Church of the Churchless

Can't stop quoting from "Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide"

Zen, along with Buddhism in general, teaches that nothing is permanent, everything changes.

So even though right now I feel like I can't stop sharing quotes from my re-reading of Barry Magid's book, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide, clearly I will at some point. 

Like maybe tomorrow, not today. Here's more passages from the book that appealed to my churchless consciousness. Which follow a Zen cartoon.

"Karma means "cause and effect," which is another way of describing interconnection and change. Enlightenment is the realization of our being the ongoing product of interconnection and change -- it is not the cosmic equivalent of the Monopoly card, "Get Out of Jail Free." We transcend nothing and nothing lasts, no matter how much we'd like to believe the opposite."

"There is nothing permanent, not even 'enlightenment.' As soon as we think we have achieved some new, perfect, permanent, and invulnerable state, we have betrayed the very essence of our realization."

"We have to kill off any notion we have that there is something to attain, something to hold on to, something special we can become once and for all. Enlightenment is not a 'thing' we 'get' from practice. Anything we think we've gotten -- even if it's made of gold -- can only get in the way. Only when there is nothing and nobody left to obstruct it will the clear breeze blow freely in every direction."

"Now Buddhism has given an altogether different answer to the question of what we essentially are. And Buddhism's answer is 'Nothing.' There is no essential true, inner nature at all."

"Although zazen is often described as a spiritual practice, 'spiritual' is not a word I like very much. Too often, 'spiritual' is explicitly contrasted with 'material' as if it represented another separate (usually higher) order of reality. In the Christian tradition, the spiritual is the realm of the soul, which is believed to have an existence separate from the body, and because the soul is not material, it is not subject to change and death like the body. This idea of a separate non-material soul is regularly conjoined to the idea of a soul that is likewise immortal."

"Yet no matter how illogical, humankind has a long history of fantasizing a separate, ethereal inner essence and imagining that, in total contrast to bodies that are all mortal, this disembodied breath or spirit is somehow immortal. It is a fantasy that exists across cultures, even persisting within Buddhism, which would seem, by the law of emptiness, to insist that there is no personal essence that could be immortal. It is hard not to conclude that a universal fear of death gives rise to an equally universal fantasy of spiritual immortality that denies its finality."

"In our daily practice, we must discover and express for ourselves the fundamental truth that this mind, this body, this moment is all that we have, is all that there is. We come to practice believing that our minds as they are, our bodies as they are, are the problem. Who wants a wandering mind or aching knees, let alone a body that is growing old or has a serious illness? But practice will never teach us to exchange this mind for another one or to substitute this body for someone else's."

"We want to escape something we believe is wrong with who we are, to escape whatever lays us open to suffering. We don't realize that the attempt at escape is itself an engine of our suffering."

"Be careful what you wish for. Only when our hopes are completely smashed will we be free. It's not the 'freedom we started out looking for at all."

But it sure sounds like something Janis Joplin sang about.

(I could listen to this song a million times and still want to hear it again. Janis Joplin was one of a kind. I got to see her perform in 1966 and will never forget that moment.)

 

 

Video shows craziness of Hindu fanaticism

This Twitter tweet contains a video that can be seen here. Religious fanaticism comes in many forms, in this case Hindu.

Open Thread 14 (free speech for comments)

Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. Though I haven't been doing too well on this, I'll try to remember to always have an Open Thread showing in the Recent Posts section in the right sidebar. If one isn't showing, I've added an Open Threads category in, naturally, the Categories section. So you can always find an Open Thread that way.

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

I'm a big fan of Zen, though I've never actually practiced with a Zen teacher, and I'm turned off by overly dogmatic or religious versions of Zen Buddhism. 

Yesterday I was idly glancing at the Zen section of my bookcase and noticed a book that I'd read nine years ago and blogged about in "Search for happiness (and self) called off."

I'm enjoying a re-reading of Barry Magid's Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide. Magid is a psychoanalyst with an appealing take on Zen. He founded the Ordinary Mind Zendo in New York City and still teaches there.

Here's some quotes from the book that resonated with me, because I agree with them. 

"Meditation can create an oasis or bubble of clarity or calm or concentration that simply excludes all the messiness of our everyday emotional reality. Under the illusion that we are cultivating a higher spiritual self, we merely end up avoiding what is emotionally painful. I have seen this take place at every level of practice from beginning students to what I had imagined were seasoned teachers."

"Zen students, especially those who have had some realization, are in grave danger of imagining that they now are somehow 'seeing reality directly,' just as it is -- without acknowledging all the ways that unconscious processes and organizing principles continue to operate, both on a personal and cultural level."

"Zazen [meditation] is not a technique. It is not a means to an end. It's not a way to become calmer, more confident, or even 'enlightened.' Indeed, our whole practice can be said to be about putting an end to self-improvement, an end to our usual compulsive pursuit of happiness -- or its Zen equivalent, the pursuit of enlightenment. Not that we can't be happy (or enlightened), it's just that we'll get there by a very different route than we once imagined -- and it may not look anything like what we expected when we started out."

"Which is the 'true' self? That question, the basis for so many Zen koans, immediately leads us astray. Instead of fully experiencing ourselves in the very act of asking the question, we imagine there's another more real, truer, more essential self hiding somewhere out of sight that we have to go search for. Not surprisingly, we can never find it."

"Zen practice can redeem the ordinariness of our lives and return us to a natural richness, simplicity, and creativity that we have long imagined could only be ours by becoming special, by attaining enlightenment or some other exotic state of consciousness that once and for all will turn us into a wholly different kind of being."

"In the traditional Zen literature, we read of the Absolute and the Relative. Here, the Absolute refers to the experience of no separation between ourselves and this moment just as it is, of no separation and therefore no sense of a separate 'self' and instead just the oneness of the whole universe. The Relative refers to our ordinary world of distinctions: good and bad, self and other, special and ordinary."

"Many forms of traditional meditation practice are initially geared to pushing students to have some experience of the Absolute -- which can feel like a very special experience indeed. But Zen has also stressed that that is only the first step, and the student must go on to experience the identity of the Absolute and the Relative, the sameness of the special and the ordinary, as paradoxical as that may sound."

"Having lost that original identity of the ordinary and the special, we typically give up on the ordinary and look to new special experiences to compensate for our loss. Although what we've lost is the most ordinary thing in the world, we go looking for something special to replace it. And thus, by pursuing the special, we are, in effect, forever condemning ourselves to be looking in exactly the wrong place for exactly the wrong thing."

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

Five reasons why I don't believe in God

Since 2004 I've written 2,365 posts on this here Church of the Churchless blog. That's a scarily large number, which testifies to my commitment to churchlessness after spending 35 years being firmly churched in an Indian guru-based form of religiosity.

During the past fourteen years I've talked a lot about why I no longer believe in God. I've put forth numerous reasons for my conversion to atheism. Here's a fairly brief description of five key reasons. 

(1) Existence must always have existed. Most religions teach that God brought our universe into existence. But I've never heard any believer argue that God brought existence into existence. That's because God must have existed prior to bringing everything else into existence.

So it sure seems like existence must always have existed. Otherwise, how could anything exist, including God? This leads to a strong argument against God: if religious believers say that God has existed eternally, this means that existence has existed eternally. 

Thus where is the need for God, since eternal existence, along with certain laws of existence necessary for further acts of creation, fills God's role without the need to posit a supernatural being?

(2) Religions and supernatural belief systems differ widely. If God or some other supernatural entity existed, one would think that there would be considerable agreement about his/her/its nature. But there isn't. 

Yes, I'm familiar with ideas such as Huxley's Perennial Philosophy, since I used to argue myself that there was a common denominator to the world's spiritual belief systems. However, I now realize that I was doing my best to cram wildly different forms of belief into the peculiarly-shaped hole of the faith that I followed.

There are literally thousands of different forms of supernatural  belief in the world. The major religions are just the tip of the iceberg, given the number of animistic, ancestor-based, and other types of spiritual systems scattered across our planet. So either God exists in a dizzying variety of forms, or God doesn't exist.

I'm going with "doesn't exist."

(3) The cosmos is vastly larger than needed for most religions. Christianity, along with Judaism and Islam, are examples of religions that were founded by a human being who was considered to be in some fashion "God in human form." Meaning, if not actually God, a messenger from God.

Problem is, there are hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, and hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe, which is a fraction of the cosmos (the known universe, plus at least that portion of the universe that has expanded beyond our light horizon, since space itself has expanded faster than light since the Big Bang).

The makes Earth utterly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Yet many, if not most, religions would have us believe that happenings on Earth reflected God's plan for creation. Well, if this is the case, why is creation so much larger than needed if humanity was made in God's image and has a special place in God's consciousness?

(4) Those who supposedly know God aren't anything special. Some religions teach that God sent a prophet, savior, or other form of messenger to Earth a long time ago. Other religions teach that there are God-realized people living today. 

Regardless, at best there is scant (I'd say none) evidence that those who supposedly have come to know God are any different from you and me. Sure, there are plenty of stories about miracles, divine powers, and such, but somehow these all occurred in the past.

Now that modern science has ways of assessing whether someone has supernatural abilities, the flow of miracles has dried up. Which leads me and other skeptics to wonder whether they ever existed in the past, other than in the gullible minds of believers.

(5) There's no demonstrable evidence that God exists. This is an overarching reason that encompasses some of what I've already said in this post. I realize that plenty of people, alive and dead, are convinced that they've had experiences that prove God or some other divine entity is real.

OK. There also are lots of people who claim to have experienced alien abductions, seen Big Foot, had visions of heaven after almost dying, and so on. It simply isn't possible to accept that every subjective experience reflects an objective reality. That way lies, if not madness, an inability to distinguish fact from fiction. 

Along with almost every other atheist, I'm very much open to evidence of God. I've meditated virtually every day of my life for the past fifty years, or so. I've prayed, sat at the feet of a supposedly God-realized guru, contemplated the nature of existence, looked for divine signs inside and outside of myself.

If God exists, God is doing a heck of a job of keeping hidden. So I choose to consider that God doesn't exist. 

There are lots of other web pages that discuss why someone doesn't believe in God. Here's one that I found to be nicely convincing. 

How I'm content with an atheistic world view

Today I got an email message from someone who asked a great question about finding contentment with an atheistic world view. I dashed off a response right away, because I loved how this person described their quandary, and how clearly their youthful angst was expressed.

Speaking of love, which the person said was their "entire meaning in life," you'll see that I didn't mention love in my reply. I thought about this only after I'd sent my response.

It isn't that love isn't important to me, or that it isn't a big part of my life.

I guess it is more of a backdrop to my life, rather than something I consciously am aware of in the foreground. And as you can read below,  I mentioned Selflessness and Service as two themes that are central to my atheist world view -- both of which seem closely akin to love, since they involve a diminution of self-centeredness.

Anyway, here's the message I got, and my reply. 

The message I got

Hi Brian, I'm new to your blog, but I'm glad I found it. I grew up nonreligious but still found myself to be the only person I know to question the nature of the universe as I do. I don't know if our beliefs are exactly the same, but I expect they're similar enough that you could give me advice as to reconciling them.

I've tried to believe. No minister or priest I've given the third degree to would believe that, but I needed them to convince me. Even the ones that said they could prove their claims eventually told me my heart was hardened and prayed that Jesus would soften it. I'm not a Christian, that I've concluded, but I haven't given up on believing in God. Maybe just because I still need to believe in something.

The secular teachings in Buddhism intrigue me, and I'm still exploring. But I didn't email you to give you a boring biography of my philosophical quest. Maybe my irreparable nihilism is a result of my age (21), but I still need to address it.

Love, or the illusion of it, is my entire meaning in life. The realization that true altruism doesn't exist, that emotions are biologically wired into us for survival, and no relationship we form will survive death, is breaking me down. I don't need to believe humans are special or the last evolution (we're clearly not), but I'm afraid to believe in absolutely nothing.

My need to believe in these things is impeding my ability to come to true conclusions on the known and unknown. I'm wondering how you were able to come to grips with an atheistic world view and still find contentment. 

My reply

 
You ask a great question at the end of your message. When I was about your age, actually a bit younger, I was heavy into existentialism, Sartre, Camus, and such. But after a year or two I grew tired of the message that it is up to us humans to find meaning in existence. That just seemed so damn exhausting. Why couldn’t meaning be given to me, free of charge?

 

So I dived into yoga and meditation at the end of the 60’s, the decade, not my age (I happen to be 69 now, so in a way I’ve returned to the 60’s.) I studied with a crazed Greek Christian yogi, then got initiated by an Indian guru and stuck with that path for about 35 years. In the end it seemed too rigid, too dogmatic, too unscientific, too faith-based.

 

Thus I’d rejected two extremes: the freedom existentialism espoused (we must choose) and the confinement of an Eastern religion/spirituality (we must do this and that to know God and experience “heaven” after death).

 

Like you, I’m attracted to secular Buddhism, but even that is a bit rigid for my current tastes. I’ve been practicing Tai Chi for about 14 years and enjoy it a lot. It’s basically Taoism embedded in physicality, in the body, in movement. When I read the Taoist literature I find it lighter, more humorous, not so serious as Buddhism (even the Zen version, which can be pretty darn serious).

 

However, I still struggle with finding meaning in life. And since I’m the age I am, the realization that I don’t have all that much more life to live can disturb or depress me at times.

 

Philosophically, I guess my approach to dealing with life boils down to a couple of core ideas. I’ve talked about a lot of stuff on my Church of the Churchless blog since 2004, so you could use the Google search box in the right sidebar to find what I’ve written about these topics. Here’s a capsule version.

 

Selflessness. Both Buddhism and neuroscience say that our feeling that we have, or are, a Self is mistaken, an illusion. I really like this idea, because almost all of my problems seem to arise from the feeling that I am Me, separate and distinct from the world. I can recommend Alan Watts’ marvelous book, “The Wisdom of Insecurity,” which is one of my favorite books. His central message is that we’re trying to find solidity is an inherently fluid world. So flow with it, dude! (or dudette)

 

Free will. Akin to selflessness, neuroscience also tells us that, almost certainly, free will is an illusion also. This gives me a feeling of calm, of satisfaction, because my worries largely stem from a feeling, “I could have done otherwise,” or “What should I do in the future?” If there is no “I” (selflessness) and no real choice (lack of free will), then most of my troubles are over — aside from inescapable sensations of pain or whatever. They are much more tolerable without the mental idea, “This shouldn’t be happening to me.”

 

Existence. Lastly, I get a chill up up my spine when I ponder the reality that existence exists. It is a replacement for God, really. Something must always have existed. Religions say this is God, who created existence. Well, a simpler approach is to see existence as having always existed. This gives me a feeling of transcendence, of being part of mystery, of something so much bigger and awe-inspiring than myself, it boggles my mind.

 

I recall a quote from Stephen Hawking that was shared after he died. It went something like this: “Given how vast the cosmos is, my disability is meaningless.” Beautiful. Of course, our life is all that we have, so naturally we take ourselves seriously. Which reminds me of another theme…

 

Service. In India this is termed “seva.” I was big into that during the 35 years I was devoted to a guru, doing volunteer work by speaking to groups, writing books, and such. Now, I enjoy taking care of our ten rural acres in south Salem, Oregon, which benefits not only me but my wife and our dog.

I’m a political activist in Salem politics. Last night a City Council candidate I support seemingly won her race. Her campaign chair emailed me this morning that what I did was key to her being elected. I almost cried, because it felt so good to do something that wasn’t about me, but about someone else who could make a difference in our part of the world.  

 

Anyway, these are some ideas. Hope they give you a few notions to explore in your own mind. We’re all different, and have to find our own unique way (even without free will, or a self).

 

    — Brian

Why do gods and spirits matter?

The title of this blog post asks a question that's a chapter title in Pascal Boyer's challenging, but intensely interesting, book, "Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought."

Boyer is an anthropologist who is also well-versed in psychology. His book isn't an easy read, but I'm enjoying making my way through it, occasionally by skipping a chapter and moving ahead to a chapter that grabs my attention more.

Not surprisingly, I'm carefully reading the "Why do gods and spirits matter?" chapter, since this is such an important question. Below is how the chapter starts off. I decided to share these passages verbatim because there's no way I could encapsulate Boyer's central point (which I've boldfaced) better than he does himself.

This is a way of looking at religious belief that's quite different from how most people look upon religiosity -- which is why Boyer starts off the chapter the way he does. 

Enjoy...

"Why do you let some religious doctrine determine what you may or may not do?" This is a common question addressed to religious people, generally by skeptics or outsiders. 

Why indeed should the existence of some supernatural agents -- the ancestors or some invisible spirits or a whole pantheon of gods or just a single one -- have consequences for what people are allowed to do? When we ask such questions we take for granted a particular scenario about the connections between belief and morality.

We assume that religion provides a certain description of supernatural agents and their moral demands ("There are five gods! They hate adultery and will smite the transgressors.") We then imagine that people are convinced, for some reason or other, that the doctrine is actually true.

It follows that they take the moral imperatives to heart, given the powers of the gods or ancestors to enforce morality. So there seems to be a simple story here: however fit for treason, stratagems and spoils, human beings happen to believe in the existence of the gods, the gods demand a particular behavior, so people abide by the rules.

Now consider another common statement: "So-and-so became more religious after his accident" (or: "after his partner had a brush with death," "after his parents died," etc.). 

The way this is formulated may be typical of modern Western conditions (in many places everybody just takes it as obvious that there are ancestors or spirits around, so it makes little sense to talk about anyone being more or less "religious") but the connection between misfortune and religion is salient the world over.

This is one of the principal contexts in which people activate concepts of gods and spirits. Again, we find this natural because we commonly accept a particular scenario about religious doctrines and salient events: that gods and spirits are seen as endowed with great power, including that of bringing about or averting disasters.

People struck by misfortune strive for an explanation and for some reassurance, and this is what religious concepts would seem to provide. A simple story again: accidents happen, people want to know why, if they have gods and spirits they can say why.

But both stories are probably false.

The facts themselves are not disputed. People do connect notions of gods to what they may or may not do, they indeed connect misfortune to the existence of supernatural agents. It is the way these connections are established in the mind that anthropology would see in a very different perspective.

Religion does not really support morality, it is people's moral intuitions that make religion plausible; religion does not explain misfortune, it is the way people explain misfortune that makes religion easier to acquire.

To get to that point we need to explore in much more detail the way social inference systems in the mind handle notions of morality and situations of misfortune. That we have evolved capacities for social interaction means that we tend to represent morality and misfortune in a very special way, which makes the connection with supernatural agents extremely easy and apparently obvious.

When I finish the chapter I'll write another blog post about the social inference systems Boyer is referring to. From what I've read already, I have a fairly good idea of the sorts of mental capacities that make religious beliefs easy to latch onto.

For example, we humans are highly social animals. We're always wondering what other people are saying about us, how much they know about us, and such. So it is an easy leap to imagine that a supernatural being is doing the same, as in the familiar Santa Claus song:

You better watch out
You better not cry
You better not pout
I'm telling you why
Santa Claus is coming to town
Santa Claus is coming to town
Santa Claus is coming to town

He's making a list,
Checking it twice;
Gonna find out who's naughty or nice.
Santa Claus is coming to town
Santa Claus is coming to town
Santa Claus is coming to town

He sees you when you're sleeping
He knows when you're awake
He knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake

Why this atheist is more saintly than religious believers

This proves nothing except that seeming synchronicities sometimes occur in a pseudo-miraculous fashion.

This afternoon I was thinking about what to write about on this here Church of the Churchless blog, and came up with the idea of talking about how I happily allow about 90% of the blog comments to be from religious believers, almost all of whom are still adherents of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) faith that I deconverted from about fourteen years ago -- after being a strong RSSB devotee for some thirty-five years.

I was going to point out that this shows how much more open-minded us atheists are than religiously-minded people. What do you think the chances are that, for example, a Radha Soami Satsang Beas or Catholic Church web site would welcome a majority of comments that denigrate the teachings being promoted on the site?

Slim to none. (Much closer to none, than slim, I'm pretty sure.)

That's because most religions are dogmatic, while most atheists and agnostics are open-minded. Regular readers of my posts will note that almost always I say things like "Almost certainly there is no God." I talk about my atheist beliefs in this fashion because I can't be sure God doesn't exist; I just see no demonstrable evidence for the existence of God.

If that evidence came to light, either out there in the world or in here within my consciousness, I'd be pleased to change my mind. Yet how many religious believers are willing to say that? "Almost certainly there is a God,  but I can't be sure about this." 

Anyway, I was all ready to write a post along these lines when I saw that a new comment had been made by Jen. It was so close to what I'd been thinking about, I'd call it "miraculous" if I believed in miracles. Which, I don't.

Spencer, I should point out, is another frequent Church of the Churchless visitor who loves to use this blog to leave comments extolling the Radha Soami Satsang Beas teachings that I no longer believe in. Here's what Jen said:

Spencer you say: "What Brian writes is simply out of ignorance, and prejudice of others he does not know, understand or choose to believe. He simply invents an explanation that works for him. But it denegrates the legitimacy of true spiritual experience. He himself is victim to his own mind's refusal to acknowledge the evidence before him."

Spencer you also say: "This is why I strongly encourage people not to judge other people's personal experiences whom we have never met and do not know. It can't be done objectively and is generally just the bad habit of personal prejudice."

Why should we believe someone else's inner experiences? We aren't supposed to speak about them because its very egotistical and we are not really interested anyway and it just sounds like boasting. Spencer what makes you think you have the right to criticise another, especially when this is Brian's blog.

I think Brian has the patience of a saint, either that or he does not read through all of the comments, or if he does read them he allows others to have their own point of view, which is something you do not allow.

We are all entitled to choose to believe what we want. He is entitled to be an atheist, he does not preach about it and wtf has it got to do with you and vinny? Quote vinny: "Problem with atheists is that their half-baked mind is unable to comprehend Atomic energy/Shabd vibrating since ages, so the solutions they offer are half-baked. These Atheists are not worthy of sitting at the feet of any Physicist, forget about Saints. Always misguiding innocent people, more dangerous than Snakes, these Atheists are a threat to any civilized society."

Spencer, I don't understand you and vinny, you preach about love and yet you show no respect for others and their opinions.

Excellent points, Jen. 

Spencer and other religious believers are very much welcome to comment on this blog, because I'm committed to open discussion and dialogue. 

Regarding Jen's noting that either I have the patience of a saint, or don't read through all of the comments, the truth is about halfway between these extremes. I have considerable patience with people who disagree with me, and I also make a habit of scanning every comment to make sure it isn't "spam" but is at least somewhat on topic.

I read some comments in their entirety,  but lengthy comments often get just a quick glance. Even though I'm retired, I still feel pressured for time, in part because my wife and I live on ten non-easy-care acres in rural south Salem (Oregon) that require a lot of work to maintain. 

And I've got two other blogs that I write for, along with three Facebook pages related to my local citizen activism. So this Church of the Churchless blog is just one of many activities that compete for my attention.

A test that science passes and religion fails: reality "kicks back"

How do we know what is real? This is a question that has occupied philosophers and scientists for as long as we humans have been pondering the nature of reality.

I don't pretend to know the answer, but I resonate with physicist David Deutsch's approach to the question. In his book, "The Fabric of Reality," Deutsch views explanations as being key to understanding what is real. He writes:

Explanations are not justified by the means by which they were derived; they are justified by their superior ability, relative to rival explanations, to solve the problems they address. That is why the argument that a theory is indefensible can be so compelling. A prediction, or any assertion, that cannot be defended might still be true, but an explanation that cannot be defended is not an explanation.

Now, I realize that this quote isn't exactly crystal clear. Which is understandable, because Deutsch's scientific world view isn't reducible to a couple of sound bites. But I'll try to do just that with another nibble at his philosophical perspective regarding understanding.

What is an explanation, as opposed to a mere statement of fact such as a correct description or prediction?

In practice, we usually recognize the difference easily enough. We know when we do not understand something, even if we can accurately describe and predict it (for instance, the course of a known disease of unknown origin), and we know when an explanation helps us to understand it better.

But it is hard to give a precise definition of 'explanation' or 'understanding'. Roughly speaking, they are about 'why' rather than 'what'; about the inner workings of things; about how things really are, not just how they appear to be; about what must be so, rather than what merely happens to be so; about laws of nature rather than rules of thumb. 

They are also about coherence, elegance and simplicity, as opposed to arbitrariness and complexity, though none of these things is easy to define either.

Deutsch uses Galileo as an example of how mere prediction is much different from genuine understanding. He says that at first Galileo didn't get into trouble with the Catholic Church even though he promoted a sun-centered (heliocentric) view of the heavens. The reason: the Church viewed Galileo's theory as just a way of predicting the motions of the planets.

Thus the Church was able to keep on believing that the Earth was at the center of the cosmos by considering that the planets behaved as if they orbited the Sun, not that they actually did so. 

To our modern sensibilities this doesn't make sense. But we live in scientific times that are far different from the religion-dominated era of Galileo. 

Deutsch says that one reason the sun-centered view won out was that the Church's perspective required a belief in everything that Galileo taught (because that was how fairly accurate predictions of planetary motions could be made), plus an additional belief that somehow reality was responsible for making it seem as if the sun was at the center of the cosmos, even though it actually wasn't. 

For example, if one were asked why a planetary conjunction occurred on such-and-such a date, or why a planet backtracked across the sky in a loop of a particular shape, the answer would always be 'because that is how it would look if the heliocentric theory were true'.

So here is a cosmology -- the Inquisition's cosmology -- that can be understood only in terms of a different cosmology, the heliocentric cosmology that it contradicts but faithfully mimics.

Religions obviously fail to produce the same sorts of understandings about reality that science does. In fact, it is difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a single fact about the world that any religion has produced that science didn't already know. 

This is a major stumbling block for those who consider that religion has a privileged view of reality. If this is the case, why hasn't a saint, prophet, or other holy person ever come up with an explanation of some phenomenon that was so persuasive, that explanation eventually came to be added to the world's common store of knowledge?

Here's one reason: religion deals largely with supernatural entities that lack what David Deutsch calls "kick back." This term is derived from the story of Dr. Samuel Johnson responding to Bishop Berkeley's solipsistic view that matter doesn't really exist by kicking a rock and saying, "I refute it thus." 

Philosophers correctly point out that Johnson didn't really refute Berkeley's assertion by kicking the rock. Rather, Deutsch uses this episode to point out a criterion for reality:

But Dr. Johnson's idea is more than a refutation of solipsism. It also illustrates the criterion for reality that is used in science, namely, if something can kick back, it exists. 'Kicking back' here does not necessarily mean that the alleged object is responding to being kicked -- to being physically affected as Dr. Johnson's rock was.

It is enough to say that when we 'kick' something, the object affects us in ways that require independent explanation. For example, Galileo had no means of affecting planets, but he could affect the light that came from them. His equivalent of kicking the rock was refracting that light through the lenses of his telescopes and eyes.

The light responded by 'kicking' his retina back. The way it kicked back allowed him to conclude not only that light was real but that the heliocentric planetary motions required to explain the patterns in which light arrived were also real.

I was a religious believer for about thirty-five years, so I'm intimately familiar with the many ways people convince themselves that God, Jesus, a guru, angels, spirit, or some other form of divinity is "kicking back' within their consciousness.

Prayers seem to be answered. Unusual events are viewed as miracles. Sights and sounds are perceived in meditation. God is viewed as working in mysterious ways that are plainly apparent to believers.

Yet there is scant evidence that any of this adds up to reality "kicking back" with evidence of a supernatural realm. If there were, converted atheists like me wouldn't be so skeptical of religious claims that fail to stand up under not only close scrutiny, but any kind of serious examination. 

Science progresses with its understandings of the universe. Religion doesn't. This alone points to the failure of religious believers to demonstrate that reality does indeed "kick back" when someone attempts to understand divinity.

Yes, all sorts of phenomena do transpire within the minds of believers. However, almost certainly this is their own psyches kicking back against themselves. Meaning, religious beliefs result in mental phenomena produced by those same beliefs. This isn't the sort of really real reality that Deutsch, along with along scientists, are looking for.

Me neither. I'd much rather know something demonstrably true about the world, even if this is a small thing, than believe in the grandest religious fantasy. 

All problems and solutions are within the mind, not the world

One reason I love to read is that a few sentences in a book can make me go Wow! or Whoa! to such an extent, I feel like it is worth reading hundreds of pages to be exposed to a single fresh thought.

That happened to me this morning as I was reading the "Criteria for Reality" chapter in physicist David Deutsch's book, The Fabric of Reality. Here's what grabbed my attention:

Galileo may have seen the world as a book in which the laws of nature are written in mathematical symbols. But that is strictly a metaphor; there are no explanations in orbit out there with the planets. The fact is that all our problems and solutions are located within ourselves, having been created by ourselves. When we solve problems in science we arrive through argument at theories whose explanations seem best to us.

Now if this is true of science, it is doubly true of religion -- because science deals with problems concerning the observable outside world, and religions typically deal with problems involving what almost certainly is an imagined supernatural realm.

Thus, for example, religions would have us worry about what will happen with our immortal soul, conveniently failing to mention that there is no demonstrable evidence for the soul, much less its purported immortality. Likewise, religions raise the concern about how we can be sure we're doing God's will, even though there's no evidence that God exists.

So it's good to keep in mind, as Deutsch reminds us, that all problems and solutions exist within the human mind, not out there in the world. This doesn't mean that our problems and solutions aren't real, just that they have a different sort of reality than, say, electromagnetism, the planet Mars, or jellyfish.

I've pondered this general notion in several blog posts, though not in exactly the fashion Deutsch has. Here's links to some of those posts, along with an excerpt from each.

What if reality is completely different from how you think it is?

I'm not sure whether ultimate reality can be known. Heck, I'm not even sure whether limited reality can be known. 

Meaning, there may be no such thing as reality.

This might just be a word we humans use for our way of looking upon the world, a subjective viewpoint which has no resemblance to the way the world really is, because there is no really beyond the subjective viewpoint. 

Alternatively, perhaps reality really exists, but it is nothing like our thoughts about it.

Best statement about reality, in just thirteen words

There's nothing wrong with believing. We all believe in things that aren't objectively true, because doing this makes us feel subjectively good. Believing is part of being human.

However, we should keep in mind that everything within our mind isn't part of objective reality. That's the beauty of Philip K. Dick's one-sentence metaphysics -- perhaps better termed ontology.

It reminds us that not believing in something is the best way to determine whether it is part of the reality outside our own head. 

For example, stand on a first-floor balcony and get yourself to believe that an invisible floor extends beyond the railing. Which is equivalent to not believing in falling through empty space. Then jump off the railing. See what happens.

Science shows how humans create reality

We don't see the universe as it is. We see the universe as it appears to us through the filter of a Homo sapiens consciousness.

Bats, snakes, monkeys, salmon, dogs, and every other sort of sentient creature see things differently, as does, in a non-conscious sense, a radio telescope and other devices that enable us to perceive aspects of the cosmos beyond our natural capacity.

However, since no one has ever had a non-human experience of reality, both our individual and collective view of How Things Really Are is inextricably biased toward anthropomorphism.

We need to scratch the "Really" in both science and spirituality.

Pay attention to the world, not thoughts

On the other hand, thinking about how to experience something different from what is happening now often is necessary. If my computer won't start up, I need to think about what to do before doing it.

Religions, though, want us to think a lot about imaginary experiences. Prayers, mantras, ritual invocations, and such are designed to place true believers in a frame of mind where the here and now is made subservient to a fantasized there and then.

Sure, all this religious stuff can feel good. Sitting in church, surrounded by people who believe like you do, hearing tales of a heaven that is so much better than this imperfect world -- all this can produce highly appealing thoughts.

But that's all they are: thoughts. Reality is somewhere else, all around the worshipper. The sound of the preacher's voice, the hardness or softness of the pew, the brightness of candles, the sight of an image of Jesus on the cross.