Church of the Churchless

Presidential candidates should be quizzed about religion

To me, there's no place for religion in politics.

Sure, virtually every politician in the United States who occupies a high office will be religious, because this is a highly religious country and voters are biased against atheists. But political decisions should be based on evidence, reasoning, values -- not blind faith in some supernatural force.

(See some previous blog thoughts on this subject here, here, here, and here.)

Bill Keller, Executive Editor of the New York Times, who is about to step down and become a full-time writer, wrote a great piece: Asking Candidates Tougher Questions About Faith. Which starts off...

If a candidate for president said he believed that space aliens dwell among us, would that affect your willingness to vote for him? Personally, I might not disqualify him out of hand; one out of three Americans believe we have had Visitors and, hey, who knows? But I would certainly want to ask a few questions. Like, where does he get his information? Does he talk to the aliens? Do they have an economic plan?

Yet when it comes to the religious beliefs of our would-be presidents, we are a little squeamish about probing too aggressively. Michele Bachmann was asked during the Iowa G.O.P. debate what she meant when she said the Bible obliged her to “be submissive” to her husband, and there was an audible wave of boos — for the question, not the answer. There is a sense, encouraged by the candidates, that what goes on between a candidate and his or her God is a sensitive, even privileged domain, except when it is useful for mobilizing the religious base and prying open their wallets.

Exactly.

Candidates try to have it both ways: they shamelessly use their religiosity to form a bond with like-minded voters, yet get offended when someone asks them probing questions about their beliefs.

Like, "How the hell can we expect that you'd make sound presidential decisions when you believe such ridiculous faith-based religious crap?" That's the sort of question I'd like to ask, but it likely would get me thrown out of a Bachmann campaign event.

Keller, though, is free to ask some excellent questions of the candidates in a companion piece, Tougher Questions for the Candidates. My favorite is:

3. (a) Do you agree with those religious leaders who say that America is a “Christian nation” or “Judeo-Christian nation?” (b) What does that mean in  practice?

Americans get all freaked out when Muslim nations are led by someone who vows fealty to the teachings of the Koran. Yet voters applaud presidential candidates who pledge to bring the Bible back into the classroom and eliminate barriers between church and state.

Huh?

How is it that an Islamic theocracy is bad, while a Christian theocracy is good? What distinguishes our political leaders from fundamentalist crazies in other nations if both believe in seriously strange stuff that has no connection to demonstrable reality?

On that note, Keller has a link to a 2004 story about the Bush administration's snide dismissal of "the reality-based community," of which I am a proud member. Browsing through the lengthy story, I came across this.

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: ''Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you.'' When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, ''Look, I'm not going to debate it with you.''

There are plenty of domineering, blustering jerks who try to get their way through force, intimidation, tough talk, and stonewalling. Their jerkiosity isn't always faith-based. But often it is.

Religions can bring out the worst in people.

Especially in politicians who already are prone to delusions of grandiosity. it's dangerous when a national leader believes that he or she has a direct personal link to God's will, as this can lead them to pursue policies which have no good reasons behind them other than "I feel it in my gut." (Meaning, the brain's blind faith center.)

Reader comments on New York Times articles often are as thoughtful as the piece itself. Highlighted comments on Heller's piece were no exception. I liked this one from Roxanne M. in New Mexico.

In his autobiography, former French President Jacques Chirac described receiving a call from President Bush in the middle of the night on the eve of the Iraq war. Bush was musing about whether his actions in the Middle East might help to fulfill the divine plan by bringing about Armageddon. The voters have a right to know whether their president's policies are based on rational evidence and suppositions or on crazy religious wish-fulfillment.

Religious beliefs are just that--beliefs. We have no problem questioning a candidates beliefs about economics, social policy or international relations, and expecting him to be able to defend those beliefs on a rational basis. Religion, however, has enjoyed a privileged, off-limits status that may have been fine, back in the good old days when all candidates were conventionally religious, usually Episcopalian, and weren't trying to use their faith as a wedge issue. But when candidates seem to think there is a higher law than the Constitution they are sworn to uphold, it's relevant to know which parts of the Constitution would be at risk under their administration.

Null hypothesis makes God a nothing

It's been a while since "null hypothesis" passed through my brain. Probably a college statistics class was the last time those words were thought about.

So I felt like I was saying hello to an old acquaintance when I came across references to the null hypothesis in the final chapter of Michael Shermer's latest book, The Believing Brain.

Science begins with something called a null hypothesis, Although statisticians mean something very specific about this (having to do with comparing different sets of data), I am using this term null hypothesis in its more general sense: the hypothesis under investigation is not true, or null, until proven otherwise.

A null hypothesis states that X does not cause Y. If you think X does cause Y then the burden of proof is on you to provide convincing experimental data to reject the null hypothesis.

OK. That sounds pretty dry. But when we substitute some words for X and Y, things get a lot juicier.

Like, "a null hypothesis states that God does not cause the world." Or, "a null hypothesis states that soul does not cause consciousness."

Ah, now we've got an experiment! Science comes alive and bumps into spirituality. We get to talk some trash to religious believers. Show me your best stuff, hot shot. What you got?

Nothing, it turns out.

I've been asking those sorts of questions on this blog for almost seven years. When claims about God, soul, spirit, afterlife, or the supernatural are made, I say "Where's the demonstrable evidence?"

Which is the same as saying, refute the null hypothesis. Such is the way of science. Yet often I get the response, "No, Brian, you need to prove that God doesn't exist." This tells me the person is ignorant of how the scientific method works.

Shermer writes:

The null hypothesis also means that the burden of proof is on the person asserting a positive claim, not on the skeptics to disprove it... The principle of positive evidence states that you must have positive evidence in favor of your theory and not just negative evidence against rival theories.

The principle of positive evidence applies to all claims. Skeptics are like people from Missouri, the Show-Me state. Show me positive evidence for your claim... Show me an ET or take me to the mother ship. Show me the Intelligent Designer. Show me God. Show me and I will believe.

So far, I don't believe. Shermer has some good advice.

It's okay to say: "I don't know," "I'm not sure," and "Let's wait and see."... We must keep an open mind, but not so open that our brains fall out.

Two Portlanders go to church so you don't have to

I like "Year of Sundays." Especially the tag line under the blog's name: we go to church so you don't have to

Thanks, Joel Gunz and Amanda Westmont, who are fellow Oregonians.

I've taken you up on your offer. You're both terrific writers (after each visit to a church or other spiritual gathering, Joel and Amanda compose separate descriptions of their experience).

Portland, Oregon's alternative newspaper, Willamette Week, gave them a 2011 "Best Divine Dilettantes" award.

If you’re in the market for a religious experience, Amanda Westmont and Joel Gunz might be able to lend you some wisdom. The pair has been attending a different Portland church every Sunday since January and writing about their experiences in their shared blog, “A Year of Sundays” (blog.beliefnet.com/yearofsundays). No spiritual gathering, from Buddhist services to Scientology, is off limits. (They’re currently trying to get a mosque into the works.)

Joel is a recovering Jehovah's Witness. He's got another blog where he trashes his former religion. Good for him. Religious true believers usually are annoying. When they knock on your door uninvited and hand you literature, they're super annoying.

(I've learned to only waste a few seconds with them by taking the Jehovah's Witnesses piece of dogmatic crap propaganda, say "Thanks, I'll get this in our recycling bin right away," and close the door in their preachy faces.)

I saw that according to the Year of Sundays sidebar, a post about their visit to a Jehovah's Witnesses service was #1 on the most popular list. Written by Amanda, it was indeed entertaining.

Having been forced to go to a Catholic Church when I was a kid, and stumble my through the first communion ritual (I had trouble swallowing the wafer and almost coughed it out), I didn't realize that some Christians pass on what's offered in the bread and wine/ body and blood part of a church service.

Amanda explains that Jehovah's Witnesses believe that only 144,000 Christians will be with God in an afterlife. These already have been selected. You're only supposed to take the Jehovah's Witnesses version of communion if you think one of those 144,000 slots is reserved for you.

Given that Joel had become a Jehovah's Witnesses reprobate, her description of what happened when the wafer basket came around to their pew was churchlessly marvelous.

The service itself was bland, largely unremarkable and without the cult-like flavor I was expecting. I did learn a few things, however, like how only 144,000 people will receive the afterlife and since those words were written 1,987 years ago, it’s a pretty safe bet that heaven is already full.

It took me a few minutes to put it all together what with the speaker’s superfluous analogies about giving gifts to your cousin’s uncle and what if the wrong person got your gift or… something? It was too dumbed down for a non-believer like me to understand. I think he was basically trying to say that heaven is like a giant game of musical chairs. There are only so many spots and the music is getting faster and louder.

I also learned that apparently you can only partake of the sacraments if you actually believe one of those chairs has your name on it.

...Of the 18 million people who attended the Memorial service worldwide in 2010, only 11,200 of them partook of the Lord’s evening meal, which is less than one percent (actually it’s .062 percent).

...I sat there for much of the service trying to imagine Joel up there giving the talk because I know he was on that path when he was a Witness. Then my thoughts turned (as they so often do) to that thing we had done in the rapture of our drunken debauchery the night before and it broke my brain. The idea of Joel Gunz ever being a Man of God just does. not. compute. (Thank Jehovah!)

So when the plate of sacramental crackers was passed through the pews and no one in the dozen rows ahead of us partook of it because they deemed themselves unworthy of a heavenly calling, the irony of Joel’s intent was not lost on me. It wasn’t until I received the plate of emblems directly from Joel Stangeland’s hand and passed it to my Joel that the magnitude of what we were doing finally hit me.

Joel was about to piss in their cornflakes.

In public.

While I took his picture.

Which is pretty much what he did.

Silence fell as the plates were passed amongst the pews, so when Joel took that first bite, everyone heard him crunch down on the cracker and a ripple of shock and awe went through the hall.

[Read more here. After the service, Joel and Amanda were asked to leave. This also happened when they and their children tried to learn how to meditate from a Buddhist monk who turned out to be a jerk.]

Religious Naturalism: sound science with a topping of awe

Thanks to a comment by Alex on a recent post about the wonders of the universe, I learned about Religious Naturalism -- which I wasn't very familiar with before. (Alex is with the Unitarian Universalists Hong Kong, UUHK.)

May I introduce the philosophical/religious position which explores the religious depth (feelings of wonder, awe, inspiration, reverence, and humility; and contemplation of life and death) of the Universe as understood by science: Religious Naturalism

More information:

http://faculty.uml.edu/rinnis/2000_stone_2_1.pdf

http://www.religiousnaturalism.org

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_naturalism

In my opinion, your article is a wonderful exposition of Religious Naturalism (if you don't mind being so described).

No, Alex, I don't mind. Browsing through the links you shared, I felt quite comfortable with this philosophy.

Some questions in the FAQs of ReligiousNaturalism.org cleared up one perplexity. If I believe in the natural world, but not in a supernatural realm, why would it be desirable for me to preface my philosophy of life, natualism, with "religious"? I sort of agree with the answers, but not entirely.

What makes a religious naturalist religious?

Our attitudes makes us religious. Being religious is not about rituals and churches, but about how we feel and address our philosophy of life. Theologian Loyal Rue expresses this well in his book (Religion is not about God), where religion is depicted as an attitude toward life (see our book store). Most naturalistic groups do not express the importance of this attitude as strongly as we do. For more see Goals of RN - Spirituality.

Why use the word religious when it carries so much baggage for so many people?

The Latin root of legere (as in ligament) means "to bind together", and thus religion is a fine word to describe the holding together of the components that make up a personal philosophy and way of life.

Interpretive religious responses also address the big questions asked by humans such as : Why is there anything at all rather than nothing? Where did everything come from? Does the universe/my life have a purpose? How do I think about death?.?

Well, I still wondered about that "religious" word. I don't want to be associated with it, though I do resonate with some of the feelings often associated with a belief in God: awe, wonder, reverence, gratitude.

I just direct those feelings toward the seemingly impersonal universe rather than a personal divinity. Looking up at the sky on a crisp, clear, moonless Oregon night, my sensations probably bear more than a little resemblance to how a religious believer feels while worshipping.

So parts of an essay by Jerome A. Stone, "What is Religious Naturalism?", spoke to me. Clicking on the link shared by Alex, I read on page 5:

Gradually I have developed a technical theory of sacredness. It goes something like this. The word "sacred" is a word we use to describe events, things, processes which are of overriding importance and yet are not under our control or within our power to manipulate. In this sense these four events and others are sacred. But there are further twists.

The stance for living which flows from this emphasis on the sacred is essentially that of openness, of readiness for the appearance of sacred events. Disciplined preparation and loyal commitment to the sacred are called for but need to be balanced by a recognition that the sacred is essentially unmanipulable. Thus Confucian focusing of heart and mind needs to be balanced by a Taoist openness to the spontaneous play of the sacred.

This is one of the events Stone mentioned -- not exactly the usual sort of religious sacredness.

One summer evening walking in a park after dinner my wife and I heard a presence just over our heads and looked up just in time to see a kestrel catch a junco in midair and carry it in its bloody claws to eat on a nearby telephone pole. It gave us both a thrill at the excellence of the hunter and a vivid realization that this struggle so close to us was yet quite other than our concerns.

For me, "Wow!" encapsulates the sacred feeling Stone is talking about. (See here and here.)

Science can take us a long ways. Still, only so far. Facts are one thing, meanings another. There are objective realities and subjective apprehensions of them.

I've got little problem with religion so long as it respects scientific discoveries instead of trying to usurp them. If your theology can comfortably mesh with big bang cosmology and evolutionary biology, go for it. Whatever turns you on.

Religious Naturalism strikes me as being the icing on a scientific cake. Some people may enjoy the cake just fine without any topping. For others, though, an additional delicious taste of quasi-religious Wow! will be more appealing.

No need for God with "Wonders of the Universe"

I felt awe, inspiration, reverence, humility. Not from a religious ritual, holy book, or spiritual sage -- from the first episode I've watched of a BBC science program, "Wonders of the Universe."

Youthful-looking physicist Brian Cox explained in Children of the Stars how the same 92 naturally occurring elements are found everywhere in the universe. So what we are, the universe is.

I've heard this before, many times.

But the way Cox put it seemed new and fresh. In the clip below he says that the building blocks of the universe -- protons and neutrons -- formed within the first few seconds after the big bang (which banged away 13.7 billion years ago).

Everything that's happened since has been a rearranging of those building blocks into increasingly complex structures, one of which is the human brain that now has achieved a good understanding of how it came to be able to understand.

Wow. Think about it. Marvel about it.

You, me, everything and everybody on Earth, the entirety of 100 billion galaxies each containing hundreds of billions of stars -- all of this came into being some 14 billion years ago.

The protons and neutrons in the nucleus of the atoms we're made of have been around that long. The atoms themselves are less old. The heavy elements (heavier than hydrogen and helium) are younger still, since they couldn't be formed until stars collapsed in upon themselves, forming additional elements through nuclear fusion.

BIgger the star, the more dramatic is the fusion process. The heaviest elements, like gold, are formed in super nova explosions where the temperature briefly reaches 100 billion degrees before the star dies in an amazingly powerful fashion.

Have a look at how Cox explains this.

I don't like the idea of dying. Yet as I watched Children of the Stars I felt more at peace about the notion of death. I saw that if stars hadn't died, Earth never would have formed. Nor would we humans exist.

Death and life are inseparable. Religions offer the promise of everlasting life, but this isn't the reality of the universe. Science can't disprove the hypothesis of eternal existence in some heavenly realm, yet neither is there any demonstrable evidence of this.

What we know, with near scientific certainty, are the truths presented by Brian Cox. We are made of stardust, heavy elements formed by exploding stars over the 14 billion year old age of the universe.

If there is a God, this is how God created us: as free-floating protons and neutrons which evolved over an immense span of time via the laws of nature into us Homo sapiens.

In a review of "Wonders of the Universe" I learned about what Cox says in another episode:

"Life as we know it," Professor Cox explained at one point, "is only possible for one thousandth of a billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth of a percent" of the lifespan of the universe. And of that barely conceivable fraction, a human life occupies only a tiny space.

Well, here we are. Amazingly. Yet also, utterly predictably.

The universe is what it is. We can't say about the universe as a whole, "what are the chances..." The chance is 100% that human beings came to occupy the planet we call Earth during the astoundingly small percentage of the lifespan of the universe that Cox says is suitable for life as we know it.

Gratitude.

This was perhaps the strongest emotion I felt after watching Children of the Stars. I wasn't grateful to a personal (or even impersonal) god, because I don't believe in the existence of such an entity.

Rather, I was filled with gratitude that out of all of the countless heavy element atoms in the cosmos, a bunch had come together into a form I call "me" that possessed the ability to be conscious.

Religions offer up unreasonable expectations, albeit appealing. Sure, I'd like to live forever. If the essence of my being was "eternal soul," "cosmic consciousness," or such, supposedly this could happen.

But reality teaches otherwise. As Cox explained, it's much more likely that the atoms which comprise my body will become part of other entities in the universe after I die. My consciousness will end when my brain does.

Bob, my brother-in-law, was a practical, mechanical, scientifically-minded person. We didn't talk philosophy a lot. Once though, he shared what he thought would happen after he died.

"I think that my atoms will go back into the universe," he told me. Pretty damn simple.

At the time, I was heavy into my true believing phase. I wanted to believe that my soul would survive my bodily death, that my consciousness not only would persist into an afterlife but expand.

Now, I've come to better appreciate the wisdom of Bob's reality-based view of life and death. It's better to see things as they are, not as we would wish them to be. And what we are is the universe. There's no difference between us and the cosmos. We are stardust; stardust is us.

If it turns out that I'm more than this, my post-death experience will be a lot more interesting than I expect (after all, anything is more than zero). If not, I'm grateful that I live in an era when modern science can be explained so wonderfully by people like Brian Cox.

There are many wonders of the universe. Foremost, perhaps, is our ability to wonder at the wonders.

Life is as absurd as we make it

Is life absurd? Sometimes it seems to be.

I ponder how large the universe is (a hundred billion or so galaxies, each with a hundred billion or so stars) and how old it is (about 13.7 billion years), and compare this with my puny earthly existence.

How insignificant I am compared to the cosmos! How absurd it is that I consider my life to mean anything in light of my miniscule'ness!

And yet...

If you want to know how a philosopher persuasively addresses that and yet, give Thomas Nagel's "The Absurd" a read.

I did so yesterday, finding it pleasingly thought-provoking. Here's one reading option, albeit with an annoyingly large line length. Or you can read the original piece in The Journal of Philosophy as a PDF file.
Download Nagel-The-Absurd

I don't claim to have digested all of the meaty/tofuy philosophical subtleties in Nagel's piece. But these are some general impressions gained from my first perusal of "The Absurd."

We find life absurd when there seems to be a disconnect between something vast or transcendent, and our little human life. We envision the grandness of the entire universe, comparing it to ourselves. Or we imagine the greatness of God, reaching a similar absurdist conclusion.

So absurdity basically involves asking "compared to what?" Nagel says that mice don't worry about their lives being absurd. Only humans have the capacity for self-awareness and self-reflection that allows for a feeling of this is absurd.

Religion is one way people cope with that feeling.

Relgious believers enlarge their absurdly small selves by identifying with the creator of the cosmos. In a similar fashion, other people cast their lot with a political party, social cause, or some other entity that gives them a sense of "this is bigger than myself."

Yet in the end, there is no end. Meaning, we can never know where a chain of causes and effects leads. I can devote my life to a noble cause, but when I die (and even while I live) I can't completely understand what meaning this has for the world.

Heck, I could be screwing things up more than I'm helping to improve a situation.

Nagel says that humanity might come to realize that we are being raised by aliens as a food source. In that case, being a tasty meal would be the meaning of my life. However, I then have to ask: Are these aliens good? Is keeping them alive positive or negative?

One way of dealing with absurdity is to not be drawn into the sort of comparison mentioned above. We simply live life, not caring much (or at all) whether we're doing something important or significant. This is difficult, though, because we humans have an innate drive to ponder our position in life beyond a simple "this is it."

Here's some quotes from "The Absurd" to whet your appetite for reading more. I'll start with my favorite quote -- how Nagel ends his piece.

If a sense of the absurd is a way of perceiving our true situation (even though the situation is not absurd until the perception arises), then what reason can we have to resent or escape it? Like the capacity for epistemological skepticism, it results from the ability to understand our human limitations.

It need not be a matter for agony unless we make it so. Nor need it evoke a defiant contempt of fate that allows us to feel brave or proud. Such dramatics, even if carried on in private, betray a failure to appreciate the cosmic unimportance of the situation.

If sub specie aeternitatis [eternally true] there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that doesn't matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.

And here's Nagel's opening thoughts.

Most people feel on occasion that life is absurd, and some feel it vividly and continually. Yet the reasons usually offered in defense of this conviction are patently inadequate: they could not really explain why life is absurd. Why then do they provide a natural expression for the sense that it is?

Consider some examples.

It is often remarked that nothing we do now will matter in a million years. But if that is true, then by the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now. In particular, it does not matter now that in a million years nothing we do now will matter. Moreover, even if what we did now were going to matter in a million years, how could that keep our present concerns from being absurd ? If their mattering now is not enough to accomplish that, how would it help if they mattered a million years from now?     

Whether what we do now will matter in a million years could make the crucial difference only if its mattering in a million years depended on its mattering, period. But then to deny that whatever happens now will matter in a million years is to beg the question against its mattering, period; for in that sense one cannot know that it will not matter in a million years whether (for example) someone now is happy or miserable, without knowing that it does not matter, period.

Lastly, here's the alien hypothesis, mixed in with some godly ponderings.

One may try to escape the position by seeking broader ultimate concerns, from which it is impossible to step back—the idea being that absurdity results because what we take seriously is something small and insignificant and individual. Those seeking to supply their lives with meaning usually envision a role or function in something larger than themselves.

They therefore seek fulfillment in service to society, the state, the revolution, the progress of history, the advance of science, or religion and the glory of God. But a role in some larger enterprise cannot confer significance unless that enterprise is itself significant. And its significance must come back to what we can understand, or it will not even appear to give us what we are seeking.

If we learned that we were being raised to provide food for other creatures fond of human flesh, who planned to turn us into cutlets before we got too stringy—even if we learned that the human race had been developed by animal breeders precisely for this purpose—that would still not give our lives meaning, for two reasons.

First, we would still be in the dark as to the significance of the lives of those other beings; second, although we might acknowledge that this culinary role would make our lives meaningful to them, it is not clear how it would make them meaningful to us.

Admittedly, the usual form of service to a higher being is different from this. One is supposed to behold and partake of the glory of God, for example, in a way in which chickens do not share in the glory of coq au vin. The same is true of service to a state, a movement, or a revolution. People can come to feel, when they are part of something bigger, that it is part of them too. They worry less about what is peculiar to themselves, but identify enough with the larger enterprise to find their role in it fulfilling.

However, any such larger purpose can be put in doubt in the same way that the aims of an individual life can be, and for the same reasons. It is as legitimate to find ultimate justification there as to find it earlier, among the details of individual life.

But this does not alter the fact that justifications come to an end when we are content to have them end—when we do not find it necessary to look any further. If we can step back from the purposes of individual life and doubt their point, we can step back also from the progress of human history, or of science, or the success of a society, or the kingdom, power, and glory of God, and put all these things into question in the same way.

What seems to us to confer meaning, justification, significance, does so in virtue of the fact that we need no more reasons after a certain point. 

"Spiritual bypassing" is an inhuman religious affliction

Whether you've belonged to a Western or Eastern variety of religion -- Christianity or Buddhism, say -- almost certainly you know the sort of person Robert Masters is talking about in his book "Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters."

When I'd come across one of them, I'd think, "Good god, just act like a normal human being instead of a pseudo-saint!" They'd be irritatingly self-righteous, emotionally detached, and uncaring about how they treated other people.

Masters says:

Signs of spiritual bypassing at work are perhaps most commonly seen in the minimizing, superficializing, or outright negation of our shadow side and so-called negativity. Other behaviors include taking global or impersonal stands on clearly personal concerns, as when we might talk about the "fact" that everthing is perfect, all unfolding exactly as it must, while we are talking to another in a demeaning way.

Or in response to someone's suffering we may say "It's all an illusion, including your suffering" or "It's just your ego." delivering one-liners with minimal feeling, much like newscasters reporting both the shallow and the deeply tragic in the very same professionally modulated tone of voice. By ducking into aphorisms of the absolute we distance ourselves from their pain and our own.

...Spiritual bypassing is especially common in spiritual paths that treat ego as something to eradicate, something in the way of spiritual realization, rather than an activity to illuminate and integrate with the rest of our being.

I've got a Master's Degree in Social Work. So does my wife, a LCSW (Licensed Clinical Social Worker) who was a psychotherapist in private practice for quite a few years. Thus I feel qualified in setting forth a pithy professional diagnosis of religious believers who are heavy into spiritual bypassing.

They're screwed up!

As am I. As are we all, in ways that range from maxi-screwed to mini-screwed.

But some people fail to embrace our wonderfully human screwed-up'ness, falsely believing that because they've learned to parrot some words from the Bible, Koran, Adi Granth, Bhagavad Gita, or some other supposedly holy scripture, they are beyond normal psychological territory and can blaze their own trail into the spiritual heights.

Almost always, this is bullshit. Spiritual bypassers lose touch with their own feelings while failing to empathize with the problems of other people. Then they call this "detachment," viewing their pathology as an elevated spiritual state.

In spiritual bypassing's realm, conceptual sprituality more often than not masquerades as real spirituality. Conceptual or emotionally disconnected spirituality can be very comforting and safe, very easy to trot out, and very easy to use to rationalize our removal, especially emotionally, from the more difficult aspects of life.

Early on in his book, Masters mentions a favorite saying of spiritual bypassers that I find particularly ridiculous: "Whatever bothers you about someone is really only about you."

Huh? If I think someone is a jerk, does that mean I'm a jerk? If I see them hitting their child and get angry, does that mean I'm a child abuser? No, of course not. It bothers me that Hitler killed millions of Jews. How is this about me?

Criticisms of religious or spiritual leaders often are deflected in a similar fashion. If a flaw is pointed out in their behavior or character, their devotees will defend them by saying, "Whatever negativity is observed is only in ourselves; saints are mirrors of our own failings."

No, they're not.

If a "saint" exhibits a normal human characteristic -- greed, lust, anger, whatever -- that's because he or she is a normal human being. Take them off their unduly elevated spiritual pedestal and their behavior is seen for what it is: what all of us do.

I've only read a few chapters of "Spiritual Bypassing." So far, I'm enjoying it. Masters has some good insights into the games that spiritual aspirants play. Here he talks about something I've wondered about myself: if everything is One, how is it that some things and people are better than others?

Even the most exquisitely designed spritual methodologies can become traps, leading not to freedom but only to reinforcement, however subtle, of the "I" that wants to be a somebody who has attained or realized freedom (the very same "I" that doesn't realize there are no Oscars for awakening).

The most obvious potential traps in waiting include the belief that we should rise above our difficulties and simply embrace Oneness, even as the tendency to divide everything into positive and negative, higher and lower, spiritual and nonspiritual, runs wild in us.

If life seems pointless...

Consider what it took for life to produce the living person that you are.

"Satsangi" is a seeker of truth, not a religious devotee

The literal meaning of the Indian word, "satsangi," is someone who associates with truth. However, various religious groups have hijacked the term to mean something else: a devotee of some particular dogma.

Unless all of those dogmas are equally true, some of those "satsangis" are more genuinely associated with truth than others are.

Going further, a real satsangi is open to truth in whatever form, shape, or manner it manifests. Thus a true satsangi can't allow himself or herself to be limited by any dogmatic religious barrier. Truth has to be followed wherever it leads.

These thoughts were stimulated by an email I received recently from a guy who, like me, is an initiate of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) -- one of the Indian organizations which uses "satsangi" as a synonym for "devotee."

He wrote me about how he stopped being a speaker at RSSB meetings ("satsangs"):

Having been unable to VERIFY sant mat, I told the Master that I could no longer feel honest or competent about asserting it to others by speaking in satsang, the same approach as Sawan Singh encourages in Gems. It felt a bit presumptive.

Anyway it should be made clear that the translation of the word satsangi is: one who associates with truth. As contrasted with one who identifies with a congregation of fellow believers.

As contrasted with: one who HOPES THAT WHAT THEY BELIEVE IN WILL TURN OUT TO BE TRUE.

Satsangi does not translate as one who willingly accepts philosophical assertions.

Satsangi does not translate as a believer in hypotheses. Satsangi means....... one who is increasingly open to truth. The truth will set us free.  Simply.

"Why?" is a tricky question

Yesterday Jim, a long-time friend, sent me a link to a video of physicist Richard Feynman responding to a question about why two magnets repel/attract each other.

Simple question. But the answer isn't.

At least, not if we consider "why?" in the depth that this word deserves. Feynman, a brilliant guy, talks about how difficult it is to isolate anything from what really is an virtually endless chain of interrelationships that extend through much vaster reaches of space and time than we normally envison when we ask "why?"

Science understands this. Religions don't. They like to offer up ridiculously simplistic answers to why? questions such as "It's God's will," "Karma," "The Lord works in mysterious ways."

Regarding the last notion, my reply is: So does the natural world.

Yet if we study reality with wide open eyes that aren't restricted by religious dogma, it's possible to make some headway in understanding what is going on inside and outside our craniums.

Electromagnetism is comprehended quite well by science, as Feynman explains. However, physicists don't know how electromagnetism relates to gravity, even though it seems pretty clear that in the earliest instants of the big bang all of the forces of nature were unified.

So mystery reigns when we ask some "why?" questions, while other queries about the nature of reality have been persuasively answered by science.

Does this reduce the glory, majesty, awesomeness, and mystery of the universe in any fashion? No. In fact, scientific facts add to the marvelous meaning that the natural world holds for us.

Jim also shared with me a shorter version of the wonderful "Science Saved My Soul" video that I blogged about last year. Have a look. I found it just as inspiring the second time around.

Cutting through Buddhist and other mystical crap

OK, the title of this blog post is blunter than David Chapman's "Effing the ineffable," but what I said is pretty much the point of his well-written and entertaining essay.

A few months ago I talked about discovering Chapman's web sites, which offer a pleasingly dizzying perspective on matters philosophical, scientific, spiritual, and mystical.

His take on ineffability, plus related subjects, was equally interesting reading. Chapman said stuff that I've vaguely understood in a roughly similar fashion, but hadn't been able to pin down so clearly.

Here's some excerpts from his piece, which deserves to be read in its entirety.

In my next few posts, I am going to criticize a particular “mystical” understanding of enlightenment that is common among Western Buddhists. It is the idea that meditation is the examination of inner experience in order to discover your True Self, which is unified with The Absolute (alias God), which is the transcendant source of goodness and is the entire universe, all of which are One.

...The experience of discovering The Ultimate Truth is said to be ineffable: impossible to talk about. However, believers proceed to eff about it at great length. Is this not odd?

Their effing explains what the experience means. Invariably, what it “means” is some Big Cosmic Theory Of Life, The Universe, And Everything. The metaphysical stuff is supposedly proved by the experience. For example, we know you can become God, because Maura O’Halloran felt weird one day. (And other people have felt weird in exactly the same way back to Gautama Buddha!)

Mystics use ineffability to deflect objections to their Big Cosmic Theories two ways:

1. Ineffability is supposed to make enlightenment experiences a very special and holy mystery.
2. Ineffability is supposed to make it impossible to argue against the Big Cosmic Theory, because arguments use words.

Here I intend to strip away those defenses, as preparation for arguing (in my next few posts) against the mystical theory of enlightenment.

What is the experience of eating a chocolate brownie like? Can you describe it?

I believe it is ineffable. There is nothing you can say about chocolate that would mean anything to someone who has not tasted it.

Chocolate brownies are one of my favorite things—but I don’t think their ineffability is a big deal.

All experiences are ineffable. The best we can ever do is say “it’s like this other thing.”

There’s nothing that’s much like chocolate. Dramatic meditation experiences are also not much like anything else. But chocolate is not a special holy mystery. No one thinks the experience of chocolate implies anything about The Ultimate Nature of Reality.

So, if meditation experiences have metaphysical implications, it is not because they are ineffable.

...Immediately after declaring enlightenment ineffable, some folks eff about it until the cows have gone to bed. If you don’t accept their metaphysical claims, they may retreat to “it’s ineffable, and moreover you haven’t had the experience, so you’re not qualified to question it.” This is a shield against all possible inquiry.

They want to have their chocolate brownies and eat them too. They get to eff, because they are enlightened—or they know someone who was enlightened, or they read a book by someone who was enlightened. But you can’t object, because it’s ineffable.

This doesn’t work. If it’s ineffable, no one can eff it. If enlightenment experiences have effable metaphysical implications, the effing has to stand on its own two feet. “I had an amazing experience that I can’t say anything about, therefore God exists” is a non-starter.

Pure awareness: beyond subjective and objective?

This morning I picked up "The Mystical Mind," a book I've read several times. With every re-reading I get something more out of it. It's a terrific blend of neuroscience, philosophy, and mysticism.

I was planning to write something new about stimulating ideas I came across in the Consciousness and Reality chapter. Then I decided to check blog posts about the book that I'd shared back in 2007.

(See here, here, here, here, and here.)

Reading them over, I saw that just about everything I was planning to say, I'd already said. So if you're looking for some non-religious "spiritual" inspiration which harmonizes with modern science, click on those links.

That said... there's always more for me to say. And to quote what others say.

Today I was struck by how the authors, Eugene d'Aquili and Andrew Newberg (both are medical doctors), linked two Big Questions: how there is something rather than nothing, and the nature of subjective awareness.

It seems to us that if we start our philosophical analysis with the reality of matter and the external world, then there are fundamentally two great discontinuities in the universe.

The first discontinuity is the big bang, or more specifically, why there is something rather than nothing. This is, of course, the question that plagued Martin Heidegger and many philosophers since.

The second great discontinuity in the physical universe is the existence of subjective awareness. It simply represents an unexplainable jump from material organization to a level of reality of another order, analogous to the jump from nothing to something.

Again, we must keep in mind that all these statements are true only if we assume the primacy of material reality as our philosophical starting point.

By which they mean, stating their position in my own words and with my own mind, that these Big Questions are meaningful only within a worldview where "subjective awareness" and "objective world" are distinct realities.

Yet let's think about this.

Is there such a thing as objective awareness? Is there such a thing as subjective world? That is, do the adjectives "objective" and "subjective" add anything to our understanding of awareness and world?

For this to be true, there would have to be a difference between subjective and objective awareness, and there would have to be an objective and subjective world. Yet the authors correctly point out that everything we know about reality is the result of awareness.

Here we get into Zennish territory, koans about the nature of existence that can't be understood or explained logically, much like how quantum physics eludes either/or definitions.

The only thing that is certain is that all aspects of material reality, including the laws of science and the mind/brain itself, exist within subjective awareness. Whether they have any other substantive reality is an open question, but what is certain is that they exist within awareness.

Furthermore, what also exists within subjective awareness is the vivid sense that the external is substantively real and that matter is something other than consciousness. But this vivid sense likewise exists within awareness or is an aspect of awareness.

So how can we decide who wins the Reality Contest, subjective awareness or the objective world? d'Aquili and Newberg persuasively argue that what is most really real has to be decided by a feeling of this is really real.

There's no objective criterion for reality, because subjective awareness is how everything we know about reality comes to be known. Seemingly this leaves us stuck in solipsism.

However, "The Mystical Mind" posits a neuroscientifically believable state of Absolute Unitary Being (AUB). People who claim to have experienced this state describe it as neither subjective or objective.

Intriguing.

This isn't any sort of other-worldly mystical state, according to the authors. They describe how, physioloogically, the brain can produce a feeling of oneness that transcends our usual feeling that there's a difference between subjective me and the objective world.

Our neurophysiological model of how this state is generated (i.e. by deafferation of areas of the parietal lobe) seems to be confirmed in our brain-imaging studies of mature contemplation in Tibetan Buddhist meditators.

Thus, there can be little doubt that AUB exists, even it is a relatively rare state. From the point of view of our concerns here, AUB has an interesting property. Neither during the experiencing of AUB nor upon subsequent recollection is this state ever perceived as subjective.

Although it is attained by going deeply within the subject, once it is attained, it is perceived as neither subjective nor objective. Indeed, from a phenomenological perspective, AUB or pure awareness seems to be anterior to either subject or object.

Of course, awareness of something is clearly perceived to be a subjective state. But as difficult as this notion may be to understand, pure awareness seems to be neither subject nor object when analyzed by the meditator after the fact. It seems to be the only state to which humans have access that eludes the categories of subjectivity and objectivity.

Just because religion works for you, doesn't mean it's for me

Every time someone leaves a comment on one of my blog posts about how their religious practice, meditation approach, or whatever, is just absolutely wonderful, how it's benefited them so much, and that I'm a fool for not jumping into the spiritual pool they they find marvelously refreshing, I think...

OK. It's great that you enjoy what you're doing. But what does this have to do with me? Or anyone else?

Some people really like to drink whiskey. Others, wine. Still others, beer. Then there's teetotalers who won't touch a drop of anything alcoholic. Each person could eloquently praise the glory of how drinking such-and-such, or abstaining, leads to good feelings, happiness, bliss, a pleasant life.

Yet whatever pleases one person, whatever works for them, might not be my cup of tea (or a stronger concoction). Hardly anybody disagrees about this when it comes to beverages, food, music, art, vacation spots, computers, cars, TV shows, movies, or other lifestyle choices.

My wife and I know quite a few people who love going on cruises. We listen to their stories of how wonderful it is to get on a big ship, visit interesting ports of call, relax on deck as the ocean slips by, and so on.

Then we say to ourselves, not for us.

Neither of us has ever been on a cruise. We probably never will go on one. We can appreciate why other people like them, but we're so certain that this isn't for us, we don't have any desire to spend time and money on something we're pretty sure we won't like.

Ditto for religion.

I've got no problem with true believers speaking about how good their religion, spiritual path, mystic practice, or such makes them feel. I enjoy happy people. If you find something that helps you enjoy life, great. Go for it.

Just don't take the next preachy step and say, "You've got to try it too!" No, I don't. Thanks for sharing, but don't expect me to embrace what you find so huggable.

Now, in some spheres there is so much solid evidence that X, Y, or Z is bad for people, it makes sense to be fairly aggressive in warning a friend, relative, or loved one about the consequences of doing something. Or conversely, to encourage them to do A, B, or C -- because of the proven benefits.

With religiosity, though, proof of general effectiveness is lacking.

Every approach to spirituality should come with a warning label: "Your results may vary." We're not talking about truth here, but about likes and dislikes, good feelings and bad feelings. There's no demonstrable objective reality lying behind the supernatural claims of the world's many competing religions.

Some faiths appeal to some people. Other's don't. Some faiths work for some people. Other's don't. Liking something doesn't mean it is universally true.

God responds to Rick Perry

Well, that didn't take long. God has already reacted to Texas Governor Rick Perry's prayer rally.

The Supreme Being isn't pleased. Turns out he isn't even supreme. Read the revelation. Here's part of God's blunt message.

Let me tell you something else,  Rick: I didn’t give you those commandments and I didn’t send my only begotten son to help you out.  I don’t care whose ox gores a foreigner or what you do with your neighbour’s ass.  And I certainly never had an interest in first century Palestinian virgins.  They’re all stories Rick, stories.

The fact is, I’ve never really done anything, so you can’t count on me to change the market place, or people’s cheatin’ hearts, or fish you out of the financial swamp you’re making for yourself. You know how you prayed to me (you used to call me “Merciful God” and cry when you were loaded) to make “everything OK” with the girl you thought you got pregnant ?  Sorry I couldn’t help–not even offer you a tissue.

Is consciousness a "president" or "press secretary"?

Yesterday my Tai Chi instructor asked a question after about twenty minutes of class, during which we'd repeated the short Five Animal form several times.

"Did the Five Animal feel differently the first time you did it, compared to the last time?" I was one of the first to answer.

"At first," I said, "I was thinking about how to open and close my rear foot, among other things. But eventually it seemed like my body was doing what it need to do by itself, naturally, no thinking required."

Other people made similar comments. By and large, with one exception, my classmates -- along with the instructor -- felt that their monkey minds had slowed down after they'd settled into a Tai Chi groove.

This got me to thinking about an interesting passage that I'd read not long ago in Timothy Wilson's "Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious." His book is about how our conscious minds are just the tip of a much larger brain iceberg that decides how we behave, feel, and so on.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett notes that this view equates consciousness with the press secretary than with the president. The press secretary can observe and report on the workings of the mind but has no role in setting policy and is not privy to many of the decisions made behind the closed door of the Oval Office. It's an observer, not a player.

How can this be, you might ask, when it so often feels as though we are consciously controlling our actions? Recent work by Daniel Wegner and Thalia Wheatley suggests an answer: the experience of conscious will is often an illusion akin to the "third variable" problem in correlational data.

We often experience a thought followed by an action, and assume it was the thought that caused that action. In fact a third variable, a non-conscious intention, might have produced both the conscious thought and the action.

My decision to get up off the couch and get something to eat, for example, feels very much like a consciously willed action, because before standing up I had the conscious thought "a bowl of cereal with strawberries would taste good right now." It is possible, however, that my desire to eat arose nonconsciously and caused both my conscious thought about cereal and my trip to the kitchen.

This makes a lot of sense to me. It fits with how I see my daily life unfolding.

Faced with a choice, a situation where I'm uncertain what to do, often it seems like my conscious awareness is a step behind an unseen "intuition" (for want of a better word) that propels me in a certain direction.

Meaning, I've already decided by the time a thought arises, "I should... ."

As I become more and more aware of how unaware I am of where my intentions come from, life seems a lot more lively -- less predictable, more spontaneous, marked by an energetic flow that bubbles out of who-knows-where.

Well, I'm pretty sure about the general location of this nonconscious current: my brain. Such also is the conclusion of modern neuroscience, which doesn't find any evidence of a nonbodily source of human consciousness.

Religious believers, of course, consider that those hunches, feelings, intuitions, unexpected thoughts, and other mind messages that appear unbidden come from God (or some other form of divinity).

Doubtful. And unnecessary. As Pierre-Simon Laplace said about God:

I had no need of that hypothesis. ("Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là", as a reply to Napoleon, who had asked why he hadn't mentioned God in his book on astronomy.)

Religion, spirituality, and mysticism mostly operate in a sphere of conceptual thought. So can I when I'm doing Tai Chi, but it isn't necessary.

I've found that, in accord with the above-mentioned third variable hypothesis, both Tai Chi and life in general go along just fine when, as much as possible, I let things unfold in accord with nonconscious intentions absent conscious thought.

For example, I can simply have a unspoken feeling that this is a good place to park my car without thinking "I should park here." Religious believers should give this sort of wordlessness a try.

Instead of constantly praising God, thanking God, seeking guidance from God, a guru, or another manifestation of godliness, go through life without trying to figure out  where an intention, action, or feeling comes from.

As Wilson explains in his book, the adaptive unconscious is a mystery to us. We have no access to its workings. Ditto with God. But the hidden side of the brain is real, whereas God -- so far we know -- isn't.

We indeed are being guided by a Higher Power. It just happens to be inside our cranium, not far off in a heavenly realm.

Rick Perry's prayer rally reeks of fanaticism

Reading about Texas Governor Rick Perry's prayer rally, which likely is a kickoff to him becoming a Republican candidate for president of the United States, I wonder how his religious fanaticism would be viewed if he were a Muslim speaking of the need for people to embrace Allah and the Koran in order to return our nation to greatness.

"Father, our heart breaks for America. We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government, and as a nation we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us, and for that we cry out for your forgiveness," Perry said.

If someone seeking to lead Egypt talked in this fashion about how Islam had to be the foundation of that country's political processes, lots of Americans would worry about the dangers of Muslim extremism.

But Christian extremism is OK to them. Hypocrisy is running wild in the Republican party these days. In non-Christian countries, they favor "separation of church and state." In the United States, though, bringing God into politics is just fine.

Isaac Asimov: some wrongs are wronger than others

One of the more ridiculous criticisms of science by religious believers is "Scientific facts often turn out to be proven wrong."

Well, in a narrow sense that's true, but American author and biochemist Isaac Asimov shows how it's also broadly false in an interesting essay, "The Relativity of Wrong."

His basic point is that there are gradations of wrongness. In response to someone who wrote him a letter praising Socrates' proposition that the wisest man knows he knows nothing, Asimov said:

My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.

Great point.

Global warming skeptics make this absurd conclusion when they nitpick details of climatology research findings, claiming that if every conclusion made by any scientist who affirms the reality of human-caused climate change isn't 100% correct, then global warming has a 0% chance of being true.

I also see this attitude reflected in comments on my blog posts by religiously-minded people.

Just like Asimov's corresondent, John, they'll point to how some scientific theory has been shown to be wrong in some respects -- which must mean that science is wrong about God, the supernatural, consciousness being separable from the brain, and such.

But Asimov reminds us:

In short, my English Lit friend, living in a mental world of absolute rights and wrongs, may be imagining that because all theories are wrong, the Earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after.

What actually happens is that once scientists get hold of a good concept they gradually refine and extend if with a greater and greater subtlety as their instruments of measurement improve. Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.

Religion's bad arguments against the big bang

The day after I wrote my previous blog post, "Mystery of existence eludes both religion and science," I returned to reading Michael Shermer's new book, The Believing  Brain.

I came across a section in his "Belief in God" chapter that reminded me of points made in my post -- which isn't surprising, given that (1) Shermer's arguments are fairly obvious, and (2) almost certainly Shermer and I have read the same ungodly books by Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, and other religious skeptics.

Have a read:

The problem we face with the God question is that certainty is not possible when we bump up against such ultimate questions as "What was there before time began?" or "If the big bang marked the beginning of all time, space, and matter, what triggered the first act of creation?"

The fact that science presents us with a question mark on such questions doesn't faze scientists because theologians hit the same epistemological wall. You just have to push them one more step.

In my debates and dialogues with theologians, theists, and believers, the exchange usually goes something like this for the question of what triggered the big bang, or the first act of creation.

God did it.

Who created God?

God is he who needs not be created.

Why can't the universe be "that which needs not be created"?

The universe is a thing or an event, whereas God is an agent or being, and things and events have to be created by something, but an agent or being does not.

Isn't God a thing if he is part of the universe?

God is not a thing. God is an agent or being.

Don't agents and beings have to be created as well? We're an agent, a being -- a human being, in fact. We agree that human beings need an explanation for our origin. So why does this causal reasoning not apply to God as agent and being?

God is outside of time, space, and matter, and thus needs no explanation.

If that is the case, then it is not possible for any of us to know if there is a God or not because, by definition, as finite beings operating exclusively within the world we can only know other natural and finite beings and objects. It is not possible for a natural finite being to know a supernatural infinite being.

...The burden of prooof is on believers to prove God's existence -- not on nonbelievers to disprove it -- and to date theists have failed to prove God's existence, at least by the high evidentiary standards of science and reason.

So we return again to the nature of belief and the origin of belief in God. I have built a strong case that belief in a supernatural agent with intention is hardwired in our brains, and that the agent as God was created by humans and not vice versa.

Mystery of existence eludes both religion and science

"Why is there something rather than nothing?" This is the ultimate question. So ultimate'y, it shouldn't be viewed as a question, because questions imply answers.

I prefer, "There is something rather than nothing."

Leave out the "why." Embrace the stark, unarguable reality of existence. Forget God. Something must exist or God couldn't exist. So my awe is directed toward existence, not God.

Existence is everlasting, eternal, omnipresent, unfathomable. Wild! If I want to feel a tingle up my psyche's spine before I fall into sleep, I ponder there is something rather than nothing as I doze off.

(Some reflections of my ponderings are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Last week a fresh New Scientist issue arrived in the mail. Glancing at the cover I was excited to read:

The Existential Issue
The staggering mysteries of being
(and how to cope with them)

Appropriately, the first mystery tackled in the existential issue was "Why is there something rather than nothing?" After all, without something, there'd be no other mysteries.

I liked the mixture of science and philosophy in the article by Amanda Gefter. In less than three minutes you can get the gist of how modern cosmology looks upon this question in the following New Scientist video.

(My favorite part: "something and nothing may well be the same thing." The universe is just a form of nothing. Ooh! So Zen!

Still, this doesn't really answer the question of why anything exists at all. Gefter acknowledges the untouched mystery of existence in her final paragraph.

None of this really gets us off the hook, however. Our understanding of creation relies on the validity of the laws of physics, particularly quantum uncertainty.

But that implies that the laws of physics were somehow encoded into the fabric of our universe before it existed. How can physical laws exist outside of space and time and without a cause of their own?

Or, to put it another way, why is there something rather than nothing?

Religious believers will seize upon this admission of science's inability to peek behind the curtain of why existence exists and exclaim, "God is the only answer!" To which I reply, "Wrong!"

God, whether viewed as a personal or impersonal power, fills precisely the same role in theology as do the laws of physics in science.

That is, a given. Something for which no cause is offered. A brute fact, wihout which no other facts are possible.

OK. To me, it's a tie. Both religion and science are clueless about the ultimate question: why is there something rather than nothing? Each offers up an answer that doesn't satisfy.

"God created the universe." Fine. So tell me, what created God?

"The universe was created by a quantum fluctuation." Fine. So tell me, what created the quantum fluctuation?

What is simply is. There is something rather than nothing. I find this eminently satisfying. More than that, actually, much more. It's awesome. Mindblowing. Astoundingly meaningful.

Why? LIke existence itself, there's no why.

The three wisest words in the world: "I don't know"

I've got some affirmations for you that will change your life. Repeat them over and over in your mind until they seem to be part and parcel of you. Because in truth, they already are.

"I don't know."
"I'm clueless."
"I have no idea what's going on."
"It's all a mystery to me."

None of us knows how we know. That's a neuroscientific fact.

I talked about this a few years ago in Knowing that you know: impossible. This blog post was based on a terrific book by Robert Burton, "On Being Certain."

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.

...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.

Holy books, gurus, yogis, masters, soothsayers, enlightened beings -- these and other manifestations of supposed Perfect Knowing are the result of a human brain expressing an inherently imperfect feeling of This is true.

We can't trust such feelings, even though we have no choice but to trust them. This is reality, not paradox.

Burton explains how our sense of knowing is a neurological circuit breaker which allows us to act, to make decisions, rather than revolving in a endless loop of "could be this... could be that.."

For most of human history, people have had no understanding of how the brain really functions.

Now we know that the aforementioned "hidden layers" are where the important brain stuff happens, with conscious awareness being less than a tip of the neurological iceberg (I'm reading a book where the author calls such a snowball on top of an iceberg -- much smaller than a tip).

Back in my true believing days I used to host regular get-togethers at our house for other devotees of the Eastern meditation system we all practiced. After dinner usually the conversation would turn to exotic topics. Such as:

What happens after we die? How does karma operate? Is God a personal being or an impersonal force?

Most of us agreed about the general answers, but we loved to debate the details. After a lot of argumentative back and forth, someone would notice that one member of our group, Steve, hadn't been saying much.

In an attempt to draw him into the conversation, he'd be asked: "Steve, what do you think about all this?" His usual response:

I don't know. I haven't a clue.

For a few seconds everybody would be shocked into silence. I'd think, "Wow, that's so wonderfully honest." But then the spell would be broken. We'd get back to expressing what each of us knew was true.

Why? Because, um, we just knew that what we knew was true. Our brains were much more primed for "I know" rather than "I don't know," just as evolution has brought us Homo sapiens to be.

Today, I feel much more comfortable with being clueless about questions and issues for which reality leaves few, if any, clues.

I'm content with accepting that the methods of science are our best means of dealing with the limitations of individual brains. I'm happy with waking up each morning and realizing that I don't know what the day will bring, what will pop out of the hidden layers of my brain, and what surprises await me around the next corner of the space-time continuum.

I don't know has come to be a central pillar of my philosophy of life, not a scary black hole of cognitive emptiness lurking in the shadows of my mind. I don't know connects me with reality rather than distancing me.

This is how life is: mysterious, unpredictable, unfathomable. And I wouldn't want it any other way.