Church of the Churchless

"Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" is a classic that I like a lot

Recently I wrote about how always trying to improve yourself is foolish. Since this makes a lot of sense to me, I'm attracted to Zen Buddhism because it shares that perspective, by and large.

This attraction is long-standing. 

One of my favorite Zen books, The Supreme Doctrine, has been in my hands since 1969, when I couldn't bear to return it to the San Jose Public Library while I was going to San Jose State College.

Another favorite is Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. I have the 1973 first paperback edition. A few days ago I started re-reading it after a long absence.


Shunryu Suzuki's words (the book is based on his recorded talks) always refresh and center me. 

These days I have minimal tolerance for spiritual books that aren't grounded in here-and-now physical reality. I've had my fill of supernatural bullshit. 

Zen is notorious for cutting through the crap. I like all of the many Zen books that grace the Buddhist section of my bookshelf. 

But there's something about Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind that really appeals to me. Here's some quotations from the initial chapters that I've read the past few days. Zazen means meditation.

For Zen students the most important thing is not to be dualistic. Our "original mind" includes everything within itself. It is always rich and sufficient within itself. You should not lose your self-sufficient state of mind.

This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.

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In the beginner's mind there is no thought, "I have attained something." All self-centered thoughts limit our vast mind.

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This is the most important teaching: not two, and not one. Our body and mind are not two and not one. If you think your body and mind are two, that is wrong. If you think that they are one, that is also wrong. Our body and mind are both two and one. 

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That is why Buddha could not accept the religions existing at his time. He studied many religions, but he was not satisfied with their practices. He could not find the answer in asceticism or in philosophies. He was not interested in some metaphysical existence, but in his own body and mind, here and now.

And when he found himself, he found that everything that exists has Buddha nature. That was his enlightenment. Enlightenment is not some good feeling or some particular state of mind. The state of mind that exists when you sit in the right posture is, itself, enlightenment.

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When we practice zazen our mind always follows our breathing. When we inhale, the air comes into the inner world. When we exhale, the air goes out to the outer world. The inner world is limitless, and the outer world is also limitless.

We say "inner world" or "outer world," but actually there is just one whole world. In this limitless world, our throat is like a swinging door. The air comes and goes out like someone passing through a swinging door.

If you think, "I breathe," the "I" is extra. There is no you to say "I." What we call "I" is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. It just moves; that is all. When your mind is pure and calm enough to follow this movement, there is nothing: no "I," no world, no mind nor body; just a swinging door.

So when we practice zazen, all that exists is the movement of the breathing, but we are aware of this movement.

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If you want to obtain perfect calmness in your zazen, you should not be bothered by the various images you find in your mind. Let them come, and let them go. Then they will be under control. But this policy is not so easy. It sounds easy, but it requires some special effort. How to make this effort is the secret of practice.

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The only effort that will help you is to count your breathing, or to concentrate on your inhaling and exhaling. We say concentration, but to concentrate your mind on something is not the true purpose of Zen.

The true purpose is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes.

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The true understanding is that the mind includes everything; when you think something comes from outside it means only that something appears in your mind. Nothing outside yourself can cause any trouble.

You yourself make the waves in your mind. If you leave your mind as it is, it will become calm. This mind is called big mind.

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Strictly speaking, any effort we make is not good for our practice because it creates waves in our mind. It is impossible, however, to attain absolute calmness of our mind without any effort. We must make some effort, but we must forget ourselves in the effort we make.

In this realm there is no subjectivity or objectivity. Our mind is just calm, without even any awareness. In this unawareness, every effort and every idea and thought will vanish.

So it is necessary for us to encourage ourselves and to make an effort up to the last moment, when all effort disappears. You should keep your mind on your breathing until you are not aware of your breathing.

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We say, "A good father is not a good father." Do you understand? One who thinks he is a good father is not a good father; one who thinks he is a good husband is not a good husband.

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But so long as you think, "I am doing this," or "I have to do this," or "I must attain something special." you are actually not doing anything. When you give up, when you no longer want something, or when you do not try to do anything special, then you do something When there is no gaining idea in what you do, than you do something.

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If you continue this simple practice every day you will obtain a wonderful power. Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you obtain it, it is nothing special. It is just you yourself, nothing special.

As a Chinese poem says, "I went and I returned. It was nothing special. Rozan famous for its misty mountains; Sekko for its water."

People think it must be wonderful to see the famous range of mountains covered by mists, and the water said to cover all the earth. But if you go there you will just see water and mountains. Nothing special.

The chance that you know something others don't is very small

After over fifty years of pursuing spirituality in one form or another, I've come to one firm conclusion. I'm nothing special.

And neither are you. Nor is anybody else.

Now, I'm not saying that everybody is the same. Obviously every person is different. We all have different thoughts, emotions, talents, likes and dislikes, appearance, and so on.

What I mean is that we're all material beings living in this material world, to sort of quote Madonna. 

So whatever we know about the world, almost certainly other people possess the same knowledge. Most of us like to think that in some way we're special when it comes to what we know. 

But the truth is that we're not. 

Some would say that our beliefs can be unique, shared by no one else. But a belief is different from knowledge. Knowledge is a true statement about reality, while a belief isn't.

Sure, we often say things like "I believe the Earth goes around the Sun." Actually that is something we know. It's a fact. 

Whereas "I believe in God" is a genuine belief. It isn't grounded in reality. There's no demonstrable evidence for that statement. 

Beliefs are limited only by our imagination. Knowledge is limited by what is true. 

Of course, a belief can be transformed into knowledge through evidence. And evidence can transform knowledge into belief if what once was thought to be true turns out to be untrue.

For example, almost everybody used to know that the Earth was flat. Now we know it is round, so that confident initial knowledge actually was a shaky belief.

Yet there's still a Flat Earth Society. Untrue beliefs take a long time to completely die, if they ever do.

A few days ago I wrote "A Bayesian argument against miracles." The takeaway quote by Steven Pinker in that post was Which is more likely -- that the laws of the universe as we understand them are false, or that some guy got something wrong?

This relates to the notion that no one possesses special knowledge. Over thousands of years, humanity has built up a store of shared knowledge.

It is ever-changing, which is the nature of knowledge. The more we know, the more there is left to know. Sometimes this is described as the Island of Knowledge having a vaster shoreline as the island expands in size.

Science is by far our best means of arriving at a shared understanding of what is real and true. Sure, scientific knowledge is constantly changing, just as our individual knowledge does. 

But science has ways of correcting errors that individuals don't. It may take a while for an untrue theory to be overturned. However, there's no doubt that science steadily progresses toward a more accurate picture of reality.

This accomplishment means, in Carl Sagan's words, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

During the seventeen years this blog has existed, I've debunked a great many religious supernatural claims. This doesn't stop people from continuing to believe in them.

Almost every day someone leaves a comment on one of my posts that amounts to an extraordinary claim about the nature of reality. If true, it would overturn much of modern science, since the claims people make go against the well-proven laws of nature.

But those extraordinary claims always lack extraordinary evidence. Or even ordinary evidence. 

The big question is, why do people continue to believe things that lack demonstrable evidence? There are plenty of reasons. Here's a few of them.

-- They want to believe in the supernatural so badly, they ignore the lack of evidence for it.
-- They enjoy the attention other people give them when they make supernatural claims.
-- They like to feel they possess knowledge no one else has.
-- They are out to make money from followers who revere them.
-- They have deluded themselves into mistaking belief for knowledge.

Having been a religious believer for thirty-five years, I understand the appeal of considering that God, spirit, heaven, angels, and such are as real as rocks, goldfish, iPhones, and clouds.

But eventually I grew out of my unfounded religiosity, because solid truth was more important to me that flimsy belief. This is why I put so much emphasis on being honest about what we actually know, versus what we would prefer to be true.

Wishes are one thing. Reality is another. 

A Bayesian argument against miracles

For quite a while I've been interested in Bayesian reasoning/statistics, even though I've never understood this subject very well.

Now I'm reading Steven Pinker's new book, "Rationality." It has a chapter on Beliefs and Evidence that focuses on Bayesian reasoning. Which is, basically (this is an introduction to an online tutorial):

Bayes' rule or Bayes' theorem is the law of probability governing the strength of evidence -- the rule saying how much to revise our probabilities (change our minds) when we learn a new fact or observe new evidence.

"Prior probability" in the Bayesian perspective is our credence in an idea before looking at the evidence for something. "Posterior probability" is our credence in an idea after we've examined the evidence.

How this is calculated is kind of complex. But even without knowing anything more about Bayesian reasoning, the following excerpt from the Beliefs and Evidence chapter should be mostly understandable, with the exception of the paragraph in parentheses, which is quite technical.

Pinker explains why believing in miracles doesn't make sense.

Our neglect of base rates is a special case of our neglect of priors: the vital, albeit more nebulous, concept of how much credence we should give a hypothesis before we look at the evidence.

Now, believing in something before you look at the evidence may seem like the epitome of irrationality. Isn't that what we disdain as prejudice, bias, dogma, orthodoxy, preconceived notions? But prior credence is simply the fallible knowledge accumulated from all our experience in the past.

Indeed, the posterior probability from one round of looking at evidence can supply the prior probability for the next round, a cycle called Bayesian updating. 

It's simply the mindset of someone who wasn't born yesterday. For fallible knowers in a chancy world, justified belief cannot be equated with the last fact you came across.

As Francis Crick liked to say, "Any theory that can account for all the facts is wrong, because some of the facts are wrong." This is why it is reasonable to be skeptical of claims for miracles, astrology, homeopathy, telepathy, and other paranormal phenomena, even when some eyewitness or laboratory study claims to show it.

Why isn't that dogmatic and pigheaded?

The reasons were laid out by that hero of reason, David Hume. Hume and Bayes were contemporaries, and though neither read the other, word of the other's ideas may have passed between them through a mutual colleague, and Hume's famous argument against miracles is thoroughly Bayesian.

Nothing is esteemed a miracle, if it ever happen in the common course of nature. It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle, that a dead man should come to life, because that has never been observed in any age or country.

In other words, miracles such as resurrection must be given a low prior probability. Here is the zinger:

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish.

In Bayesian terms, we are interested in the posterior probability that miracles exist, given the testimony. Let's contrast it with the posterior probability that no miracles exist given the testimony. 

(In Bayesian reasoning, it's often handy to look at the odds, that is, the ratio of the credence of a hypothesis to the credence of the alternative, because it spares us the tedium of calculating the marginal probability of the data in the denominator, which is the same for both posteriors and conveniently cancels out.)

The "fact which it endeavors to establish" is the miracle, with its low prior, dragging down the posterior. The testimony "of such a kind" is the likelihood of the data given the miracle, and it's "falsehood" is the likelihood of the data given no miracle: the possibility that the witness lied, misperceived, misremembered, embellished, or passed along a tale tale he heard from someone else.

Given everything we know about human behavior, that's far from miraculous! Which is to say, its likelihood is higher than the prior probability of a miracle. 

That moderately high likelihood boosts the posterior probability of no miracle, and lowers the overall odds of a miracle compared to no miracle. 

Another way of putting it is this: Which is more likely -- that the laws of the universe as we understand them are false, or that some guy got something wrong?

Always trying to improve yourself is foolish

This morning I meditated, as I always do. Via my iPhone I also listened to a Buddhist speak about Buddhist teachings, as I sometimes do. 

What surprised me, sort of, is that afterwards I felt somewhat worse. It was as if trying to improve myself led to me feeling like I'd temporarily gone backward on the improvement front. 

As soon as I went back to simply living my life -- having lunch, going grocery shopping, listening to CNN and MSNBC as I drove around in my car -- my mood improved.

For quite a while I've been toying with the idea that engaging in a never-ending spiritual search for more... more self-awareness, more control of my emotions, more mindfulness, more knowledge of how my mind works, all that is akin to running on a hamster wheel of self-improvement. 

Meaning, when I'm always trying to get somewhere better than where I am now, I'm missing the opportunity to be satisfied with the present moment.

Obviously this isn't a groundbreaking insight. It's common sense that's been echoed by many people much wiser than myself. Today I simply had a stronger feeling that I need to break free of the habit that was with me for the 35 years I was a religious believer, Eastern religion variety.

The habit of considering that there always was another step to be taken on the spiritual path, another flight of stairs to be climbed on my ascent to the spiritual heights. 

Though I've been able to leave behind most of the religiosity that used to be so important to me, the desire to keep searching for greater levels of meaning, happiness, and contentment never left me. But more and more, I'm getting used to the idea of not needing more. 

This is hard to describe.

It's not like I'm becoming fatalistic or uncaring. I still have many goals that I want to pursue. I'm dedicated to trying to make the world a better place. I'm committed to remaining a good husband, father, grandfather, friend.

However, I can do all that without feeling like some essence within me needs to improve. After a lifetime of studying the world's religious, philosophical, and mystical writings, along with daily meditation for up to several hours a day, there's really nothing new that I need to learn or experience in the realm of "spirituality." 

(I put that word in quotation marks because it doesn't capture what I am getting at, but it's the best word I can come up with.)

It's a relief to just settle into the life that I've living, instead of feeling there's a better life awaiting me around some corner.

For many years I've been saying on this blog that mindfulness has become my meditation. That's still true. It's just that even mindfulness can become a chore, an exercise to get better at, instead of simply attending to what's happening right here, right now without viewing that as mindfulness.

If what I've said in this post doesn't make sense, here's some previous posts on this theme, along with an excerpt from each. Maybe they'll help explain what I'm trying to get at here.

Ending the spiritual search

Always looking for more from life than what life already is giving me is beginning to seem unwise. 

More meaning. More happiness. More purpose. More depth. All that more, more, more seems to lead to a hamster-wheel sort of existence.

Spiritual seeking can become such a habit, the seeker doesn't realize that they're going around and around without really getting anywhere.

If we're in an endless loop of seek-find-seek-find, the way out is to either stop seeking or find that which satisfies completely. 

Since I'm not completely satisfied with life (who is?), it seems to me that giving up a quest to make life into something that it isn't already is the best way to go.

End of spiritual questions is the final answer

I've experienced that sort of who cares? clarity now and then. Sometimes life seems so simple, so fine just the way it is, yet also so mysterious, so impossible to comprehend. I grok that there's no answer to life's biggest spiritual, religious, and philosophical questions -- because there's no way to form a cogent query.

And a little while later I order another spiritual, religious, or philosophical book from Amazon -- because searching for answers to unanswerable questions is just so darn much fun.

Great quotes from "Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: a Zen Guide."

"It's a little harder for most people to realize that not only is the mind that I'm trying to escape the only mind I have, but that the mind that I'm seeking is also the mind that I already have. The perfection that we're so busy pursuing is to be found nowhere but right here in the very moment, regardless of its content. This is the most basic spiritual insight that we can have. This moment is it! What we've desperately been seeking is already here."

Why atheism makes sense even if theism doesn't

Even though it's true that usually people aren't described by their unwillingness to believe in imaginary things -- there aren't afairyists who proclaim their skepticism about the existence of fairies -- the situation is different in regard to God.

Below I've shared an excellent comment from Appreciative Reader that was left today on a recent post of mine. The comment explains why even if the notion of God is incoherent, which of course it is, there's still good reason for atheists to object to the belief in God held by billions of people. 

After all, believers in fairies don't try to impose their belief on other people, whereas highly religious countries like the United States have their politics greatly influenced by fundamentalists who consider that whatever they imagine their God wants, like an end to legal abortion, should apply to everybody.

Plus, atheism is a stand for truth, reality, reason, evidence. Even if religious believers didn't try to impose their beliefs on others, many atheists (certainly me included) would feel the need to point out that God is a hypothesis lacking any demonstrable factual foundation. 

Here's the comment from Appreciative Reader, which is a reply to another commenter, 271 Days. His mention of Adam Dalgliesh led me to Google the name, which I'd never heard before. Wikipedia told me this is a fictional character in a series of  fourteen mystery novels by P.D. James, a British thing from what I could tell. 

@271Days:

Heh, okay, I get what you’re saying. You’re saying the term “God” itself is incoherent, so that the term “theist” would be incoherent and meaningless too; and, as such, its obverse, that is to say, “atheist” or “atheism” would also not be quite coherent. Fair enough, that makes sense, so far as it goes.

Here’s three separate observations, as far as this, that I’m enumerating separately in the interests of clarity:

(1) Your argument is based squarely on how wide, in fact wide to the point of incoherence, is the term “God”. Therefore, it fails the moment we move from the general to the particular.

So that when it comes to the Christian God, or the Judaic, or the Islamic, atheism continues to be a valid position. Likewise, when it comes to the Hindu gods, or the Shinto gods, or for that matter the Roman and Greek pantheons of yore, then too atheism continues to be a sound position to take. Ditto the RSSB God.

Even, for that matter, some kind of Deistic impersonal Oneness-God, or some completely watered down abstract Aquinian “prime mover” God, or whatever --- the moment you move from wide-open generalization to any kind of exactitude, immediately atheism once again makes complete sense.

(2) This is kind of topsy-turvy, in the sense that you’re suggesting that atheism does not make sense because theism, generally speaking, itself does not make sense. In order to suggest that atheism is an invalid position, you’re first and foremost suggesting that theism itself is an incoherent and invalid position.

And you know what? I can live with that. It is entirely possible that if, a century or two down the line, theistic superstitions become relegated to arcane history books, and the word “God” and “theism” will draw blank stares from everyone other than history nerds; should that come to pass, then the term “atheism” itself will become meaningless, absolutely.

Unfortunately we’re not there yet, though. As long as there remain theists, so long atheism remains a valid position. If the moment a theist comes out and declares himself such, you’re willing to jump out and tell him that what he’s saying is incoherent and nonsensical, the atheist will be content to stay silent in the sidelines. Of course, if and when the theist, in response to your ridicule, now moves from the general to the particular, well then, that’s when you GO TO #1.

(3) This third point is merely a variation on #1 and #2 above, but still might be meaningful for the sake of emphasis. Do you believe in the existence of ampembalanxes, 271Days? Yes, or Not-Yes? If the censor arrives at your door with his clipboard and asks you, “Do you tick a “Yes” to the question, ‘Do you believe in ampmbalnxes?’ ”, I guess you won’t agree to tick it, right?

You may either just say “No” (choosing to define “No” in this context as simply “Not-Yes”); or you may just tell him his question is not meaningful without further clarification. The point is, you don’t tick in a “Yes”, you don’t say you believe in said undefined ampembalanxes. I don’t see why the atheist wouldn’t be content to do the same for the God question.

I don’t think the reasonable atheist has any kind of fixation over God. If people around him stopped going on and on and on about unsupported claims about God, the reasonable atheist would be content to not say anything at all. Let theism disappear completely from the face of the earth; and so will atheism.

If what I’ve tried to convey, in some detail, by those three (overlapping) points above, is what you’re saying here, then I guess we’re in agreement. But if you’re somehow trying to claim that while atheism is an incoherent position, but at the same time theism makes sense to you, then I’m afraid your argument is totally mistaken, and I disagree with you in the strongest possible terms, for reasons already discussed very clearly above.

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“Forgetting about that book for a second my view is simple. No matter what you posit ie. cosmos, universe, laws, you have already posited awareness first. You can’t get behind awareness. Whatever you say requires awareness first. Awareness is the First Principle. So I think we can logically say Awareness/Being/Spirit/ is God. You don’t have to question if awareness exists. It exists before anything else possibly can.”

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I don’t see that, at all.

I think you’re conflating two things here: on one hand, what we know about something; and on the other, how we’ve come to know of it.

Sure, as far as the latter, awareness is indeed the first principle. You cannot become aware of some facet of existence without first having become aware in the first place. That’s tautological, absolutely. First principle, as you say.

However, that most certainly does not apply to the thing we’re becoming aware of. Sure, you need to first to become aware in order to become aware of the universe/cosmos. But that is most certainly not to say that awareness itself must first have existed in order for the universe/cosmos to exist or to have come into being.

You’re basically stating the former position, and ending up implying the latter; and this latter position, when you unwrap your implicit argument and look clearly and closely at it, makes absolutely no sense at all, and in fact is plain wrong.

An analogy may make this obvious point doubly clear. Is it necessary for James’s Adam Dalgliesh to be alive in order for him to finally understand who is (or are) the one (or ones) that did away with the publishing magnate, whose murder he’s been investigating? Absolutely, yes.

But that speaks only to Dalgliesh’s personal understanding, and not the subject of his investigation. Dalgliesh’s life, his consciousness if you will, is necessary to his personal understanding of the perpetrator’s identity, yes, absolutely; but his life and/or his consciousness have nothing at all to do with who the perpetrator(s) actually might be.

Of course, as earlier (that is, as with your argument about the semantics around theism and atheism), if you’re merely making the former argument without in fact meaning to slip in, by implication, the latter argument, then once again I don’t disagree with you.

If all you’re saying is that in order for there to be awareness of the universe/cosmos, there must first be awareness --- and if you just stop there, not making any further implicit claims --- then fine, we’re agreed. But that’s just a blindingly obvious truism, an out-and-out tautology, and I don’t see the point of making that argument at all.

Still, and like I said, if you choose to make that focused argument, entirely pointless though that argument seems to me (“pointless” in that it leads nowhere at all, and is most certainly not a refutation of atheism in any shape or form), then okay, I don’t disagree with you.

Open Thread 41 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread.

Remember, off-topic comments should go in an Open Thread. 

If you don't see a recent comment, or comments, posted, it's because you've failed to follow the above rule. Keep to the subject of a blog post if you leave a comment on it. And if you want to use this blog as a "chat room," do that in an open thread.

As noted before, it's good to have comments in a regular blog post related to its subject, and it's also good to have a place where almost anything goes in regard to sharing ideas, feelings, experiences, and such. That place is an Open Thread.

Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. Remember that I'm moderating comments, so it could take a while for your comment to be published. Almost every comment submitted to an Open Thread will be approved. Personal attacks on someone are an exception, as is hate speech. Argue with ideas, not insults.

Though I haven't been doing too well on this, I'll try to remember to always have an Open Thread showing in the Recent Posts section in the right sidebar. If one isn't showing, I've added an Open Threads category in, naturally, the Categories section. You can always find an Open Thread that way.

So if you're a believer in some form of religion, mysticism, or spirituality, this is where you can put your "praise God," "praise Guru," or "praise _______" comments.

Happy birthday to me, from me

It's my birthday tomorrow. I'll be a super-young 73, using my personal definition of super-young.

(I'm reading a humorous book about growing older -- Stupid Things I Won't Do When I Get Old --  that says two answers to the question "When does old begin?" are "Old age is my current age +4" and "Tomorrow. Always tomorrow. Never today.)

At any rate, I'm in pretty good shape. As evidence I present this photo of me in the Big Meadow at Black Butte Ranch in central Oregon, where my wife and I own a 1/4 share in a vacation home. That's Black Butte in the background, a pleasingly extinct volcano.

My mother died at 73. But she was an alcoholic who didn't exercise much, smoked a lot her entire life, didn't eat very healthily, and suffered several strokes well before she was my age. She would have been much better off smoking marijuana rather than tobacco; sadly, cannabis legalization came too late for her, but in time for me.

So by comparison, I'm doing pretty damn well.

And even though I've only just started reading the book linked to above, it's encouraging that I've been able to avoid some of the stupid things the author advises old folks to avoid. Like, double-spacing after periods, which made sense in the age of manual typewriters but not today, and not using an AOL or Yahoo email address. 

(I was an early adopter of Gmail. Sadly, though, another Brian Hines was an even earlier adopter, so I've had to make do with [email protected] while I wait for my namesake who doesn't need to use a number after his name to die and bequeath me his email address. Hey, I can dream.)

I guess I should try to come up with some philosophical wisdom to justify a Church of the Churchless blog post about my impending birthday.

Well, comparing current me with younger me, I'd say that the biggest change in how I view myself in relation to the universe is that I no longer am nearly as grandiose. Meaning, I used to believe that one day I'd be privy to the deepest mysteries of the cosmos.

Through all the daily meditation I did since 1970, and the guidance of an Indian guru, my consciousness would soar to higher regions of reality and I'd know divine secrets that other unenlightened souls could only dream of comprehending. Of course, I also was proud of my humility.

Now, my goal is to be able to remember for as long as possible how the three remote controls for our television, Apple TV, and DirecTV satellite receiver work together so I can continue to perform my manly duty of taking charge of our evening viewing of Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and other streaming services.

Thus far, I'm handling all that with senior citizen technological perfection. Plus, I can make my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Pro function well (except when they don't, but then it's Apple's fault, in my own mind at least).

One of the best things about growing old is that you don't worry nearly as much about attaining grand milestones.

Maybe I'll write another book someday, but I'm fine with the four books I've already written. My wife and I have been married for 31 years. I'm much happier than I was in my 18-year first marriage, so there's no pressure to work on our relationship, though I've got work to do on loading the dishwasher the way Laurel likes.

I still go to three Tai Chi classes a week -- Tai Chi has been a part of my life for 17 years -- and work out at a gym three times also. However, I'm good with maintaining the weights I'm currently capable of lifting, while in my younger days I was always trying to handle heavier weights.

I guess this is part of life after 70.

You have a more realistic perspective. You grasp that if you can just keep on doing what you enjoy doing for as long as possible, that's plenty good enough. I want to make the world better insofar as I can. However, I don't expect that the fate of the world, the United States, Oregon, Salem, or our neighborhood in any way depends on me.

That said, every day I drive by about a hundred acres of farmland just north of our neighborhood that was slated to become a subdivision before my wife and I led a complex, costly, five-year fight to stop it because all those houses would have threatened our neighborhood wells and the springs that feed a community lake.

That successful effort taught me the value of doing concrete things in this physical world, rather than wasting time on religious imaginings of what a supposed supernatural realm might be like. Stopping the bulldozers was hugely more fulfilling than pretending I was a spiritual being destined for life in "heaven" (Eastern religion variety).

Anyway, these are my birthday eve thoughts. My wife just finished baking a birthday cake, so tomorrow evening will be devoted more to my stomach and less to my mind. 

Why it makes no sense to ask for evidence that God doesn't exist

Over the years I've written numerous blog posts about the near-impossibility of proving a negative such as God doesn't exist. 

This isn't the way both science and common sense work.

We don't ask for evidence that invisible fairies aren't making our cars move. Since cars have engines, or motors if they're electric, there's lots of evidence in favor of engines/motors, so no need to deal with the invisible fairy hypothesis.

Same is the case with God. Or at least how atheists look upon God. 

Below is how Armin Navabi addresses this issue in his book, "Why There Is No God: Simple Responses to 20 Common Arguments for the Existence of God."

"There's no evidence that God doesn't exist."

When confronted with criticism, some theists will pull out this argument in an attempt to shift the burden of proof toward the critic. Although this tactic can feel very clever, it opens a door to absurdity.

This argument seems to suggest that we believe in everything, even things we have yet to think about, until that belief is proven false. That's simply not a logical way to perceive reality.

If the criteria for something being accepted as true was based purely on there being no evidence against it, an endless number of hypothetical objects could suddenly become "real." This has been the source of numerous playful thought experiments by skeptics around the world.

-- The flying spaghetti monster, who created the earth with his noodly appendage.

-- The invisible pink unicorn, whose "believers" logically know that she must be invisible because she has not been seen, yet have faith that she's pink.

-- The dragon in Carl Sagan's garage, a thought experiment he describes in The Demon-Haunted World. The dragon is invisible, floats in the air, generates no heat and is incorporeal, thus evading all forms of sensory detection.

-- Russell's Teapot, a hypothetical teapot that you cannot prove isn't orbiting the sun.

Of course, all of these examples were designed in good fun. Bertrand Russell does not actually believe that there is a teapot orbiting the sun. However, there is no way to definitively prove that these fanciful claims aren't true, which demonstrates the total absurdity of this line of thinking.

Ad hoc arguments

Carl Sagan's invisible dragon argument shows the futility of ad hoc arguments in explaining reality.

An ad hoc argument is one that makes excuses to rationalize away the valid criticisms of an argument without any evidence to support it. When the claimant desperately wants something to be true, she'll often employ an ad hoc argument to counter any arguments to her claim.

The dragon in Carl Sagan's hypothetical garage cannot be seen because it's invisible. A skeptic might press for evidence. But its footprints cannot be observed because it hovers in the air, and the dragon's invisible fire is heatless.

A rationalization can be formed to explain the absence of any form of evidence. These rationalizations don't make the original claim true. Indeed, it's easiest to make ad hoc arguments about things that don't really exist because that frees you up to create increasingly fanciful arguments.

When applied to theism, this ad hoc reasoning can be seen in the increasingly vague descriptions of God. The rationalizations discussed in the last chapter -- that God cannot be comprehended or described -- fall under the ad hoc fallacy.

Such rationalizations make God so vague that it becomes impossible to refute the idea, but they get the claimant nowhere closer to proving his claim. 

Disbelief is not the same as belief in something else

Telling an atheist to prove there is no God automatically assumes that this is what the atheist believes. While gnostic atheists confidently believe that there are no deities, many other atheists are agnostic atheists. 

In other words, these people do not believe in any gods, but they do not claim to be certain that gods do not exist. Gnostic atheists, meanwhile, do feel confident saying that no gods exist. Both are valid types of atheism.

It is important to note that atheism and agnosticism are not mutually exclusive. To understand the difference between atheist and agnosticism, visit AtheismVsAgnosticism.com

Lack of belief in deities is enough to classify someone as an atheist. Lacking belief in something does not mean that you believe it to be false; it just means that you have no conviction that it's true. 

For example, a friend of yours may believe that Ford is the best car company in the world. You have no particular opinion one way of the other. You don't believe that Ford is better than any other car brand, but you also don't know that it's not the best car brand. In this situation, you would be agnostic about your friend's claim.

In actuality, most people are atheist about at least some gods.

After all, there are thousands of gods throughout the history of world theology, but the majority of religious people have no problem in disbelieving Zeus, Thor, or Anubis. Jews and Muslims have no problem denying the divinity of Christ. Monotheists are well practiced in disbelieving other gods.

As Richard Dawkins put it, atheists simply take this one god further.

Religions demand perfect evidence from anyone rebutting their claims but offer none for their own claims. If faced with convincing evidence in favor of any deity, we should reconsider our position. 

But we need to ask questions and go where the evidence leads us, rather than try to lead the evidence where we like. By questioning everything, we follow the evidence, rather than trying to force the evidence to fit our presupposed conclusions.

Thoughts on a good death

Over on my HinesSight blog, yesterday I wrote "My wife's sister died today. It was a good death." I'll copy it in here.

We're all going to die. That's 100% certain. Death follows life with a cosmic inevitability. The big question is: Will we die a good death?

This morning my wife, Laurel, learned that her older sister, Lynn, had died last night. Naturally there were tears. But not much sorrow. Because Lynn died a good death. 

In fact, a very good death. Exactly the way most of us would want to go, Laurel and I definitely included.

Lynn and her husband, Randy, had driven to Colorado from their home in Kentucky. Randy took her there as a romantic gesture. 

He had proposed to Lynn in Colorado. That's where they went on their honeymoon. 

Lynn had some health problems. However, she wasn't feeling bad on their Colorado trip. Last night she and Randy walked around the town where they were staying.

Sometime during the night Randy felt Lynn slumped against him in bed. He tried to wake her up. Then he realized she wasn't breathing. He called 911. Efforts to resuscitate her failed. 

Death sucks. Even when you're in your mid-70s, Lynn's age. Life is precious. Nobody wants to die so long as life seems worth living, 

Yet when death comes, most of us fear the suffering that often accompanies a person's last days more than dying itself. 

That's why Lynn had a good death. To die in your sleep while on a romantic getaway with your spouse -- that's a fine way to say goodbye to life.

No suffering. No lengthy period of physical decline. No beeping monitors in an ICU. Just going to sleep and not waking up.

Who knows? This could happen to any of us. Like, tonight. Or, tomorrow. Yesterday Lynn had no idea she was going to die. That's wonderful. 

To be alive one moment and dead the next, without a lengthy string of moments in-between marked by fear, anxiety, regret, or other negative emotions that afflict many dying people, that's a very good death.

Science is repeatable. Religions aren't.

There are lots of reasons to choose science over religion. Chief among them, of course, is that science comes up with solid knowledge about reality, while religion doesn't. 

But I find science's repeatability to be an especially appealing feature of science. 

Meaning, if somehow all scientific knowledge were to disappear from the face of the Earth, while leaving humanity intact, there's little or no doubt that this knowledge eventually would be rediscovered. 

In other words, science is repeatable. It's methods aren't dependent on one-of-a-kind happenstance, like Einstein being born at a particular time and place with certain aptitudes. 

If Einstein hadn't come up with his theories of special and general relativity when he did, someone else would have trod the same scientific ground not long after.

Ditto with Darwin's theory of evolution. Others were on the verge of publishing their own take on evolution just when Darwin was about to, which, I recall reading, spurred Darwin to finish writing "On the Origin of Species" as soon as possible.

We can also easily imagine an alien civilization in a galaxy far, far away having much the same understanding of scientific reality as we humans do. Sure, their language, concepts, mathematics, and such probably would markedly differ from ours.

But almost certainly they'd have a similar understanding of atomic particles and the forces of nature as we do. After all, their basic physical reality would be the same as our basic physical reality.

By contrast, things would be very different if somehow all religious knowledge were to disappear from the face of the Earth. Or if we came into contact with an alien civilization and learned about what beliefs, if any, they might have in the realm of religion 

What are the chances that Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism would reappear if no trace of these religions remained? Essentially, zero. 

Same with every other religion, since each religion is heavily dependent on historical circumstances that can't be repeated. Jesus' supposed birth and death. The Koran being dictated to Muhammed by an angel. Hindu beliefs arising from ancient Indian sources.

Because Buddhism is the most psychological, and least supernatural, of the world's major religions, it's teachings would have the best chance of being rediscovered if all trace of Buddhism vanished. Even so, Buddhism obviously is a product of the insights arrived at by a specific person. 

Take away the Buddha, and you would still have Buddhism, yet in a markedly changed form. But take away Einstein, and the theory of relativity would be totally unaffected, since the theory rests on the nature of reality, not on any particular person.

Of course, most religious people find the non-repeatability of their faith to be a desirable feature. It gives them a pleasing feeling of being special. Jesus died for our sins so that we might live for eternity with our Father in heaven. Cool!

Unreal. But cool. 

Me, I prefer reality. Which is why I love science so much.

Particular people are responsible for scientific discoveries -- they don't fall out of the sky like snowflakes -- yet this knowledge has little or nothing to do with them, and everything to do with the nature of our world.