESY!" and seek to destroy their opposition through science education camps, studies, ridicule, and interactive museums designed to indoctrinate the youth.

Wow. Jayme, you make science sound like a Hitler youth camp. Come on.

As noted above, scientists are open to new ideas. But they'll remain in the category of Mere Idea until evidence is provided that indicates an idea reflects how the natural world really is, or functions.

Scientists love debate, controversy, arguments, and such.

However, the scientific method demands that this game of Show Me proceed under certain rules. Seemingly what you consider a cry of heresy is science calmly saying, "Interesting notion, but what's the evidence in support of it?"

Most mainstream science is fairly predictable within a prefabricated theoretical architecture of known principles and experiments. But science on the fringe is where the breakthroughs and new phenomena are discovered or explained. Many professional careers are ended when leaving the mainstream for fringe areas at the end of the world. UFOs, paranormal research, antigravity, perpetual motion, big foot, crop circles, psychedelics, alternative cosmologies, etcetera - are interesting places to kill a career while making a living by selling to a popular fringe audience.

There's a lot not to agree with here. Prefabricated theoretical architecture? I assume you mean such things as electromagnetism, gravity, relativity theory, quantum mechanics, cellular biology, neuroscience, and all the other facts science knows about the world.

Your computer uses this science, so your ability to post a comment on my blog testifies to the non-theoretical nature of the scientific method.

I disagree that breakthroughs in science occur on the sorts of "fringes" you cited. Einstein didn't leave pre-existing science and mathematics behind when he came up with his theories of relativity. Rather, he took what was known and extended it into new territory.

All of the subjects you mentioned are legitimate areas of scientific inquiry. So far, most have come up empty on the evidence front. It isn't that science considers these areas taboo. Rather, they just are nonproductive fields for a scientist to focus on.

Believe me, the first person to come up with a genuine perpetual motion machine won't have any trouble being accepted by mainstream science. A Nobel Prize almost certainly awaits him or her.

Most science tells a good story but mostly science is like any collective belief system bent on self preservation: only, with science, the priests tell a much more potent truth about a consensus reality supported by abstract facts and obscure causal relations. They can explain to you ad nauseum why you are wrong to think what you do.

Priests? Oh, you must be referring to scientists.

This is such a specious non-argument, which I encounter disturbingly frequently. "Science is just another religion." No, it isn't. Religion is religion. Science is science. 

Jayme, I don't understand what you mean by "abstract facts and obscure causal relations." Again, science leads to discoveries that actually change the way humans can do things.

Like, fly in an airplane. Observe what is happening inside a brain. Communicate over the Internet. Talk on a cell phone. All this isn't abstract or obscure at all. You've got things backward.

Religion is the field that specializes in abstractness and obscurity, not science. As to scientists explaining why you're wrong, may I suggest: listen to them. You probably will find that indeed you are wrong. 

To say that we have to wait for the "truth" science has to offer before we can call it truth is giving one's own authority away. Any scientist who is pushing a theory is simply making up a good story that seems to fit the facts. It is only true because other scientists who are popular with their peers have agreed it is true and it seems to fit the facts.

False. My Taoist sensibilities lead me to explain the situation this way, Jayme. You're confusing two separate, but interrelated, things.

(1) There is what's happening in the world, cosmos, universe, whatever you want to call life's playing field. (2) There is how we make our way through, around, and within what's happening.

Broadly speaking, (1) is the domain of science, while (2) is the domain of philosophy, spirituality, religion, mysticism, and such -- including the arts.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, in science or the scientific method prevents anyone from embracing any darn way-making they choose. What turns you on, meaning-wise, go for it.

Nobody can take that away from you. And certainly science has no desire to.

What seems to bother you is that the scientific method demands evidence before a new understanding of "what's happening" is accepted. This is as it should be, because the playing field of life belongs to everybody.

It's shared territory, while your private form of way-making or meaning-making is yours alone.

You are way off base when you claim that scientific theories are accepted only because popular scientists have gotten agreement from their peers that such and such is true. Your statement "and it seems to fit the facts" is much more accurate.

Yes, to be accepted, a truth has to fit the facts. If this bothers you, I can understand why you dislike science.

Right on, Richard Feynman

Thanks to Pharyngula, I was able to start my day off with an inspiring RIchard Feynman paean to reality, science, doubt, uncertainty, and godlessness.

Feynman was an amazing physicist. And this short video shows that he also was an amazing person.

Science is divine if nature is God's creation

OK, that's a big "if" in this blog post title. But let's assume for a non-churchless moment that God is real, and God created the physical universe.

So here we are, in God's marvelous creation. Living, breathing, pondering what existence is all about.

Part of that pondering is something called science.

It studies the natural world -- including the portion we call "humanity." Science is the best means known to man (and woman) for sorting out what's true about the universe, and what isn't.

Why, then, are so many believers in a personal God who created the universe so mistrustful of a discipline, science, whose aim is to reveal the nature of nature, God's creation?

I don't get it. Neither did Isaac Newton and many other scientists whose devout religious beliefs spurred them to study what some Christians have called God's second book, nature.

The second of God’s two revelations is the book of nature, termed “general revelation.” This is the implied record about our Creator that is discovered in the natural world around us. It is considered general in that it is a disclosure of reality that has been generally available to all people throughout the ages.

Now, I certainly don't agree that God's actions are reflected in the book of nature. However I have no problem with someone watching a beautiful sunset, or the full moon rise, and spontaneously uttering "Oh, my God!"

After all, if this is God's creation, then whatever makes us more aware and knowledgeable of what exists within existence must be revered as revealing divinity.

And that "whatever" happens to be science.

To better understand why this is so, have a listen to an interesting discussion between American atheist biologist (and avid blogger) PZ Myers and British theist evolutionist Denis Alexander. (Here's the mp3 link.)

What struck me about this interview, which was on a Christian radio station in Britain, was how refreshingly different Alexander was from the fundamentalist sorts of Christians who dominate the air waves in the United States.

I mean, a theist evolutionist -- that's terrific.

Alexander correctly saw no conflict between his religious beliefs and science. Neither did Myers, though as an atheist he also correctly kept emphasizing that religion can have zero, repeat zero, influence on scientific research.

Where I most agreed with Myers, and thought that Alexander was off the mark, was in the part of the discussion concerning the limits of science.

Scientists don't claim that art, music, morality, ethics, emotions, politics, culture, and such can be reduced to quantitative explanations. In these areas religion can play a role in human affairs (although I wish it wouldn't).

But Alexander kept trying to portray this as a weakness of science, whereas that is false. Myers kept bringing the discussion back to what the scientific method sets out to do: produce valid, reproducible, objective knowledge about the material universe.

To a religious believer in a personal creator God, this is one half of "God's book" (the other half being whatever holy text he or she believes in). Here science is unarguably King over religion, as Myers kept arguing -- and Alexander seemed to agree.

Even when I was a true believer, I was a devoted reader of science books and magazines. I didn't see any conflict between my metaphysical beliefs and what science knows about the material world.

Big bang. Evolution. DNA. Particle physics. Quantum mechanics. Relativity theory.

It shouldn't matter whether someone considers these phenomena and laws of nature to have come from God, or purely natural processes.

They're real, to the best of human knowledge. That's what counts. And reality is divine, whether you take this word in a secular or religious sense.

Science-bashers, read this before you comment

Yeah, I admit it: I"ve been getting a bit testy lately, blog-wise. (Summer-wise, life is great, what with a new camera and scooter to play with in the Oregon sunshine.)

If you read through some of the exchanges between Phil and me on my "Who cares if God exists?" post, you'll find a touch (well, maybe a slam) of irritation in my comments on Phil's comments.

You see, what gripes my churchless non-soul as much as anything is when science-bashers resort to spurious, irrational, shape-shifting arguments that can briefly sound good on the surface, but quickly break apart into Huh? fragments of non-sensicality when tested for soundness.

If I sound like I'm being harsh on anti-science types, my comparative mildness will be revealed by taking a look at some posts on biologist PZ Myers' Pharyngula blog.

For example, yesterday Myers laid into religious crazies in "I may not be perfectly rational, but my magic invisible monkeys are!" Great take on the question of whether science should try to accommodate religion. (Short answer: no.)

And I liked his "High Crimes and Misdemeanors," which enumerates some of the offenses that get visitors to his blog banned from leaving comments. Here's three that, as a fellow blogger, I could relate to:

Concern trolling. A particularly annoying form of trolling in which someone falsely pretends to be offering advice to favor a position they do not endorse; a creationist who masquerades as someone concerned about the arguments for evolution as an excuse to make criticisms.

Godbotting. Making an argument based only on the premise that your holy book is sufficient authority; citing lots of bible verses as if they were persuasive.

Insipidity. A great crime. Being tedious, repetitive, and completely boring; putting the blogger to sleep by going on and on about the same thing all the time.

Anyway, back to Phil and what I find annoying about his anti-science arguments -- which aren't at all original, so that helps explain why they're so irritating (see "Insipidity" above).

Here's a partial list of science-bashing approaches that leave me with a bored can't you do better? yawn. I realize that it's too much to expect that religious types will stop using them if I point them out, but, hey, while miracles are impossible, hope still springs eternal.

(1) Science doesn't know everything about something, so you can't trust what science does know. Wow, what a load of garbage. For example, Phil correctly pointed out that in the current state of big bang theory, direct evidence for inflation (the cosmological, not economic, variety) is lacking.

OK, this doesn't mean that the big bang theory is wrong -- just that more needs to be learned about how our universe was formed. Actually, there is loads of evidence in support of the big bang theory, as this Wikipedia article points out. But science-bashers like to seize on what isn't known by science rather than what already has been discovered.

That's like saying you can't trust me when I say that 2 + 2 = 4, because I don't know differential calculus. A ridiculous argument, so please, Church of the Churchless commenters, don't waste my and your time by bringing it up again.

(2) Scientific theories keep changing, so this shows they aren't true. Another hugely weak argument. Science isn't religion, thank non-god! It is open to new facts, fresh explanations, expanded horizons of knowledge beyond what is already known.

By and large, scientists make progress by standing on the shoulders of their predecessors. Einstein's theory of relativity broke new ground, not replacing Newton's laws of motion but showing that in extreme circumstances those laws don't reflect reality. Likewise, the bare bones of Darwin's theory of evolution has been vastly fleshed out by subsequent research.

Full-blown revelations don't occur in science. Unchanging truth isn't discovered. Scientists are engaged in a never-ending quest for more truth, more understanding, more insights into the nature of the cosmos. This is a strength of science, not a weakness. Know-it-all's never do. They're only found in religion, not science.

(3) Science hasn't proven that X can't be true, so X must be true. Agggghhhhh! This B.S. drives me crazy! I keep demolishing this absurd argument in my brilliant responses when it pops up in a comment conversation, but I haven't been able to kill it. Sigh...like Sisyphus, I am doomed to keep rolling the rock of reason into the lap of religious believers, who persist in tossing it down the hill of reality again.

One more time: the scientific method, and everyday life, is based on positive -- not negative -- evidence. No one, except a crazy person, goes into the kitchen and thinks "I don't know that there aren't invisible elephants in the refrigerator; if I open the door they could run out and trample me."

Similarly, no one can prove that God doesn't exist, that a billion angels can't dance on the head of a pin, that the soul doesn't enjoy eternity in heaven if you believe in Jesus, and countless other could be fantasies. 

Phil likes to argue that science hasn't proven that consciousness isn't non-material, metaphysical. Yes, indeed. Science also hasn't proven that Phil hasn't been sent by the Devil to drive me crazy with his illogical arguments, or that he isn't an alien being studying how humans react to non-sensical reasoning.

Only positive evidence counts.

If you want me to believe that God exists, show me persuasive evidence. If you want me to believe that consciousness is separable from the physical brain, show me persuasive evidence. I'm not interested in could be's. Anything we imagine could be. I want reality, not imagination.

(4) Science can't explain the subjective side of life -- art, love, awareness, and all that -- so it knows nothing. No, science knows a lot. About the reality we share as humans. Not our subjective sense of knowing, because that is private.

I've read a great many science books. I've never come across any scientist who seriously argues that human consciousness isn't real. After all, every scientist occupies the same inner world of awareness as each of us does.

This is a bogus argument. Science-bashers like to put words into the mouths of scientists that I never hear them utter. Like, "Objective reality that can be measured, counted, and mathematically described is the only genuine form of truth."

Scientists understand the subjective side of life. They simply focus in their professional work  on the outer world which can be jointly experienced, not the inner realm of consciousness that is each human's private domain.

I have no access to your subjectivity, just as you have no access to mine. You might know astounding truths about the cosmos. But if you can't provide any evidence to me of that knowledge, I've got no reason to believe it.

(5) Science is unable to answer the Really Big Questions, like why there is something rather than nothing. Yeah, so what? Nobody else can answer them either. Religion, mysticism, philosophy -- they all are clueless about ultimate reality. So is science. We're all reading the same blank page in the Really Big Questions answer book.

Some questions are outside the sphere of science. In fact, most of those questions are outside the sphere of anybody. For example, how would it be possible to know why there is something rather than nothing? Or even if this is a valid question, since "why" presumes there could have been nothing instead of something (the universe).

Science-bashers, if you can't prove that someone else, like a religious figure, knows the answers to the Really Big Questions, save your blog commenting breath and don't bore me with complaints that scientists haven't figured out the nature of ultimate reality. 

Especially boring are arguments along the lines of, "Since an entity must always have existed  for there to be something now, this proves that God exists." No, it proves that something must always have existed (or at least it proves this within the sphere of human understanding).

It's more reasonable to suppose that this thing is the physical cosmos, rather than a metaphysical god or some other supernatural power. If something is assumed to be eternal, why not the material matter/energy that is known to exist now rather than some hypothetical unseen entity?

(6) Science is a belief system, just as religions are. False. The scientific method is a means of sorting out truth from falsehood so valid beliefs are left standing, while invalid beliefs are toppled.

It only accepts a few meta-beliefs, such as that external objective reality exists and generalizations can be made about it. Otherwise, science is belief-free.

I'll let this essay, "Science as a Belief System," make the point for me, since it's written by someone who knows a lot more about the philosophy of science than I do. Here's an excerpt:

I have demonstrated that a scientific belief system is differentiable from a religious one because it minimizes faith, has a greater explanatory power, and is open to belief revision. It seems strange to me that people are still attempting to unify science and religion.

These two types of belief systems are entirely incompatible. Someone holding both religious and scientific beliefs cannot be thinking scientifically, as it is inconsistent (However, someone thinking religiously may hold scientific beliefs without conflict).

Despite all the measures science takes to seek the truth and explain the universe, it is still easy to [be] skeptical of its claims. However, it is far easier to be skeptical of religious claims. Since no better alternative belief systems exist for explaining the universe, the choice between those we have is easy.

No psychic abilities found in Twitter study

Darn, I was hoping that my occasional Twittering had some cosmic significance.

But an article in New Scientist, "First Twitter experiment probes belief in the paranormal," describes a study that showed a lack of metaphysical ability among 7000 people who signed up for a scientific use of Twitter.

The formal part of the study, which took place over four days, tested both whether the group as a whole was psychic and whether believers outperformed disbelievers. On each day I travelled to a randomly selected location and asked everyone to send tweets describing their thoughts and impressions about the location.

In the judging phase, participants were presented with five photographs, one showing the location and four decoys, and asked to select the target. The photograph that received the most votes was taken as the group's decision. If the group were psychic, the majority would vote for the correct target.

They didn't. Which doesn't mean that no one in the group had a remote viewing ability, though I am deeply skeptical that such exists.

An interesting finding was that in a first trial, study participants who were believers in the paranormal claimed a high level of correspondence between their thoughts of a location before it was revealed to them, and a subsequently-seen photograph of the location.

Yet when this "correspondence" was put to a scientific test, there was no difference in remote viewing ability between believers and skeptics. The study leader, Richard Wiseman, says:

So what did we learn? Well, the study didn't support the existence of remote viewing and suggests that those who believe in the paranormal are simply good at finding illusory correspondences between their thoughts and a target – which is, maybe, why they believe in the first place.

This fits with something I read in Owen Flanagan's book "The Really Hard Problem" this morning. Intuitions are fine. But they aren't always true. So it's important to cast a critical eye on our own insights, whether they be about morality or anything else.

If nature has gifted us with a moral system that operates mostly intuitively and if intuitions are not always reliable, then we are positioned to propose another meta-norm that instructs us to check and double-check intuitions and gut reactions: Pay close attention to your intuitive moral responses and to the confidence you experience about the validity of your norms and values. Consider alternatives.

Subjectivity is the experience of objectivity

Wow, this post title runs the risk of winning a blogosphere Yawn! award. But hang in there, reader -- this subject of subjectivity and objectivity actually is darn interesting.

And as intimate to you and me as what we're doing at this very moment.

Which, in my case, includes sipping coffee from a yellow cup and watching the letters I type on my laptop's keyboard appear on the screen. I'm experiencing those things, along with much more -- such as hearing my wife open a desk drawer and shuffle through some papers.

Now, there seems to be a big difference between (1) the objective state of affairs in my house, and (2) my experience of that state.

This often is called the "hard problem" of consciousness, explaining that difference.

How does my physical brain generate a sense of subjective Brian? Neurosurgeons who opened up my cranium would just observe a mass of fleshy matter. But somehow my brain cells enable me to experience the world from the inside out, as it were.

As a... words are so hard to come by ... world that lives inside me, not a world that exists separate from my consciousness of it.

Yet, it does.

My wife sees the same coffee cup, the same laptop, and everything else in our house (she, on the other hand, would be justified in saying that I don't see many things she does, such as socks and t-shirts scattered on top of my dresser, and unwiped water drops on the stainless steel kitchen sink after I've made coffee).

So what's going on?

Are mystics justified in claiming that subjectivity is the only reality, that consciousness is the essence of the cosmos and not materiality? Or does science have the inside track on truth, with its emphasis on describing entities that can be studied objectively?

Let's dump the "or" in the paragraph above. That's an insight I've gotten from Owen Flanagan's book, "The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World."

It's an excellent read, though if you're thinking of buying it keep in mind that I'm a glutton for philosophical punishment (Flanagan is a philosophy and neurobiology professor at Duke University). Your reading results may vary.

I like how Flanagan zeros in on some basic notions of subjectivity and objectivity that respect the reality of both our inner subjective experiences and the outer objective world. I'll let him speak for himself, since any attempt on my part to summarize his arguments likely would screw up his philosophical position.

No one, dualist, naturalist, or pan-psychic, has yet explained consciousness... What we can say for certain now is that a naturalist picture fits much better with the rest of science than any known dualist or immaterialist view. Of course, the naturalist must accept the burden of showing how, using only natural resources, he proposes to explain phenomenal consciousness. Here is how.

Token neurophysicalism is the view that each and every mental event, each and every experience, is some physical event or other -- presumably some central-nervous-system event. Type neurophysicalism is the view that each kind or type of experience, e.g. "seeing a red cube" or "believing that [snow is white]," each kind or type of event -- be it perceptual, emotional, or a belief -- is realized in "pretty much the same way" by each member of the species that has the relevant experience.

...What matters is that each and every experience supervenes in some strong sense on a brain state. We can accept the truth of token neurophysicalism, and thus reject all immaterialist views that deny it, while resisting the conclusion that the essence of a mental event is revealed completely or captured completely by a description of its neural level realizer.

The reason is as follows, and it applies uniquely to conscious mental events: Conscious mental events are essentially Janus-faced and uniquely so. They have first-person subjective feel and are realized in objective states of affairs. As John Dewey said, "given that consciousness exists at all, there is no mystery in its being connected with what it is connected with."

Speaking counterfactually, water would be H2O and gold would be the substance with atomic number 79 even if there were no subjects of experience, no sentient beings, in the world. Objective realism is true of water and of gold.

But even if a conscious-mental-state token (say, your experience here and now of seeing these words on this page) is realized, and realized necessarily, in some complex neural process n in you, it is not the case, speaking counterfactually, that n could occur in a world without subjects.

Specifically, n could not and would not occur in a world in which you were not reading these words.

...The asymmetry between water and gold, on the one side, and conscious mental events, on the other, can be said to come to this: the nature of water and gold is essentially objective -- it is completely objective, ergo objective realism. The nature of conscious mental events is such that despite being perfectly natural, objective states of affairs, they have as part of their essential nature the subjective feel they have.

Call the basic idea subjective realism. Subjective realism says that the relevant objective state of affairs in a sentient creature properly hooked up to itself produces certain subjective feels in, for, and to that creature. The subjective feel is produced and realized in an organism in virtue of the relevant objective state of affairs' obtaining in that organism.

The subjective feel is, as it were, no more than the relevant objective state of affairs obtaining in a creature that feels things.

...For many it produces a mental cramp to think the thought that mental events are neural events but that their essence cannot be captured completely in neural terms. Such is the power of objective realism, a doctrine that is true for most of the things and types of things in the universe but that is not true for experiences.

The cramping can be eased, I propose, by accepting that the subjective realist is claiming nothing mysterious. It is simply a unique but nonmysterious fact about conscious mental states that they essentially possess a phenomenal side.

Well, I don't know if you find this as brilliantly convincing as I do. How would I? You are you and I am me.

Yet as Flanagan says, this doesn't mean that we each inhabit our own utterly subjective world of personal experience.

Our experiencing is an objective state of affairs, along with coffee cups and laptops. Experience simply is a feeling state, according to Flanagan, which makes a lot of sense to me.

There aren't two worlds, one subjective and one objective. Our experiencing is part of the objective world, albeit a unique part -- one which does not exist apart from the experiencer.

(I'm both thrilled and terrified that what I just wrote makes sense to me. "Thrilled," because Flanagan's perspective clears up a lot of philosophical confusion for me. "Terrified," because it's always possible that the confusion is more real than the clarity. Whatever...)

How to judge a "science of the soul"

Quite a few mystical, meditational, and spiritual entities (organizations or individuals) claim to teach a science of the soul. See, for example, here, here, here, and here.

My previous post about the scientific method stimulated some pondering: how would a science of the soul go about trying to discover what, if anything, lies beyond the physical human brain and material universe?

I'm assuming that "soul" refers to something metaphysical.

If not, then it doesn't make sense to speak of a science of the soul, because plain "science" would be sufficient -- plenty of researchers already are delving into how our minds work, including how meditation practices affect neurological functioning.

I like the idea of applying the scientific method to spirituality, perhaps better termed personal consciousness research, because "spiritual" is a word that has lost most of its meaning for me.

Yet based on my experience of more than thirty years with an organization that termed itself a science of the soul, I've come to realize that the scientific method typically gets short shrift in metaphysical pursuits.

Sure, the word "science" gets used a lot by gurus, teachers, authors, disciples, and others who consider that their approach to spirituality is far different from that followed by traditional religions.

Let's consider, though, what a genuine science of the soul would look like if it adhered to the scientific method as shown in this diagram.

What's most striking is the circularity of scientific investigations. Theories are continually revised as experiments and observations confirm or disconfirm predictions implied by a theory.

So if someone is engaged in a science of the soul, almost certainly he or she is going to be saying, "Interesting, I didn't know that before," a lot.

Ideas about any possible metaphysical reality are going to keep changing as direct experience replaces abstract beliefs. Conceptions that once seemed to be reasonable hypotheses will be discarded as experiments fail to confirm them, while other theories arise as better candidates for explaining the cosmos.

This is the nature of the scientific method: continual refining of what is considered to be true. Yet most so-called sciences of the soul aren't really open to having their core belief system modified.

This shows that they aren't genuinely scientific, because given the marked differences between the various science of the soul teachings, it is difficult to see how they all could be in touch with objective metaphysical truth.

Somebody -- and maybe everybody -- has got to be wrong. Yet how often do we hear a spiritual teacher or leader say about a central tenet, "I don't consider this to be true any more."

In a recent issue of The New Yorker I've been reading an article by Elizabeth Kolbert, "The Sixth Extinction?" Tag line: There have been five great die-offs in history. This time, the cataclysm is us.

Geologist Walter Alvarez and his colleagues proposed in 1980 "that a six-mile-wide asteroid had slammed into the earth, killing off not only the forams but the dinosaurs and all the other organisms that went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous."

This went against the prevailing scientific understanding of how species became extinct and was met with a lot of skepticism. Kolbert says that evidence kept accumulating in favor of Alvarez' theory over the next decade.

"Those eleven years seemed long at the time, but looking back they seem very brief," Walter Alvarez told me. "Just think about it for a moment. Here you have a challenge to a uniformitarian viewpoint that basically every geologist and paleontologist had been trained in, as had their professors and their professors' professors, all the way back to Lyell. And what you saw was people looking at the evidence. And they gradually did come to change their minds."

Beautiful. This is a big part of why I love science. Scientists change their minds! Gurus, prophets, masters, sages, Popes, and such...hardly ever.

Here's another thing, though, about a science of the soul: it can't be a communal exercise, because there is no way to tell whether another person knows anything metaphysical (see here and here). 

So the plural language at the end of the preceding quotation -- "people," "minds" -- is going to have to be "person" and "mind." Namely, you or me, if we're science of the soul practitioners.

Theoretically, I suppose it'd be possible for someone to delve into the question of what might exist apart from the physical and never change his or her mind. But it's difficult to imagine how this could be the case, since experience of a metaphysical reality is going to be much different from a mere conception of it, even if the conception is correct.

Which is my main point: if you're not continually changing your mind about what is true, and what isn't, then you're not engaged in a science of the soul.

On the other hand, if you are, "I was wrong" will be your frequent mantra.

Science is the only way of knowing objective truth

It's amusing when anti-scientific true believers get on their fundamentalist soapboxes. I've had a good time reading the nonsensical comments on my spiritual pseudo-science post.

I'll try to avoid sounding too condescending here, though I agree with biologist PZ Myers when he responded to a creationist with "I'll be condescending when condescension is deserved."

First -- and probably most importantly -- everybody uses the scientific method in their everyday lives. Otherwise it would be impossible to live any sort of normal life. So those who criticize how science works are hypocrites, unless they also are criticizing themselves.

Here's a simple depiction of the scientific method. It's a looping, circular process of Theory - Prediction - Experiment - Observation.

I try to turn on my TV. I'm met with a blank screen. What to do? I come up with some theories. Set got unplugged. I'm pressing the wrong button on the remote control. I'm holding the wrong remote. TV is broken. Power is off.

If any of these theories is correct, my prediction is that dealing with the problem will cause the TV to turn on. So I start experimenting. And observe what happens.

What I don't do is sit on the couch and say to myself, "It's God's will. Nothing I can do about it. Except pray."

I don't expect that a miracle will cause the TV to start working again. I assume that I can learn some facts and use that knowledge to, hopefully, start watching a favorite show.

Scientists simply use the same common-sense approach in a more rigorous and organized fashion, applying the scientific method to considerably more complicated subjects.

Second, note that the description above the diagram says:

The scientific method uses objective experimentation to predict, verify, or refute, an assertion made by a theory.

"Objective" means that the experiment isn't dependent on a particular subject, or person, which would make it subjective rather than objective.

It doesn't matter whether I, my wife, or a TV repairman checks the plug, remote control, circuit breakers, and such. Each of us is observing the same things, and should come up with the same results if we do the same experiment.

Which can be demonstrated to other people, another meaning of "objective." If I can't figure out what the problem is with the TV, I can call in an expert and show him what I've tried already.

"See, the plug is in. The surge protector power light is on. This is the right remote control, and other functions are working." And so on.

But obviously not everything in life has an objective quality that makes it amenable to investigation through the scientific method. This gets us to...

Third, there are subjective and objective domains of reality. So there is subjective truth, and there also is objective truth. It's ridiculous when people say, "Science can't know everything."

Well, duh.

Obviously.

Science doesn't know how the coffee I just took a sip of tastes to me. Science doesn't know how I'm feeling emotionally right now. In fact, science doesn't have a clue about anything I'm aware of, because consciousness is a subjective phenomenon.

Scientists have inner lives, just as we all do. I've read lots of science books and regularly peruse several science magazines. I spend two years working on a Ph.D. in Systems Science. I've never come across a scientist who denies the reality of subjective conscious experience.

So this is a non-issue, the claim by science skeptics that science can't know everything. It doesn't attempt to.

Scientific knowledge concerns the shared realm of objective truth where demonstrable evidence can be displayed and communicated to other people, leading to a public assessment of whether observed facts fit the prediction of some theory.

Science isn't out to deny the reality of subjective sensual impressions -- sounds, sights, tastes, feelings, odors, and such. Nor is it out to deny other private experiences that comprise the conscious reality of every person's existence.

The scientific method merely says, "If you can't show me the demonstrable evidence that supports a theory, I won't accept it as being objective truth." 

Liking strawberries more than bananas still can be your subjective truth. As can your belief in God, angels, heaven, astral travel, divination, the Eight Holy Veils of Her Most Illustrious Visage, or whatever else resides within the private confines of your psyche.

Including experiences of any or all of the above, plus any other possible subjective experience. Science just wants you to bring back some convincing evidence if you want other people to accept that your subjective experience reflects the nature of an objective reality.

Hey, that's not too much to ask, is it?

Yet for many religious true believers, it is. They want others to accept their metaphysical pronouncements -- Jesus saves, God is good, karma crushes carnivores, the soul survives bodily death -- without any evidence.

Subjective truth doesn't need evidence. If I say to you, "I like strawberries more than bananas," you're going to accept my personal like.

But if I claim, "Strawberries are tastier than bananas, so you should eat more of them," then likely I've got an argument on my hands. You'd be entirely justified in replying, "Well, maybe to you; I feel differently."

As I often say on this churchless blog, I've got no problem with "I like..." when it comes to religiosity. It's saying "I'm right..." that gets me irritated. (See my post on this subject.)

I get this image of a pick-up basketball game. A guy stands by the court, talking trash to the players.

You guys got nothing! No game at all. Shit, I could play circles around you. You'll be standing in my dust, wondering how that dunk just slammed over your candy-ass'es.

The players who are actually showing their stuff say, "Dude, come on. Show us what you've got." In this metaphor they're the scientists, the ones who want to put the guy's I'm-better-than-you theory to the test.

But he's a religious true believer.

He talks a good game, and maybe inside his head he is playing a great subjective game of basketball. However, he isn't able to show his stuff in the outside physical world where people have shared experiences.

So there's no reason to believe that he can do what he claims. The players go back to their scientific method game. If the guy ever wants to join in, great. Standing on the sideline and talking trash, though, doesn't earn any respect from those who are actually in the game.

"Quantum Gods" debunks spiritual pseudo-science

Traditional religions embrace a lot of crazy unsubstantiated beliefs. But so do modern New Agey sorts of spirituality, which often take a speck of scientific truth and try to inflate it into a grand explanation of the cosmos.

So in addition to fundamentalist dogma, we churchless types need to train our skeptical guns on targets such as the film "What the Bleep Do We Know?"

Personally, I liked this movie a lot more than, say, a speech by the Pope.

However, since I'm fairly familiar with quantum theory (in a non-mathematical sense, at least), having researched it in the course of writing a book about mysticism and the new physics, a lot of question marks were floating over my head as I watched "What the Bleep Do We Know?"

This movie claims that quantum effects carry over into everyday reality, and urges viewers to adopt a form of "quantum spirituality" that is 99% bullshit and 1% science.

Recently I finished reading physicist Victor Stenger's newest book, "Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness." The title sort of implies a positive outcome for the search.

But Stenger is out to debunk simplistic attempts in this direction. Namely...

The first concept, which I term quantum spirituality, asserts that quantum mechanics has provided us with a connection between the human mind and the cosmos. The second concept, which I call quantum theology, argues that quantum mechanics and chaos theory provide a place for God to act in the world without violating his own natural laws.

Quantum theory is weird. Difficult to understand. Seemingly paradoxical, as when scientists tell us that photons of light can behave either as a wave or a particle depending on how they are observed.

Stenger, though, explains the science underlying quantum phenomena, showing that while quantum theory is strange, it isn't other-worldly or mystical. For example, here's an excerpt from Stenger's "Ghostbusting the Quantum" chapter.

This allows us to conclude that the basic objects, whether contained in a light beam or a beam of electrons, protons, or any other body in nature, are particles. There is no wave-particle duality. Photons are just particles.

...So, then, what is waving? What is the source of the observed interference pattern that fits what is expected for waves? That pattern is the statistical distribution of a large ensemble of individual particle detections.

...If you insist on interpreting the wave function as a "real" physical entity such as a water wave, then it moves faster than the speed of light, indeed, infinite speed, violating a basic tenet of Einstein's special theory of relativity.

However, if we accept that the wave function is just an abstract mathematical entity physicists use to compute the probability for finding a particle at a particular location in space, then there is nothing spooky about it. Abstract things can move as fast as their inventors wish.

I've wondered, "Where do the laws of nature reside?" Are they in some sort of elevated Platonic mathematical realm, or part and parcel of the universe's natural phenomena?

Stenger considers that the laws of physics are human inventions. I won't attempt to describe his reasoning that supports this conclusion, because I don't fully undertand it. Still, it fits with my churchless admiration of Mystery as the cosmos' core quality.

We try to explain the universe as best we can, whether from a scientific, religious, spiritual, or mystical perspective. But in the end, we're unable to grasp what's at The End of it all.

Mysteries can be frustrating if you think they must be explained. However, when mystery is left mysterious, until it isn't, there's much beauty in dark depths of not-knowing. So a message I got from Stenger's book is:

Let's allow science to explain only what can be genuinely understood, and not twist scientific facts in an attempt to construct indefensible models of the cosmos.

Honest questions are a lot better than fake answers, as noted in a previous post about the pseudo-science in "What the Bleep Do We Know?"

[Here's a PDF file of a New Scientist review of "Quantum Gods."]
Download Review of Quantum Gods

Open-mindedness demands evidence, not gullibility

Ooh, I just love it when someone says something so brilliantly, it makes me think, "I could have said that myself!" (if I was that brilliant)

Case in point: a wonderful YouTube video about open-mindedness that I learned about via Pharyngula, where blogger PZ Myers titled his post "Something a few of our commenters ought to watch."

My sentiments exactly.

It amuses me when fundamentalists wander onto this blog and start preaching, "Your skepticism is the real fundamentalism!"

That doesn't make any sense, except in their twisted, tortured, thought-disordered illogic. I try to respond with reasonable statements like "not believing isn't a belief system."

But like they say, a picture can be worth a thousand words.

So maybe the YouTube video on open-mindedness will bring some fresh air to shuttered psyches. I'll embed it at the end of this post -- after sharing ten images from the video that appealed to me.

(click to enlarge)

Here's the basic fallacy: that not believing in pseudo-science or unproven metaphysics shows that the skeptic is closed-minded.

  If supernatural is jumped to as the reason for something unexplained, this closes off other explanations prematurely. Plus, it really isn't an explanation.

The unexplained simply is unexplained. It isn't "spiritual," "God," "quantum phenomena," or anything else. Just a question mark.

If you don't believe something because there's no evidence for it, you aren't saying that thing can't ever be proven to be true. For now, though, you've a skeptic.

Those who are skeptical about science's skepticism are indeed two-faced. They're prone to gullible belief in really weird stuff, but won't believe in the scientific method -- which is a lot more believable.

Great point: if you let all kinds of fanciful crap into your mind, there isn't going to be any way to sort out reality from illusion. People in mental hospitals are open-minded in that sense. They're also insane.

People are free to believe whatever they like. But other people are equally free to challenge reasons for those beliefs. That's what happens on this blog. If you don't like to be challenged, don't spout unproven beliefs.

If someone expects that their beliefs will be accepted on a just because, that indeed is the height of arrogance. Strangely, often these people claim to be humbly religious.

Right on: someone with an unproven notion should be trying to find demonstrable evidence for it, not demanding that others accept it uncritically.

Final image says it all... "An open mind that demands no evidence will let in an awful lot of rubbish." So to be a productively open-minded person, you've got to filter what's allowed into your belief system.

Here's the video:

Sure you're right? You're probably wrong.

Is a depression coming? Will Obama's stimulus and budget plans get the country back on track?

Does God exist? Is heaven the after-death destination for believers, and hell for doubters?

These sets of questions seem very different -- economics is worldly; religion is other-worldly. But after reading a recent Newsweek article, "Why Pundits Get Things Wrong," I suspect there is a commonality between those who offer up answers in both areas.

Ongoing research by Philip Tetlock, a psychologist, looked at 82,361 predictions by 284 pundits. Searching for an explanation of why some people were better predictors than others, he found that:

The best predictor, in a backward sort of way, was fame: the more feted by the media, the worse a pundit's accuracy. And therein lay Tetlock's first clue. The media's preferred pundits are forceful, confident and decisive, not tentative and balanced. They are, in short, hedgehogs, not foxes.

In other words, those who were most certain they were right were more likely to be wrong. It's better to be a fox, someone who knows many things, than a hedgehog, who knows one big thing.

The article's author, Sharon Begley, lists the characteristics of foxes (better predictors) and hedgehogs (worse predictors).

Foxes... cognitively flexible, modest, open to self-criticism, consider competing views, doubt power of Big Ideas, recognize uncertainty, pepper their speech and writing with "however" and "but."

Hedgehogs... supremely confident, dismiss opposing views, drawn to top-down arguments based on a Big Idea, seek certainty, dismiss information that undercuts preconceptions.

In punditry though, and this applies to supposed secular and spiritual experts alike, most people like to hear decisive answers rather than tentative opinions.

Even though in my graduate school days I was taught that it's better to be roughly right instead of precisely wrong, brazen black and white statements generally appear more attractive than those in shades of gray.

However (yes, I'm a fox), reality is grayish.

So usually those who predict extremes of doom and gloom, or sunshine and roses, will be off the mark. Likely the world economy isn't heading into a free fall, and probably the Second Coming isn't near at hand (or far at hand, for that matter).

Here are some excerpts from an interesting New Yorker story about Tetlock's book that support my churchless inclinations.

I don't trust experts who make over-confident economic predictions, nor religious leaders who claim to know what is going to happen to us after we die.

People who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us. When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake.

...The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote.

...The experts’ trouble in Tetlock’s study is exactly the trouble that all human beings have: we fall in love with our hunches, and we really, really hate to be wrong.

...Most people tend to dismiss new information that doesn’t fit with what they already believe. Tetlock found that his experts used a double standard: they were much tougher in assessing the validity of information that undercut their theory than they were in crediting information that supported it.

...But the best lesson of Tetlock’s book may be the one that he seems most reluctant to draw: Think for yourself.

Like a fox. (If you're not sure whether you're more of a fox or a hedgehog, here's some questions that will give you an indication.)

Embrace evolution. Because it's real.

I'm a day late on celebrating Darwin's 200th birthday with a blog post. But yesterday I listened to disbelievers in the theory of evolution hold forth on the radio, so I was thinking of you, Charles.

What Darwin did, brilliantly, is point us in a vitally important direction: reality. That's what science does so well, and religion so poorly.

Now, I realize that "reality" is a dirty word to many people, not all of whom are fundamentalists, because it sounds so elitist, unspiritual, objectifying, divisive.

One guy I heard on a talk show claimed that he wasn't religious; he just wanted students to be exposed to different beliefs in science class, so they would realize that some people believe in this and some believe in that.

At first I thought he was joking, because this notion is so nonsensical.

Are there no facts, no shared sense of objective reality? What allows the guy to talk over the airwaves, using words that all English-speakers can understand? Isn't this reality, rather than belief?

Is everything to be questioned in some sort of post-modern circus? "In this ring, believers in a flat-earth dance with believers in a spherical planet. Over here, believers in alchemy perform with believers in chemistry."

I doubt anyone, even the most fervent true believer, is asking for the elevation of all beliefs to an equal footing. Only certain facts are to be questioned -- those which threaten a particularly precious belief system.

Almost always, a religious one.

It's strange, really, how supposedly godly people are so frightened of mankind being dethroned from a privileged position in the universe. Aren't they supposed to be more humble and egoless than the rest of us heathens?

Susan Jacoby wrote a interesting piece, "Darwin the Disturber." What he disturbed is a fantasy that humans are special creatures uniquely favored by God, occupying a position in the cosmos outside the realm of nature. She said:

I do not understand why it seems so important to theologians (and some sociologists) to find an explanation for human behavior that extends beyond the purely naturalistic. If the genetic research now being conducted in laboratories around the world tells us anything, it is that the interaction of genes is far more complicated than scientists imagined even a decade ago.

Worrying about whether we ought to "play God" is somewhat premature, given that the more we learn about the human brain, the more we learn about how much more there is to learn. But if, as I believe, everything about human beings that we call "spiritual"--our ability to love, to create art, to imagine our own deaths--is inescapably housed within our material corpus, why is that so disturbing?

It has been almost a year since I watched the person I loved most in the world move inexorably toward death, his great mind shutting down as a result of the inevitable, degenerative, entirely physical process of Alzheimer's Disease. Now he lives only in the memories of those who loved him--and our memories are as dependent on the physical health of our bodies as his were on his body.

It does not enhance human dignity one bit to find a "spiritual" explanation for our higher mental functioning; nor does it decrease human dignity to look upon our highest achievements as part of nature, inexorably tied to the body that is ours for a finite period. This finiteness renders life more, not less, meaningful: we are enjoined to use the brains within our bodies to leave as much as possible to those who will inhabit the material world after us. Darwin faced reality, and that is why he was a human as well as a scientific giant.

Thanks to Pharyngula, I came across a one-minute condensation of 4.5 billion years of life on Earth.

Guess what? Humans are a barely noticeable insignificant blip at the very end. That's real. And it doesn't bother me at all.

Because I no longer consider that a single specimen of Homo sapiens, me, is significant in the cosmic scheme of things either. 

That's Darwin's gift to us all: a humble sense of where we stand in the vast expanse of the still-mostly-mysterious universe.

Brain hard-wires a belief in God

Most religious believers consider that they're on the road to transcending the crudity and illusion of material reality.

So, churchless skeptic that I am, it was hugely enjoyable to read in the latest issue of New Scientist about increasing evidence that the brain creates God.

More accurately, a belief in God.

An alternative being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works.

That's not to say that the human brain has a "god module" in the same way that it has a language module that evolved specifically for acquiring language. Rather, some of the unique cognitive capacities that have made us so successful as a species also work together to create a tendency for supernatural thinking. "There's now a lot of evidence that some of the foundations for our religious beliefs are hard-wired," says Bloom.

Much of that evidence comes from experiments carried out on children, who are seen as revealing a "default state" of the mind that persists, albeit in modified form, into adulthood. "Children the world over have a strong natural receptivity to believing in gods because of the way their minds work, and this early developing receptivity continues to anchor our intuitive thinking throughout life," says anthropologist Justin Barrett of the University of Oxford.

Interesting. Makes sense. Explains why religiosity is so widespread, and atheism/agnosticism so rare.

It's easy to follow the God road, because the human brain has built-in sign posts that point in that direction: "Believe in the supernatural!" Recognizing those predilections is difficult, since they're so much a part of us.

A mind-body distinction seems to be at the root of religion's ever-spreading belief tree.

For example, each of us -- me included, for sure -- has a feeling that there's a difference between (1) the "me" who looks out through the eyes and is aware of what is perceived, versus (2) the physical mechanisms of vision and cognition.

Thus even though we might be materialists intellectually, we're dualists experientially.

Bloom says the two systems are autonomous, leaving us with two viewpoints on the world: one that deals with minds, and one that handles physical aspects of the world. He calls this innate assumption that mind and matter are distinct "common-sense dualism". The body is for physical processes, like eating and moving, while the mind carries our consciousness in a separate - and separable - package. "We very naturally accept you can leave your body in a dream, or in astral projection or some sort of magic," Bloom says. "These are universal views."

The big question is: are they correct views? Since there is no, or very little, scientific evidence of mind-body dualism, our innate belief that there is leads to a mistaken proliferation of disembodied entities.

In olden days (and even today in some cultures) people saw natural phenomena as being animated by unseen forces. Lightning came from an angry god. Wind was the whispering of spirits.

Now, a unitary God has mostly replaced the heavenly pantheon. Monotheistic religions -- Christianity, Judaism, Islam -- hold sway over most of the world's population. Yet divinity is still viewed as being separate and distinct from physicality.

As are we supposedly, being images of God. Most people believe they have (or are) a soul. It's hard to imagine that death is the end of our existence, since our wispy consciousness feels so different from our substantial body.

Based on these and other experiments, Bering considers a belief in some form of life apart from that experienced in the body to be the default setting of the human brain. Education and experience teach us to override it, but it never truly leaves us, he says. From there it is only a short step to conceptualising spirits, dead ancestors and, of course, gods, says Pascal Boyer, a psychologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Boyer points out that people expect their gods' minds to work very much like human minds, suggesting they spring from the same brain system that enables us to think about absent or non-existent people.

Now, many argue that we have a sense of mind-body dualism because this is how things really are. Similarly, religious believers say that a conception of life after death seems true to us because it is.

Indeed, the New Scientist article notes that "whether or not a belief is true is independent of why people believe it."

Yes, but the fact that young children are predisposed to believe in disembodied entities strongly implies that religion sprouts from infantile seeds, not an adult understanding of reality.

These cognitive biases are so strong, says Petrovich, that children tend to spontaneously invent the concept of god without adult intervention: "They rely on their everyday experience of the physical world and construct the concept of god on the basis of this experience." Because of this, when children hear the claims of religion they seem to make perfect sense.

Hmmm... a Bible verse from 1 Corinthians 13 comes to mind.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.

Such as, the Bible. And God.

Learn from science: expand your wavelength

"Into the Light" is the title of the introduction to Universe, which stimulated my "Greetings from the center of the galaxy" post.

Reading about the electromagnetic spectrum, I don't see how anyone could doubt that science has a whole lot to teach us about opening ourselves to a broader understanding of reality.

Despite being suffused with light, surprisingly little of the universe is visible to the naked eye. Unaided, we can detect only 6,000 of the universe's estimated 70 billion trillion stars from Earth -- and no more than a few thousand from any one location.

Dust, distance, light pollution and a thick atmosphere may serve to obliterate much of this population, but the simple truth is that we are blind to most wavelengths of light and subsequently blind to a large proportion of the celestial sphere's denizens.

Beyond the familiar rainbow of visible light there lies a much more vibrant world, for the heavens blaze across a spectrum of energies far broader than the eye can behold: black holes are uncloaked by bright x-ray bursts as matter spirals into them; treasure chests of embryonic stars smoulder in the infrared; nebulae bask in the ultraviolet light of hypergiant stars; and microwave echoes chronicle the afterglow of the Big Bang.

Only in the last century have we become aware of light's many guises and been able to step into this unseen realm -- it is no coincidence that our exploration of space has advanced hand in hand with our exploration of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Without the technological supersenses to capture the invisible -- and amplify the visible -- our view of the universe would be but a pale reflection of its true nature and our understanding of it similarly constrained.

There's so much more to know, to grasp, to experience. The blind faith of religious dogma is restricted to feeling its way around a horribly confined space.

Reality needs to be embraced in all of its awesome glory. What's theologically close at hand and seemingly comprehensible to certainty-desiring minds isn't all there is.

Greetings from the center of the galaxy

I couldn't think of a better Christmas day greeting than this one -- a marvelous image of the Milky Way galactic center. (Click on "full size" for higher resolution image.)

Yesterday I saw it as I was garnering churchless inspiration from an astronomical picture book, "Universe: Journey from Earth to the Edge of the Cosmos."

Tears came to my eyes. Sitting on a cushion in my meditation area, I felt very, very small.

Also, very, very fortunate to be living in a time when science could show us so vividly what lies beyond the confines of everyday experience.

The caption in the book, where the image is rotated 90 degrees, says:

Dense star fields (should you care to count them, there are nearly 10 million stars here) announce our arrival at the galactic core. In these bright depths galactic orbits are completed in decades -- it takes our sun 225 million years. A ribbon of dust weaves diagonally across the page leading to the exact point around which we all revolve [top left in image above], where beats our galaxy's dark heart.

"Dark," because a black hole lies at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, having the mass of about four million stars the size of our sun.

But that's not what moved me the most about this image. It was the ten million stars that looked as closely packed together as salt grains spilled on a countertop.

Yet actually the average distance between stars in the Milky Way is about 5 light years, or 30 trillion miles.

Imagine (as if we can) traveling at 186,000 miles per second for five years just to get from one tiny speck in the image to another tiny speck. Equally astounding:

If the Sun were the size of a baseball, the density of the stars in our galaxy would be comparable to scattering fifty baseballs across the United States, so that there would be one star per state.

Ponder those words. Then look again at the full-size image of the galactic center.

I feel hugely more genuine awe and wonder from this reflection of really real reality, than from the Christmas sermon preaching of Rick Warren that I briefly listened to this morning as I channel-flipped through some cable news channels.

"Jesus died for our sins." Oh, yeah? What the hell does that mean? It's just words, dogma, blind belief.

The center of the galaxy ... now that's something you can actually point to, marvel at, have your mind boggled by.

And here's the most astounding thing of all: whatever the unimaginably vast cosmos is made of, so are we. Wherever it ultimately came from, so did we.

One of the most inspiring lines I've ever heard in a movie was spoken by Jodie Foster in "Contact" (which was based on a book by Carl Sagan).

She's a scientist strapped into a machine that's been built from plans apparently sent by an advanced alien civilization. It hasn't been tested yet. She's the ever-so-willing guinea pig.

Not knowing what will happen when the machine is turned on, Foster's character is willing to sacrifice her life in order to learn much more about the truth of the universe.

The countdown begins. A whole lot of shaking and rattling ensues. And we hear her say to mission control:

I’m ok to go..if you can hear me I’m ok to go!

Beautiful. That's the spirit of science. Daredevil truth-seeking.

Mysticism and spirituality, when shorn of fundamentalism, can have the same commitment to understanding naked reality.

Seek the center. Our galaxy has one. Each of us does. Is there anything more satisfying to do?

Belief is in the brain, so beware

Believing in the supernatural is easy: our brains lead us down the belief road without our knowledge. So there's good reason to be skeptical of religious, mystical, or spiritual experiences.

Much, most, or all of the time (depending on your level of skepticism) your brain is fooling you.

Such is the fascinating message of Sharon Begley's "Why We Believe" in a recent issue of Newsweek. I read her piece the day after my wife and I believed we were at the right election night party place, but really weren't.

We weren't in a supernatural frame of mind, but some of Begley's believing findings sure seemed to apply to us. Such as:

As scientists began studying belief in the paranormal, it quickly became clear that belief requires an open mind -- one not bound by the evidence of the senses, but in which emotions such as hope and despair can trump that evidence. ... The idea that the brain constructs reality from the bottom up, starting with perceptions, is woefully wrong, new evidence shows.

If we really want something to be true (like being an elevator ride away from an Obama victory party), our perceptions and thoughts likely are going to be tilted in the direction of our feelings and emotions.

Ambiguous evidence will be construed as Yes, we're on the right track! In the same way, religious believers see what they want to see in a holy book, holy person, or holy place. If your mind is deeply attached to a religious symbol, it may conjure up sensations that seem real, but actually aren't.

Brain imaging shows that the regions that become active when people imagine seeing or hearing something are identical to those that become active when they really do see or hear something in the outside world. ...It is not too far a step for mentally healthy people to see or hear what they are thinking intensely about.

I'm reminded of stories told by disciples about gurus to whom they're devoted.

After being told by the guru that it is possible to be in touch with his astral (or "radiant") form, and spending many hours in meditation visualizing the guru's presence, one day the guru appears and talks to them. Well, maybe. Or, not.

Christina Puchalski, director of the George Washington Institute for Spirituality and Health, felt her dead mother's presence "with me in a very deep and profound way, emanating from a certain direction," she says. "Maybe if you're thinking very strongly about that person, your mind is creating the sense that he is there."

Believing that there is more to life than what is apparent here on Earth can be comforting. I certainly got a lot of satisfaction from my true believing days. It was wonderful to feel so special, so cared for, so clearly guaranteed a better life after this one ended.

I'd still like this to be true. However, I've reached a point where truth is more important to me than feeling wonderful. Sure, I want both.

However, I also want my reality to be as real as possible.

The universal human need to find meaning and purpose in life is stronger and more basic than any attachment to empiricism, logic, or objective reality.

Well, that may be. However, I'm still optimisic that people -- me included -- can find meaning and purpose in attuning themselves to how the world is, in contrast to how they'd wish it to be.

Getting down to rock bottom reality

I've never understood why science isn't worshiped by religious believers. After all, most religions believe that God or a higher power created the cosmos.

So seemingly the next best thing to knowing God would be knowing how our universe works, since it stands to reason that the consciousness of the creator would be reflected in the creation -- in the same way as the psyche of an artist shines through his or her paintings.

Normally my meditation nook's reading corner has several science books nestled comfortably next to spiritual and philosophical titles. I jump back and forth between them most mornings, finding each genre inspiring in its own fashion.

Recently I've been making my way through Frank Wilczek's "The Lightness of Being." He's got a Nobel Prize in Physics, a fact prominently displayed on the book's cover (can't blame him).

This was a book that sold itself via the front cover flap. I noticed it at a Salem bookstore and wondered if Wilczek had anything new to say about his subtitled subject: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces. Reading this on the flap made me get out my VISA card:

Matter is built from almost weightless units, and pure energy is the ultimate source of mass. Wilczek calls this discovery "The Lightness of Being." But he also shows us much more. Space is no mere container, empty and passive. It is a dynamic Grid -- a modern ether.

The Grid is more fundamental than any "fundamental" particle; its spontaneous activity creates and destroys particles. This new understanding of mass and "empty space" explains the puzzling feebleness of gravity and brings a gorgeous unification of all the forces of nature into sharp focus.

God! That's so beautiful. Such was my thought as I walked up to the cashier.

I was carrying a holy book. "Holy," because it was founded in reality, not dogma or superstition. Sure, science doesn't have all the answers to what the universe is made of. Wilczek makes this clear, repeatedly.

But in "The Lightness of Being" I've been learning about what is known, or at least strongly suspected, about the nature of rock bottom reality. Whether you believe that the universe came from God, the Tao, Brahma, Allah, the Big Bang, or some other source, here's the latest word on how the creative power fashioned our home.

To me, this is deeply significant.

Again, I don't see how any person of faith would want to ignore the findings of modern science, particularly physics and cosmology -- which are delving into the foundation of time, space, energy, and matter.

Namely, the basic stuff of creation. Which, as the quote above says, turns out to be energetic "nothing" that morphs into more materialistic "something," the subatomic particles that we and everything else are made of.

This isn't an easy book to read. The cover copy is the least complex writing in it. Smattered here and there, though, are observations that point to some aha's for anyone (like me) who resonates with the scientific side of Taoism and Buddhism.

For example:

Philosophical and scientific ideas about what the world is made of continue to change. Many loose ends remain in today's best world-models, and some big mysteries. Clearly the last word has not been spoken. But we know a lot too -- enough to draw some surprising conclusions that go beyond piecemeal facts.

They address, and offer some answers to, questions that have traditionally been regarded as belonging to philosophy or even theology.

For natural philosophy, the most important lesson we learn from QCD [quantum chromodynamics] is that what we perceive as empty space is in reality a powerful medium whose activity molds the world.

...So: What is the world made of? Subject, as ever, to addition and correction, here is the multifaceted answer that modern physics provides:

--The primary ingredient of physical reality, from which all else is formed, fills space and time.
--Every fragment, each space-time element, has the same basic properties as every other fragment.
--The primary ingredient of reality is alive with quantum activity. Quantum activity has special characteristics. It is spontaneous and unpredictable. And to observe quantum activity, you must disturb it.
--The primary ingredient of reality also contains enduring material components. These make the cosmos a multilayered, multicolored superconductor.
--The primary ingredient of reality contains a metric field that gives space-time rigidity and causes gravity.
--The primary ingredient of reality weighs, with a universal density.

OK, I admit it: not many people are going to find those words as inspiring as what leaves the mouth of their preacher, rabbi, guru, or other religious teacher.

But they are to me. In fact, they're even more inspirational. Because they're based on reality, not imagination.

Emptiness is fine with me as the "primary ingredient of reality." (Not that I have any choice in the matter, or non-matter.) There's no warm and fuzzy personal God in science's foundational view of the cosmos.

But there's beauty. Here's Wilczek in one of his more poetic moments:

Beneath the familiar, sober appearances of enduring matter in empty space, our minds envision the dance of intricate patterns within a pervasive, ever-present, effervescent medium...Our substance is the hum of a strange music, a mathematical music more precise and complex than a Bach fugue, the Music of the Grid.

Through patchy clouds, off in the distance, we seem to glimpse a mathematical Paradise, where the elements that build reality shed their dross. Correcting for the distortions of our everyday vision, we create in our minds a vision of what they might really be: pure and ideal, symmetric, equal, and perfect.

Or have our imaginations made too much of a wispy chimera? We point our telescope, and wait for the clouds to clear.

Thumbs up to naturalism, evolution, and Palin fading away

Today Pharyngula, a terrific science/ progressive/ anti-religion blog, hit the mark with links to stories on three of my favorite subjects.

Exposing Sarah Palin for the fool that she is. Palin is against science. She's for the teaching of creationism. She doesn't think humans have much to do with global warming. Picturing her as vice-president of the United States: too irrationally scary to contemplate.

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.

Evolution points to a reality incompatible with traditional religion. Some people claim that God could have created the universe in the big bang and then left it (including Earth, obviously) to evolve in accord with natural laws. But what's the point of religion if there's no evidence of anything godly in the physical world?

First, let's clear up the incoherence of the question. I understand it as, "Does understanding science [it's not just biologists who exhibit this phenomenon!] lead to an abandonment of religious beliefs?", and that's the question to which I think an affirmative is the correct answer. It ought to; scientific thinking is corrosive to religious belief.

...Thinking scientifically means that you question assumptions and that you ask epistemological questions and you try to rationally justify the acceptance of ideas, and that's the antithesis of religious thinking. If you apply scientific reasoning to even that moderate version of religion, it crumbles — there is simply no evidence for any of their claims.

The natural world is, naturally, all that is known to exist. "Materialists" are better termed "naturalists." Science knows that matter isn't just solid objects, stuff you can knock your fist on. It's also energy, space and time, quantum tremblings far beyond our ability to sense with even the most powerful instruments. There's plenty of room for pondering the Big Questions of Life in naturalism.

Science is dependent upon methodological naturalism because a necessary feature of any scientific hypothesis is that it is testable. Non-natural causes are by definition non-falsifiable, and therefore scientific methods cannot act upon them. It is like the now famous cartoon of the mathematician writing out a very complex equation, but in one part simply writes “and then a miracle happens.” His colleague points out that, “I think you need to be a little more explicit in this section.” (I may be paraphrasing.)

Science cannot say, “and then a miracle happens.” There is no way to do an experiment or make an observation that can test a miracle. Miracles, by definition, defy natural forces or explanations. They cannot be constrained, which is a necessary feature of any hypothesis that can be falsified.

God, the Big Bang, and a Big Bounce

It's well accepted that our universe came into being about 13.7 billion years ago with a bang. A big bang, in fact. So big, and yet so small.

Because the energy which became at least 100 billion galaxies each containing about 100 billion stars, supposedly was contained within a singularity of infinite density and temperature that wasn't even a point in time and space – since a singularity is where the laws of nature (including general relativity) break down.

This helps explain why the Catholic Church has looked with favor on the big bang theory, as have theologians of other faiths.

Time is considering to come into existence with the big bang. Before it, there was nothing. So it's easy to consider that God was behind the big bang, kicking creation into existence in a "let there be light" fashion.

Now, though, a big bounce theory is gaining adherents. Last night I read a Scientific American article, "Big Bang or Big Bounce?: New Theory on the Universe's Birth," by Martin Bojowald.

Here's the Key Concepts summary of the article:

• Einstein's general theory of relativity says that the universe began with the big bang singularity, a moment when all the matter we see was concentrated at a single point of infinite density. But the theory does not capture the fine, quantum structure of spacetime, which limits how tightly matter can be concentrated and how strong gravity can become. To figure out what really happened, physicists need a quantum theory of gravity.
• According to one candidate for such a theory, loop quantum gravity, space is subdivided into "atoms" of volume and has a finite capacity to store matter and energy, thereby preventing true singularities from existing.
• If so, time may have extended before the bang. The prebang universe may have undergone a catastrophic implosion that reached a point of maximum density and then reversed. In short, a big crunch may have led to a big bounce and then to the big bang.

Cool. There still was a big bang, but it probably wasn't the first. In fact, there could be an infinity of universe-creating moments, since the big bounce theory suggests that the beginning of time is a myth.

The cosmos always has existed. It just bounces around, oscillating between big bangs and big crunches, wiping out all traces of what came before each seemingly one-of-a-kind creation of a universe.

I like (but don't claim to understand) the loop gravity theory. What's not to like about a notion that makes you think "loopy"? And, "far out."

In the quantum theory of gravity, a vacuum is the absence of spacetime – an emptiness so thorough we can scarcely imagine it. Loop gravity describes how each increment of energy added to this vacuum generates a new atom of spacetime.

The spacetime atoms form a dense, ever shifting mesh. Over large distances, their dynamism gives rise to the evolving universe of classical general relativity. Under ordinary conditions, we never notice the existence of these spacetime atoms; the mesh spacing is so tight that it looks like a continuum. But when spacetime is packed with energy, as it was at the big bang, the fine structure of spacetime becomes a factor, and the predictions of loop gravity diverge from those of general relativity.

… Because of the quantum-gravitational change in the balance of forces, no singularity—no state of infinite density—can ever arise. According to this model, matter in the early universe had a very high but finite density, the equivalent of a trillion suns in every proton-size region. At such extremes, gravity acted as a repulsive force, causing space to expand; as densities moderated, gravity switched to being the attractive force we all know. Inertia has kept the expansion going to the present day.

Who can fathom infinity? But the mass of a trillion suns shrunk to the size of a proton … that's mind-boggling, yet at least minimally comprehensible.

Lying in bed after reading the article, musing about the mystery of the universe before falling asleep, I pondered a cosmos that has always been, and just keeps banging/bouncing away, forever.

My ponder ran up against what it always does in such speculating: awe, pure and simple. My train of thought falls over an abyss of mystery. I'm left with nothing but Wow.

I'm pretty sure this is the same feeling religious believers have when they contemplate an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent God. They and I fall on our non-comprehending knees before the ultimate.

The thing is, science points the way to the mystery of always was, always is, always shall be with a lot more believability than religion does.

So if you want to feel cosmic awe, there's no need to pick up a holy book. Just Scientific American.

Join the Church of Holy Fuck!

There's nothing wrong with churches that some churchlessness won't fix. After all, that's what this blog is. This morning I was inspired to become the first member of another churchless church, that of Holy Fuck!

In chartering this institution within my own psyche, my first decision was whether the exclamation point was necessary.

Grammatically, it could be confusing – as in the title of this post.

Does the ! go with the entire sentence, or just with Church of Holy Fuck! I've concluded that it's better to be confused than lackadaisical. Hence, I'm decreeing that an exclamation point shall always be part of the church's name.

If you don't agree, tough. Start your own church.

I'm hoping you'll convert to the Church of Holy Fuck! though, because it's a marvelous faith. It blends divinity and profanity, which strikes me as the only way to go through life.

Proving that my experience is in line with my philosophy, I can testify that Holy fuck! is a mantra that frequently springs to mind. I'm constantly being amazed and surprised by reality. And that's the church's only form of worship.

Befuddlement. At which point we believers in our own unknowing honor Most Majestic Reality with a heartfelt Holy fuck!

The cosmos has countless ways of revealing its holy fuckness. If you haven't encountered one of them by noon, you're probably still sleeping. Or, brain dead.

Today I was blessed with several Holy fuck!'s early in my day, before meditating. I'd reached the final chapters of "Decoding the Universe" by Charles Seife (subtitle: "How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes").

I find that science books are one of the best means of eliciting a Holy fuck! in me. Religious, spiritual, metaphysical, and philosophy books usually start with a mystery, then try to explain it in a reasonable and pleasing fashion.

For example, the mystery of death. Explanation: Jesus died so that you might have eternal life (Christian version). Problem solved.

Religion appeals to those who want neat and tidy explanations that elicit a Praise the Lord! Science, on the other hand, often begins with a question and ends with a Holy fuck!

I like that. It just seems like whatever reality really is, it's unlikely to be understandable by a human consciousness. So I feel like I'm coming closer to ultimate reality, rather than further away, when my mind is blown.

Not by absurdity, which is what religion offers up. But by a reasonable chain of logic that ends by dangling us over an abyss of Holy fuck!

For example, Seife describes the extent of the knowable universe:

Since information travels no faster than the speed of light, if you draw an invisible, enormous (but finite) sphere around the Earth that has a radius of tens of billions of light-years, you encompass all of the universe that has been able to send information to us since the moment when light was set free [about 400,000 years after the big bang].

He calls this sphere the Hubble bubble. It has a radius of about 40 billion light-years. That's more than the 13.7 billion light year age of the universe, because the fabric of space has been expanding faster than the speed of light.

But for the Church of Holy Fuck! it doesn't matter what the size of the Hubble bubble, the potentially observable universe, is. The key word in the quote above is "finite."

Because Seife says that "at the moment, scientists believe that our universe is infinite in extent – that it has no borders – and that it doesn't have a funky shape that curls around on itself, as a handful of scientists have unconvincingly argued."

OK. That was news to me. I'll accept it, in part because I enjoy the Holy fuck! that comes from doing so.

If the Hubble bubble where we are is finite, and the universe is infinite, then quantum theory leads to some mind- blowing conclusions.

The wave function captures every single piece of information about all the stuff – all the matter and energy – in our Hubble bubble, whether we are aware of it or not. It encodes the location and momentum of every single atom in that Hubble bubble, as well as everything else you can possible imagine about our bubble.

In it are encoded the position and color of every lightbulb on Piccadilly Circus, the velocity of every fish in the sea, and the contents of every single book that exists on Earth. Our Hubble bubble's wave function even includes your wave function; it encodes every single morsel of information about you, down to the quantum states of each atom in your body.

Though this is an unbelievably large amount of information, our Hubble bubble's wave function contains everything about our visible universe. Just for the heck of it, let's call it wave function #153.

Now, here's where it gets fun.

I've read quite a bit about the "multiple universes" theory in quantum physics, and have discounted it as fanciful mumbo-jumbo. Seife, though, got me to see the Holy fuck! of it by emphasizing what happens if you have a finite Hubble bubble within an infinite universe.

There are only a finite number of wave functions for a Hubble volume. There are an unbelievably, unbelievably huge number of possible wave functions (call it a kergillion), but that number is finite nonetheless. So our wave function is one of kergillion possible wave functions.

…But remember, there are an infinite number of these Hubble bubbles in an infinite universe. Infinity is more than a kergillion – even more than a kergillion plus one. And once we reach a kergillion-plus-one Hubble bubbles, something incredible must have happened.

There are only a kergillion possible wave functions a Hubble bubble can have, so in a collection of a kergillion-plus-one Hubble bubbles, there must be at least one duplicate! Two Hubble bubbles must have exactly the same wave function. Every atom, every particle, every little dollop of energy is in exactly the same place, has exactly the same momentum, and is exactly the same in every single possible way you can imagine – and even in the ways that you can't imagine.

But in an infinite universe, there isn't just going to be one duplicate. Infinity just keeps on going… and going… and going.

If there's nothing particularly special about our wave function, then in a volume that contains a million kergillion Hubble bubbles, there are about a million identical copies of our universe.

…Each of those Hubble bubbles even contains an identical copy of your wave function – down to the quantum states of each atom in your body. There are a million copies of you, identical in every detail. In fact, those million dopplegangers are reading a doppelganger copy of this book and are finishing this paragraph as you are, right … now.

Holy fuck!

Doesn't matter if this is true. No one can know. Seife says, "Of all the insane things that I have tried to convince you of in this book, this is by far the craziest. I, myself, have a very, very hard time believing it…But the logic seems fairly airtight."

Do you want to live forever? In a sense, you will. Because "you" aren't at all unique, if the universe is infinite.

Each of us is purely and solely information – that's difficult to argue against, even (or especially) if one favors a mystical, non-material conception of the cosmos. After all, a soul, or spirit, must be something knowable, if only by God or the soul/spirit entity itself.

Yet there is good reason to believe that within the infinity of existence, everything exists an infinite number of times.

I like that notion. It makes eventually not being the particular being I call "me" more palatable. There are back-up Brian's scattered around all over. Just not close at hand.

Indeed, if the universe is infinite, then physicists estimate that an identical Hubble bubble should be roughly [10 to the 10^th to the 115^th] meters away from us. Of course, you'd never be able to communicate with your doppelganger, as it would be vastly, vastly more distant than the edge of our visible universe, but if the universe is infinite, that doppelganger should be there nonetheless.

Greetings, infinite number of identical Brian's!

I realize that we can't know each other, but I still want to extend a hearty Holy fuck! to each of you nonetheless – which each of us has just written on our IBM Think Pad simultaneously.

Way cool.

There's some downside to this finite Hubble bubble deal, though. A huge downside. Its description will have to wait for a post on another day.

And another Holy fuck!

Repent! Believe in science!

Often a cartoon speaks more truth than thousands of words. Thanks to Pharyngula, here's a great example:

The complete comic says even more. Yes indeed, "the truth will set you free."

Which leaves religion out of the picture, because it puts barriers between us and reality – substituting wishful thinking for clear-eyed understanding of the universe.

A recent comment conversation over on last year's "Atheists crush Christians at 'Does God Exist?' debate" post is a good example.

I appreciate that "C," a Christian, was willing to enter into a dialogue with us churchless heathens (see his July 7, 2008 comment and subsequent responses).

C said that scientific conceptions about the big bang and evolution are theories. That's true.

But I pointed out that there's a big difference between: (1) a theory with lots of evidence to back up, and (2) a theory backed up by little or evidence.

A belief that Jesus died for our sins falls into the second category. A belief that the universe began with a stupendous "explosion" some 14 billion years ago that eventually led to life on Earth evolving into creatures capable of pondering where we came from falls into the first category.

I heartily disagreed with C's statement to Adam:

One thing I'd like to hear you admit is that evolution and the big bang are theories, they are not facts, and that it takes just as much faith to believe in that as it takes for me to believe in Christ.

This betrays a serious lack of understanding of the scientific method. And of theology.

In Christianity, faith is a virtue. In science, it's a defect that has to be minimized as rapidly as possible if a theory is to be considered anything more than blind belief.

I've read some big thick books about evolution, such as Richard Dawkins' "An Ancestor's Tale." It was a subject of my "Evolution is sacred, religion is profane" post.

Yesterday C wrote this to me in a comment:

Just to close, could you please just show me the tons of evidence evolution has? I'm not asking this sarcastically, I'd just like to see the evidence that you speak of and that I've never heard. Thanks.

P.S. Please don't send me links, not that I'm being ignorant. I just like hearing it better from learned people like yourself.

Well, C, you didn't want links, but I suggest you click on the two a few lines above. There's no reason for me to repeat what I've already said, and what Dawkins' book is all about.

There's just as much evidence, albeit of different kinds, for the big bang. With both the big bang and evolution theories, many truths remain to be revealed in detail, but the foundations of understanding are well fleshed out.

What these theories answer, and Christianity (nor any other religion) can't, is a simple question: How did things come to be as they are?

If an all-powerful God exists, he or she could have created everything all at once. In fact, that's what Genesis erroneously says. "All at once" being over the course of a few days, which is close enough for religious work.

Yet, everything we know about the universe and Earth points to a different conclusion. Living and non-living things have been changing continuously. In short, stuff happens.

And there's no evidence that all this happening is under any sort of conscious guidance. Unless you want to call the laws of nature "conscious," which I feel there's good reason to do. But Nature is a far cry from the notion of a personal God who sets into motion and subsequently guides both cosmic and human affairs.

So I'll continue to kneel at the altar of science. I'm devoted to reality. I also admit that I'm devoted to having reality turn out to be the way I want it.

I do my best to resist having the first devotion undermined by the second. That resistance is a big part of what science is all about: honoring the way things really are above how we'd like them to be.

Which is why I like that comic so much. "The truth will set you free." Yes, Amen to that.

Knowing that you know: impossible

It's strange, but the most familiar sensation we have also is the most mysterious: knowing. I know this. And yet, I don't.

Just like everything else that I know. Or you know. Or anybody knows.

We don't know how we know. Which means we can't trust what we know – not with 100% certainty. So this should squash fundamentalism of every variety.

Except…people can't control their knowing. Reason, facts, information, persuasion: our sense of knowing isn't influenced by any of that.

Our knowing can't be trusted. Yet it's what we rely upon at every moment. Go figure. (But you can't, because knowing isn't capable of being figured.)

I've finished reading Robert Burton's "On Being Certain," the subject of a previous post after I'd read an article about the book. It's been quite a ride.

Loopy. That's the best word to describe it. Over and over, I'd find Burton pulling the rug out from under a viewpoint that I'd thought was solid. And believed in myself.

So I'd be thrown for a loop, experiencing some mental vertigo, turned upside down, searching for another certain spot of ground.

I'm still digesting the book. I don't quite know how to talk about what I've learned about not knowing – as the subtitle puts it, "believing you are right even when you're not."

This is a first stab. More posts will follow, probably. Can't say for sure. Uncertainty rules the day. Every day.

One of Burton's central points, which seems as certain as anything can be (he's a neurologist), is that human awareness – including our sense of knowing – is mediated by a hidden layer of brain activity.

The hidden layer, a term normally considered with AI [artificial intelligence] jargon, offers a powerful metaphor for the brain's processing of information. It is in the hidden layer that all elements of biology (from genetic predispositions to neurotransmitter variations and fluctuations) and all past experience, whether remembered or long forgotten, affect the processing of incoming information.

It is the interface between incoming sensory data and a final perception, the anatomic crossroad where nature and nurture intersect. It is why your red is not my red, your idea of beauty isn't mine, why eyewitnesses offer differing accounts of an accident, or why we don't all put our money on the same roulette number.

What this means is that stuff we're absolutely, completely, supremely confidently sure about, we can be wrong about.

Because we only know what pops out of the hidden layer into our conscious awareness. We can't know how the incoming data were manipulated by the hidden layer.

Thus those moments of intuitive, mystical, spiritual, unitive insight, where we feel "Ah, so this is what life is all about!" – those moments also are states of knowing that pop out of the hidden layer.

Being hidden, the insight can seem like an act of grace, a gift from God, an unquestionable revelation. Burton quotes William James:

Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.

Burton then comments:

This is a brilliant observation, equating religious and mystical states with the sensation of knowing, and with the further recognition that such knowledge is felt, not thought…James' description is perfectly straightforward – with mystical states, people experience spontaneous mental sensations that feel like knowledge but occur in the absence of any specific knowledge. Felt knowledge. Knowledge without thought. Certainty without deliberation or even conscious awareness of having had a thought.

But there's that hidden layer…

Just because we have a feeling of inerrant knowing doesn't mean that feeling is accurate. What pops into awareness is sort of like picking up the phone and hearing someone say, "Congratulations, you've just won a million dollars."

You don't know who is on the other end of the line, whether they can be trusted, what their motivation is, where they're calling from. Everything we're aware of, Burton says, is like this. Including the knowledge that we're aware.

Think about it. Or rather, don't think about it. Just be aware of being aware, of knowing your knowing. It's something we usually don't pay any attention to.

How I simply know what I want to write, and how my fingers type out that knowing. How you simply know whether what I've written makes sense, is understandable, means anything to you, is just gibberish or profoundly insightful.

But what the heck is that knowing? Is it a feeling, a thought, a sensation, none of the above? Is it under our control? Can you intentionally change your knowing? Or is that mysterious perception outside of our control?

Burton:

The feeling of knowing is universal, most likely originates within a localized region of the brain, can be spontaneously activated via direct stimulation or chemical manipulation, yet cannot be triggered by conscious effort.

These arguments for its inclusion as a primary brain module are more compelling than those postulated for deceit, compassion, forgiveness, altruism, or Machiavellian cunning. One can stimulate the brain and produce a feeling of knowing; one cannot stimulate the brain and create a politician.

What a predicament. The idea of a thought being created by more specialized modules, some operating outside of our control and awareness, seems both intuitively obvious and antithetical to how we experience our thoughts.

That's because we have a mental circuit breaker. It allows us to function without paralyzing indecision. Problem is: it can be wrong, and there's no way we can know that we don't know what we are sure we know.

As an isolated system, thought is doomed to the perpetual "yes, but," that arises out of not being able to know what you don't know. Without a circuit breaker, indecision and inaction would rule the day. What is needed is a mental switch that stops infinite ruminations and calms our fears of missing an unknown superior alternative.

Such a switch can't be a thought or we would be back at the same problem. The simplest solution would be a sensation that feels like a thought but isn't subject to thought's perpetual self-questioning. The constellation of mental states that constitutes the feeling of knowing is a marvelous adaptation that solves a very real metaphysical dilemma of how to reach a conclusion.

I love it. And, I hate it.

I love it because I can't tell you how many times I've been told by true believers, "Brian, you think too much." They say this because they just know what the truth beyond thought is.

Why? No why. They just know that ultimate truth isn't a thought. And since my metaphysical beliefs seem to be founded on thinking, and their knowing isn't, then obviously their knowing trumps my thinking.

Which is ridiculous. Because Burton's book presents lots of evidence that every sort of knowing, even the kind that doesn't seem to be based on anything but direct awareness, actually flows out of that hidden layer of brain functioning.

So I hate it. Because my knowing is just as unreliable as a true believer's, who I don't believe knows the truth. How to balance this loving and hating?

That'll have to wait for another post.

Being absolutely right, you’re wrong

You can't have "right" without "wrong." So if what you say is absolutely 100% certain, no doubt about it – that can't be true.

The Taoists figured this out a long time ago. Yin requires yang. Up needs down. Truth depends on falsity.

Much more recently, Karl Popper made falsifiability the cornerstone of what distinguishes a scientific theory. I echoed his ideas in "If a religion can't be wrong, it surely is."

I keep coming back to this notion, because both intuitively and logically it appeals to me. Sure, something may be real, yet improvable or indescribable.

Existence, for example. "What is, is." That statement sounds marvelously correct. And it is. But it doesn't mean anything. Not really.

"The Dream Weaver," a book I'm reading now, talks about words without meaning.

Basically, when you use a word, it needs a criterion. There must be a way to use the word incorrectly. It can't be the case that everything is selfish, or that everything is natural. If that were the case, then the word would become meaningless. If everything were considered natural, what would be the point of asking, Is this thing natural? It's sort of paradoxical in a way: I create a word that means everything and, in doing so, it means nothing.

Now, I'm fine with indescribable meaninglessness. That could well be the most meaningful thing in the world. Lots of experiences just are what they are – incommunicable to anyone else, but filled with Wow! for the experiencer.

Like the Greeks, we need to distinguish Truth from Beauty. A rose is a rose is a rose. That's beauty. Water is two molecules of hydrogen and one molecule of oxygen. That's truth.

A rose can't be anything other than a rose. Several molecules can be something other than water.

Similarly, much religious or metaphysical dogma can't be wrong because words are used in a way that defy falsification.

"God is everything."
"Consciousness is all."
"Whatever happens has to happen."
"A perfect guru never makes a mistake."
"Everything is destined."
"The world is illusion."
"Jesus is coming."

In each case, someone making the statement can't be pinned down if you try to show they could be wrong. They always have a way to wriggle out from skepticism because there's no "there" to what they're saying.

As I noted before, Eastern philosophies and religions are as prone to this as Western ones are. The Bible is true because it says in the Bible, "This is the word of God." The guru is perfect because his predecessor was flawless, and perfect gurus can't err when they appoint a successor.

Whenever I run up against words that can't be wrong, I start to lose interest in them – since they can't be right.

This explains why I've found myself gritting my teeth and filling the margins with question marks as I make my way through the last chapters of "Consciousness is All," a book that started off more interestingly than it is ending up for me.

In the beginning I liked how the author directed my attention to how awareness works. But when he turned to saying (over and over, in various ways) that everything is consciousness, it sounded just the same as "God is love."

Religious. Dogmatic. Meaningless.

Yet those words sound so wonderful. They explain it all! Karl Popper writes:

I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler, were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appeared to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated.

Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. This its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refused to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still "un-analysed" and crying aloud for treatment.

Recently there's been quite a bit of discussion on this blog about awareness. This can be another example of a word that doesn't mean anything, yet can seem deeply meaningful.

Yes, without awareness we can't be aware of anything. And without existence, nothing exists. Nor would life be lively if we weren't alive.

These are realities – awareness, existence, life. But they're not truths, not in any sort of scientific, logical, or evidentiary sense, because there is no untruth to which they can be contrasted.

How could I be aware of unawareness, or exist as nonexistence, or live a non-life? If such were possible, then speaking of these contraries would have some purpose.

As it is, discussions of these subjects can end up sounding to me like the oft-heard quote on sports radio: "It is what it is." (frequently spoken after a devastating loss or embarrassing athletic moment)

Don't get me wrong: there's nothing more interesting to me than awareness, existence, and life. That's because I've got a huge interest in being aware of existing after I stop living my life.

It's just that when I hear talk of "awareness never ends" it strikes me as no different in kind from "Jesus saves." Namely, a belief that can't be tested. At least, not in this life – which is the only life I can be sure of.

While I have a fondness for philosophies that assure me life is just fine exactly the way it is, and I don't need to do anything about it, I'm skeptical about whether there's any meaning to these assurances beyond the warm, fuzzy feeling they produce in my often-anxious soul.

Zen tells me, "first there is a mountain; then there isn't; then there is." I also have heard that the world appears just the same to an enlightened sage as an unenlightened fool. So why not remain a fool if there's no way to tell the difference?

In the end, there could well be no beginning and no end. But so long as we're not there, isn't there a "here" as well as a "there"?

[Note: Popper's proposition that falsifiability is what distinguishes science isn't universally accepted, for sure. See here and here (scroll down to Goldstein).

But even though I don't claim to fully understand the objections to his view, one reason seems to be that falsifying isn't what scientists really do, mostly. They set out to prove rather than disprove.

Fine. I'd be just as happy if metaphysical propositions could be proven to be true, rather than capable of being shown to be false. Sort of seems like the same difference to me, but someone more knowledgeable is free to prove me wrong.]

Update: This blogger has a nice take on falsifiability, viewing it as a necessary but not sufficient condition for a scientific hypothesis.

Which raises the question…if you hold to a metaphysical, spiritual, or religious belief, what would it take for you to admit, "I'm wrong"?

If you can't come up with an answer, that belief either is blind faith or not really anything capable of being believed (as noted above, awareness, existence, and life are outside the arena of belief, being pre-requisites for playing the game).

Brain damage = enlightenment?

Jill Bolte Taylor had what she calls a "stroke of insight." In her case it was an actual stroke – which produced a blood clot the size of a golf ball that pushed on her language centers in the left side of her brain.

Watch the nineteen minute video of her talk about the experience. Or read the transcript. It's fascinating and moving.

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

Taylor's central theme is that the analytical left side of the brain cuts us off from the marvelous oneness revealed by the intuitive right side of the brain. As she lost her left brain functions, she felt pretty darn good.

However, it took her forty-five minutes to figure out how to call for help. And she went through eight years of post-stroke therapy to recover her left-sided capabilities. If her brain damage was as enlightening as her talk suggests, why wouldn't mystics destroy part of the brain instead of meditating for umpteen years?

The many comments on Taylor's video and transcript are as interesting as the talk itself. Viewers and readers have widely divergent opinions about her experience.

Here's a cynic:

This is a joke, right?

People paid $6,000 to hear this bozo ramble on about a super cliche psychedelic experience?

You can read thousands of very similar (but often much more profound and interesting) accounts at websites like erowid.com (not to mention thousand of books about drugs and altered states of consciousness, and millions of books and movies that have been influenced by them).

… Jeez. Smoke a joint. Drop a hit of acid. Eat some mushrooms, or try any of hundreds of other ways of altering your consciousness... it's a hell of a lot less painful and dangerous than having a stroke.

And here's an admirer:

This is incredible. amazing. beautiful. I happen to be reading the new Eckhart Tolle book right now - A New Earth - Awakening to your Life's Purpose. These two people have walked very different paths but somehow ended up at the same place, and saying more or less the same thing. It inspiring and gives me so much hope for humanity and this place. It is really even difficult to give words to how deeply this talk struck me. I just kept wanting to thank her for sharing herself and her healing with us.

I'm somewhere in between. Which, to me, is the point. We need both sides of the brain. To deny one half or the other is to deny half of human experience.

Taylor says that when she finally reached a colleague by phone, she couldn't understand what he was saying. Nor could she communicate her own thoughts.

Eventually the whole number gets dialed, and I'm listening to the phone, and my colleague picks up the phone and he says to me, "Whoo woo wooo woo woo." [laughter] And I think to myself, "Oh my gosh, he sounds like a golden retriever!" And so I say to him, clear in my mind I say to him. "This is Jill! I need help!" And what comes out of my voice is, "Whoo woo wooo woo woo." I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, I sound like a golden retriever." So I couldn't know, I didn't know that I couldn't speak or understand language until I tried.

Yet now she's able to share her experience with audiences, because she has the left side of her brain back. And what is her main piece of advice?

I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.

Yes, it is. There are lots of ways to get more in touch with our right brain – meditation, dancing, athletics, drugs, sex, to name a few. Getting into "the zone" is a good thing. But for sure, it's not the only thing.

Yesterday I felt great in my Tai Chi class. At the end of it we did the long form, 108 moves that should take around 20 minutes to perform (or "play," in Tai Chi parlance).

About a third a way into the form I thought, "I'm flowing today." About halfway through I thought, "There's no way I'm going to stumble or make a wrong move."

As soon as I said that to myself, my analytical side responded with, "Oh no, you shouldn't be thinking that way. You're going to jinx yourself. You're going to talk yourself out of the zone you're in."

But I didn't.

I kept on feeling in the flow. Part of me was in the zone, and part of me could say "You're in the zone." The two parts weren't interfering with each other, as they sometimes do. I didn't have to shut off half of my brain to play the long form proficiently.

And that also is Taylor's message.

So who are we? We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world.

Right here right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are -- I am -- the life force power of the universe, and the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. At one with all that is.

Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere. where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the "we" inside of me.

Quantum and non-dual consciousness

Ah, intellectual and inspirational bliss.

A free, downloadable, thoughtful, well-written "Course in Consciousness" that moves smoothly from down to earth quantum theory to soaring spirituality.

This is my cup of reading tea. I've only been able to quickly browse through the 242 pages of Stanley Sobottka's writing, but I can tell that there's a lot to like here.

Sobottka is an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Virginia, so obviously he knows his scientific stuff.

His deep knowledge of, and appreciation for, Buddhist/Advaita teachings is more surprising – though he isn't the only physicist to wade into some deep philosophical waters (Amit Goswami and Shimon Malin are some others).

Check out Sobottka's short "Dialogue in Consciousness" for an overview of his approach. I resonate with almost everything he says, though I can't help repeating my mantra, "What do I know?"

I learned about the Course in Consciousness from a post on the Church of the Churchless forum. It quoted a paragraph on page 184:

Particularly destructive among the self-deluded spiritual teachers are those who teach that only they and their personal power can bring freedom, or that they are the ones best suited for the task. They would merely strengthen the chains of our bondage. No genuine teacher will imply that we need anything or anyone, since we are already free and complete. A teacher's function is to convey this to the student, and to help him or her to see that. A teacher is at best an invaluable resource to the student, and at worst, a "false prophet", the deluded purporting to teach the deluded, the blind trying to lead the blind.

Amen to that.

This passage from page 101 also appealed to me:

In summary, the following is what physics (plus some simple logic) tells us: There are no objects. There is only a series of observations. There is no observer. There is only nonlocal universal consciousness. As we shall see later, these statements are the essence of both Advaita and Buddhism. (In Advaita, nonlocal universal consciousness is called pure Awareness. In Mahayana Buddhism, it is called primordial consciousness, or buddha-nature.) It is remarkable that physics, which is the science of external, objective reality, can tell us so much about subjective reality, and also can be in such agreement with our most profound nondualistic teachings.

I'm a big fan of science. I also am attracted to the nondual teachings that constitute much of Sobottka's course.

It seems crazy that to know reality, we'd have to ignore half of it: objectivity or subjectivity. Consciousness seemingly links the outer and the inner, science and spirit, physics and mysticism – because if we're not conscious of something, it doesn't exist for us.

Here's Sobottka's Chapter 26: "Very short summary"

The following concepts, like all concepts, cannot describe Reality, but, unlike most concepts, they point to Reality.

1. The premise: Consciousness is all there is. Another word for Consciousness is the impersonal, yet intimate, I.

2. The conclusions:

I am not an object or entity.
Objects and entities are never real.
Whatever is supposed to happen will happen. Whatever is not supposed to happen will not happen. There is no doer, so there is no choice.
The entire manifestation is an expression of Love.

3. The practice: Don't believe this—look and see it for yourself!

This interview with Sobottka also encapsulates his outlook.

[Technical note: Sobottka's web site has links to some interesting PowerPoint presentations. If you don't have PowerPoint, you can view them with a free PowerPoint viewer.]

Science unites, religion divides

I've enjoyed the big bang discussion that took off in the comments on my previous post.

In the course of defending science and the scientific method against a man, Rhawn Joseph, who believes the big bang, evolution, relativity, and the laws of thermodynamics are all myths, I've had an opportunity to reflect on why science appeals so much to me.

Pretty simple: it produces common ground on which we all can stand – reality. Religion divides people, because there's no agreement about the nature of what, if anything, lies beyond the physical universe.

So dogmatic arguments over God, soul, life after death, and such continue interminably. There's no way of resolving them.

Science, however, proceeds steadily (though with many changes in direction) toward a unified understanding of what reality is all about. There's no Western science or Eastern science, no American science or Chinese science. There's just shared scientific knowledge.

And that's beautiful.

Which leads to an important point that's so obvious, it shouldn't need saying. But we often forget it, and this leads to unnecessary confusion, arguments, and emotionality.

"I" is different from "It." Subjective reality is different from objective reality. Yet they're both equally real.

Here's how Ken Wilber describes the reality situation. "I" is the realm of the interior individual – me as I know myself. "It" and "Its" (plural) is the exterior side of reality – an objective realm that we all can know communally.

Traditionally, philosophical types talked about the Beautiful, the Good, and the True. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It's also in the realm of "I," subjective.

So when someone commented that they enjoyed Joseph's You Tube video, "God & the Myth of the Big Bang," I thought That's fine. Personally, I found it so obnoxious I could only watch five minutes of it. But hey, vive le difference.

If we all liked the same movies, there'd be no point to the Academy Awards. Each of us has different subjective likes and dislikes. That's as it should be, since our interiors are different.

But what about exterior reality, the domain that science investigates? Now we're into a much more objective state of affairs, which is why scientists can come to a consensus about the laws of nature.

Here, truth rules, not beauty. So I asked people who had seen Joseph's Big Bang video to tell me what evidence he had that big bang cosmology, which is accepted by almost all scientists, is wrong and Joseph is right.

I didn't get an answer. I really didn't expect one.

I've read quite a few books about the big bang, quantum theory, relativity theory, and other aspects of what's often called the "new physics." I subscribe to Scientific American and New Scientist. I read all three weekly newsmagazines (TIME, Newsweek, US News & World Report, and two daily newspapers.

If some guy had overturned a big chunk of science through a You Tube video, I figured I'd have heard about it. However, he hasn't. He's presented some imaginative ideas in an artsy fashion, expressing his "I." This doesn't change the reality of "It" though.

The scientific method is an intriguing blend of friendly openness and harsh skepticism. Scientists are open to new ideas, but if you throw out a fresh hypothesis – particularly if it purports to be an improvement over settled science – you'd better bring your best game.

In "The Demon-Haunted World," Carl Sagan wrote:

Again, the reason science works so well is partly that built-in error-correcting machinery. There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or sacred to be probed, no sacred truths. That openness to new ideas, combined with the most rigorous, skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, sifts the wheat from the chaff.

It makes no difference how smart, august, or beloved you are. You must prove your case in the face of determined, expert criticism. Diversity and debate are valued. Opinions are encouraged to contend – substantively and in depth.

The process of science may sound messy and disorderly. In a way, it is. If you examine science in its everyday aspect, of course you find that scientists run the gamut of human emotion, personality, and character. But there's one facet that is really striking to the outsider, and that is the gauntlet of criticism considered acceptable or even desirable.

That's as it should be. Objective reality belongs to all of us. Human knowledge about the universe is our most precious asset, one which must be passed on to future generations intact – not diluted with subjective drivel, religious or otherwise.

So I hope this helps explain why I defend science so strongly. When I see it trashed, I feel the same way as when I see litter along the rural Oregon road that leads to our house. Hey, that's public property! You've got no right to leave your crap there!

If someone wants to mess up their own home, that's their business. Just as what transpires in your "I" is up to you. But when someone ventures into the realm of "it," staking a claim to the nature of objective reality – that's everybody's business.

Our common ground, truth, is too precious to be left undefended. As Sagan said, openness and skepticism are our bulwarks against pseudo-science.

(Here's another post of mine on this subject).

Starbucks coffee and the big bang

I don't know why drinking a latte at Starbucks makes me feel so cosmically strange. But here's what been happening recently.

I sit down at a table, look at my cup, all festooned with the Starbucks logo and a quotation from somebody or other, and it just feels unbelievably weird. So freaking unlikely.

That me, Brian, is existing right here and now, in an Oregon Starbucks, about to sip a warm caffeinated drink out of a cardboard container.

What are the chances of this happening, given our 13.7 billion year old universe that sprang into existence from a speck of pure energy much smaller than a sub-atomic particle, and now has expanded to an incomprehensible size – some 46 billion light years from us, because the universe has been expanding faster than light.

Holding my latte, dumbstruck by the seeming discordance between how mundane this Starbucks moment is and how majestic the cosmos is, I visualize myself whizzing around the Earth at the equator more than seven times in a second – like Superman did in the old TV show (showing my age) but at the speed of light.

Then going that fast for 46 billion years. Mind-blow!

That's how large the observable universe is, courtesy of the big bang. It's filled with wonders that I can't begin to conceive of. And I'm clutching a Starbucks latte. What are the chances?

Well, 100% obviously. Because this all seems perfectly real. Starbucks, me, the table, other customers, the whole earthly shebang.

Yet from another perspective it's all exceedingly unlikely, as physicist Paul Davies talks about in "Cosmic Jackpot: Why the Universe is Just Right for Life," the book I blogged about in my previous post.

The laws of nature, and their associated constants, have to be almost exactly just the way they are or life (including me and my Starbucks latte) couldn't exist as we know it.

This leads religious types to posit a creator who made a universe perfectly suited for us. And scientific types to ponder why, of all the countless sorts of universes a big bang could have fashioned, ours is so peachy-keen for us human beings.

Maybe I've got a philosophical blind spot, notwithstanding my attraction to most other Big Questions About Existence, but I find it difficult to see what the problem is here that theologians, physicists, and other deep thinkers are trying to solve.

Because my feeling of Starbucks' strangeness obviously is part of my subjective psyche, not objective reality. I mean, it's all in my mind – the product of learning a lot about cosmology and our place in the universe.

Speculations abound about why things are as they are.

Davies runs through the main candidates in his book (listed in my post). For example, there could be countless universes of every variety, and we happen to have evolved in one of the few that are suitable for life. Or this all could be a computer simulation run by an advanced civilization, ala the Matrix movie.

Though I've always been spiritually inclined, I seem to be coming around to the first option described by Davies: The Absurd Universe. He clearly doesn't like it, as his description strikes me as slanted.

This is probably the majority position among scientists. According to this point of view, the universe is as it is, mysteriously, and it just happens to permit life. It could have been otherwise, but what we see is what we get. Had it been different, we would not be here to argue about it.

The universe may or may not have a deep underlying unity, but there is no design, purpose, or point to it all – at least none that would make sense to us. There is no God, no designer, no teleological principle, no destiny. Life in general, and human beings in particular are an irrelevant embellishment in a vast and meaningless cosmos, the existence of which is an unfathomable mystery.

Davies goes on to explain seven other possibilities (including "none of the above"), his favorites being "The Life Principle" and "The Self-Explaining Universe."

However, he readily admits there's no solid evidence that favors one hypothesis over another. So the universe remains an unfathomable mystery, just as The Absurd Universe proponents recognize.

"Absurd" doesn't seem to be the right word, though. Davies chose it because he believes, or wants to believe, that the universe is endowed with a life principle of some sort – a quasi-religious conception. Leaving mystery as mystery clearly bothers him.

I used to feel that way also. Now I'm more at ease with the astounding strangeness of drinking a latte on an insignificant planet in a universe that extends 46 billion light years from the Starbucks I'm sitting in.

Absurd. Strange. Mysterious.

Human conceptions. Somehow I doubt that the universe uses these words to describe itself. It just is what it is. Contentedly, if that word – like all words – means anything when applied to the cosmos.

Yes, for us the universe is a mystery. We strive to explain it. And though bits and pieces have come to be understood, the whole remains a mystery.

What's wrong with that? I drink a latte in Starbucks and marvel. Einstein did the same. He said:

The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.

It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.

I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves.

Hey, Einstein and me have something in common. I can't conceive of such a God either. Questions – that's all we need to be "religious" in the Einsteinian sense. Answers not required.

Mysteries should remain mysterious. Until they're not.

Physics ventures into the territory of mystics

I find scientific explanations of the universe much more satisfying than religious ones.

Science grounds hypotheses in reality that can be observed, tested, and experimented upon. Religion constructs airy-fairy castles in the sky that are divorced from everyday experience.

But there's a point, way out there, where observing, testing, and experimenting aren't possible – not even in theory. For example, much of the universe is forever beyond human knowledge because it is receding from us faster than the speed of light, so no signal will ever reach us from this domain.

However, we can envision a possibility, remote as it is, that someday, somehow, faster than light travel or communication will be available to humans. Then much more of the universe will be within the bounds of what can be known.

When it comes to ultimate explanations, though, I'm decidedly skeptical that science ever will be able to come up with answers to the questions that mysticism, spirituality, and religion explore with such zeal.

Why does existence exist? Where do the laws of nature come from? Are there other universes besides our own? Does reality consist of more than the four dimensions we're familiar with?

Last November I criticized physicist Paul Davies' new book, "Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe is Just Right for Life," for claiming that science could supply answers to essentially religious questions.

Davies strikes me as a scientist who brings religion into his work through ungrounded philosophical speculation.

His ideas sometimes sound like what you'd expect from a bunch of stoners sitting around smoking dope and musing on What It's All About. "Man, there could be a whole universe in one molecule of that smoke, and we could just be a puff of hot air in the Big Dude's hookah pipe!"

I admitted that I hadn't read his book, having based my critique on reviews by other people and an essay Davies wrote. I've now finished "Cosmic Jackpot" and haven't changed my mind.

Still, it's a fascinating read. Davies clearly lays out possible explanations for why the universe is as it is, and why living beings (us) have evolved an ability to comprehend, albeit most imperfectly, the cosmos. In a final chapter he lists them as:

A. The Absurd Universe
B. The Unique Universe
C. The Multiverse
D. Intelligent Design
E. The Life Principle
F. The Self-Explaining Universe
G. The Fake Universe
H. None of the Above

Davies says that his inclinations lie in the directions of E and F. Yet he admits that this predilection isn't based on much more than a hunch.

Many scientists will criticize my E/F inclination as being crypto-religious. The fact that I take the human mind and our extraordinary ability to understand the world through science and mathematics as a fact of fundamental significance betrays, they will claim, a nostalgia for a theistic worldview in which humankind occupies a special place. And this even though I do not believe Homo sapiens to be more than an accidental by-product of haphazard natural processes.

But I do believe that life and mind are etched deeply into the fabric of the cosmos, perhaps through a shadowy, half-glimpsed life principle, and if I am to be honest I have to concede that this starting point is something I feel more in my heart than in my head. So maybe that is a religious conviction of sorts.

Yes, maybe. Indeed, probably. Old habits die hard. In Davies. In myself. In everybody.

We're necessarily locked into ways of looking at the world that reflect our animalistic capacities. Our eyes capture a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, so we speak of "divine light." Our legs allow us to move from place to place, so we speak of a "spiritual path."

Yet how do we know that the way we relate to the world bears any resemblance to how things really are? Or whether the words "how things really are" possess any meaning beyond what a human being gives to them?

How. Things. Really. Are.

Upon even a slight bit of reflection, every thought in my head, or yours, turns out to be a product of mentality that has evolved upon a single insignificant planet circling one of several hundred billion stars in a galaxy that is but one of a hundred billion or so others.

Yet we think we know what it is all about. Or at least, that we can speculate about where the answers may lie.

Writing about Davies, the Rationally Speaking blog reminds us of Wittgenstein's adage, ""Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

In the chapter preceding Davies' E/F preference, he ends with what strikes me as a more honest and defensible posture than his admitted "hunch."

Both religion and science draw their methodology from ancient modes of thought honed by many millennia of evolutionary and cultural pressures. Our minds are the product of genes and memes.

Now we are free of Darwinian evolution and able to create our own real and virtual worlds, and our information-processing technology can take us to intellectual arenas that no human mind has ever before visited, those age-old questions of existence may evaporate away, exposed as nothing more than the befuddled musings of biological beings trapped in a mental straitjacket inherited from evolutionary happenstance.

The whole paraphernalia of gods and laws, of space, time, and matter, of purpose and design, rationality and absurdity, meaning and mystery, may yet be swept away and replaced by revelations as yet undreamt of.

Yes.

Skepticism isn’t “blind faith”

Religious believers like to say that agnosticism or atheism also is founded on faith – faith that there's no evidence for God. So skeptics are as filled with faith as the faithful.

That's ridiculous. It's the sort of word play that led Donald Rumsfeld, the incompetent Secretary of Defense, to say "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence" in reference to Iraq's unfound weapons of mass destruction.

Well, I see no evidence of a unicorn in our living room right now. There's just my wife and our dog, neither of whom looks like a horse with a horn coming out of its head.

But gosh, I guess you could say that this lack of evidence doesn't conclusively prove that there's no unicorn in my house. The creature could be so small, it's hiding under the couch. Or it could be invisible.

The thing is, there's an obvious difference between: (1) surmising that something exists, and (2) surmising that something doesn't exist.

It's the difference between one and zero, presence and absence.

This is why I reacted with a What the heck? when I read a Newsweek article, "Moderates Storm the Religious Battlefield," that included this quote from Rev. Timothy Keller.

I urge skeptics to wrestle with the unexamined "blind faith" on which skepticism is based, and to see how hard it is to justify those beliefs to those who do not share them.

Rev. Keller, skepticism is not a belief. It's a reasonable response to absence of evidence.

I don't have blind faith that there's no unicorn in my living room. It's an open-eyed conclusion that anyone is welcome to refute, if they can show me where the unicorn is hiding.

Similarly, religious skeptics like me are very much open to evidence of God's existence. Problem is, there isn't any.

In a recent issue of New Scientist, A.C. Grayling addressed a related subject in "No, science does not 'rest on faith.'" He was responding to the notion that science's assumption of an orderly and intelligible universe is an act of faith.

It isn't, because the universe obviously is orderly and intelligible, or there wouldn't be notions, magazines, debates over faith, or anything else. It'd all just be misty chaos.

I agree with Grayling:

Making well-motivated evidence-based assumptions that are in turn supported by their efficacy in testing predictions is the very opposite of faith. Faith is commitment to belief in something either in the absence of evidence or in the face of countervailing evidence.

It is seen as a theological virtue, as the story of Doubting Thomas is designed to illustrate. In everyday speech we use the phrase "he took it on faith" to mean "without question, without examining the grounds"; this captures its essence.

So faith isn't a virtue. It's a vice. When we have eyes to see, it's wrong for someone to go about blindly. You cause lots of other problems for other people, and sow unnecessary confusion.

There's a unicorn! And God!

Where? Show me. I'm a skeptic with eyes.

Paul Davies’ “Cosmic Jackpot” comes up empty

Where do the laws of nature come from? Great question. Here's an equally good one: Where do the laws of nature reside?

I've always wondered about this.

Science has found that the universe is remarkably well-ordered. Mathematics describes its fundamental laws (such as gravity and electromagnetism) so perfectly, Paul Dirac said, "If there is a God, he's a great mathematician."

But how does every bit of matter know how to obey the law of gravity? Where's the software, the program, that controls the hardware of the universe? Or are these even meaningful questions?

I used to think that they were. I wondered why science books didn't contain a lot of philosophy.

Instead of just describing the laws of nature, I wanted scientists to ponder whether those laws existed in an ethereal Platonic realm of pure mathematics separate from material existence, or were part and parcel of the physical universe (to name but two possibilities).

Physicist Paul Davies takes the two "where" questions above seriously. That's admirable.

But the big question about those questions is: Can any human being, no matter how wise or intelligent, attempt to explain the source of the laws of nature in any meaningful fashion?

My answer, which is echoed by others more knowledgeable about these matters than me, is "No."

That's why I can title this post the way I did, even though I haven't read Davies' book, "Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe is Just Right for Life." (There needs to be a question mark in the subtitle, for sure.)

A Church of the Churchless commenter pointed me to an New York Times essay by Davies, "Taking Science on Faith." His thesis is summed up in the final two paragraphs :

It seems to me there is no hope of ever explaining why the physical universe is as it is so long as we are fixated on immutable laws or meta-laws that exist reasonlessly or are imposed by divine providence. The alternative is to regard the laws of physics and the universe they govern as part and parcel of a unitary system, and to be incorporated together within a common explanatory scheme.

In other words, the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.

The last sentence strikes me as ridiculous. I have no idea what Davies is talking about.

In the essay he says science has decided on "faith" that the laws of nature exist outside of the universe. That's news to me, as I'm pretty sure it would be to virtually every scientist.

Chad Orzel, another physicist, doesn't find the questions Davies grapples with to be very compelling. Like most scientists, he's interested in the practicalities of how the laws of nature operate, not why they exist.

In his review of Davies' book, Orzel says that it's hard to write about a topic you can't take seriously.

If you ask me what the constants of nature are, that's a well-formed question. I can do a measurement, and find a value. If you ask me why the constants of nature have the values they do, that's not a well-formed question.

There's no measurement I can do to answer that, and as a result, I just don't find it that compelling. If it scratches your teleological itch, great, but as far as I'm concerned, it's vaguely interesting to debate in a casual bull-session manner, but not really worth the effort of writing a three hundred page book.

I have a lot of respect for Paul Davies. I've read quite a few of his books. I included copious quotes from them in my book about mysticism and the new physics, "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder."

Still, Davies strikes me as a scientist who brings religion into his work through ungrounded philosophical speculation.

His ideas sometimes sound like what you'd expect from a bunch of stoners sitting around smoking dope and musing on What It's All About. "Man, there could be a whole universe in one molecule of that smoke, and we could just be a puff of hot air in the Big Dude's hookah pipe!"

For example, Alejandro's thoughtful review of "Cosmic Jackpot" notes that Davies criticizes the anthropic principle, which generally posits a multitude of universes in addition to ours, because he feels it is much more likely that we'd be living in a computer simulation of a universe than in a real one.

Well, I liked The Matrix as a movie. But I wouldn't base a scientific understanding of reality on it.

So I feel justified in calling "Cosmic Jackpot" an empty payoff, even without having read the book. Davies is asking religious questions. For thousands of years people have speculated about how the universe came to exist, and how it is sustained.

Religion hasn't come up with any believable answers.

And while I've got a lot more confidence in science than in religion, I'm seriously skeptical that a scientific explanation of where the laws of nature come from is going to be found either.

I could be wrong, of course. It simply seems that Davies is asking unanswerable questions. To definitively know the source of the laws of nature that formed our universe, seemingly you'd have to get outside of it – the universe.

If you were part of a computer simulation, how could you know about the programmer? If you're wandering in a maze, how would you be able to figure out who constructed it?

Davies believes that it's possible to comprehend the whys and wherefores of the laws of nature, even though we're all part and parcel of those laws.

I can't see my own eyes without the aid of a mirror. Where's the mirror that lets us observe the universe from an outside perspective?

Religions claim that such a "mirror" exists – in revelation, prophets, mystic experience. I doubt it. I also doubt that science ever will be able to get an objective view of the laws of nature, as Davies thinks is possible.

The universe is. So are we. That might be the best answer to the fundamental questions of existence we'll ever be able to come up with.

Arousal and quiescence in the mystical brain

Browsing through my collection of half-read books, recently I came across The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience.

Starting in where I left off quite a few years ago (the book was published in 1999), I can tell that I'm going to be reading this baby straight through this time.

Because the question marks I left in the margins next to statements that questioned whether any mystical experience occurs outside of the physical brain now would have my personal version of exclamation marks next to them (a round dot made with my highlighter).

Back in my religiously devoted days I was resistant to any suggestion that the body is all that we are. After all, my goal was to rise to spiritual regions with my soul – if not now, then after death.

Older and hopefully wiser now about unsupported metaphysical claims, I'm a lot more open to scientific conceptions of spirituality. Which is why The Mystical Mind is more interesting to me the second time around.

This morning I read the first part of Chapter Two about the brain and central nervous system. Fascinating. As a long time daily meditator, for more than thirty-five years, I'd always wondered about the difference between active and passive approaches to meditation.

Some people sit quietly and try to reduce brain activity. Others engage in walking meditation, or dancing – if you're a Sufi.

The authors of this book are both medical doctors, so they're well qualified to explain goings on in the brain, which they consider to be the source of the mind.

The brain is the substantive underlying part of human thought, experience, and emotions. In other words, it is the bodily organ that allows us to think, feel, and receive input from the external world. The mind is generally considered to be the thoughts and feelings themselves. Thus, the mind is the product of the functioning of the brain.

OK, I already knew that. But what Eugene d'Aquili and Andrew Newberg then reminded me of was stuff that I hadn't thought about much since high school science classes: how the autonomic nervous system, which helps connect the brain to the rest of the body, is composed of two subsystems – the sympathetic system and the parasympathetic system.

The sympathetic system causes a sense of arousal (yes, the kind you're thinking of, along with opening airways in the lungs, increasing heart rate, dilation of the pupils, and such). The parasympathetic system, on the other hand, maintains homeostasis and conserves the body's resources and energy.

In short, we've got arousal and quiescent systems in our body and brain. And the point of this book, which I know because I jumped ahead and read the final chapters years ago, is that mystical experiences are the product of different sorts of arousal/quiescent states.

Reductionist? Sure. But like the authors say, point out any human experience that occurs in the absence of a body and brain. If that were to occur, the person would be dead, incapable of pointing.

What's interesting is that if you push either the arousal or quiescent systems far enough, they can cause an "eruption" in the other system.

Such a function may occur when one of these systems is driven to maximal activity despite the protective antagonistic mechanism. When this occurs, one can induce a "reversal" or "spillover" phenomenon.

This spillover effect occurs when continued stimulation of one system to maximal capacity begins to produce activation responses (rather than inhibitory) in the opposite system. This state is relatively rare and requires intense driving of one of the systems, beyond its normal capacity and beyond the inhibitory effects of the other system.

They give examples.

The hyperquiescent state "may be experienced as a state of oceanic tranquility and bliss in which no thoughts or feelings intrude on consciousness and no bodily sensations are felt."

The hyperarousal state is associated "with keen alertness and concentration in the absence of superfluous thoughts and feelings. The person may feel as if they were channeling vast quantities of energy effortlessly through their consciousness." (as when athletes feel they're in the zone or going with the flow)

The hyperquiescent state with eruption of the arousal system "is usually accompanied by the sense of a tremendous release of energy. Thus the meditator may experience an 'active' bliss or energy rush."

The hyperarousal state with eruption of the quiescent system may involve experience of "an orgasmic, rapturous, or ecstatic rush arising from a generalized sense of flow and resulting in trancelike states."

They add about the latter:

This experience may occur as a result of practices such as Sufi dancing and marathon running and even occurs briefly during sexual climax.

Ah, finally. A form of meditation that I'm good at.

What reality is really made of

Oh, man, did my philosophical heart flutter when I looked at the cover of the most recent New Scientist magazine and read:

WHAT THE UNIVERSE IS REALLY MADE OF: strip away human notions of reality and one thing remains

I feverishly turned to page 38. Finally, I'd know What It is All About. I had a suspicion. Which was confirmed when I saw the heading, "Reality by numbers."

Yes, it isn't wildly surprising that a science magazine would contain an article by a physicist, Max Tegmark, who believes that the essence of the universe is mathematical.

Surprising or not, the notion makes a lot of sense. For if you want to get beyond an anthropomorphic conception of reality, what's better to take you there than a pure abstract number? Tegmark talks about the search for a theory of everything, a complete description of reality:

My personal quest for this theory begins with an extreme argument about what it is allowed to look like. If we assume that reality exists independently of humans, then for a description to be complete, it must also be well-defined according to non-human entities – aliens or supercomputers, say – that lack any understanding of human concepts.

Put differently, such a description must be expressible in a form that is devoid of human baggage like "particle," "observation" or other English words.

In contrast, all physical theories that I have been taught have two components: mathematical equations, and words that explain how the equations are connected to what we observe and intuitively understand. When we derive the consequences of a theory we introduce concepts – protons, stars, molecules – because they are convenient.

However, it is we humans who create these concepts. In principle, everything could be calculated without this baggage: a sufficiently powerful supercomputer could calculate how the state of the universe evolves over time without interpreting it in human terms.

All of this raises the question: is it possible to find a description of external reality that involves no baggage? If so, such a description of objects in this reality and the relations between them would have to be completely abstract, forcing any words or symbols to be mere labels with no preconceived meanings whatsoever. Instead, the only properties of these entities would be those embodied by the relations between them.

Well, if you're only somewhat confused by this overview of Tegmark's outlook on reality, read his core paper "The Mathematical Universe" to dive into much deeper thought-waters.

I swam back to the surface of my usual mundane ideas after just a few pages. But while there I saw that Tegmark helpfully boils down his perspective to a couple of hypotheses: (1) There exists an external physical reality completely independent of us humans, and (2) Our external physical reality is a mathematical structure.

He admits that more than a few physicists (and lots of metaphysicians) disagree that reality exists without observation. Yet if the ERH (External Reality Hypothesis) is correct, it does make sense that the universe wouldn't be founded on human concepts.

After all, the cosmos preceded us by over thirteen billion years. Why would the root of existence be capable of being captured in a word like "God," "quantum," "vacuum energy," or "Buddha nature"?

So I like Tegmark's emphasis on shedding language-baggage. That's what most deep mystical philosophies do. He takes the same concept-less route in pursuing a scientific, rather than spiritual, approach to grasping the nature of reality.

Without words, what would religions rest on? Take them away and you're left with an appealing voidness, empty of dogmatism fueled by a belief that this description of the ultimate is how things really are.

Admittedly, there's more than a little feeling of vertigo – ooh, I'm spinning with no thought place to stand on! – if you embrace Tegmark's hypothesis. It takes some getting used to.

Ultimately, why should we believe the mathematical universe hypothesis? Perhaps the most compelling objection is that it feels counter-intuitive and disturbing. I personally dismiss this as a failure to appreciate Darwinian evolution.

Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic trajectories of flying rocks. Darwin's theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we look beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down.

I keep coming back to "don't know" as the wisest idea we could ever have about ultimate reality.

Boltzmann brains can blow your mind

Who needs far-out religious myths – walked on water! resurrected from the dead!— when science is able to come up with equally mind-blowing hypotheses that have the advantage of being plausible?

Take the case of Boltzmann brains. These aren't actual brains, but most likely are free-floating conscious entities that pop out of random quantum fluctuations in the vacuum that pervades the universe.

None have been observed. In fact, a New Scientist article on the subject (August 18 issue) says:

A Boltzmann brain is so improbable, in fact, that there is essentially no chance that even a single one has appeared in the 13.7-billion year history of our universe. But factor in the accelerating expansion of the universe, and the picture changes: it points to an infinitely large space that will last an infinitely long time, with ongoing fluctuations in the vacuum.

This will be a cold, dark and inhospitable place for conventional creatures, but a perfect breeding ground for Boltzmann brains, which would see only empty space around them.

Pretty creepy. From our point of view. However, if you're a Boltzmann brain you've just arisen spontaneously out of nothing. No history. No evolution. No words like "creepy" in your consciousness.

So it's impossible to say how a Boltzmann brain would see things. Which is why the New Scientist article has this sub-heading: Cosmologists are afraid – very afraid.

This is what I find most interesting about Boltzmann brains: how they point to the subjectivity of Homo sapien'ish conceptions of the cosmos. This is what scares some scientists, because our understanding of the laws of nature is necessarily founded on how we go about understanding things.

Cosmology, indeed most of science, assumes that we humans are typical observers in the grand scheme of things…So here's the problem: some well-established cosmological models predict that, trillions of years in the future, Boltzmann brains could vastly outnumber "ordinary observers" like us, who depend on aeons of evolution and life support.

If that is true, then over the lifetime of the universe, they – not we – might be the typical ones. That's scary, because models suggest that their view of the cosmos would be strikingly different from ours.

Well, yeah.

Um, let's see. Would (1) a disembodied consciousness that just sprang into existence from a quantum vacuum fluctuation look upon the universe differently than (2) a human being acculturated by other people, all of whom perceive the world through physical organs? Sure seems so.

Now some people who are skeptical about science likely are going to jump on the Boltzmann brain bandwagon and say, "Told you so! Science is just one way of looking at reality. The so-called 'laws of nature' are just artifacts of human cognition, not how things really are.'"

OK, there's some truth to that.

But to my mind the possibility of Boltzmann brains undercuts a lot more than the scientific method. It demolishes the objectivity of everything – including every defined form of spirituality, religion, and mysticism, which usually are promoted by science skeptics as being more valid ways of knowing.

What I love about Boltzmann brains is how they stretch (or blow to smithereens) our usual assumption that human consciousness is the template for every sort of consciousness. Rather, says the New Scientist article:

What exactly might these things be? In theory, they could take on almost any form, but the larger and more complex they are, the less likely it is that they will appear, according to the laws of probability and quantum mechanics.

They could be disembodied brains with eyeballs, floating in outer space. They could consist of a whole body, encased in a space suit and equipped with an oxygen tank. They could be human brains, animal brains, or an intelligent alien species made of gas.

What matters is that they qualify as conscious – by whatever definition researchers agree on.

Well, if I was a Boltzmann brain I might take issue with that last sentence. Hey, humans! I'll decide whether I'm conscious! Not you. Things look differently out here in the infinite vacuum.

I've enjoyed pondering a cosmos with no consciousness. As well as a cosmos that is only consciousness. Boltzmann brains stimulate the notion of another alternative: a cosmos with a freakingly inconceivably different form of consciousness from ours.

Some attributed quotes:

Physicist Arthur Eddington. "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."

Biologist J.B.S. Haldane: "Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

Sounds like a blown mind is a lot closer to truth than a certain mind.

Science keeps painting religion into a corner

Believers in the supernatural, do you feel a bit more cramped today? Like there's less room for your beliefs to roam unquestioned?

You should, if you've been following the out-of-body news. Scientists have been able to induce out-of-body experiences in healthy people. They didn't need to nearly die on an operating table and look down at their bodies from an external vantage point.

All it took was some virtual reality goggles, a camera, and a stick.

Now, this is just a first step toward understanding out-of-body experiences. It doesn't rule out the possibility that human consciousness is able to exist separate from a body.

And heck, in-body experiences aren't completely understood either – how the brain manages to create a sense of self separate from the world.

Nonetheless, this is one more in a long line of scientific advances that have the cumulative effect of painting religious, spiritual, mystical, and metaphysical belief systems into an ever smaller corner.

Big Bang cosmology explains the universe's creation (though not completely). Evolutionary theory explains how complex life forms arose on Earth (though not completely). Quantum physics explains how all the somethings in existence can be founded on essentially nothing (though not completely).

I had to add the (though not completely) qualifiers to head off anti-science types who would be quick to tell me, "But Brian, there are a lot of gaps in scientific knowledge."

Yes, admitted. By both me and scientists.

However, there's a big difference between the empty spots scattered around the large expanse of Knowledge that's been painted by science, and the utterly blank unfinished corner that Religion has been crowded into.

By which I mean, in case this metaphor is getting too metaphorical, that science has pretty darn good explanations for almost everything that religious belief systems take on faith to be supernatural or metaphysical.

So what's a believer to do? One option is to shut your eyes, put your hands over your ears, and mutter "You don't exist, you don't exist" to scientific knowledge. This is the fundamentalist approach, both Western and Eastern.

After a book I wrote about karma and vegetarianism, "Life is Fair," was published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) I got an email from an anxious RSSB initiate. He didn't like all the mentions of evolution in the book. He said that if evolutionary theory were true, it would destroy his faith in the RSSB teachings.

I found this very strange. Isn't the spiritual quest supposed to be in the direction of reality? How could learning more about what is real be destructive of spirituality?

To me, science is the best friend of someone sincerely seeking spirit. For if you believe that spirit (a.k.a. shabd, in the Indian vernacular) is the essence of the supreme being, it isn't going to be explainable by science – even though spirit/shabd is considered to be the ultimate source of nature's laws.

A similar argument can be applied to Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or any other sort of belief in an other-worldly God. If your God or Supreme Being is reducible to material explanations, then this divinity isn't very spiritual, is it?

Paint away, science. Confine my religious beliefs into the smallest possible corner.

This should be the prayer of every spiritual seeker. For every time a metaphysical belief is explained by science, you've got less room for fantasy, dogma, imagination, and blind faith to operate. You've getting shoved in the right direction: toward inexplicable Mystery.

I wish I could say something about that mysterious corner of existence that most strongly resists science's knowledge painting brush. But if I could, it wouldn't be what it is.

Emptiness. Wonder. Awe. Ignorance. Confusion. Paradox. Not-knowing.

Even here though, science is able to throw hints in our direction. No matter how small that unexplained corner of the cosmos seems to be, almost certainly it's way larger than we can even begin to imagine.

There's plenty of room to roam there, for those unafraid of bursting religious fetters.

Science takes the honest path

For me, science is energizing while religion sucks the life out of my soul. Or whatever the heck it is that makes my life lively.

As I said in a comment to my "Quantum Christian gobbledygook" post, deflating the ridiculous proposition that electromagnetism casts any light on the Trinity was deeply satisfying. I felt so good after writing that post.

Doing my best to look upon reality with eyes wide open unleashes something that could easily be called "mystical" if it wasn't so natural. Speaking truth to bullshit – that brings us closer to the angels.

More accurately: it would, if there were any.

Today I stumbled upon some YouTube videos of Sean Carroll giving a talk at the recent Daily Kos convention. Carroll is a physicist with an engaging sense of humor. He started off his "Hey, I Uploaded a Video" post with:

Just got back from a great trip to Beijing, very enjoyable if a bit tiring, where much musing was done on the Primordial Existential Question, about which more anon. But I also mused a bit about what this blog needs, and I came to the conclusion that must have been obvious to everyone else long ago: more videos of me.

Sean, you'll get no argument here, even though I've only visited the Cosmic Variance blog a few times. I enjoyed your pithy discussion of what the universe is made of.

Short answer: almost entirely not of what we are. You and I, said Carroll, are made of ordinary matter. But that constitutes just 5% of the universe's total stuff.

The rest is 25% dark matter, which hasn't been detected yet (if you want to know how scientists can come up with a precise percentage of how much there is of something undetectable, watch the videos), and 70% dark energy – which is inherent in the fabric of empty space.

That's way cool. And gloriously mysterious. It isn't the false mystery of religion, which posits hypothetical metaphysical entities and then breathlessly proclaims how inaccessible they are.

Well, yes. This is what you'd expect if something isn't real: it'd be unreachable and unknowable.

But science is pretty darn sure that dark matter and energy are real. We just don't know their nature. That's a true mystery.

Near the end of the second video Carroll talked about the movie, "What the Bleep Do We Know?" He said that the film is full of nonsense. It claims that we can change reality into what we want by thinking about it. The people who made it, he noted, must have earned themselves high-ranking jobs in the Bush administration.

David Albert, a physicist and philosopher of science professor at Columbia, was interviewed for four hours by the filmmakers. They took 10 seconds of what he said and completely mangled his meaning.

Carroll said that Albert now is doing his best to communicate how we really should go about trying to understand reality. Which, in Carroll's paraphrase of Albert's message, is:

Look, when you're trying to understand the world, there are two approaches you can have.

One kind of approach is that when you try to look at the world you come with a precondition, you come with a set of demands that the world tell a story that is flattering to you.

The other thing you could do is to come with an authentically open mind and open heart. Expend many different hypotheses and compare them to the evidence. And accept what the evidence tells you. Discard the hypotheses that don't fit the evidence and believe in the hypotheses that do. And that second method is called science.

And I would like to say that it's more than that, that the second method is called honesty. And it's probably a good method to use in all sorts of fields of human endeavor.

Amen to that.

Here's Albert himself on the subject of "What the Bleep Do We Know?" and how we should go about knowing more. Double Amens to this.

It seems to me that what's at issue (at the end of the day) between serious investigators of the foundations of quantum mechanics and the producers of the "what the bleep" movies is very much of a piece with what was at issue between Galileo and the Vatican, and very much of a piece with what was at issue between Darwin and the Victorians.

There is a deep and perennial and profoundly human impulse to approach the world with a DEMAND, to approach the world with a PRECONDITION, that what has got to turn out to lie at THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE, that what has got to turn out to lie at THE FOUNDATION OF ALL BEING, is some powerful and reassuring and accessible image of OURSELVES.

That's the impulse that the What the Bleep films seem to me to flatter and to endorse and (finally) to exploit - and that, more than any of their particular factual inaccuracies - is what bothers me about them. It is precisely the business of resisting that demand, it is precisely the business of approaching the world with open and authentic wonder, and with a sharp, cold eye, and singularly intent upon the truth, that's called science.

Not religion. For sure.

Christian quantum gobbledygook

I didn't get a free book. But I was able to write a blog post with gobbledygook in the title, which is a fine second prize. My investigation into how Christians are mangling quantum theory began with an email that arrived yesterday.

The header read:

'God the Final Frontier' - New Book Explains How Discoveries In Science Reveal the Nature of God Even A Child Can Understand.

That sounded promising. I can be childlike. And I want to know the nature of God. Tell me more.

The author's approach is unique because it reveals scientific discoveries such as how quantum physics provides positive proof for the doctrine of the Trinity (one of the most controversial doctrines in Christianity), and how Einstein's Theory of Relativity fit's the Genesis account of creation, in simple, easy to understand language.

Well, I didn't like the apostrophe in "fit's." But the email apparently came from a public relations firm, not the author, and everybody knows PR types can't write.

I wanted to know how quantum physics proves the Trinity. And praise be, the last words of the email were "Note: Review copies are available by replying to this e-mail . Please furnish your shipping address."

Ooh, ooh! I was excited. I replied as quickly as my trembling fingers could type. Then I got another email:

Brian, review copies are available for established publications and media personalities.

What?!!! This blog is an established publication. The Internet is a form of media. And I've got a personality. Where's my damn free review copy?!!!

My reply must have been forwarded to the author of "God the Final Frontier," because I heard from him. We exchanged a few emails and figured out that the firm which sent out the publicity emails had omitted the "established publications and media personalities" qualifier without his knowledge, which led to my premature free book! excitement.

Fair enough. But I was still curious about quantum physics proving the doctrine of the Trinity. I'd browsed around the book's web site and read some sample pages. One of them, thankfully, got right to my question (page 39).

Philip DelRe, the author, said that he'd typed "light" on the World Wide Web (Can you do that? Don't you have to use a search engine?). In less than a minute he found himself in a quantum physics laboratory in England (Cool. I've never been able to get into one of those Internet tubes and actually go somewhere like that).

He quoted verbatim from the website:

Light is made up of three types of particles, or wavelengths, each distinct from the other, no one of which without the others would be light. Each has its own separate function. The first originates, the second illuminates or manifests, the third consummates, or completes. The first is called invisible light; it is neither seen nor felt. The second is both seen and felt. The third is not seen but is felt as heat.

Hmmmm. Now I'm no physicist, but I've read a lot of science books and magazines. Somehow this quote just didn't seem like what you'd expect to find on a quantum physics web site. So I fired up Google and went exploring.

I tried various combinations of quotes from this passage. Nothing popped up at first. That struck me as strange, since usually Google is great at finding quotation sources. So I emailed the author and asked where he found the quote.

Mr. DelRe replied that he failed to note the address of the site and hasn't been able to find it again. He said, "It was a lab. In England. Google apparently moved it and I have tried cannot find it again."

OK. However, I was still curious about the quotation. So I pressed on. Eventually I hit on the right combination of Google search terms and was directed to a Google Book Search result for another book, "Love's Immensity Or the Progressive Revelation of God Through His Hebrew Names" by Bertha Carr-Harris.

This sure wasn't a quantum physics lab website. But Carr-Harris' book had almost the same language.

Light is constituted of three rays, or groups of wave-lengths, distinct from each other, no one of which without the other would be light. Each ray has its own separate function. The first originates, the second formulates, illuminates or manifests, and the third consummates. The first ray, often called invisible light, is neither seen nor felt. The second is both seen and felt. The third is not seen but is felt as heat.

Progress. Except no citation was given here either. I poked around Google a bit more and found some other Christian references to light as reflecting the nature of the Trinity. For supposedly the Father is neither seen nor felt; the Son is both seen and felt; and the Spirit is not seen but felt.

The Trinity is a mystery. Light, though, has had a lot of, well, light shone on it. What I learned with some additional Googling, combined with my own common sense, cast some dark shadows over these attempts to use quantum (or electromagnetic) theory to support Christian dogma.

For one thing, I couldn't find any reference to light being composed of three types of particles. My good friend Wikipedia confirmed that the elementary particle that defines light is the photon. There are three basic properties of all electromagnetic radiation – intensity, frequency, polarization – but not three distinct "rays" or "wave lengths."

It's true, though, that the electromagnetic spectrum is made up of ultraviolet, visible light, and infrared. Humans can see visible light, but not ultraviolet or infrared. Infrared light can be felt, so at least part of the DelRe and Carr-Harris quotes are vaguely accurate.

But only vaguely.

I have no idea, scientifically speaking, how unseen and unfelt ultraviolet light (the "Father") is supposed to originate, while unseen and felt infrared light (the "Spirit") consummates. (Except, microwaves are on the infrared side of the spectrum, and they do a good job of heating up leftovers for me to consume).

I also don't know how it's possible to say that the ultraviolet range of the electromagnetic spectrum can be considered "unseen and unfelt." Scientists see it all the time with their instruments, such as radio telescopes. Just because it's unseen by the human eye doesn't mean it can't be "seen" by other means.

God is different, of course. God can't be proven to be seen in any fashion. So this is another way the Light = Trinity analogy breaks down. Somehow the above-mentioned Christian authors never thought about the fact that if the ultraviolet spectrum really was unseen and unfelt, it wouldn't be part of the scientific canon.

Which happens to be the title of a book I'm reading, "The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science." Proving that there is synchronicity (but not that there's a God), my bookmark was left at the exact place where Natalie Angier, the author, began to describe how light works.

It turns out that if the pseudo-quantum Christian connection between light and the Trinity is correct, bees and pit vipers are closer to the Father and Holy Spirit than humans are.

Our eyes evolved to respond as best we could to ambient light, and the sun is very good at propagating light waves that are between 15 and 32 millionths of an inch long. This is the slice of light that we immodest Homo taxonomists have designated as visible light, or optical light, or daylight.

Yet the terms are terribly blinkered. Other animals can see light lying well outside the so-called visible range – in the ultraviolet, in the infrared, in radar. Bees, for example, see perfectly well in the ultraviolet range, and many flowers beckon their pollinators with ultraviolet stripes, while the pits of a pit viper detect infrared light, the signature thermal radiation that emanates from meal and menace alike.

So rather than proving that the "Trinity" revealed by electromagnetism is an objective reality, actually science shows that what is seen and unseen depends on what sort of being is doing the seeing. God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – is in the eye of the beholder, whether human, bee, or pit viper.

The electromagnetic spectrum also reveals that light isn't three separate things, or any other number of separate things. It is one thing. Electromagnetism. So much for the Trinity. As a NASA web site says:

We may think that radio waves are completely different physical objects or events than gamma-rays. They are produced in very different ways, and we detect them in different ways. But are they really different things? The answer is 'no'. Radio waves, visible light, X-rays, and all the other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum are fundamentally the same thing. They are all electromagnetic radiation.

Nice. Rather than confirming the Christian dogma of the Trinity, what science knows about light points in the direction of Eastern (and Western, in guises such as Plotinus) philosophy that posits an impersonal Oneness as the ultimate reality.

Good try, Mr. DelRe and Ms. Carr-Harris. But you need to look somewhere else to support your belief in the Trinity. If I may make a suggestion, try blind faith.