Church of the Churchless

Compared to science, religion knows nothing about reality

Here's another of my wife's monthly letters to the editor of the Salem (Oregon) Statesman Journal newspaper. Her April offering was titled "Reader prefers science over religion" on the opinion page. 

Me too.

As we were driving around today, talking about this and that, including the ridiculousness of religiosity, Laurel mentioned that nothing in the Bible or any other holy book has led to any new understanding of reality in the way science does all the time.

Meaning, one would think that the prophets, sages, gurus, enlightened beings, divine sons/daughters of God, or whoever would have been privy to some fact about the world unknown to the science of their time. 

After all, religious believers consider that the founders of their faith understood ultimate reality in a profound way -- more completely and accurately than ordinary people. Well, if this is true, why didn't they describe some fact about the universe unknown to supposedly ignorant materialists?

Because, as my wife says below, religion is based on mere belief, while science is based on demonstrable facts about reality.

In science, we have ways of knowing when we are wrong. In religion, there is no way beliefs can be shown to be wrong.

This is because religion is a system of bias and mere belief, where you can rationalize and distort facts to come to the conclusion you want.

The more religious people are, the better they seem to be at rationalizing things away that make no sense.

Good things happen when you pray? Claim God did it. Bad things happen even though you prayed? Claim “it must have been God’s plan and better wisdom.”

Science can show that religious beliefs are wrong.

Religious people know this deep down, and this is why they so often resist science. The more science advances, the more threatened believers get because it keeps proving religious beliefs don’t make sense, are primitive or plain wrong.

There has never been a religious belief that has ever had any influence in promoting the real advancement of science. Instead, religion has impeded science.

In science, faith is a vice, since it can affect good exploration for the real facts. In religion, faith is considered a virtue but leads to false facts about reality.

Laurel Hines
Salem

My missing checkbook taught me a lesson about God

After getting a haircut a few days ago I reached into the pocket of my jacket where I'd put my checkbook. Problem was, no checkbook. 

"I'll have to give you cash," I told Kim, my haircutter. "Cash is good," she said. "I like cash." 

"Me too. But I also like my checkbook, and I'm pretty sure I stuck it in my jacket pocket before I left home." 

The next stop of the day in my retired life was my Tai Chi class in downtown Salem (Oregon). After I'd gotten in my car, post-haircut, I looked through my backpack and the floor of the car for the missing checkbook. 

So where the heck is my checkbook? was very much on my mind as the Tai Chi class started. I was going through the motions of the movements, but my mind was absorbed in thinking about the missing checkbook.

I recollected taking it out of a drawer before I left for my haircut appointment, since I always pay Kim with a check, not cash. I was pretty sure that I'd put it in the pocket of my jacket. I wasn't as sure that I'd zipped up the pocket. 

"I threw my jacket on a chair before Kim started cutting my hair," I mused inwardly while doing a Tai Chi form. "Maybe the checkbook slipped out and fell behind the chair. If so, hopefully either Kim or a cleaning person will notice it. But what if it gets picked up by someone else, or maybe the checkbook fell out after I parked my car and walked to Kim's salon."

These sorts of thoughts consumed my mind for about the first 20 minutes of my Tai Chi class.

I couldn't stop thinking about the hassle it would be if I'd lost the checkbook, especially since it was time to balance our bank's monthly statement, and I'm obsessive about reconciling it perfectly, to the penny. 

Eventually, though, my philosophical side started gaining some power over my worrying side. 

I remembered reading in Daniel Dennett's new book, "From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds," about the distinction between manifest and scientific reality. Here's a passage that will give you a feel for how Dennett uses these terms.

Here are a few other folk convictions that need Hume's strange inversion: sweetness is an "intrinsic" property 0f sugar and honey, which causes us to like them; observed intrinsic sexiness is what causes our lust; it was the funniness out there in the joke that caused us to laugh.

Oversimplifying somewhat, in these instances the causes and effects in the manifest image have become inverted in the scientific image. You can't find intrinsic sweetness by studying the molecular structure of glucose; look instead in the details of sweetness seekers. 

It is how our brains respond that causes "us" (in the manifest image) to "project" an illusory property into the (manifest) world.

...Our brains have tricked us into having the conviction, making the judgment, that there seems to be an intrinsically wonderful but otherwise undescribable property in some edible things: sweetness. 

So even though my way of looking at manifest and scientific was rather different from Dennett's meaning of the words, I had this intuition after I began to grow tired of thinking about my checkbook when I should have been focused on Tai Chi:

All of the worries, thoughts, concerns, and such I was having about the checkbook were manifesting in my own mind, not anywhere else. The checkbook itself -- the scientific objective reality of the checkbook -- was a different thing entirely. My checkbook was somewhere; I just didn't know where. There was a good chance it was sitting on a counter in my house, even thought my mind was almost certain that I'd put it in a pocket of the jacket that I wore to my haircut.

Once I started thinking along these lines, I relaxed. 

I realized that the checkbook was either lost, or it wasn't lost. I wouldn't know which was true until my Tai Chi class was over and I could return home. I could talk myself into believing in either possibility -- lost or not lost -- but only one of those possibilities was true, and I wouldn't know which until I walked through my front door and looked at the counter.

Where, after my Tai Chi class was over, I immediately saw my checkbook. Really Real Reality had made itself known, replacing the Might Be Reality my mind had spent considerable time pondering after my haircut.

Now, I realize that it isn't as easy to confirm the existence, or lack thereof, of God as it was to confirm that my checkbook was on the counter and hadn't been lost.

My point is just that beliefs can lead us anywhere. Religions ask us to fill our heads with possibilities about God, heaven, life after death, and such -- just as my mind had been filled with possibilities about what might have happened to my checkbook. I came to realize that no matter what I believed about where my checkbook was, the reality of where it was wasn't up to me.

And that was a big relief. Almost as big as returning home and finding my checkbook on the counter.

One of my favorite sayings comes from Philip K. Dick: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

This applies to lost checkbooks as much as it does to God.

We can believe whatever we want, but this doesn't change the reality outside of our believing mind. In my case reality confirmed that my checkbook wasn't lost. I'm not aware of any demonstrable evidence that God is real, so I continue to not believe in God's existence.

Memes like "God promises life after death" explain popularity of religion

We usually think that religions require people to believe in certain things. Like God, heaven, life after death. But what if religiosity is more akin to a tune you just can't get out of your head than a consciously arrived-at system of beliefs?

Memes, according to Wikipedia, are "ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme."

They propagate and evolve much like genes do: through natural selection. Here's how Wikipedia says memes operate in the area of religion.

Aaron Lynch attributed the robustness of religious memes in human culture to the fact that such memes incorporate multiple modes of meme transmission. Religious memes pass down the generations from parent to child and across a single generation through the meme-exchange of proselytism. Most people will hold the religion taught them by their parents throughout their life. Many religions feature adversarial elements, punishing apostasy, for instance, or demonizing infidels.

In Thought Contagion Lynch identifies the memes of transmission in Christianity as especially powerful in scope.

Believers view the conversion of non-believers both as a religious duty and as an act of altruism. The promise of heaven to believers and threat of hell to non-believers provide a strong incentive for members to retain their belief. Lynch asserts that belief in the Crucifixion of Jesus in Christianity amplifies each of its other replication advantages through the indebtedness believers have to their Savior for sacrifice on the cross. The image of the crucifixion recurs in religious sacraments, and the proliferation of symbols of the cross in homes and churches potently reinforces the wide array of Christian memes.

Makes sense to me. 

The meme hypothesis explains why core religious beliefs almost always have a strong appeal to people. By contrast, what I like to call "real reality" has lots of nasty aspects to it.

Death. Pain. Disease. Suffering. We are born. We die. In-between life and death there's both pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, good and bad. 

Such is the state of human affairs without the consolations of religion. Life after death. God's eternal love. Heavenly bliss.

It's easy to imagine how popular these notions would have been to the first Homo sapiens individuals who came up with them. And then how easily such religious memes would have found their way into other human minds. Today, get-rich-quick schemes spread like wildfire. Religious ideas would have been equally tempting to early members of our species, if not more so.

Memes don't have to be rationally (or irrationally) accepted. They're akin to viruses in that a meme can "infect" a mind without the person choosing to invite it in. People don't consciously choose to get a cold. A cold virus simply causes them to have cold symptoms.

Likewise, the meme theory of religiosity says that while religious beliefs may appear to be adopted, actually they may simply spread by virtue of their attractiveness to human minds.

Here's a short Richard Dawkins video where he talks about memes and religion.

I'm not a Christian. So why is my athletic club closed on Easter Sunday?

Some holidays are secular, like the Fourth of July or President's Day. It doesn't bother me when businesses close on a genuinely national holiday. 

But Easter? It's a purely Christian day, a celebration of Jesus supposedly being resurrected from the dead. 

I don't believe in any sort of God, including the Christian variety. Naturally I also don't believe that Jesus was the Son of God, nor that he came back to life after being dead.

Lots of other people have different reasons for not viewing Easter as any sort of special day. Many embrace some other religion. 

So why does our athletic club have a sign on the front desk saying it will be closed all day next Sunday?

My wife, an increasingly bold atheist (if you're a Jehovah's Witness, my strong advice is not to knock on our door when she's home), asked this question to the front desk staffer a few days ago.

She said something like, "We aren't Christians. Many other members aren't either. They're atheists, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, or whatever. I don't get why all of us can't use the club on a day that has meaning only to Christians. If some club staff member wants to go to an Easter Sunday service, seemingly they could trade shifts with some other staffer, or arrange to work another day."

Not surprisingly, my wife didn't get a cogent response. The person at the front desk doesn't set club policies; they just work there. 

This isn't a huge deal for us.

It just shows how deeply engrained in American culture the Christian religion is. Hopefully one day businesses won't close their doors on a day devoted to the worship of an imaginary God whose imaginary Son experienced an imaginary resurrection from the dead.

We live in an awkward in-between time of human history.

Knowledge of reality through science and the scientific method has never been greater. Yet most people still cling to pre-scientific fantasies about supernatural beings, life after death, heavenly realms, and such.

I'm totally fine with people believing in whatever they want, even if there is no demonstrable evidence for the belief. However, when their unsubstantiated faith-based belief interferes with the ability of other people to live their own lives as they want, we have a problem. 

Again, my wife and I not being to use our athletic club on Easter Sunday isn't going to ruin our lives. It just is an example of the power of religiosity to control people who don't believe in any religion. 

If somebody wants to go to a church service on Easter, that's great. Go for it. It isn't what I want to do, but just as I don't expect Christians to like what I like, I'm fine with Christians having their own likes. 

What bothers me is society as a whole -- including our athletic club in particular -- unduly elevating the likes of Christians above the likes of everybody else. I like to exercise on Sunday. If a national secular holiday falls on a Sunday, then I readily accept if a business wants to close its doors on that day.

Easter, though, is a special day only for Christians. My wife asked the front desk person at our club if they will be closing at any time during Ramadan this year, a holy month for Muslims. No big surprise: the club won't be.  

Flexible improvisation is a better way of living than rigid religion

Rules are fine. Except when they aren't. 

For me, one of the most enjoyable things about giving up on the ridiculousness of religion is no longer having to comply with rigid rules, dogmas, commandments, rituals, and such. 

Every religion has its own peculiar absurdities. Of course, what is absurd to an outsider will make sense to an insider. At least if the insider doesn't think about what's being required too much. 

Here's an example: the mystical meditation path I followed for about thirty years demanded that followers be vegetarians. This wasn't a problem for me, since I'd stopped eating meat before I learned about Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an Indian spiritual organization led by a guru who was considered to be God in human form. 

At some point in the 1990s, I believe it was, the guru decided to raise the bar on vegetarianism. Now animal rennet, a frequent ingredient in cheese, was a no-no. So RSSB followers were supposed to make sure that cheese they ate didn't contain animal-derived rennet.

Now, even though I was a strong believer in not killing animals for food, it was a stretch for me to accept that eating a minuscule bit of forbidden rennet in a pizza, say, was going to be a big drag on my spiritual evolution.

But since at that time I was a devoted devotee of the guru, I did my best to eliminate cheese with animal rennet from my diet. RSSB followers put a lot of work into compiling lists of "good" and "bad" cheese brands. Eating out at a restaurant, though, often required some decidedly awkward encounters with serving staff.

"Does the cheese on this veggie pizza have animal rennet in it?" us rigidly obedient RSSB'ers would ask a hapless waiter. Not surprisingly he'd say, "I have no idea." "Please check," we'd say. 

The poor guy would be forced to disappear into a backroom and try to read the label on a cheese container. Or at least he'd pretend to do this before returning to our table with some sort of answer. Which often was "I couldn't tell for sure." 

We felt that we were acting in accord with God's will, since the guru's edict against eating animal rennet supposedly had a divine foundation, given his status as God in Human Form (akin to a living Jesus). I'm not sure what the waiters and waitresses who had to deal with our no animal rennet! demands thought about us. 

"Crazy religious fanatics" would have been a reasonable assessment, one which I now agree with.

Today I was browsing the online New York Times opinion page and came across a piece by Stephen Asma with a great title: "Was Bo Diddley a Buddha?"

If you don't know who Bo Diddley is, this probably means you're a lot younger than I am. Here's a video of him from 1965, when I was a junior or senior in high school. 

Asma relates how he used to play guitar with Bo Diddley, and what this taught him about improvisation. Asma now is a philosophy professor, so his piece has some depth to it. It's nicely written, so I invite you to read the whole thing. Here's some excerpts:

Before my first gig with Bo, I spent a full week of intense preparation, learning and rehearsing his songs. On the opening night, he arrived to the venue five minutes before showtime. As he walked onstage in front of 500 shouting fans, I tried to tell him all the songs I’d prepared.

He just looked at me blankly through his Coke-bottle glasses, plugged into his amp and launched into a loud, rhythmic riff on his trademark rectangular guitar. He never bothered to tell me what song we were playing, what chord changes were coming, what key we were in, or anything. But, as every blues and jazz musician knows, that’s how it goes.

After the first tune, he realized that I could follow him, and he cryptically shouted, “This monkey is tied, now let’s skin it!”

Bo and the other greats I played with often worked this way, and it was a hair-raising on-the-job education. These musicians never told me what was coming next, partly because they didn’t know themselves. They were masters of the art of improvisation.

...Improvising, in music, is the act of composing and performing simultaneously, and it is difficult to master. But it is also universal, and despite the powerful human impulse to plan and program, integral to nearly every aspect of our lives. No matter who you are — a welder, philosopher, a guitarist or a president — you are in some sense simultaneously making the map of your life and following it. It is not an exaggeration to say life itself is one long improvisation.

...In music, at least, improvisation sometimes gets a bad rap, usually from the precincts of classical or other formal Western styles that rely on notation. It is sometimes looked down upon with a “my kid could do that” kind of dismissive attitude. But the ability to improvise is not just “winging it.” It is built on foundations of study and practice that prepare the improviser for the moment of action.

“Wu-Wei” is a Chinese word that is often translated as “non-action” but more accurately means “natural action,” or action in accordance with nature. The idea, dominant in Taoism and Zen, is that one should try to find the natural way of doing something and then simulate, or align oneself to it, as opposed to forcing it.

For example, the butcher should carve the animal at its joints, not in arbitrary locations. A carpenter should work with the grain of wood, rather than against it. A martial arts master should find the most economic use of his energy, and turn his opponent’s own force to his advantage, and so on.

Finding this natural way is not effortless, but requires great practice. Once it has been mastered, however, it is possible to find a unique presence of mind in these activities. The mundane actions are turned into artistic and even spiritual expressions. Playing a musical instrument, boxing in a competition, and even folding your laundry can be Zen-like improvisations.

Zen Buddhism and Taoism focus more on the method of your life rather than the content of your life. It’s not so much who you are, or even what you do in life. Rather, it’s how you do it. Since, in these practices, the present moment is ultimate reality (albeit usually obscured and hidden in regular consciousness), all one needs to do is shut off the babble of discursive thought and sink into one’s present activity.

According to this view, the meaning of life is not found in rules, formulas, commandments, categorical imperatives and cultural norms.

For sure. 

Obsessing over eating a few specks of animal rennet that are part of the cheese in a vegetarian pizza is rigid religiosity. Laughing about whether the cheese has rennet -- who gives a shit! -- while taking a big bite would have been flexible improvisation.

But I didn't know that at the time.

So, accept my belated apology, all you waiters and waitresses who had to check cheese ingredients because my friends and I were in the grip of playing life as if every note on the guru's music sheet had to be followed exactly.

Which, as Bo Diddley and Stephen Asma knew, goes against the grain of an improvisational understanding of life. 

Perhaps "why?" is a word without meaning

Like young children, we adults also love to ask Why?  It just seems so natural to want to understand why our car won't start, why our spouse is angry with us, why we've got a stomach ache. 

I'm not denying the usefulness of why, of seeking causes, of fathoming the source from which a certain aspect of reality has sprung. 

However, more and more, I'm beginning to sense that the question which we take for granted -- why? -- may lack meaning beyond the minds of us humans. 

Of course, this could be said of anything.

Even when it comes to seemingly solid scientific facts, like how electromagnetism works, it's possible to envisage an alien being with a consciousness much different from ours not being able to grasp our principles of modern physics in this area.

This being might comprehend our common physical reality in a decidedly unique way. Which could include a lack of needing Why? to make sense of things.

I've talked about this general notion in a couple of blog posts:
"Why ask 'why' if the question is unanswerable?
"There's no answer to 'Why does the world exist?'"

Regarding the latter post, it seems almost unarguable that there can't be a reason for existence existing, since the existence of that purported reason would lead to another Why? 

This is the problem with positing God as the creator of existence.

What or who created God? If the answer is "nothing, God has always existed," then one can simply say, "fine, I choose to accept that existence has always existed, which eliminates the need for God." 

Ultimately, there has to be an end to Why? But when we're talking about everyday less-than-ultimate reality, does Why? make any more sense?

I don't know for sure.

Increasingly, I'm at least wondering whether we need Why? as much as most of us believe we do. And at the edge of my perplexity about Why?, I have a dim intuition that this entire concept is a human construction that isn't part of the fabric of reality as it exists outside of Homo sapiens' minds.

Here's three sources that have contributed to this vague feeling. I'll let the quotes speak for themselves.

(1) Some lines from the movie, "Arrival," where a mysterious alien spacecraft arrives on Earth carrying equally mysterious beings. Someone has said that it is important to know the purpose of the alien visit. A linguist responds:

Dr. Louise Banks: And "purpose" requires an understanding of intent. We need to find out, do they make conscious choices or is their motivation so instinctive that they don't understand a "why" question at all. And biggest of all, we need to have enough vocabulary with them that we understand their answer.

(2) Some quotes from a New Yorker article, "A.I. vs. M.D.: What happens when diagnosis is automated?"

“Our results support the hypothesis that a process similar to naming things in everyday life occurs when a physician promptly recognizes a characteristic and previously known lesion,” the researchers concluded. Identifying a lesion was a process similar to naming the animal. When you recognize a rhinoceros, you’re not considering and eliminating alternative candidates. Nor are you mentally fusing a unicorn, an armadillo, and a small elephant.

You recognize a rhinoceros in its totality—as a pattern. The same was true for radiologists. They weren’t cogitating, recollecting, differentiating; they were seeing a commonplace object. For my preceptor, similarly, those wet rales were as recognizable as a familiar jingle.

In 1945, the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle gave an influential lecture about two kinds of knowledge. A child knows that a bicycle has two wheels, that its tires are filled with air, and that you ride the contraption by pushing its pedals forward in circles. Ryle termed this kind of knowledge—the factual, propositional kind—“knowing that.” But to learn to ride a bicycle involves another realm of learning. A child learns how to ride by falling off, by balancing herself on two wheels, by going over potholes. Ryle termed this kind of knowledge—implicit, experiential, skill-based—“knowing how.”

The two kinds of knowledge would seem to be interdependent: you might use factual knowledge to deepen your experiential knowledge, and vice versa. But Ryle warned against the temptation to think that “knowing how” could be reduced to “knowing that”—a playbook of rules couldn’t teach a child to ride a bike. Our rules, he asserted, make sense only because we know how to use them: “Rules, like birds, must live before they can be stuffed.”

...“Imagine an old-fashioned program to identify a dog,” he said. “A software engineer would write a thousand if-then-else statements: if it has ears, and a snout, and has hair, and is not a rat . . . and so forth, ad infinitum. But that’s not how a child learns to identify a dog, of course. At first, she learns by seeing dogs and being told that they are dogs. She makes mistakes, and corrects herself. She thinks that a wolf is a dog—but is told that it belongs to an altogether different category. And so she shifts her understanding bit by bit: this is ‘dog,’ that is ‘wolf.’

The machine-learning algorithm, like the child, pulls information from a training set that has been classified. Here’s a dog, and here’s not a dog. It then extracts features from one set versus another. And, by testing itself against hundreds and thousands of classified images, it begins to create its own way to recognize a dog—again, the way a child does.” It just knows how to do it.

...The “black box” problem is endemic in deep learning. The system isn’t guided by an explicit store of medical knowledge and a list of diagnostic rules; it has effectively taught itself to differentiate moles from melanomas by making vast numbers of internal adjustments—something analogous to strengthening and weakening synaptic connections in the brain. Exactly how did it determine that a lesion was a melanoma? We can’t know, and it can’t tell us. All the internal adjustments and processing that allow the network to learn happen away from our scrutiny.

As is true of our own brains. When you make a slow turn on a bicycle, you lean in the opposite direction. My daughter knows to do this, but she doesn’t know that she does it. The melanoma machine must be extracting certain features from the images; does it matter that it can’t tell us which? It’s like the smiling god of knowledge. Encountering such a machine, one gets a glimpse of how an animal might perceive a human mind: all-knowing but perfectly impenetrable.

(3) Some quotes from Daniel Dennett's new book, "From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds."

Imagine we are back in the early days of this process where persistence turns gradually into multiplication, and we see a proliferation of some types of items where before there were none and we ask, "Why are we seeing these improbable things here?" The question is equivocal! For now there is both a process narrative answer, how come, and a justification, what for.

...We can reverse engineer any reproducing entity, determining its good and its bad, and saying why it is good or bad. This is the birth of reason, and it is satisfying to note that this is a case of what Glenn Adelson has aptly called Darwinism about Darwinism: we see the gradual emergence of the species of reasons out of the species of mere causes, what fors out of how comes, with no "essential" dividing line between them.

Just as there is no Prime Mammal -- the first mammal that didn't have a mammal for a mother -- there is no Prime Reason, the first feature of the biosphere that helped something exist because it made it better at existing than the "competition."

Natural selection is thus an automatic reason-finder, which "discovers" and "endorses" and "focuses" reasons over many generations. The scare quotes are to remind us that natural selection doesn't have a mind, doesn't itself have reasons, but is nevertheless "competent" to perform this "task" of design refinement.

...There are reasons why trees spread their branches, but they are not in any strong sense the trees' reasons. Sponges do things for reasons, bacteria do things for reasons; even viruses do things for reasons. But they don't have the reasons; they don't need to have the reasons. 

...This is competence without comprehension.