Church of the Churchless

Shermer on why a supernatural God almost certainly doesn't exist

This month's Scientific American has a great "Skeptic" column by Michael Shermer: At the Boundary of Knowledge: Is it possible to measure supernatural or paranormal phenomena?

Shermer cites physicist Sean Carroll's book (The Big Picture, which I enjoyed) in this passage.

Take our understanding of particles and forces, which Carroll says “seems indisputably accurate within a very wide domain of applicability,” such that “a thousand or a million years from now, whatever amazing discoveries science will have made, our descendants are not going to be saying ‘Haha, those silly twenty-first-century scientists, believing in ‘neutrons’ and ‘electromagnetism.’”

Thus, Carroll concludes that the laws of physics “rule out the possibility of true psychic powers.” Why? Because the particles and forces of nature don’t allow us to bend spoons, levitate or read minds, and “we know that there aren’t new particles or forces out there yet to be discovered that would support them. Not simply because we haven’t found them yet, but because we definitely would have found them if they had the right characteristics to give us the requisite powers.”

Excellent points. After thousands of years of recorded human history, there is precisely zero solid demonstrable evidence of supernatural psychic powers. Which means, the chance is extremely close to zero that such powers exist.

In his next concluding passages, Shermer also demolishes the likelihood of a supernatural God.

What about a supernatural God? Perhaps such an entity exists outside nature and its laws. If so, how would we detect it with our instruments? If a deity used natural forces to, say, cure someone’s cancer by reprogramming the cancerous cells’ DNA, that would make God nothing more than a skilled genetic engineer. If God used unknown supernatural forces, how might they interact with the known natural forces? And if such supernatural forces could somehow stir the particles in our universe, shouldn’t we be able to detect them and thereby incorporate them into our theories about the natural world? Whence the supernatural?

It is at the horizon where the known meets the unknown that we are tempted to inject paranormal and supernatural forces to explain hitherto unsolved mysteries, but we must resist the temptation because such efforts can never succeed, not even in principle.

When I believed in a divine power that existed above and beyond the bounds of the natural world, arguments like these threatened my spiritual sensibilities. 

Now, I worship at the Altar of Reality. So I'm attracted to whatever brings me closer to what is real, even if these truths are difficult to accept. I'd prefer that a loving God was waiting to embrace my immortal soul after I die.

But what I prefer and what is real outside of my preferring brain often are very different things. We've got to choose which to pay the most attention to.

"Anxious time" is mental. "Calm time" is physical.

Here's another chapter in my never-ending story of Observations About the Cosmos That Are Either Astoundingly Brilliant or Fucking Obvious.

I've figured out where anxiety comes from! And how to cure it! 

OK, let's make that my anxiety. Your results may vary. Consult a qualified professional rather than this blog post if you're really being driven crazy by uncontrollable worrying.

The sort of anxiety I'm talking about manifests in me as a sort of negative mental background buzz. I'll be lying in bed before going to sleep at night, or my senior citizen afternoon nap, idly thinking about stuff in my life, and I'll notice that instead of my state of mind being neutral or positive, there's a mildly bothersome feeling of something is wrong. 

That feeling is so common, usually I don't even notice it. Like I said, it's more like a gray mental background that makes thoughts and feelings which pass in front of it more darkly worrisome than they would be otherwise.

A mild tendency toward negativity is another way of putting it, as if my mind is habitually anticipating a less cheery future than the situation I'm pondering really deserves. 

A few days ago, I had a sudden intuitive realization: what's going on here is a Time Problem.

Before I describe that realization, I'll note that this particular Observation About the Cosmos also explains a feeling I sometimes get after ingesting some vaporized marijuana. (In Oregon, where I live, marijuana is legal.) Here too, a feeling of anxiety seems to be a Time Problem.

In both cases -- stoned and not-stoned -- my mind appears to be operating on a different time scale than the rest of physical reality. The stoned case is easier to analyze, because for me and many other marijuana users, time seems to slow down when I'm high. 

So, for example, after smoking some pot I'll be brushing my teeth with an electric toothbrush that has a timer and think, "This is taking longer than it should." It isn't, of course. When I stop thinking that thought and just focus on the physical act of brushing my teeth, any feeling of should goes away. 

What I mean is, paying attention to physical reality as fully as possible makes my sense of internal time pleasantly mesh with the passage of events in the world. If I'm high after ingesting some marijuana, the events seem to go slower. Which isn't a problem, because I'm an integral part of those events. Time and Me are one, not two.

(If this doesn't make sense, smoke some pot, then read the preceding paragraph again.)

By contrast, I've noticed that in both my stoned and not-stoned states, a mild sense of anxiety arises when my Mental Time conflicts with Physical Time. Now, I realize that nobody, including scientists, has a genuine grasp of what "time" is. I'm speaking about it in the commonsense understanding of things happening one after the other.

So when I'd idly thinking about what I have to do in the future, or what I've done in the past, the sense of worry that often comes across me seems to have its root in a time mismatch. I feel out of sync, or out of sorts, because the objective passage of time in the physical world that surrounds me is different from the subjective sense of time in the mental world within my brain.

Another way of putting it: The world moves at a slower pace than my thoughts and feelings do.

Thus when I think along the lines of "tonight I've got to write a blog post about X," there will be a certain anxiousness associated with that thought -- because my mind is projecting an image of tonight and the physical world is still at 3 pm on a sunny Oregon day.

Sure, this is Meditation/Mindfulness 101, not an astounding fresh insight. But I still find this Observation About the Cosmos a revelation. For me. Again, your results may vary.

All I have to do to regain a sense of calm, a feeling of everything is just fine with the world, is to re-focus my attention on... the world. The physical world, not my mental world. Lying in bed, being aware of my breathing, the weight of my head on a pillow, any sounds coming from outside the room -- now I feel totally relaxed. 

The world is going at the same speed as I am. I am going at the same speed as the world. World and me are in sync, together, in harmony, not at odds. Which feels good.

(Final attempt at a succinct description of what is essentially indescribable: Physical time moves at a constant speed for me; Mental time typically moves at a faster speed for me.)

"Incomplete Nature" shows how life is based on absence

Demonstrating some spousal exaggeration, my wife has been saying that she fears being crushed by a pile of books I've read that are awaiting my blogging attention.

(I made sure to include a chair in this photo for scale; unless Laurel shrinks to two feet tall, I think she has nothing to worry about. However, I will admit that there's another pile behind this one, so combined they could possibly be a risk to wifely health.)

The top light green book, 600 pages thick, seemed like a good place to start on reducing the pile. It is Terrence W. Deacon's densely written, yet provocative, "Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter."

This is one of those books that makes me think, If I can read this sucker all of the way through, and understand a good share of it, that compensates for not doing other senior citizen brain exercises, like the New York Times crossword puzzle.

There were times (well, many times) when I felt like giving up on Incomplete Nature.

But I persevered, even when I'd read a chapter and be perplexed about what the heck Deacon was trying to say. Since he is a professor of biological anthropology and neuroscience and the chair of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, obviously Deacon has impressive intellectual and academic qualifications. 

Bottom line: this book further convinced me that life and consciousness emerged from matter, not some divine or supernatural source. However, it is really difficult for me to summarize Deacon's thesis, because it was so difficult to understand Deacon's writing.

Here's an initial stab at relating what appealed to me the most -- his emphasis on absence. 

Now, this also is a fascination of mine. I've just written about it in a much different way than Deacon has. You'll find lots of posts about absence in the "Wu Project" category in the right sidebar of this blog. My first post on this theme was in 2006, "The Wu Project."

We’re talking here about the real Wu. Which, because it signifies nothing, is pretty darn hard to say anything about. Nonetheless, I’m drawn to try. And even more perhaps: to be.

It’s a dream of mine. To be Wu. Not the Chinese character. Not the various Wu-associations Wikipedia talks about. Something else. What remains when all the somethings that I’m not are negated and just the nothing that I may be remains.

“May be” is the operative word here. There are no guarantees with Wu. It’s the ultimate mystery. You can’t rely on it for anything, because there is no thing there. Or so they say. And I tend to believe them.

Early on in his book, Deacon writes:

Each of these sorts of phenomena -- a function, reference, purpose, or value -- is in some way incomplete. There is something not there there. Without this "something" missing, they would just be plain and simple physical objects or events, lacking these otherwise curious attributes. Longing, desire, passion, appetite, mourning, loss, aspiration -- all are based on an analogous incompleteness, an integral without-ness.

As I reflect on this odd state of things, I am struck by the fact that there is no single term that seems to refer to this elusive character of such things. So, at the risk of initiating this discussion with a clumsy neologism, I will refer to this as an absential feature, to denote phenomena whose existence is determined with respect to an essential absence. 

This could be a state of things not yet realized, a specific separate object of a representation, a general type of property that may or may not exist, an abstract quality, an experience, and so forth -- just not that which is actually present. This paradoxical intrinsic quality of existing with respect to something missing, separate, and possibly nonexistent is irrelevant when it comes to inanimate things, but it is a defining property of life and mind. 

A complete theory of the world that includes us, and our experience of the world, must make sense of the way that we are shaped by and emerge from such specific absences. What is absent matters, and yet our current understanding of the physical world suggests that it should not. A causal role for absence seems to be absent from the natural sciences.

This is brilliant. Deacon had me on pages 2 and 3. I was looking forward to him building on this theme, fleshing out the notion of absence being the key to understanding life, mind, and consciousness. 

When I got to the end of his 600 pages, I felt a lack.

Which I guess is appropriate, given his emphasis on absence. I never fully grasped his argument for absential features being the foundation of living beings. But here's a simple, and decidedly incomplete, way of explaining Deacon's creative, detailed, rigorous, yet excessively abstruse take on the world.

Constraint is a concept that runs through his book. It is key to understanding thermodynamic processes. When water boils, steam is released. Without any constraints, steam just bubbles up into the air from a pot of boiling water, like when I make spaghetti. 

But when steam is constrained in certain ways, it can be used to power things, like a locomotive. Or to heat things, like an apartment building. Putting bounds on where the steam goes, restricting its freedom, so to speak, allows people to do useful things with boiling water.

Deacon writes:

But although the specific absences that constitute a constraint do not suffer the epiphenomenality of descriptive notions of organization, they are nevertheless explicitly not anything that is present. This requires that we show how what is absent is responsible for the causal power of organization and the asymmetric dynamics of a physical or living process. 

...The presence of constraint -- the absence of certain potential states -- is a critical factor in the capacity to perform work. Thus, it is only because of a restriction or constraint imposed on the release of energy (e.g, the one-directional expansion of an exploding gas in a cylinder) that a change of state can be imposed by one system on another. 

It is precisely by virtue of what is not enabled, but could otherwise have occurred, that a change can be forced.

A brilliant observation. Also, an obvious one, now that Deacon has pointed it out.

Even though I've read all of his book, I still don't grasp what he says below very well. Others may find the following even more mysterious. Or, perhaps, less so. In another blog post I'll try to explain how his absential outlook relates to mind and consciousness. 

The core insight that guides this book can be grasped by taking the Taoist metaphysics quoted at the beginning of this chapter seriously. We simply need to pay attention to the holes. As rhetorically ironic as this sounds, the thesis of this book is that the answer to the age-old riddle of teleology is not provided in terms of "nothing but..." or "something more..." but rather "something less..." This is the essence of what I am calling absentialism. 

This is the Tao Te Ching passage Deacon alludes to:

Thirty spokes converge at the wheel's hub, to a hole
   that allows it to turn.
Clay is shaped into a vessel, to enclose an emptiness
   that can be filled.
Doors and windows are cut into walls, to provide
   access to their protection.
Though we can only work with what is there, use
   comes from what is not there.
    -- LAO TSU

Mother Teresa becomes a saint despite "spiritual darkness." Hey, make me a saint too!

I was baptized Catholic. I'm immersed in spiritual darkness. I have grave doubts about God. So why can't I become a saint, since Mother Teresa has been canonized by Pope Francis despite her admitted spiritual darkness?

Here's excerpts from an AP story, Mother Teresa: a Saint Despite Spiritual 'Darkness.'

For nearly 50 years, Mother Teresa endured what the church calls a "dark night of the soul" — a period of spiritual doubt, despair and loneliness that many of the great mystics experienced, her namesake St. Therese of Lisieux included. In Mother Teresa's case, the dark night lasted most of her adult life — an almost unheard of trial.

...Take the Feb. 28, 1957 letter she wrote the then-archbishop of Kolkata, Jesuit Archbishop Ferdinand Perier.

"There is so much contradiction in my soul. Such deep longing for God, so deep that it is painful, a suffering continual, and yet not wanted by God, repulsed, empty, no faith, no love no zeal," she wrote. "Souls hold no attraction. Heaven means nothing, to me it looks like an empty place. The thought of it means nothing to me and yet this torturing longing for God."

ME TOO! 

At least the part about heaven meaning nothing, looking like an empty place. Also, the no faith part, the lack of love for God. 

The big philosophical difference between Mother Teresa and me is that her "tortured longing for God" presupposed the likelihood that God exists, whereas I also long for God -- but in the way that I long to win the MegaBucks Lottery or long to have a secret rich friend buy me a top-of-the-line Tesla and leave it in our driveway.

I'm also tortured by the failure of the cosmos to give me what I want. However, I possess enough scientific-based rationality to know that, as the Rolling Stones sang, "You can't always get what you want."

(For a decidedly non-saintly perspective on Mother Teresa, check out "Sadistic Religious Fanatic: Mother Teresa was no saint.")