Church of the Churchless

Reality requires a broad scientific look, not narrow mystic visions

Put on your philosophical wading boots. I'm about to jump into the deep end of some interesting, but sort of complex, questions about the nature of reality as seen through the eyes of quantum physics.

But rest assured that, in accord with the focus of this Church of the Churchless blog, I'll be drawing some inferences about what makes sense, and what doesn't, when it comes to religious, mystical, and spiritual claims about reality.

This might take a few blog posts, so I'll do my best to keep this initial post as short and simple as possible.

(Which means, it is going to seem lengthy and complex to many readers; sorry about that, it's the nature of the philosophical beast we're trying to come to grips with.)

I'm about two-thirds of the way through a fascinating book, "What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics," by Adam Becker. Becker is a science writer with a Ph.D. in astrophysics.

The key word in the title is meaning. Here's why.

Historically, the prevailing view of quantum physics is known as the Copenhagen Interpretation, which often is pithily summed up as "shut up and calculate!" In other words, most physicists don't worry about the underlying meaning of what is known about the quantum world.

They're content with the fact that the mathematics of quantum mechanics are amazingly accurate and precise, which is why we've experienced such fantastic accomplishments in fields such as computer technology, lasers, medical imaging, and so much else.

Now, I'm going to quickly jump into the religious/mystical side of life, to avoid readers of this post heading off to another corner of the World Wide Web. 

In Becker's "More Things in Heaven and Earth" chapter, he discusses a useful analogy to illustrate the core philosophical debate between the "shut up and calculate" folks, and the "let's dig deeper for underlying meaning" folks. This is basically the distinction between logical positivism and realism.

Before we get into that analogy, I need to say that I'm not arguing for a simplistic direct connection between logical positivism and mystical ways of thinking, versus realism and scientific ways of thinking, because the situation is murkier than that. Here's some quotes from Becker:

The logical positivists were understandably opposed to philosophical castles in the sky and the tortuous prose they were often defended with. But the logical positivists weren't merely against metaphysics -- they believed they could actually dismiss metaphysical claims as meaningless.

Meaning, they held, was a matter of verification: knowing what a statement means is equivalent to knowing how to specify it using your senses. According to the positivists, when you say "it's hotter outside that it is in here," you really mean "if you go outside you will feel hotter than you do in here."

The statement's meaning is the method of verifying it empirically -- and if there's no way of verifying a statement against your senses, then that statement has no meaning.

...But idealist and theological claims aren't the only kinds of statements that make no contact with the senses.

There are also more straightforward claims like "the couch is in the living room even when nobody's there," that can't be confirmed directly. Statements like these about the existence and persistence of material objects independent of perception are realist claims -- they're statements about a real world that exists whether or not there are any humans around,

These statements are fundamental to science. Yet some of the positivists, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, dismissed realist claims as meaningless too, because they can't be verified by experience. All that is meaningful, on the positivists' account, are statements about perceptions, along with the purely logical statements of mathematics. 

Obviously mysticism isn't a mathematical enterprise. But leaving that aside, over the fourteen years I've been writing on this blog I've heard countless (more or less) stories of how someone had a vision of God, or of Jesus, or of a guru, or of divine light and sound, or whatever. 

When I and other skeptics would ask for evidence that those mystical experiences were real, typically the response would be along this line: "I know what I experienced, and it felt genuine to me, so you should believe that it was real."

This is basically a positivist argument.

Of course, unlike scientific positivism, there really isn't any way for other people to reproduce that experience -- though believers in mystic visions like to say things like, "You just need to meditate in this fashion for a long time, and have faith in God/guru/angelic beings/whatever."

I'm going to turn now to Becker's analogy, which hopefully will make my point more clear. He uses something most of us are familiar with, a TV remote control that has stopped working, to illustrate the distinction between positivism and realism.

Quine's paper, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," took aim at the core of the positivist program, the verification theory of meaning. Quine pointed out that there was no way to verify single statements -- all attempts to verify a statement inevitably involve the assumed truth of other statements, which are themselves subject to the same problem.

For example, say the remote control for your TV isn't working, and you can't turn the TV on. You suspect that the batteries in the remote are dead. You can verify this by replacing the batteries and trying to turn on the TV with the remote again. You do this, and the TV turns on.

Does that mean you were right? No.

It's entirely possible that the batteries in the remote control weren't dead at all. Maybe the remote had a short and will only work intermittently, no matter what batteries you use. Or maybe the old batteries were in backward, and you didn't notice; you just popped them out and put in new ones pointing the right way.

Or maybe something more exotic is going on: maybe the remote always worked, but when you tried it before, the TV mysteriously shifted its picture to the infrared and its sound to the ultrasonic, so you couldn't see or hear it; the TV happened to go back to normal after you changed the batteries, but not because you changed them. 

The last idea is clearly preposterous -- how could that happen? -- but the point remains that in testing out the new batteries in the remote, you've assumed a wide variety of basic facts about the world, all based on previous experience, and any of which could, in principle, be wrong.

This isn't merely true of suppositions about batteries in remote controls; verification of any statement behaves this way 

Looking out the window and saying, "It's raining outside," assumes that your view through the window's glass gives you an accurate picture of the outside world, and that your eyes are functioning property, and that the dimmed light and falling droplets  are in fact caused by a rain cloud and not an alien spaceship blotting out the Sun and dropping some exotic substance onto your front lawn.

So you can never verify a single statement: you're always stuck verifying the entirety of your knowledge about the world, or at least a very large fraction of it. As Quine put it, "Our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body."

With the verification theory of meaning left gasping for air, Quine dismissed the idea that it's meaningless to talk about unobservable things. Unverifiable statements must have meaning, because no individual statement is verifiable.

Thus the "metaphysics" so dreaded by the positivists came roaring  back: rather than speaking simply of sensations, Quine contended that it was perfectly intelligible to speak of physical objects with existence independent of the speaker.

So this gets me back to the title of this post: reality requires a broad scientific look, not narrow mystic visions.

I'll talk about this more in another blog post, because this one is plenty long already. For now I'll simply observe that without using these terms, for quite a few years I've been engaged with positivist believers in mystical experiences who don't want to take a broad realistic view of the cosmos.

For example, a supernatural experience typically demands that someone assume that human consciousness can function outside of the physical brain; that there are spiritual realms of existence beyond the physical universe; that there are "laws of nature" unknown to science, and so on. This sort of worldview requires a very different understanding of reality than is known either to science or everyday experience.

Which is why I no longer believe in it.   

It hurts to argue with reality

This is a great simple explanation of why it makes sense to love science, to love truth, to love reasoned fact-based discussions of what is happening in the world. Fantasies can be fun, but reality has a way of biting us in the butt when we ignore what is.

"Atheist Experience" guys demolish arguments of a supernatural believer

I've come to the conclusion that a big part of being a spiritual person is thinking clearly.

(When I say "spiritual," I don't mean religious or supernatural; I mean finding meaning in life, the underlying spirit of one's life, so to speak.)

If we don't think clearly, there's a danger that our emotions, feelings, desires, intuitions, and such will lead us astray. I'm certainly not saying that thoughts are more important than other aspects of our psyche -- just that we need to find a balance between the rational and non-rational parts of ourselves.

Case in point: this You Tube video is a 24-minute example of how a deist caller to the Atheist Experience TV show is utterly unable to discuss in any sort of coherent fashion why he believes God, or any other supernatural entity, exists. 

I watched the whole video, but in the first 5-10 minutes you can get a good feel for the discussion between the atheist guys and Jeff from Aptos, California. 

The person who emailed me a link to the video yesterday said:

Hi Brian, I just listened to this call on the call-in program called The Atheist Experience. What is so unbelievably fascinating about this call is that the caller has absolutely no clue about what's being said.

I would go further and say he is unable to comprehend or make sense of what the hosts of the show are saying so clearly. It is like they are speaking a foreign language.

 

The caller is so fixated on his own viewpoint that it is impossible to have a normal conversation with him. It is the same with many of the people who comment on your blog.

I agree that many Church of the Churchless commenters display the same lack of understanding of what it means to believe in the supernatural, and not to believe in the supernatural.

Over and over, the caller, Jeff, is asked to explain why he is a deist, a believer in God. He's repeatedly asked to provide reasons, or evidence, to support his belief in God. But all of his explanations are either circular, or unresponsive.

Of course, there's no demonstrable evidence of God, or I and almost every other atheist in the world would believe in God. After all, us atheists typically are open-minded, as Don and Matt, the Atheist Experience guys, are. 

As noted regularly on this blog, most recently in this post, atheism isn't a belief; it is the absence of a belief in theism, in God. Don and Matt keep pointing out that they aren't saying there is no God. Rather, they consider that because of insufficient evidence that God exists, they assume that not-believing in God is the wisest choice.

I liked how they interrupted the caller when he tried to answer their question about why he is a deist by starting out with, "But you..." They correctly said that when someone begins to answer a question about themselves with "But you...", it's clear that they aren't intent on providing an answer.

Asking an atheist to prove that there is no God is an example of how religious believers fail to think clearly. The burden of proof is on a believer, not a skeptic.

In a trial, the prosecution has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone committed a crime. Fairly frequently, the defense won't call a single witness. Why? Because they don't have to prove that the defendant didn't commit a crime.  

Likewise, an atheist doesn't have to prove that God doesn't exist. Atheists like me, and like Don and Matt, leave open the possibility that God or some other supernatural entity might exist. If there is sufficient evidence of this, we would believe. Because there isn't, we don't.

Of course, there are good reasons to believe in God, even if God doesn't exist. Here's some of them:

(1) It feels good to believe that death isn't the end of us, but the beginning of an afterlife.
(2) It feels good to be part of a religious community, given the social support that comes with this.
(3) It feels good to be provided a moral code, rather than having to decide what is right and wrong on our own.
(4) It feels good to consider that we're part of a "chosen people," instead of just being an ordinary person.
(5) It feels good to believe that a divine power is guiding your life.

Here's the thing though: just because something makes us feel good doesn't mean it is true. Fantasies can be fun. 

I regularly get comments on this blog along the lines of, "Brian, why are you trying to take away an important source of support for people, their belief in God?" My answer: "I'm not trying to do this. What I'm trying to do is learn the truth about God and supernaturalism in general."

For me, the arguments in favor of believing in God or the supernatural are weak, too weak for me to accept. Yes, I used to believe in not only God, but in the existence of living masters, or gurus, who essentially were God in human form. Now I don't believe in either.

However, since I used to believe, I understand the appeal of believing. Life is hard. The Buddha got it right when he taught that life is suffering. We all need shoulders to lean on. I get why most people in the world believe in God and the supernatural. This feels good.

There's nothing wrong, and a lot right, with feeling good. I'm simply saying that feeling good because of a belief in God is one thing, and that belief being true is a very different thing.

Science was mentioned in the Atheist Experience video as being our best way of determining what is true. For sure. Here's a 4-minute video in praise of science that's well worth watching.

Religious believers ignore reality, while making up fantasies

After fourteen years of blogging here on the Church of the Churchless, I'm not surprised anymore by this evident fact about most religious believers:

They make two mistakes. They ignore aspects of this evident physical reality that conflict with their chosen religious dogma. And they embrace fantasies about supernatural realms that almost certainly don't exist. 

Thus religious believers close their eyes to what can actually be known, while making up stories about what is unknown -- such as what, if anything, lies outside the bounds of our universe.

Here's some examples of what I'm talking about. 

I've written several posts about recent stories that reputable Indian business publications have published about a guru's highly questionable financial involvements. (See here and here.)

These are well-researched stories that lay out in considerable detail how Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), is deeply enmeshed in the tale of how two brothers, Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, who are relatives of Dhillon, have lost billions of dollars through shady business deals.

But RSSB true believers refuse to accept the facts that are right in front of their eyes, even going so far as to consider that the guru is orchestrating the bad press about him as a test of how devoted and obedient his devotees are.

Obviously this is crazy.

But since crazy is the foundation of every religion, including the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, followers of the guru who comment on this blog, such as "One Initiated," have resorted to name-calling and insults because they are unable to come up with facts to refute the tell-all stories published by Bloomberg and Business Today.

(Additional stories about Gurinder Singh Dhillon and the Singh brothers have been published by other organizations.)

What's obvious to everyone but those head-in-the-sand acolytes is how readily religious believers ignore facts that threaten their belief system, while accepting extremely spurious dogmas that have no demonstrable evidence to back them up.

I'm proud to be a member of the Truth Telling Club. We aren't an actual club, of course. But I feel a close connection to everyone who does their best to accept reality as it is, and to dismiss fantasies that aren't real.

This is difficult work. It requires research, an open mind, a willingness to admit errors and mistakes, a heartfelt commitment to following the truth wherever it leads. 

By contrast, religious believing is easy.

So is ignoring facts about the ugly side of one's chosen religion, such as the sleazy financial dealings Gurinder Singh Dhillon has been engaging in while he supposedly was dedicating himself to both his own spiritual uplift and that of his disciples.

The good news is that the truth always wins out. Reality always has the last word. Why? Because truth and reality are vastly more powerful that falsehood and fantasies.

Likely there is more truth to come out about the RSSB guru's financial dealings.

We live in a world where secrets are difficult to keep, even by the rich and powerful.

Fortunately, our world has plenty of people who value honesty above lies, truth-telling above dissembling, straight talk above meaningless blather. Religions likely always will be with us, but I'm confident that their power will diminish as reality increasingly comes to be valued above fantasy.

Why I don't believe in anyone's supposed supernatural experience

Today I got an email from someone who said:

Well, here in your blog itself, you have all of these people sharing their experiences.  Huge voluminous paragraphs detailing all kinds of dramatic experiences, with stars and moons and spatial flight and GIHFs [God In Human Form] popping up with personal guidance and what-have-you.  My question is : Why do you ignore them now, now that you do see these experiences spoken of, quite plainly?

This was my response.
----------------------------
As you might expect, I consider that people who say they’ve had experiences of a supernatural reality are either deluding themselves, or other people. Both are possible, of course, if someone believes they’ve had a genuine experience, then tries to convince others that it was real. 

I’m reading an interesting book, Selfie. 

The author notes that culture is a key ingredient in human experience. This is obvious, of course, when it comes to so-called mystical experiences. How often do Christians have a vision of Krishna? Very rarely, if at all. 

Likewise, how often do Sant Mat devotees have a vision of Jesus? Very rarely, if at all.

The only way I could begin to accept that “supernatural” experiences are real would be if everyone who reported that sort of experience had virtually identical descriptions of it. But they don’t.

 

A few minutes of Googling turned up some examples. Here’s some people who had visions of Jesus.

 

http://www1.cbn.com/700club/ron-zaucha-vision-jesus

 

https://www.godisreal.today/jesus-vision/

 

And there’s people who have visions of fairies, with whom they interact.

 

http://www.fairycongress.com/seeing-fairies/

 

So why should I believe Sant Mat devotees who claim to have visions of the radiant form of their guru, or some supernatural realm that's part of the Sant Mat dogma? Why should their visions be given more credence than the people who have visions of Jesus or of fairies?

 

Now, some would say that ALL supernatural experiences must be accepted as real, because there are myriads of kinds of supernatural realities. I guess this would be similar to an alien visiting Earth and landing in a tropical forest, while another alien landed on a pole and saw snow/ice. 

 

OK, that’s possible. However, a big difference is that Earth is part of physical existence, so the various parts of our planet can be explored, photographed, etc.  

 

And I’d argue that going that "believe everything" route requires giving up any semblance of a rational, evidential, factual take on reality. We then would end up accepting all sorts of conspiracy theories, alternative views of science, crazy ideas of every variety. 

 

So I choose to not believe in the objective reality of anyone’s description of a supernatural experience, rather than believe in all of them. There’s no evidence that a supernatural reality even exists, much less that humans are able to experience it via some sort of elevated consciousness.

 

     -- Brian

"Existence is entirely futile." A brave essay on the human condition.

With the author's permission, here's a highly thoughtful, well-reasoned, nicely-written email message I received recently that presents a stark, but persuasive, perspective on the human condition. 

I enjoyed reading about what led this person to change from a hopeful spiritual person to a nihilistic atheist. The message ended with an invitation to me to comment on it, which I was pleased to do -- which led to some further thoughts from the message sender.

I've shared an edited version of our interchange after the essay itself. Enjoy. And I mean that word, enjoy, because even though what follows will strike many people as being depressingly bleak, I find the essay to be a refreshingly honest view of the suffering that inevitably accompanies consciousness and self-awareness.

Hi Brian,

Thanks for the thoughtful and witty blog. I have enjoyed it a lot.

I'm writing to share my story of what precipitated my personal transition from a somewhat hopeful "spiritual" person to a nihilistic atheist. I'm writing because I know that you also made the journey from believer to atheist, and I thought you might find this interesting. If not, forgive me and delete this as soon as possible.

I grew up in a conservative Christian home although I never could genuinely believe in those inane ideas. In my young adulthood I migrated toward eastern spirituality with my final resting spot being Buddhism due to the fact that it is non-theistic (seemed the most plausible). Through those years I read as much on these topics as I could, along with other books on philosophy (especially existential philosophy), practiced meditation, etc.

Throughout my entire life of critical thinking, the phenomenon of suffering has drawn the most of my intellectual resources.

Anybody who stares into the abyss of suffering that exists very quickly realizes that the existence of suffering utterly and irrevocably destroys any belief in God and any belief in "ultimate" meaning/purpose. This became more and more difficult to ignore, so I nestled into the notion that life was essentially neutral. The existence of suffering made it impossible to be "good", yet I thought it might still be neutral. 

One quick disclosure: I have an incurable and untreatable genetic disease that leaves me in almost constant pain, both physical and emotional.

So, early on, this journey began as a quest to see if this predicament could be reasonably reconciled with an existence that could still be deemed "good". I latched onto accounts of profound mystical experiences, where the individual relayed experiences of bliss, joy, love and the unshakable knowledge that existence was overflowing with benevolence.

The fact that these experiences occurred buoyed me. During that time, I think I collected and read every experience that was ever put into print. I also found websites that had collections submitted by people. 

Fast forward: I now understand these experiences to essentially be a psychological coping mechanism. The fact that the overwhelming majority proceed from deeply traumatic periods bolsters this understanding.

The human mind is adaptive and it creates psychological fictions when it needs to.

Some have contended that these experiences are too life enhancing to represent some pathological state or to be the product of trauma. I thoroughly disagree and I compare them to the phenomenon of dissociative personality disorder. This is an immensely powerful and effectual response to trauma, sometimes triggered by only a single traumatic event (usually sexual abuse).

While the casual onlooker may see an abnormality, this is a phenomenon that allows for coping with the trauma. In this sense it is adaptive and "positive". Compare this to the trauma of simply being alive with the pervasive stress and pressures of survival and the omnipresent fear of death/extinction. All of this against the backdrop of apparent meaninglessness. It is no wonder that the psyche generates these encouraging fictions.

Mystical experience, like religion in general, is a natural phenomenon. Homo sapiens, the cognitive animal, needs cognitive encouragement to survive and nothing accomplishes this more than the conviction that life is essentially meaningful, blissful, loving, and peaceful regardless of the appearance to the contrary. 

So, this was one of my discoveries that started to put a crack in the armor of my hope. The other being ontology and pondering the nature of time. Long story short, I kept coming up against what I now call the "impenetrable impasse of ontology." Every philosophy, religion, and even branches of science (physics, cosmology) eventually reaches this impasse.

In short, we cannot account for the existence of anything without providing for the existence of something that is timeless, eternal, or outside of time; something that is uncaused. This can be conceptualized as an eternally preexistent static Being, "substance," or energy.

Theistic religion invented a creator being; they reached the impasse. Modern cosmology has conceived of the uncaused as pure potential in the form of "quantum foam." This eternal something can also be conceived in the form of an endless causal chain, infinitely regressing into the past. In this case, it is only the chain or sequence itself that is uncaused and eternal. Some theories in modern astrophysics have reworked this theory (see the book Endless Universe).

The bottom line is that something eternal must exist. To many this is immediately hopeful. To me, it is the absolute deathblow to hope.

What this impasse of ontology showed me is that existence is entirely futile.

I realized that eternity itself is the epitome of futility. I realized that suffering is directly born out of an eternal chaos and is not temporary in any way, shape, or form. If this universe is either the latest conflagration of an endless causal chain or the product of a timeless substance, the result is the same.

Anything uncaused simply exists—existing for no purpose or reason—and anything it generates must also be correspondingly devoid of meaning and purpose.

But the most problematic feature is that this purposeless energy/process generates unfathomable degrees of pure misery. Anything eternal does not ultimately evolve, progress, or change at all. Thus, it is process that will never cease generating this misery. I realized in the starkest possible terms that suffering is entirely inescapable and eternal. 

As horrifying as it was, this made sense to me because I had come to actually view suffering as being the very core and essence of life.

I had long known negative experience to be greater quantitatively and qualitatively. Not only is profound suffering universal and ubiquitous, but it is also far more consequential.

Negative experience is more impactful and carries incomparably greater psycholgical weight than anything positive (except maybe the fictive mystical experience, hence its survival value). A single traumatic event can utterly destroy a life, while the same cannot be said for an exceedingly happy event. 

I also realized that there can be no experience without being limited, as consciousness can only exist if it has a "point-of-perspective" from which to experience.

All the new age drivel about an "infinite consciousness" is just that -- pure drivel. It is an abject contradiction in terms and is categorically impossible. The necessity of limitation as a functional condition for the existence of consciousness further strengthened my discovery that suffering is inescapable.

The one and only hope that I carry with me today is that I will be entirely obliterated at death, which I certainly presume will be the case.

Over my long journey, I have come to realize that suffering is the very nature of being alive and nothing can change that as it is ultimately derived from a unchanging eternal "cause." Suffering would not be occuring right here and now if it was not an intrinsic aspect of existence. The blind chaos that spits out universes will forever generate universes of pure agony, just like the one we are living in.

This is why I look forward to death more with each passing day. I loathe such clichés as "life is a gift." Life is not a gift. Life is a random yet inconceivably tragic event. 

Thanks for listening. I'd love to hear your thoughts if you have the time and would like to respond.

 This is some of what I said in my reply.

There’s a lot to say about what you said. You’ve obviously thought long and deeply about matters that most people don’t think at all about. Kudos to you for doing that. You’ve shown a lot of courage, discarding spiritual/religious crap that merely tries to smooth over the evident suffering and pain in this life by providing specious answers to difficult questions. 

 

I tend to see existence as being generally neutral, since likely consciousness is fairly rare in the cosmos. At least, as compared to the vastness of interstellar space and the hundreds of billions of stars in a typical galaxy.

 

But when consciousness is involved,  I think you’re correct: pain and suffering are inevitable.

 

This is particularly true when a being has not only awareness, but self-awareness. Our dog suffers (she hates loud bangs, so fireworks last night stressed her out), but I don’t see any sign that she worries about her suffering. When she is in pain, mental or physical, she suffers. Then, she is back to enjoying her dog life.

 

I heartily agree with you that mysticism, spirituality, religion — they’re all attempts to deal with the oppressive reality of a universe that doesn’t give a shit about us.

 

You say that the cosmos generates universes of pure agony. Yes, this certainly can be true. Your life testifies to that, as do countless other examples of people who suffer horribly, not to mention the lives of countless animals raised in terrible conditions for the eating pleasure of humans (I’m a vegetarian, partly for that reason).

 

Yet for me, and obviously there’s no right or wrong answer here, being so personal, I find the universe to be essentially neutral — which was your initial conception. I can’t argue against your current view, since it also makes good sense. I just tend to see us humans as an anomaly, rather than a feature of the universe. Somehow we have developed sufficient consciousness to become aware of our awareness, which now is both our greatest strength and also our greatest weakness.

 

This is part of the essay-writer's response to my thoughts.

 

I see where you are coming from to say that the physical universe is , in and of itself, value-neutral. If the universe had only produced inert bits matter, I agree that it would be value-nuetral. Yet I find the fact that it eventually generated self conscious beings to be tragic -- a tragedy which tips the scales in the direction of negativity. 

 

In many schools of philosophical thought, our principle predicament is often articulated as our confrontation with a meaninglessness/purposelessness universe (i.e., a neutral universe).  I wrote an essay some time ago that it is not meaninglessness that makes life problematic, but suffering. If life was meaningless yet beautiful, existence would certainly still be a mystery but it would not be a problematic mystery.

 

The lack of meaning only becomes a problem in the context of suffering and thus, it is the existence of suffering that is the original, fundamental, insurmountable  problem. People will always fool themselves with various schemes of purported meaning that can be dreamed up, but the reality of suffering will always be there to slap them in the face. Suffering cannot be denied and is always there to keep us honest.

 

I find religion/mysticism to be a survival strategy of our species. In this way I understand it and don't blame people. There will always be psychological crutches. Doubtful anyone would even be able to function at all with none. 

 

My psychological crutch is the conviction that death is total obliteration. A crutch need not always be untrue. I think that our eventual extinction is the greatest accidental gift the universe bestowed on us. 

 

We are an anomaly, yet we are an anomaly of the universe that is left to experience the very universe that randomly generated us. In this sense we are unique and uniquely cursed. Our subjective experiences of pain are of an entirely different order than mere space rocks colliding into each other.

 

Relatively speaking, sentience is the "most important" phenomenon in the universe because it the most consequential. When compared against an infinite expanse of swirling gasses and molten rock, one suffering person is incomparably more important. 

 

[Regarding some quotes about our psychological zombie'ness that I shared.] We are zombies in the sense that we are programmed by nature and there isn't a thing we can do about it. We are programmed to seek out positive experience and avoid negative experience. This is only possible for beings that are conscious and capable of experience. We seek to gain positive experience and avoid negative experience because we know what it is like to experience.

 

Thus, there is some link between that in us which seeks future experience and that which has/had experience. I know of no better candidate for that which has experience than consciousness. Does this imply that consciousness is somehow active? I don't know, but if so, I know that it acts to no avail.

 

The absurdity of life is such that we can never have what we are wired to seek. Our instincts are fundamentally at odds with reality. 

 

 

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. 

Religion is a warm bath. Atheism is a cold shower.

I love not only warm baths, but hot ones. It feels good to be immersed in water close to my body temperature. It relaxes me, makes me feel comfortable, sometimes puts me to sleep.

When I want to wake up, though, a cold shower is much better.

Now, I don't actually take cold showers unless our water heater is broken and I'm desperate to get clean. However, I have taken a cold shower of truth, which is why I chose atheism over religion after some 35 years of being an ardent believer in God, soul, spirit, and heaven.

(Eastern religion variety)

Because I'm deeply familiar with both religious believing and atheist doubt, I know what I'm talking about when I say that it takes much more courage to be an atheist.

Believing in God, or some other form of supernatural divinity, is easy. Most people in the world, and certainly most people here in the United States, are religious. So being a believer puts you in the majority, which is like being in a warm cultural bath of godliness.

Even if someone doesn't follow the same faith as you, if you're religious you get a heck of a lot more respect than if you're one of those damned atheists who are all hung up on that disturbing word, truth. 

Disturbing if you're religious, that is. Those words are music to the ears of truth-seekers, like me. 

It wasn't easy for me to give up the warm bath of my religious beliefs. After all, I'd spent almost four decades believing that I was special, one of God's chosen people, destined for a pleasant afterlife, embraced by the cosmos in a fashion few other humans were.

Fantasies are fun. Reality can be painful.

I'm pleased to report that, like many others who have chosen clear-eyed truth over blind faith, I've come to realize that it is more important to live life honestly than to hold onto religious lies.

There is no demonstrable proof of God. Likewise, there is no convincing evidence that anyone, alive or dead, has known God. But the human mind is adept at weaving together stories that create a pleasing myth. 

God loves us. God has sent a messenger to save our souls. God has a wonderful plan for us if we have faith. 

What's not to like about these sentiments? Well, one big thing: almost certainly they aren't true. (Us scientifically minded atheists know that nothing is 100% certain, but 99.99% is good enough, and I'm generous when I give a .01 chance of God actually existing.)

So if you've given up on religious fantasies, or are on the way to doing this, congratulations.

You've bravely chosen truth over lies, which is a very good thing. Have courage and keep treading the truthful path. It won't always be comfortable, but it will be much more satisfying than embracing religious falsehoods.

Free will and religion are both comforting fantasies

I've just about finished re-reading a great book by a British attorney, Richard Oerton, who has spent half a century pondering the nature, or rather lack thereof, of free will. 

Previously I've written about "The Nonsense of Free Will: Facing Up to a False Belief" in these posts:

Free will is a wonderful thing to lose
Sitting in the jury box, I deny free will
Belief in free will linked to desire to punish

Oerton makes some highly persuasive arguments against free will, building his case with a mixture of logic and facts. I'm enjoying his book even more the second time through, perhaps because I've had five years since the first reading to do my own further musings about free will.

I'm going to share some excerpts from Oerton's chapter, "Free will and religion: some parallels." 

A basic parallel is that both free will and religiosity come naturally to people. It just seems so obvious that humans can freely choose to do this rather than that. It also appears so obvious that God exists, since how could the universe come into being without a creator?

Well, reality doesn't give up its secrets easily. This is the lesson of science: coming to know how things really are, as opposed to how they appear to be, is tough going. Religious belief is easy to come by. So is believing in free will. 

What Oreton does is his book is challenge the easy belief in free will. He also makes a good case for viewing religion and free will as two sides of the same faulty-belief coin. Here's some passages that I particularly liked in the above-mentioned chapter. He's just spoken about the Age of Faith many centuries ago when atheism would have been almost unthinkable.

There may have been a few who questioned the existence of God but, by and large, it would not have entered anyone's head to do so. Religious belief was in the air that people breathed, taken for granted. They were born into it, they lived in it and they died in it. 

They knew that God existed, and knew with such certainty that they would never have felt the need to say so. And don't we think now about free will in very much the same way as our ancestors thought then about God? Don't we accept it just as unquestioningly? Our own age may not be an age of religious faith, but it is an age of faith in free will.

...One of these parallels lies in the fact that God and free will are both mystical concepts. The idea that we might be able to understand God is almost blasphemous. God is by definition transcendent, supernatural, and (as the old hymn has it) moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform.

If an unbeliever questions a believer about the nature or behavior of God, the unbeliever will be met sooner or later (and probably sooner) by the assertion that, because God is what God is, such questions are unanswerable. And so it is with free will: those who want to live by it must accept that there are no good answers to the questions which they might (but seldom do) ask about its nature and purported effects.

...those who believe in free will see the behaviour of their fellow human beings in such a way as to justify and reinforce their belief -- just as religious believers see the work of God so clearly in the workings of the world that they cannot see these workings in any other way.

And here's some passages that make some great points about how, if we accept the reality of evolution, as every educated person should, some tough questions about free will arise.

We can't very well say that free will has always existed, if only because the human race hasn't always existed. It would not be credible to suggest that the earth's first life forms had free will. It would not be credible to suggest that an influenza virus now has free will, or even a tapeworm, or a woodlouse.

All these living things must be creatures of causality, governed and moved purely by physical processes. If we, as twenty-first century people, are not governed by physical processes because we have what we call free will, we must have managed, at some stage of our evolution, to detach ourselves from the laws of nature which up until then had governed us.

But when and how? So far as I know, evolutionary scientists have not concerned themselves with these questions, and they are unlikely to do so unless they themselves believe in free will, know exactly what it is and manage to devise some criteria according to which its existence or non-existence can be recognized. 

We would be wise not to hold our breath.

Yet another parallel lies in the fact that like belief in God, belief in free will (so long as it remains unexamined) tends to be comforting to those who hold it.

...And the "utilitarian" argument for belief in God -- that it ought to be fostered because it is socially cohesive and leads people to live better lives -- is paralleled by a similarly utilitarian argument for belief in free will: that it is an important part of our society, our culture, our morality, our sense of self, and so on, and that we must therefore hang on to it however incoherent it may prove, on examination, to be, because humankind cannot stand very much reality.

How deluded are you? (If you're religious, you'll score higher.)

The most recent issue of New Scientist has a story called "Delusional You." The online version is differently titled: Grand delusions: Why we all believe the weirdest things.

Now, most of us consider that it is other people who are deluded, and that we're an exception, being nicely connected to reality. Which, I suppose, is another delusion. Here's an excerpt from the story.

That we are all prone to delusions may not be so surprising. A range of cognitive biases makes the human mind fertile soil for growing all kinds of irrational beliefs. Confirmation bias, for example, means we ignore inconvenient facts that go against our beliefs and uncritically accept anything that supports them. Desirability bias leaves us prone to shoring up beliefs we have a vested interest in maintaining because they make us or our group look good. Clustering bias refers to our tendency to see phantom patterns in random events, impairing our ability to draw logical conclusions from the available evidence.

The New Scientist story includes the Peters Delusion Inventory, "which is the most widely used measure of delusional proneness."

I was pleased to find that I scored in the low range, having answered "yes" to only two of the 21 questions. And one of them seemed problematic to me, Do you ever feel as if some people are not what they seem to be? Yeah, I feel this often, particularly when I'm around politicians. This can be reality, not delusion.

Anyway, below is the Peters Delusion Inventory. I couldn't resist putting four decidedly religious'y questions in red, and three more spiritual/New Age'y questions in purple. This shows that religiosity, or more generally, belief in special powers, makes it more likely that someone will be delusional.

This is somewhat at odds with how the story says we should look upon delusions. 

First we need to be clear about what a delusion is. "There's a loose way of talking about delusions -- like when we talk about the 'God delusion' --“ which simply means any belief that's likely to be false and is held despite lack of evidence, or even in spite of the evidence," says Lisa Bortolotti at the University of Birmingham, UK. The psychological take is more nuanced.

Delusions are still seen as irrational, but they are also idiosyncratic, meaning the belief is not widely shared. That rules out lots of things including most religious beliefs, conspiracy theories and the denial of climate change. Furthermore, the idiosyncratic nature of delusions makes them isolating and alienating in a way that believing, say, a conspiracy theory is not. Delusions also tend to be much more personal than other irrational beliefs, and they usually conform to one of a handful of themes.

Hmmmm. The way I see it, just because a delusion is widely shared doesn't make it less of a delusion. Consider the four religious'y questions in red below. 

Lots of true believers do feel they are especially close to God, have been chosen by God in some way, believe in the occult, and sometimes feel they have sinned more than the average person. These aren't idiosyncratic beliefs; they rest at the heart of some major religions and mystical paths.

And the questions in purple are widely held by those who follow certain meditation practices.

In the thirteen years since I started this Church of the Churchless blog, I've seen many comments from people who believe in telepathic communication, consider that it is possible to completely stop thinking, and view thoughts as alien to the supposedly pristine "soul consciousness" that is separate from the mind.

Now, feel free to take the delusion test.

How Deluded Are You?

Almost everyone is vulnerable to delusions, but some of us more than others. These 21 questions constitute the Peters Delusion Inventory, which is the most widely used measure of delusion proneness. Give yourself one point for each “yes” and zero points for each “no”, then tot up your score.

1 Do you ever feel as if people seem to drop hints about you or say things with a double meaning?

2 Do you ever feel as if things in magazines or on TV were written especially for you?

3 Do you ever feel as if some people are not what they seem to be?

4 Do you ever feel as if you are being persecuted in some way?

5 Do you ever feel as if there is a conspiracy against you?

6 Do you ever feel as if you are, or destined to be someone very important?

7 Do you ever feel that you are a very special or unusual person?

8 Do you ever feel that you are especially close to God?

9 Do you ever think people can communicate telepathically?

10 Do you ever feel as if electrical devices such as computers can influence the way you think?

11 Do you ever feel as if you have been chosen by God in some way?

12 Do you believe in the power of witchcraft, voodoo or the occult?

13 Are you often worried that your partner may be unfaithful?

14 Do you ever feel that you have sinned more than the average person?

15 Do you ever feel that people look at you oddly because of your appearance?

16 Do you ever feel as if you had no thoughts in your head at all?

17 Do you ever feel as if the world is about to end?

18 Do your thoughts ever feel alien to you in some way?

19 Have your thoughts ever been so vivid that you were worried other people would hear them?

20 Do you ever feel as if your own thoughts were being echoed back to you?

21 Do you ever feel as if you are a robot or zombie without a will of your own?

0-5 You are less prone to delusions than most. Your thinking style is probably more analytical than intuitive.
6-7 Congratulations! You are normal. The average score is 6.7, with no difference between men and women.
8-21 You are more prone to delusions than most. You are likely to think intuitively and jump to conclusions.

         Schizophrenia Bulletin

How an atheist can find "spiritual" inspiration

A few days ago I was talking with somebody about finding "spiritual" uplift without believing in God or any other supernatural entity.

I put that word, spiritual, in quotation marks because I no longer consider that there's some sort of other-worldly spirit or soul. Not in me. Not in anybody else. Not in the cosmos.

Yet I'm still attracted to the notion of spirituality. In a thoroughly secular sense.

Meaning, well... it's all about meaning.

Whatever inspires us to carry on through tough times; whatever propels us forward on our life journey when we're not sure if we can take another step; whatever makes us willing to sacrifice for a cause greater than our self; that is what I talking about when I speak of spirituality these days. 

It's the eff in ineffable. We recognize it in ourselves because it's at the core of our being. But it's damn tough to describe to someone else, being so intimately related to our wordless sense of purpose. 

When this thing I'm calling spirituality is missing, life seems pointless.

So it's important for everyone, atheists as well as religious believers, to cultivate the seeds of spirituality so we aren't left with barren psychological soil that leaves us feeling dry, despairing, desolate, deserted.

Having experienced both religiosity and atheism at different times in my 68 years, I think believers in God have a somewhat easier time of it when it comes to spiritual uplift. After all, they can simply imagine their chosen divinity smiling down upon them, urging them on to embrace their religious practices with more fervor.

This is what a revival is all about -- being spurred to pursue a divine goal with increased energy and effort. 

So how can an atheist feel the same sort of spiritual uplift? What inspires a secular mind to pursue a godless life with the passion akin to a religious zealot? 

Tough questions, for sure.

I can only speak for myself, since there are more varieties of atheism than religiosity, given that each and every atheist finds meaning in a unique way. All Christians find satisfaction in a belief in Jesus, whereas each atheist seemingly roots their life in something different.

Ah, but there's a common denominator underlying the wild diversity of atheist spirituality: reality. 

By which I mean, really real reality. The reality of this universe, this galaxy, this planet. The physical reality that not only surrounds us, but is us. The reality we live and breathe every moment from our first breath to our last expiration. 

It is here that I find spiritual inspiration. 

When I deeply commit to embracing reality as it is, or at least as best I can understand it, that is when I feel the same kind of spiritual uplift that used to enervate me when I was a religious believer.  In both cases -- secular and religious -- I felt a strong drive to expand my capacity to grasp reality.

However, I now realize that in my true believing days I was driven toward an imaginary supernatural reality, not anything demonstrably genuine. My feeling of inspiration was real; the godly goal I was pursuing was false. 

So, yes, it is indeed possible for atheists to find spiritual inspiration. The source of that inspiration isn't difficult to find. It isn't far away. In fact, there is no distance between the inspired person and what inspires. 

Reality.

It is both what we seek and what is seeking. Pretty damn simple. And wonderfully inspiring.  

 

Tempting as it is to pray, health problems should be managed without God

I've got some semi-serious health problems. Meaning, they aren't fatal or debilitating. But they're damn annoying. The details aren't necessary to know for the purposes of this post, though I've blogged about what I'm going through here. 

It's been interesting to see how my atheist mind has been dealing with the stress I've been feeling.

Back in 2006 I wrote a couple of posts on the subject of turning to God during difficult times. The first was "Atheists in foxholes do exist." It concluded with:

Religious belief or faith is almost always individualistic. That’s a paradox, considering that humility and loss of ego usually is considered to be a religious virtue. It’s self-centered to believe that a God, guru, angel, Buddha, or whoever is going to bestow upon us the blessing of a miracle that isn’t available to all.

We are special. Divinity cares more about us than others. These beliefs underlie every intercessionary prayer. For if we merely wanted God to give us what is natural, normal, lawful, and regular, we’d merely say “thy will be done” (which, in my opinion, is the best prayer—if you feel the need to pray at all).

It’s better to let reality trump belief. Focus on what is happening, not in what you hope will happen. Focus on what you can change about reality, not on what you hope a higher being will change.

Even in a foxhole. Especially in a foxhole.

And here's an excerpt from the other post, "Yes, there are agnostics in dentist's chairs."

During my devotional days I’d try to adopt the attitude that a dental visit was God’s will, part of my bad teeth karma. I’d repeat the mantra given to me by my guru and do my best to enter into a relaxed “thy will be done” attitude.

Today I felt just as calm, cool, and collected. Yet the Brian whose mouth was open for well over an hour was an agnostic, not a believer. I felt no need to lean on a higher power. Reality was my mainstay.

“What has to happen is happening,” I told myself. “Accept it.” And I did. I found that it helped to focus on my one-syllable mantra, if only to keep myself from worrying about how much decay would be found once the malfunctioning crowns/bridge were removed.

However, what I'm going through now is much tougher for me to handle than a visit to the dentist (even for a root canal).

I'll be honest and admit that Atheist Me has occasionally laid in bed at night, when I feel the most anxious, and uttered some prayers to the God I no longer believe in. I've also called upon the Indian guru I no longer believe in to make an appearance in my consciousness.

So I totally understand why believers in a divinity find comfort in feeling that their health problems have some spiritual purpose/benefit, are being overseen by a supernatural being, or will be ameliorated through the grace of a higher power. 

After all, if a nonbeliever like myself is tempted to appeal to God for help, obviously religiously-inclined people are going to look upon God as the Healer of Last Resort (or first resort, since some extreme believers reject medical treatment entirely -- even for their children, which should be considered child abuse).

Here's what I've found, though. 

As my favorite saying by Philip K. Dick puts it, Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. 

Beautiful!

Reality is what sustains us. Reality also is what makes us suffer, pushing us down. Reality is all there really is. And that includes our thoughts, beliefs, imaginings, and such that only exist within our own minds.

Yet as Dick said, there's a difference between a reality that is only a mental belief, and a reality that continues to exist even in the absence of a belief about it.

When I'm physically hurting, that's real.

Praying to God might make me feel better about the pain, but prayer to an imaginary God isn't going to make the pain go away. More accurately, if the pain does go away, this will be due to the power of a person's mind, not the power of a supernatural being.

Thus I still use a mantra to help me get to sleep at night, and to relax during the day. But I no longer believe that the mantra has some mystical power, or is being sensed by a divine being. It makes me feel better, which is all I need.

Yes, I realize that prayer also makes religious believers feel better. That's why I said in my previous post:

Recently a couple of people have asked me, “What’s wrong with believing?” after listening to one of my rants about the power and glory of Faithlessness. It’s a question that is akin to the more basic query: “What’s wrong with feeling good?”

Because religious belief does make many people feel better. Yesterday on a cable news channel I saw an interview with a female doctor about the power of prayer. She said that she had a patient who now was almost totally paralyzed.

He told her that prayer and a belief in God’s goodness—that there was a divine reason or plan for what had happened to him—was sustaining him. Seemingly you can’t argue with that. Whatever works. 

That still makes sense to me. Whatever works.

And this will be different for atheists and believers. Atheists with a health problem can derive the same comfort from a secular practice as a religious person can get from a faith-based practice.  

When should a subjective spiritual experience be trusted as reflecting objective reality?

I love the title of this blog post, because it is such a damn fine question. During the thirteen years this Church of the Churchless blog has existed, I'd say that this question has been at the root of more posts and comments than any other existential issue.

After all, consider how relatively easy it is to assess the validity of (1) objective experiences of physical reality, and (2) subjective experiences of physical reality. 

As an example of (1), if someone claims that they saw a giraffe in their back yard, we've got to consider the circumstances. Perhaps they live in a part of rural Africa where giraffes are common. We'd then give some provisional credence to their claim, though it would be nice to have a photo of the animal, or at least of its footprints (chewed leaves high up on a tree would be additional evidence).

However, if the person lives in New York City, we'd be a lot more skeptical. Sure, it's possible that a giraffe escaped from a zoo or circus. This is very unlikely, though. If a photo of a giraffe in their back yard was provided as proof, we'd want to make sure that it wasn't photoshopped.

My point is that experiences of objective physical reality fall into an intersubjective realm. 

Most people have the basic five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell. Our individual sensory experiences certainly differ -- some can see or hear better than others, and wine tasters are said to be able to distinguish more tastes than the average person -- but by and large, if someone makes a claim about having some sensory experience of the physical world, there are ways to confirm how valid this claim is.

An astronomer who claims to have discovered an unknown planet in the far reaches of our solar system would need to provide some solid objective evidence that the planet actually exists in objective reality.

Moving to (2), on the other hand, purely subjective claims really can't be challenged. If we both see the same movie in a theatre, our experience of the objective images/sounds on the screen will be very similar, but our subjective reaction to the movie may be very different.

"I hated that film." "What? You must be kidding. I  loved it!" "No, I really hated it." 

Absent some form of sophisticated brain imaging, and maybe not even then, it is usually impossible to know whether someone is truthfully relating a subjective experience. Maybe my movie-watching companion actually liked the film, and is saying she hated it for some unknown reason.

My point here is that usually we take at face value claims about subjective experiences.

If someone tells me they felt at one with the universe after hiking to the top of a coastal mountain and seeing the sun set over the ocean, I'm not going to feel any inclination to challenge that assertion. 

Ditto if they went to a Taylor Swift concert and said it was a life-changing experience. "Great," I'd reply, thinking to myself, I doubt this would have been my reaction, but everybody's different.

So now we get to the tricky question. 

Objective physical reality really isn't very different for different people. Mostly we experience the objective world in similar ways. If this wasn't the case, intersections with red, green, and yellow lights would be filled with crashes, rather than with drivers almost always reacting to the same sensory inputs in a predictable fashion.

And I think we'd all agree that subjective reality is the opposite -- different people have different subjective experiences of the world. Now, since no one has access to any other person's subjectivity, we have to infer this. However, all of our relationships with people lead us to recognize that they typically view the world much differently than we do. 

What's perplexing is when someone claims to have had a subjective experience of an objective supernatural reality. (And believe me, this happens frequently in comments on my blog posts, so I'm almost perpetually perplexed.)

My main reaction to this sort of claim is to echo the oft-heard phrase, "Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence." 

Look, if someone says they have discovered some new aspect of physical reality, this is a really big deal. A new subatomic particle. A new planet. A new species. A new tribe (in the 1950s this was common to see in National Geographic; now, very rare).

Solid intersubjective proof would have to be provided of the claim. This is how science works. Also, everyday life. We don't believe that someone saw a space alien, Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness monster just because they said they did.

However, if someone takes LSD, or meditates intensively for years in a dark room, then claims to have had a marvelous epiphany of what the cosmos is all about -- nirvana! enlightenment! satori! -- I'm got no interest in talking them out of that claim.

How could I?

I had many LSD and other psychedelic "trips" in my college years. They basically were indescribable. I can say "walls melted into flowing colors," but those words don't begin to capture my memory of an LSD experience. And here's the important thing:

I'm not claiming that my subjective psychedelic experiences were of some objective reality. I had a unique experience of the world, but this was the same world that a "straight" companion would have experienced -- aside from purely internal non-sensory drug-induced experiences.

So when I hear that a person claims to have subjectively experienced a supernatural level of objective reality, my skeptical sensors go on full alert. I used to believe this was possible, but I've come to recognize the difference between believing and knowing.

Someone may be fully convinced that they've had an experience of a higher non-physical realm of reality. But without intersubjective evidence needed for knowledge, this claim should be viewed skeptically -- even by themselves.

I've meditated almost every day for over 45 years. For a long time I'd meditate for several hours in a dark room or closet. I've seen light. I've heard sounds. I've had profound experiences. But again, I don't claim they were of an objective supernatural reality. All I know is that my subjective self experienced such and such.

Like I said, this is a perpetual theme on this blog: in a comment people will claim to have experienced X, Y, or Z through meditation, the guru's grace, God's power, or whatever. 

I rarely respond to these claims.

I'm totally willing to accept that their subjective experience is real. However, this is the same as my being totally willing to believe that someone loved a Taylor Swift concert. A subjective claim doesn't require any validation. It is what it is: someone's inner experience of physical reality.

But when someone claims that they've had an inner, or subjective, experience of an unknown (to the rest of us) bit of supernatural reality, I'm not going to accept that claim without some solid demonstrable evidence. 

Objective reality seemingly should come with some objective attributes, even if these are far removed from everyday physical reality. I accept the evidence for a quantum realm, even though quantum phenomena behave very differently from things in everyday reality.

Scientists can show us the effects of the quantum realm, even though it can't be directly experienced by our senses. Most of our modern technology is based on quantum mechanics, so when my iPhone works, that's proof enough for me.

Where, though, is there any solid evidence of a supernatural realm? Short answer: there isn't any.

No one who claims to have experienced such a realm returns with miraculous powers, hitherto unknown knowledge, or anything else that points to a objective realm beyond the physical. 

All we have are stories, claims, beliefs, dogmas, and such.

I've got no problem with people who say they've had an experience of divinity. My problem is with people who want me, and others, to accept that their personal experience was of some objective reality. 

"The Realm of the Wise" is a book I both agree and disagree with

A while back I got an email from Marc Deprey, who shares my interest in Greek philosophy -- notably Plotinus' conception of the One as being both the fountainhead and essence of existence. 

Deprey said that he'd written a book, "The Realm of the Wise," that has quite a bit in common with my book about Plotinus' teachings, "Return to the One." 

Bookaholic that I am, I couldn't resist ordering a copy from Amazon. The Realm of the Wise is appealingly short -- just 134 pages. 

There is very little, if any, overt religiosity in Deprey's book, another plus. He cites Plato's famous Allegory of the Cave, just as I did in my own book. 

In this cave scene, it is we who are bound. It is we who see density in the shadows. It  is we who see separate, distinct things where inter-connectedness and interdependence pervades. It is we who see these reflections as the only reality and dismiss the surrounding space that makes them possible as meaningless, as no-thing. It is we who are prisoners in our own cave, which for us is filled with our thoughts, perceptions, and sensations and nothing more. 

So Deprey, like many other truth-seekers, considers that this world basically is an illusion. We're absorbed in staring at shadows on a cave wall. We need to find a way to turn around and experience the ethereal light that illumines the objects of physical reality. 

I pretty much agree with these sentiments. We don't see the world as clearly as we should. Our minds are full of misconceptions. We drive ourselves (and others) crazy with our interpretations of reality that are way off the mark. Thus much of Deprey's book has a Buddhist'y sort of tone that I liked. 

Meaning, we need to distance ourselves a bit from the feelings, thoughts, desires, and such that all too often drive us in negative and unproductive directions. We'd be better off looking at ourselves from more of a detached perspective. But Deprey goes farther.

The book's subtitle is Finding Your Wise Guide. This isn't a person. Nor is it any other entity separate from ourself. 

When the essential quality of the universe, namely simple awareness itself, informs us, we have entered the Realm of the Wise.

...When it comes to determining the best action, the most compassionate, the wise way, we expect our mind to be its own master. In contrast, dogs are wiser than us. Our dog looks for its master, "whines" in longing love when separated from him or her. In the same way, our mind also longs for its master. 

But unlike our dog, we feel alone, and our aloneness generates fear forcing our mind to act impulsively without insight. So who is our mind's master? The Wise Guide, the unconditioned awareness, the intelligent space.

Nice sentiments. Not too long ago, I would have agreed with these words. Even now, I wish they were true. Indeed they might be, but I've got some problems with the notion of "unconditioned awareness" in my current mindset. 

I just can't understand what "simple awareness itself" could be like. After all, there is much evidence that consciousness, or awareness, is produced by the workings of the brain. And there is essentially zero evidence that awareness exists independently of the brain.

Now, I readily admit that I've gone back and forth on this question in thirteen years of Church of the Churchless blog posts. In 2011 I wrote favorably about the notions of pure awareness and Absolute Unitary Being. 

This isn't any sort of other-worldly mystical state, according to the authors. They describe how, physiologically, 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.

I kind of doubt, though, that this is the same as Deprey's "unconditioned space," which appears to be more like a calm, clear consciousness that can reflect worldly objects and mental images without being affected by them. 

Again, as much as I would like to believe that this sort of awareness is possible, I just can't accept that it does. It seems more like wishful thinking than an actual state of being. 

If you want to know why I feel this way, check out "My (only) big problem with Sam Harris' 'Waking Up' book." Here's some excerpts.

Harris sees a mystery where there doesn't have to be one. He distinguishes between (1) brain processes and (2) consciousness. But if consciousness is a product of the human brain, not something separate and distinct from the brain, then consciousness is part of what the brain does.

Consciousness is a brain process.

...Sam Harris seems to believe that consciousness is something "extra" that gets added on to brain processes. Otherwise, why would Harris speak about "pure consciousness"? 

Here's another passage from Singh's book which speaks to this issue.

Complaining that psychology can't explain why red things look red to our brains is like complaining that a chef who has demonstrated how to combine and cook all the ingredients of a casserole still hasn't explained why a casserole has come out of the oven.

Casseroles simply are what get produced by that precise cooking procedure. Conscious experiences simply are what get produced by environments stimulating brains to deal with ongoing events.

I'm with Singh.

Harris has an extensive history of meditating under the tutelage of various teachers. He has left behind most of the mystical crap that was part of those teachings, but seemingly not all of it. Harris' attachment to "consciousness" being something distinct from what the brain does appears to be a holdover from those earlier Buddhist days. 

This is another Paul Singh quote that makes a lot of sense to me.

Being conscious is necessary for enjoying life, but consciousness isn't something that people have. Biologically and psychologically, it only makes sense to say that an animal can consciously enjoy eating food, but it is the eating of food that is enjoyed and not the consciousness as well.

We don't say, "That meal was a pleasure to eat, and my consciousness of eating was pleasurable too." There is no such thing as consciousness as yet another thing for us to enjoy. We simply enjoy the things around us. It is the food that is enjoyable, not the consciousness of the food.

Similarly, when I open my eyes and look at an apple on the table in front of me, I see the apple, not a consciousness of the apple. There aren't two things, a seen apple and a consciousness of the apple, involved here. If I say, "The apple is in my consciousness," I can only mean to say "I see the apple," or "The apple is in my range of vision."

Imagine a psychologist asking a subject to look at that apple on the table, and then asking, "Don't tell me whether you see the apple. I'm sure that you see the apple. I just want you to tell me if the apple is in your consciousness." 

Surely this would be a joke. Seeing the apple is just being conscious of the apple. Having consciousness is simply being conscious of what's going on. There is no such thing as consciousness over and above simply being alive and aware of one's surroundings.

My atheist sources of awe: existence, evolution, consciousnessI

In my previous Church of the Churchless post I talked about how much I liked "The Way of Wonder" by Jack Haas. Wonder, awe, even reverence -- these aren't feelings that only religious believers have. 

Hey, us atheists are equally wonder-filled, awestruck, reverent before something much greater than us.

We just are in awe of what really exists, not what is imagined to exist.  (Like God, heaven, soul, spirit.)

On a dog walk this afternoon I got to thinking about what I find most atheistically awesome about reality. Here's my top three, in order of awesomeness. 

Naturally I've included links to some of my blog posts concerning these subjects.

(1) Existence exists. 
There's nothing more mind-blowing to me than the stark fact that existence exists. If I ever feel like I need some chill up my spine, all I have to do is contemplate the undeniable reality of the cosmos. I am. The world is. Wow! 

Check out: 
"Existence exists" -- the cosmic lock to which humans have no key
Existence exists. Amazing!
Embrace awe that existence exists, not religion

(2) Evolution says all life has a common ancestor
We all are one. Humans, starfish, roses, elephants, bacteria, everything. Some 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago there was a Last Universal Common Ancestor to which all life is related. This likely was a small single-cell organism. Far out! I'm related to everything alive.

Check out:
Evolution is sacred, religion is profane

(3) Consciousness allows us to feel awestruck 

I used to feel that consciousness was way more mysterious than I consider it to be now. Science is making strides in understanding how consciousness arises in brains. Nonetheless, I'm still amazed that I, and every other conscious being, is able to be aware of the world that surrounds us, and indeed is us. 

Check out:
Float gently on a stream of consciousness
"I Am a Strange Loop"-- a book that beautifully explains consciousness, soul, and I-ness
Consider a cosmos with no consciousness

It isn't all about us. Humans aren't special.

We have no option but to use our human ways of knowing to understand the universe. However, this doesn't mean that us Homo sapiens possess the capability of accurately answering all the questions about the cosmos that come to mind. 

Or even being sure that we're able to ask the proper questions. 

More and more, I'm embracing the conclusion that human consciousness likely isn't capable of grasping the Great Big Questions (notably including why the universe exists at all), much less the answers to them.

Here's a letter from the June 2017 issue of Scientific American on this subject. I've also included the "Imagine No Universe" piece referred to in Dave Bolton's letter.

THINKING OF NOTHING

In “Imagine No Universe” [Skeptic], Michael Shermer explores attempts to answer the question of why there is “something rather than nothing” in the universe and the difficulty in defining “nothing.”

Why do we assume we have the potential brainpower to ever explain such mysteries? Could there not be aspects of the universe our human intelligence is unable to reach at the present time? Consider this: A dog travels in your car. Can it ever understand motor mechanics or geography? Your cat watches television. Has it any knowledge of electronic communications?

Why do we, just one of the species in existence, assume our brains are capable of knowing why we exist and what there is beyond infinity? This should not inhibit us in striving to understand the purpose of life, and so on. But we should accept that it may take a millennium of human development to know everything. Perhaps then we will become gods!

DAVE BOLTON
Essex, England

-------------------------
Why Humans Prefer to Be the Center of the Universe

Michael Shermer

Imagine nothing. Go ahead. What do you see? I picture dark empty space devoid of galaxies, stars and planets. But not only would there be no matter, there would be no space or time either. Not even darkness. And no sentient life to observe the nothingness. Just ... nothing. Picture that. You can't.

Here we face the ultimate question: Why is there something rather than nothing? I have compiled several responses from a number of sources, including a 2013 book by John Leslie and Robert Lawrence Kuhn entitled The Mystery of Existence (Wiley-Blackwell) and Lawrence M. Krauss's 2017 book The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far (Atria Books).

Nothing is nonsensical. It is impossible to conceptualize nothing—not only no space, time, matter, energy, light, darkness or conscious beings to perceive the nothingness but not even nothingness. In this sense, the question is literally inconceivable.

Nothing is something. It is a logical fallacy to talk about “nothing” as if it were a “something” that ceases to exist. Here we bump up against the problem of defining what we mean by “nothing” and the restrictions that language imposes on the problem. The very acting of talking about “nothing” makes it a “something.” Otherwise, what are we talking about?

Nothing would include God's nonexistence. In Leslie and Kuhn's taxonomy of “nothings,” they list what categories of things might be included in “something” that would be negated by “nothing”: physical, mental, platonic, spiritual and God. If by “nothing” is meant no physical objects or matter of any kind, for example, there can still be energy from which matter may arise by natural forces guided by the laws of nature. Physicists, for example, talk about empty space as seething with virtual particles, from which particle-antiparticle pairs come into existence as a consequence of the uncertainty principle of quantum physics. From this “nothingness,” universes may “pop” into existence.

Nothing excludes creation ex nihilo. If by “nothing” is meant that there is no physical, mental, platonic or nonphysical entity of any kind, then there can be no God or gods, which means that there cannot be anything outside of nothing from which to create something. This negates the Christian theologian argument that God created the universe ex nihilo, or “out of nothing,” based on the English translation of Genesis 1:1 that “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This is misleading. Recent scholarship has suggested that the Hebrew word for “creation” in Genesis 1:1 is bara (ברא)—a verb that more accurately translated means to “separate” or “divide.” Genesis 1:1 should read, “In the beginning God separated the heavens and the earth.” Separated from what is not indicated.

Nothing is unstable; something is stable. Asking why there is something rather than nothing presumes “nothing” is the natural state of things out of which “something” needs an explanation. Maybe “something” is the natural state of things, and “nothing” would be the mystery to be solved. In his sweeping narrative, The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far, a sequel to his 2012 book A Universe from Nothing, Krauss notes that “Einstein was one of the first physicists to demonstrate that the classical notion of causation begins to break down at the quantum realm.” Although many physicists objected to the idea of something coming from nothing, he observes that “this is precisely what happens with the light you are using to read this page. Electrons in hot atoms emit photons—photons that didn't exist before they were emitted—which are emitted spontaneously and without specific cause. Why is it that we have grown at least somewhat comfortable with the idea that photons can be created from nothing without cause, but not whole universes?”

One answer has to do with our discomfort with the Copernican principle, which holds that we are not special. We prefer religious and anthropic explanations that the universe was created and fine-tuned for us because they put humans right back in the center of the cosmos anthropocentrically—it is all about us. But 500 years of scientific discoveries have revealed that it isn't about us. From this fact, we may gain purchase on a perspective that engages both the religious and scientific impulse toward a sense of awe one gains from contemplating nothing.

Believers, be clear about what sort of belief you want others to accept

Someone recently emailed me, asking if I read the many comments (223, currently) on a recent Church of the Churchless post. Here's part of my reply.

I admit that I haven’t read the many comments on this post in much detail. In my current irreligious frame of mind it just strikes me as mostly meaningless to discuss/argue about subjective experiences as if they reflect some objective reality. There’s no way to tell whether someone’s supposed “mystical” experience is anything other than a projection of their own mind absent some sort of convincing demonstrable evidence.

 

Logical or reasonable arguments can lead anywhere. To me, most of the content of the comments is akin to debating the details of how unicorns look and act. The first question to ask is, “Do unicorns exist?” If they don’t, then it is just an exercise in creative fiction to delve into details of an imaginary creature. 

 

Philosophical debates aimed at how one lives in this world strike me as quite different. I read a lot of philosophy, both explicit and implicit. Finding meaning in this world clearly is a subjective exercise. But the world itself is objectively real, which gives meaning to the search for meaning. 

 

Trying to find meaning in supernatural realms and powers for which there is no evidence of their existence strikes me as a waste of time. And I say this as someone who has wasted a lot of time in this pursuit.

Here's another way of expressing what I was trying to say in my reply: believers should be clear about what sort of belief they are claiming is valid, and so worthy of being embraced by other people.

The basic distinction is between subjective and objective reality, as I noted in my reply. Now, I realize that "subjective" and "objective" mean different things to different people. But the dictionary definitions make good sense. 

Subjective: characteristic of or belonging to reality as perceived rather than as independent of mind :  relating to or being experience or knowledge as conditioned by personal mental characteristics or states

Objective: of, relating to, or being an object, phenomenon, or condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers :  having reality independent of the mind

So let's say that someone speaks of experiencing God, heaven, or some other manifestation of a supernatural reality beyond the physical universe. For example, as in the above-mentioned comments, some people talk about astral realms, radiant forms, divine light and sound. 

I have no problem accepting that a person had an experience along these lines. After all, the mind is capable of creating many mental manifestations that are much different from everyday reality.

If you take a psychedelic drug, likely you're going to have profound personal experiences.
If you have a psychotic form of mental illness, likely you're going to have profound personal experiences.
If you meditate for lengthy periods, likely you're going to have profound personal experiences.
If you meet with a holy leader you're deeply devoted to, likely you're going to have profound personal experiences.
And if you deeply desire to have a certain religious experience, likely you're going to have profound personal experiences in line with that desire.

Naturally this doesn't exhaust the ways religiously-minded people can have deeply moving experiences of what seems to be a divinity beyond themselves. Every religion is awash with stories about devotees who have experienced a glimpse -- or a full-on encounter -- with the divinity they believe in.

I'm interested in these stories in much the same way I'm interested in hearing someone talk about going to Glacier National Park, a Monster Truck event, Paris, a Taylor Swift concert, or any other experience that leaves this person with an amazing feeling best expressed as "You had to be there to believe it."

Meaning, I accept that they had a profound experience. But I don't accept that this was an objective manifestation of reality.

Well, in the examples above the experience was of something objectively real, such as Taylor Swift. However, the person's experience of a Taylor Swift concert was their own, whereas the objective reality of the concert was independent of their individual mind.

In the case of religious, mystical, or spiritual experiences, often the discrepancy between subjective and objective is much greater.

After all, there is no shared experience of God, heaven, soul, spirit, or any other supernatural entity. All we have are descriptions of individual experiences, and there is no way to prove that these are anything other than the manifestation of a person's subjective mind.

So I wish religious believers would be clearer about what they claim to have experienced.

I had numerous profound encounters with what seemed to be a higher reality in my college days, when I imbibed LSD, mescaline, and other psychedelics. But I rarely, if ever, told other people that my psychedelic experiences were of an objectively real reality.

Yes, at the time the sensations I experienced seemed like a doorway to a higher state of consciousness. And maybe they were, in a personal subjective sense. Meaning, for me. Not for anybody else.

Yet religious believers often extrapolate from their individual personal experience of some supposed divinity and claim that their experience proves that the divinity is objectively real. Which, of course, it doesn't. 

"I had a subjective experience of X" is very different from "X exists as an objective fact." The first statement doesn't demand proof, because subjective experiences basically are unprovable. The second statement does demand proof, because it is a claim about universal reality. 

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.

Have faith that reality is better than any belief

One of my first Church of the Churchless posts, "Just have faith," was written in November 2004. It's still one of my favorites. Re-reading it today, I was pleased that I still agree with just about everything in it. 

The reason: even though thirteen years ago I was more open to the hypothesis of God and life after death than I am now, the method of open-minded scientific faith that should be used to investigate all sorts of hypotheses -- both worldly and spiritual -- rings as true to me today as it did back then. 

My personal research into the nature of reality has led me to the conclusion favored by most other scientifically-minded people: there is no demonstrable evidence for the existence of a conscious being, power, or force we could call "God." 

So I have come to reject the God hypothesis, even though my previous belief that God exists was highly pleasing to me.

This is the power of faith. Real faith. Meaning, faith that whatever reality consists of, knowing this truth, even if it makes us uncomfortable, is preferable to embracing a false comforting belief.

Below is what I said in my "Just have faith" post. Note that in the last sentence I speak of "God" being another name for "ultimate reality." This is a rather unusual use of the word, God, but it makes sense to me.

I still pray to God, even though I'm an atheist. However, when I say "God, show me your true nature," I'm really saying "Reality, I want to know you as you are." 

Just have faith

Faith is wonderful.
Faith is all we need to be spiritual.
Just faith. Faith alone.
So we shouldn't have faith in anything other than pure, naked, empty faith.

What is faith stripped of thought, emotion, perception, expectation, imagination? Whatever it is, that's what we are seeking. Such is the message at the mystical core of every deep spiritual teaching. A few examples:

Christianity: "Be silent therefore, and do not chatter about God, for by chattering about him, you tell lies and commit a sin....Also you should not wish to understand anything about God, for God is beyond all understanding....If you understand anything about him, then he is not in it, and by understanding something of him, you fall into ignorance." Meister Eckhart (Selected Writings, Penguin Books)

Judaism/Kabbalah: "God is not what we think It is. God is not a thing, a being, a noun....Jewish mystics often refer to It as Ein Sof, which means Endlessness....Ein Sof precedes thought and it even precedes the Nothingness out of which thought is born. Nothingness is viewed as a level of awareness that is the result of the 'annhilation of thought.'" Rabbi David Cooper (God is a Verb, Riverhead Books)

Islam/Sufism: "Anything that has a beginning and an end is a 'shell.'...There is more to the pronouncement of faith than what is said with the tongue because it too has a beginning and an end....We know then that the 'soul' of prayer is not only its external form but also a state of total absorption and unconsciousness during which all these external forms, for which there is no room, remain outside." Rumi (Discourses of Rumi, Threshold Books)

Buddhism: "If you want to reach the other shore of existence, give up what is before, behind, and in between. Set your mind free, and go beyond birth and death....I have conquered myself and live in purity. I know all. I have left everything behind, and live in freedom. Having taught myself, to whom shall I point as teacher?" Teachings of the Buddha (The Dhammapada, Nilgiri Press)

Here's how to tell the difference between true faith and false faith: Imagine that you are standing in the middle of a bare windowless room. Two doors lead out of the room. Both are closed, but can be opened with a turn of the doorknob. The doors are marked with signs that describe what awaits on the other side: (A) Reality, (B) Belief

After you open a door, you have to walk through it. The door then will shut and you never will be able to leave the place you have entered. Choose Reality and you will know things as they really are, from top to bottom of the cosmos. You will know whether or not God exists and, if so, the nature of this ultimate divinity. You will know whether death is the final end of your existence or if it is the beginning of another form of life. You will know whether there is a meaning to the universe beyond what human beings ascribe to it.

Or, choose Belief and you will know only what lies within the confines of your current suppositions about the nature of the cosmos. For the rest of your life you will be confident that what you believe to be true, really is. Any evidence to the contrary will not make an impact on your mind. You will remain doubt-free, faithful to the beliefs you now hold about God, creation, life, death, and the purpose of human existence.

Which door would you choose to walk through?

Before answering, consider carefully the potential ramifications of your choice. Reality is an unknown, a mystery. It could be frightening or fabulous, painful or pleasurable, warmly loving or coldly uncaring. Do you want to embrace absolutely real reality? Or would you rather hold on to your beliefs about what is real?

Someone with the type of faith extolled by the Church of the Churchless would unhesitatingly choose Door A and boldly stride into Reality. For their faith is not in anything particular, but is a faith that truth can be known, should be known, and, indeed, must be known.

This is the faith Henry David Thoreau speaks of in Walden:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living it so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the Devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to 'glorify God and enjoy him forever.'" (Where I Lived, and What I Lived For chapter)

Such is a scientific faith, a faith that does not foreclose in advance any possibility about what reality may consist of, a faith not in the unproven pronouncements of some supposedly holy person or book but in one's own direct experience of divinity--or direct non-experience, as the case may be.

Still, there is nothing wrong with belief, so long as our beliefs remain subservient to reality. When reality extends its hand, we should be able to happily surrender even our most cherished beliefs. This will not be difficult if our faith is in the rightness of whatever spiritual experiment we have chosen to undertake, and not in the surety of realizing a particular outcome.

A material scientist adjusts his beliefs, or hypotheses, in accordance with the results of his experiments. He does not design an experiment to produce certain desired findings, for this would not be science. The scientific method is what a scientist has firm faith in; everything else is provisional until proven.

Similarly, the height of spirituality is to just have faith.
Faith that reality is better than any and all beliefs.
Faith that the ultimate reality we may call "God" will be reflected in an open mind...but not a closed one.

 

Reality is a terrible thing to waste -- yet religions and politicians do

What is real? This is one of the most important questions. I've grappled with it for my entire adult life. 

The basic problem I or anyone else faces in answering that question is that we humans are subjective beings who exist in an objective world. 

So subjectivity and objectivity are intermingled in everything we do, which includes grappling with the nature of reality.

Wisdom, in my admittedly subjective opinion, largely lies in recognizing the difference between "I believe," "I feel," and similar I-based views, and "It is true that..." The latter sort of statement refers to an intersubjective reality, which is the closest we can come to objectivity.

Meaning, if several people agree about the nature of something, and have good reasons for arriving at that agreement, this should bring us closer to knowing the reality that exists outside of our individual subjective minds. 

Religious believers usually consider that God is the source of this universal reality. I don't. However, we have some common ground in that a sense of the "sacred" (broadly defined) motivates both secular and religious truth-seekers. 

Traditionally, as in the Middle Ages, science was viewed as a means of revealing the glory of God's creation. That attitude still is prevalent today, so long as we leave out a single word, "God's." Most scientists, and most lovers of science, are awestruck by the marvelous regularities revealed by the laws of nature. 

Also, by the unfathomable vastness of the universe (or universes) as we look outward at the cosmos, and the equal mystery of the infinitesimal quantum realms that lie within every speck of matter/energy.

Even during my true-believing days in an Eastern form of religion, I found it objectionable when my fellow devotees would dismiss modern science, and rationality in general, as a lesser form of knowing. They had been brainwashed into viewing closed-eyed meditation as the only way to grasp ultimate truth.

I had a different view.

Science could tell us a lot about objective reality, but not everything. Our seemingly subjective consciousness could become a means of knowing objective realms of reality beyond the physical, given sufficient training in certain forms of meditation.

Now I'm skeptical that this is the case.

I still meditate every day, but I see this as akin to mental exercise/conditioning and not as a means to escape the bounds of ordinary ways of learning about the world. So even more than before, I've come to view scientific, intersubjective, communal understandings of reality as sacred (in a secular sense of the word).

It deeply bothers me when religious leaders and politicians ignore objective facts in favor of subjective beliefs. For example, human-caused global warming is a fact. Not a 100% certain fact, but an extremely highly likely fact, not much less probable than the fact that the Earth orbits the sun or water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. 

So when Trump cabinet nominees refuse to acknowledge the reality of human-caused global warming, I see this as profane. Again, in a secular sense, the opposite of sacred -- which to me is seeing the world as it objectively is, not as we subjectively would like it to be, or believe it to be.

On climate change, a handful of Trump nominees have broken with the president-elect, who has called global warming “a hoax.” Zinke, Pruitt and Rex Tillerson, the nominee for secretary of state, each acknowledged in their confirmation hearings that the climate is changing, but stopped short of blaming burning fossil fuels. The nominees each employed a version of what Mother Jones called Republicans’ favorite excuse on global warming: “I’m not a climate scientist.”

OK, so you're not a climate scientist. Neither am I. But I accept what climate scientists have learned about global warming, just as I accept what physicists have learned about gravity, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics. 

Reality is a terrible thing to waste. Here we are, living what almost certainly is our one and only life in the one and only universe we can know about, 

I can sort of accept that ordinary individuals have the right to believe untrue stuff about the world, since the consequences of their false understanding of reality usually don't affect other people. 

But when religious leaders or politicians engage in blatant reality-denial, that's a whole other thing, because their utterances and actions do affect other people. Lots of them. Everybody on the planet, really, when it comes to denying global climate change caused by human activities. 

Fighting in defense of reality is essential. It's our sacred duty, whether or not we believe in God. 

"The Simplest Case Scenario" is a must-read for philosophical science-lovers

Scientific. Philosophical. Well-written. Creative. Mind-expanding. 

"The Simplest Case Scenario" by Karl Coryat pushed all of my book-loving buttons.  It's subtitle points to why I liked it so much: How the universe may be very different from what we think it is.

I've believed this for my entire adult life. But for most of that time I thought that the Secret of the Cosmos could only be revealed through mysticism, meditation, philosophical contemplation, enlightenment, psychedelics. 

At the same time, I've always adored science.

I've read countless (almost) books about quantum mechanics, cosmology, neuroscience, cutting edge physics, systems theory, evolution, and such. But I figured that scientific thinking could only go so far, and it was necessary to break out of its boundaries to approach the Meaning of It All.

Well, Coryat has done a damn fine job of melding the facts of modern science with a consciousness-expanding view of what lies at the core of reality.

And he does this without resorting to supernaturalism, religion, God, or anything in the realm of woo-woo -- which is why I like his approach so much better than the many authors like Deepak Chopra who try to make quantum theory into New Age'y "create your own reality" ridiculousness.

Coryat's basis thesis is that the universe is made of information, not stuff.

Physicist John Wheeler's "it from bit" hypothesis supports this contention, but this book goes further than any other scientific writing I've come across in ferreting out the implications of information being the root of reality.

For example, we assume that photons reaching us from a star a billion light years away have been doing their electromagnetic thing for that length of time. Meaning, the photons have been objectively real across that immense span of space-time. However, Coryat persuasively argues that an act of observation essentially brings the photons into being.

This seems counter-intuitive and wrong.

Yet if all we know about the world comes from information, what reason is there to posit a realm of stuff that somehow is both itself and also a source of information about itself? The simplest case scenario, as Coryat puts it, is to understand that "When you look at an object, you aren't actually looking at the object. You're looking at information about the object."

From this simple thread of a premise, the book spins some marvelous webs of conclusions in a convincing manner. My knowledge of quantum mechanics and other scientific subjects is greater than that of most people, but nowhere near professional level.

Still, I feel like I have a pretty good ability to sense bullshit in books that purport to explain the rock-bottom nature of reality, even if I can't pinpoint the factual reasons for my skepticism.

It is a tribute to Coryat's writing ability and obvious extensive background research that my copy of "The Simplest Case Scenario" only contains a few marginal question marks penned in by my highlighter. 

I found his treatment of free will to be overly simplistic and out-of-touch with how this supposed human quality should be defined. Namely, as the ability to choose to act differently even if every particle in the universe, including those that comprise the willing brain, were in exactly the same condition.

In other words, genuine free will requires some sort of supernatural assumption, a liberation of consciousness from universal laws of nature. Coryat doesn't believe such exists, yet he argues for the appearance of intentionality in complex informational systems. Yes, but this isn't free will.

I also couldn't follow his contention that a universe comprised of information, rather than stuff, leaves little or no room for the possibility of advanced alien life forms. He says, "The stumbling block for finding truly alien life is that the history of any other informational systems needs to be consistent with our techno-biological history."

There's a good chance I don't understand the subtlety of Coryat's thinking in this regard.

However, it seems to me that while being able to understand or communicate with an alien life form requires some form of cognitive/perceptual commonality, I don't get why a informational universe demands that only one basic type of observer exist within it. 

This isn't a perfect analogy, but whenever I go on a walk with our dog and she spends several minutes avidly sniffing some blades of grass that hold no interest for me, I'm reminded that she and I exist in the same world, but perceive it in very different ways. 

And what Coryat said in his entry in a Foundational Essays contest -- which formed the basis of this book -- seems at odds with his current position: "Perhaps for an alien race with its own origin and history, the universe would reveal an entirely different set of constants and laws. Indeed, it would be a different universe."

These are minor quibbles, though, and like I said, they might arise from misunderstandings on my part.

My book review bottom line is: READ IT.

Appealingly, to do this you don't even have to buy "The Simplest Case Scenario," though as a habitual reader of printed books, I recommend that you get an Amazon copy on real paper. Alternatively, Coryat is offering a free PDF download of his book at simplestcasescenario.com

Karl Coryat is an interesting guy. Check out his minimalist web site: http://www.pisspoor.com/coryat.html He's a music journalist, a successful Jeopardy contestant, and a comedian. 

He also just might have figured out the Secret of the Universe. Or, not. Read his book and make up your own mind. 

Viewing life as a Plinko board: probabilistic, chaotic, uncertain

It's easy to see what happens in life. It's much more difficult to comprehend why something happens.

For example, we know that Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States. But why this occurred -- beyond the obvious "Trump got more electoral votes than Hillary Clinton" -- is a question that can't be definitively answered.

This doesn't stop people from theorizing, though. 

At one extreme, a religious believer might say It was God's will. Or phrased more generally, This was fated to be. At another extreme, a nihilistically-minded person could opine, Shit just happens; end of story.

A book I've been reading, "The Simplest Case Scenario: How the Universe May Be Very Different from What We Think It Is," contains a metaphor that strikes me as an appealing middle ground between extreme determinism and extreme randomness.

Karl Coryat, the author, argues persuasively that the universe is composed of information rather than matter/energy. I'll write about his intriguing interpretation of modern science after I've finished his book, which should be in a few days. I'm looking forward to posting a highly positive Amazon review.

Coryat uses a Plinko Board analogy to convey how the universe, or by implication any part of it, could take many potential pathways -- but ends up taking only one. 

The Price is Right game show uses a Plinko Board. Here's a video showing it in action. (I've made the video start at the point a contestant does the Plinko thing.)

Coryat explains how a Plinko board, or box, works.

If you drop a chip into a Plinko box, the chip may take any of a number of paths to the bottom. Whenever the chip falls between two pegs, it hits a peg underneath and must "decide" whether to go left or right. In this manner, each row of pegs that the chip encounters is like a coin toss, where we would expect the chip to go to the left or right with equal probability. Stated another way, it's as if the chip is presented with a series of yes-or-no questions, and the chip chooses an answer every time, effectively at random.

So this makes it sound like life is a crap game. You throw your dice and random luck makes things happen. However, in a footnote Coryat deepens our understanding of what is going on when a chip is dropped into a Plinko board.

Technically, the falling chip is exhibiting chaotic behavior. Rather than its path being determined strictly by the laws of probability, the path depends upon the precise way it was dropped, as well as minute factors such as air currents, dust, the exact shape of the chip, unevenness of the pegs, etc. 

Still, the path is sufficiently unpredictable and unreproducible, and the outcome closely enough simulates probability laws, that we can think of the chip's path as being determined by probability. (The same is true of a well-performed coin flip or dice-roll.)

Chaotic behavior is deterministic. But the factors causing the behavior are so complicated, or so subtle, or so difficult to discern, for all practical purposes the ultimate reasons why something happens remain hidden in a chaotic shroud. 

Often this is called The Butterfly Effect. Wikipedia says:

The butterfly effect is the concept that small causes can have large effects. Initially, it was used with weather prediction but later the term became a metaphor used in and out of science. In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.

The name, coined by Edward Lorenz for the effect which had been known long before, is derived from the metaphorical example of the details of a hurricane (exact time of formation, exact path taken) being influenced by minor perturbations such as the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier.

Lorenz discovered the effect when he observed that runs of his weather model with initial condition data that was rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome.

I find a lot of comfort in these notions: Plinko box, chaos theory, butterfly effect.

Now, I admit that in my true-believing days I also found comfort in a belief that karma determined what happened in life, and that it was possible to escape karma's clutches by raising one's consciousness to a higher supernatural level through meditation and the grace of a guru.

(Yeah, I know that sounds weird, but so is every false religious belief. In addition, much of modern science sounds decidedly weird, even though it is true. So weirdness is found almost everywhere one looks.)

Thus in my previous state of mind, I would have thought, "Donald Trump won the presidency because this was meant to be."

Not believing this anymore, yet not being willing to accept that randomness rules the universe, I'm attracted to the logical, scientific, reasonable notion that determinism controls what happens in life -- yet usually not in obvious ways. 

Mostly we like to look for Big Reasons that explain Big Events. Like, the winning of a presidential election. Or more personally, why we ended up married to a certain person, living in a certain place, having a certain career, and such.

So political commentators obsess over election results, exit polls, demographics, campaign strategies, etc., etc. There's nothing wrong with this. However, there's good reason to suppose that a presidential election is more akin to a Plinko box than we might like to think.

What if a staffer had said something at a certain time that made Clinton decide to not set up a personal email server for her Secretary of State work? What if Attorney General Lynch had the thought, "I shouldn't let Bill Clinton onto my plane," which would have made it much more possible for her to overrule FBI Director Comey's decision to publicly reveal a further investigation into Clinton's emails just before the election?

Many what if's of this sort can be visualized. A few tiny influences could have had a giant impact on the election, per the butterfly effect. In fact, almost certainly they did. It's just impossible to figure out what they were.

The course of real life events can't be observed like the falling chip in a Plinko box. All we know is the final outcome, not the convoluted chain of often-chaotic causes and effects that led to this rather than that happening. 

Like I said, I find this comforting.

I don't enjoy the thought that Trump's victory was destined. Nor do I embrace the notion that it is possible to know why he won, and Clinton lost, because this would mean that if the Clinton campaign had been smarter, they would have come out on top on election day. Which leads to a sense of blame. And neither do I believe that there is no reason Trump won.

But in between It was meant to be and Shit happens is Sometimes life takes strange turns. Why? Impossible to say. Just like it is impossible to say why a single chip falling in a Plinko box ends up where it does. 

Three philosophical approaches for coping with a Trump presidency

Like a lot of people, I was shocked last Tuesday when, instead of the Hillary Clinton win that I expected, I went to bed with the nightmare of a President Trump coursing through my still-awake brain. 

It took me a long time to fall asleep. I did my best to relax, to reassure myself that this wasn't the end of the world. But damn, it sure felt like it. 

During the past post-election week, I've been exploring mental defusing approaches to keep my head from exploding.

They seem to be helping, though it's difficult to separate the healing that comes from the simple passage of time and relief provided by the three philosophical approaches described below.

Your results may differ, of course, because you and I are different people.

I'm a godless scientific-minded materialist. So "Trump's election is part of God's plan" doesn't do anything for me, while it may for you. However, my first philosophical approach has some similarities to this sentiment. Minus God and plan.

It's my favorite, so I'll describe it in more detail than the other two approaches.

(1) Determinism rules the world. And, elections. I'm a big non-believer in free will. (Type "free will" in the Google search box in the right sidebar to find my many posts on this subject.) There's just no evidence that anything other than deterministic laws of nature are responsible for why things turn out the way they do.

It's easy to accept this when it comes to events involving entities that aren't alive, such as earthquakes. When a town is devastated by the ground shifting underneath it, nobody blames the earth for doing something wrong.  

Likewise, if a lion attacks someone in an African jungle, the animal isn't viewed as blameworthy. At least, not in the sense of "it could have acted otherwise." Lions do what they do because that's their nature. But most of us view human beings differently.

We have this strange idea that Homo sapiens is a species that isn't governed by the deterministic laws that everything else in the universe, living and non-living alike, must follow. The reason: evolution has given us a sense of being an ethereal free-floating consciousness that is able to freely choose what the mind and body do.

Almost certainly, this is an illusion, one that has benefits, yet also drawbacks.

Just as a wrongly-held belief in free will makes us judgmental toward criminals (vindictive punishment isn't scientifically justified in a deterministic world, while controlling their behavior and rehabilitation is), so does it make us think "Donald Trump wouldn't have been elected president if only... ."

Clinton hadn't wanted her own email server. Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic nominee. FBI Director Comey hadn't released his letter soon before the election. Etc. Etc.

There's no such thing as "if only" in a deterministic world. Only one thing can happen at a time. Then another thing happens. And a following thing. There is no reality where anything happened differently than what actually occurred. 

I find this comforting. This is why I enjoy dispassionate fact-based analysis of 2016 election results, as described in a recent post on my other blog.

As weird as Trump is, his winning the White House wasn't a random unexplainable bolt of electoral lightning. Like everything else in life, it was the result of causes and effects, some of which can be understood by us humans, and some of which elude our current ability to make sense of political reality.

I don't like what happened on November 8. But then, I don't like a lot of things that happen in the world.

Having Dover remind me that everything happens for various reasons, including presidential victories, helped me view the reality of President Trump as simply one more explainable undesirable event -- like an epidemic, earthquake, or economic downturn.  

Now, I want to be clear: believing in determinism doesn't mean that one is fatalistic. Rather, just the opposite. Earthquakes and lion attacks have to be fought, resisted, dealt with, anticipated. But our reactions to determined events also are determined. (As is someone writing a blog post about determinism, and other people reading it.)

The advantage of a deterministic point of view is that energy isn't wasted in non-productive negative feelings of "this shouldn't be happening."

A skilled boxer doesn't worry about the punch that didn't land, or his opponent's blow that did. He uses that information in deciding what to do next. Focusing on a non-existent might have been distracts from bringing about the potential actuality of what can be. 

(2) There is no objective right or wrong, good or bad. Related to my strong belief in determinism is a conviction that nowhere in the universe does an objectively real entity known as "right," "wrong," "good," or "bad" exist.

These labels are applied to things, people, events, and such by subjective human beings. They don't possess any reality outside of the human mind. Which doesn't mean they are unimportant judgments; deciding what is right or wrong, good or bad is an inescapable part of being human. 

Our makeup is such that, in contrast to animals, we continually draw abstract conclusions from concrete happenings.

An earthquake isn't only that. It gets adjectives: devastating, horrific, terrifying. Similarly, the election of Donald Trump isn't only that. It gets the same sort of adjectives from people who were opposed to him: frightening, disastrous, dangerous.

I try to keep in mind that about half of the electorate was pleased, if not overjoyed, by Trump's victory. At the same time, about half was saddened, if not seriously depressed. Was one of these reactions correct, in tune with objective reality, commensurate with the way the world really is?

No. Both were subjective. The only objective truth is: Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States. 

(3) Expanding our perspective alters our point of view. Obviously. Yes, it is possible to see the universe in a grain of sand. Still, there is a difference between the universe and a grain of sand. 

Science-lover that I am, news that there are hugely more galaxies in the universe than previously thought helps me to view Trump, myself, and everything else in our world as less cosmically significant. 

Recent research conducted by an international team led by Christopher Conselice, an astrophysics professor at the University of Nottingham, found that the universe has about 2 trillion galaxies, which is 10 times more than previous estimates.

Two trillion galaxies. Not two hundred billion, which is still a heck of a lot. Two trillion. Each containing on average maybe 100 billion stars. 

I feel very, very small. Not insignificant. Just small. 

Understand: it is vitally important that we protect the livability of our one and only planet Earth. All those other galaxies, all those other stars with all those other planets, they don't do us a bit of good, because we're stuck with our galaxy, our star, our planet. 

Still, I enjoy having my mind blown by the thought of those 2 trillion galaxies. It doesn't change the reality of what just happened in the 2016 presidential election. But it damn sure gives me a different perspective on it.

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.

Free will is an illusion: convincing Sam Harris video

Below is a 9-minute video that encapsulates Sam Harris' views about free will.

Which, in short, is that it is an illusion. And that the world would be better off if people recognized this, rather than wrongly believing that humans are able to freely choose what to do at any given moment.

The background music in the video is a bit distracting. But Harris' message is so convincing, and the video is so well done (aside, perhaps, from the music selection), I urge you to watch it.

Now, I realize that some people don't look upon free will in the way that Harris does.

Harris, like me, considers that free will means just that: we are free to will what we want to do. This is how the legal system looks upon free will. It also is how virtually everybody who believes in free will looks upon it: as the capacity to do this rather than that. 

The alternative view of free will makes little, if any, sense. Namely, that while we are not free to choose what we will, if there is nothing constraining us from carrying out that determined choice, then we have "free will." 

Well, this viewpoint simply means that humans have as much free will as a well-functioning computer does. Absent software or hardware problems, a computer is able to carry out the tasks that it has been programmed to do. But does this mean it has free will?

No. Likewise, Harris says that because we live in a deterministic universe, human actions also are determined by all of the influences acting upon us from birth onward (even before birth, of course, given genetic influences). 

If you watch the video and find flaws in Harris' arguments, please leave a comment explaining what you think he got wrong. Like I said, I find the video highly convincing, but I'm open to hearing reasons why free will isn't an illusion. So far, I just haven't come across any convincing ones.

Sam Harris - Free Will from The Inspiration Journey on Vimeo.

Science warns: don't get sucked into a black hole of belief

When I was in college forty-six years ago, back in the ancient year of 1970, I was attracted to a Eastern form of mysticism that went by various names, including Science of the Soul. 

I really liked the idea of being able to do a spiritual "experiment." 

Become a vegetarian. Live a moral life. Meditate for several hours a day as instructed by the guru. Observe what happens in meditation. Explore the hypothesis that there are higher non-physical domains of reality. Attempt to enter these via an altered form of consciousness.

For about thirty-five years I diligently conducted that experiment.

When I considered what I'd learned from all that meditating, all that following the teachings of the guru, all that volunteer service I'd put in on behalf of the spiritual organization, I came to a conclusion:

I no longer believed what I'd been told was true. I'd lost faith in the guru and his teachings. I didn't think that reality extended into supernatural realms, there was life after death, or that God existed.

To me, then as now, I viewed my change of heart and mind as completely consistent with my commitment to investigate a Science of the Soul. After all, scientists alter their views as new and better evidence becomes available. Science isn't a fixed set of facts, but a dynamic process of seeking what appears to be the most likely truths about the cosmos.

Below are some quotes from physicist Sean Carroll's marvelous book, "The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself." In his Accepting Uncertainty chapter, Carroll talks about the scientific method in a fashion that resonates with me. 

In between the quotations, I've commented on them. First, Carroll speaks about absolute faith. This was something that many of my fellow disciples had. At least, they claimed they had 100% confidence that the Guru was God in human form and his teachings were true.

Me, I was never that sure.

For a long time I felt that the chances were high that it was indeed possible to leave this physical universe behind and enter higher regions of supernatural reality. But I had my doubts about this, even though I did my best to suppress them behind a covering of belief. 

That lingering skepticism probably protected me from being sucked into a black hole of belief, for which I'm grateful. Carroll writes:

The word "faith" is highly charged, and this isn't the place to argue over how it should be defined. Let us merely note that sometimes faith is taken as something that is absolutely certain. Consider these statements from the Catechism of the Catholic Church: [I've just included one of them]

...Faith is certain. It is more certain than all human knowledge because it is founded on the very word of God who cannot lie.

It is this kind of stance -- that there is a kind of knowledge that is certain, which we should receive with docility, to which we should submit -- that I'm arguing against. There are no such kinds of knowledge. We can always be mistaken, and one of the most important features of a successful strategy for understanding the world is that it will constantly be testing its presuppositions, admitting the possibility of error, and trying to do better.

We all want to live on a stable planet of belief, but we want to avoid being sucked into a black hole of belief, where our convictions are so strong that we can never escape, no matter what kind of new insight or information we obtain.

In the next passage, Carroll speaks about a subject that has frequently come up on this blog since I started Church of the Churchless in 2004, disturbed at how the religious right had played a big role in getting George W. Bush re-elected as president. When I disparage blind faith, religious believers often respond with "But Brian, you have your own kind of faith -- faith in the ability of science to uncover the truth about reality."

Here's how Carroll deals with that spurious argument.

You will sometimes hear the claim that even science is based on a kind of "faith," for example, in the reliability of our experimental data or in the existence of unbreakable physical laws. That is wrong. As part of the practice of science, we certainly make assumptions -- our sense data is giving us roughly reliable information about the world, simple explanations are preferable to complex ones, we are not brains in vats, and so forth.

But we don't have "faith" in those assumptions; they are components of our planets of belief, but they are always subject to revision and improvement and even, if necessary, outright rejection. By its nature, science needs to be completely open to the actual operation of the world, and that means that we stand ready to discard any idea that is no longer useful, no matter how cherished and central it may once have seemed.

Then Carroll talks about an important subject, our inability to know anything for certain. It's all a matter of probabilities. That's how my spiritual beliefs (and then the lack thereof) altered over the years: gradually, as I experienced increasing evidence that pointed to naturalism, rather than supernaturalism, being most likely to be true.

Am I completely convinced of this? No.

I'm very much open to the cosmos, or God, proving me wrong. If I come across convincing evidence for life after death, soul travel, and an immaterial divinity, I'd be overjoyed to say, Changed my mind again! 

For now, though, I'm going with what seems much more likely to be true. This is my one and only life; there's no spiritual reality beyond the physical world; consciousness is produced by the brain and ends when the brain does. Carroll says:

Because we should have nonzero credences for ideas that might seem completely unlikely or even crazy, it becomes useful to distinguish between "knowing" and "knowing with absolute logical certainty." If our credence for some proposition is 0.0000000001, we're not absolutely certain it's wrong -- but it's okay to proceed as if we know it is.

...Consider going home tonight and cooking some pasta for dinner. But before you open the lid on that jar of marinara sauce, ask yourself: What if a freak mutation inside the jar has created a deadly pathogen that will be released if and only if you open the lid, spreading through the world and killing all forms of life. Clearly that would be bad; just as clearly, it seems very unlikely. But you can't prove that it won't happen. There's a chance, even if it's very small.

I'm not bothered by the loss of my once-cherished beliefs in God, an afterlife, and zipping around heavenly regions in my astral, causal, and soul-selves. I started out my spiritual quest by wanting to know the truth about the cosmos. I'm still committed to that quest. 

It just has led me to change my beliefs to be in accord with how reality most likely is. I'll keep searching for More Reality, as we all do. Like Carroll says, certainty never happens. 

The resolution is to admit that some credences are so small that they're not worth taking seriously. It makes sense to act as if we know those possibilities to be false.

So we take "I believe x" not to mean "I can prove x is the case," but rather "I feel it would be counterproductive to spend any substantial amount of time and effort doubting x." We can accumulate so much evidence in favor of a theory that maintaining skepticism about it goes from being "prudent caution" to being "crackpottery." We should always be open to changing our beliefs in the face of new evidence, but the evidence required might need to be so overwhelmingly strong that it's not worth the effort to seek it out.

We are left with, not absolute proof of anything, but a high degree of confidence in some things, and greater uncertainty in others. That's both the best we can hope for and what the world does as a matter of fact grant us. Life is short, and certainty never happens.

"Existence exists" -- the cosmic lock to which humans have no key

I'm obsessed, in a pleasing way, with a cosmic notion: existence exists. 

(A Google search of my blogs reveals the posts where I've tried to "eff" this ineffable subject. Some are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

Seemingly there's not much I could add to what I've said about this ultimate mystery. Except... what I'm going to add right now.

Which is another attempt to speak about the unspeakable feeling that comes over me when I contemplate the fact that existence exists.

This feeling can't be produced on demand.

Right now I'm talking about a memory of it, not the feeling itself. For me, it's a sort of godless grace. When the feeling happens, I'm grateful for the sensation of getting a glimpse of what can't be known. 

At least, I'm pretty sure, not by a human brain. Any human brain. Doesn't matter if you're a genius, a mystic, a Nobel prize winner, a poet, a savant, a philosophical mastermind. 

I'm convinced that the feeling I've talked about in my blog posts is a cosmic lock, not a key. It vaguely points in the general direction of Ultimate Mystery, but in no way does it lead closer to an understanding. 

Here's one of my attempts to talk about the cosmic lock.

It happened again today. That sudden "bottom falling out from under me" feeling, sort of the mental equivalent of being startled by an elevator going into free fall.

I like the feeling. It's the most genuine sensation of spirituality, not really an apt word, but best I can come up with, that comes over me in my churchless way of looking at the world.

What it is -- and I'm also struggling to find the right words here -- is awe that existence exists. 

I was walking along with one of our dogs on a pleasant rainless mild Oregon day, enjoying the early spring sprouting greenness on a trail that leads through woods to a nearby lake. 

I'd been thinking about how nature has no straight lines, no obvious rigid order, no firm demarcations between this and that. Only the human-built structures along my way possessed those features.

Then my vision of nature became much more cosmic. In an instant I was swept past all the various manifestations of nature into a void of mystery which was as much an ultimate fullness as an absolute emptiness.

Down the rabbit hole. Cut the elevator cable. Dive out of the balloon with no parachute. Exhilarating. 

Time stood still. Or rather, time no longer existed. I was face to face with what is for me the only unarguably true spiritual sensation:

Existence exists. Always has. Always will. Is now. 

After my most recent "bottom falling out from under me" feeling I had this intuition: that sensation is mind-blowing because the human brain lacks the ability to cognize the primal reality of existence existing... eternally, uncaused, uncreated, just freaking there. 

Evolution has brought us Homo sapiens some marvelous cognitive abilities compared to other species. We have unraveled many cosmic mysteries -- quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and so much else. 

There are significant gaps in our knowledge of the universe. But I agree with leading scientists that there don't appear to be any insurmountable obstacles to vastly expanding our already-immense grasp of how the cosmos is put together and operates.

When it comes to the sheer facticity of existence, though, the is'ness of reality, it seems extremely unlikely that we humans ever will be able to open that cosmic knowledge lock. The feeling I have when contemplating existence exists is akin to a psychological short-circuit.

My brain just doesn't seem capable of grasping the fact that all facts can be friends with "why?" -- except the primal fact of existence. I have the sense that natural selection has given us humans the ability to unravel complex tangles of cause and effect, but NOT the ability to grasp the meaning of existence pure and simple. 

Assuming there is such a meaning. Or such a thing as "existence pure and simple."

Maybe advanced beings from an alien civilization in a galaxy far, far away possess the cosmic understanding of existence exists that eludes me, and seemingly every other member of my species. 

But how would we know this, even if we came into contact with such a civilization? I strongly suspect that if an alien being handed me the key to the ultimate cosmic lock, I'd have no idea how to use it.

Or, how to grasp what lay beyond the open door. 

Stephen Hawking's "Genius" series looks at free will confusingly

Wow! As a big Stephen Hawking fan, I never thought that I'd write a blog post where I took him to task for getting a scientific subject wrong. 

But after watching Episode 3 of Hawking's new "Genius" series, I've got to point out how confusing this Why Are We Here? episode was when it came to free will. 

I've read a lot about free will. I've thought a lot about free will. I've written a lot about free will. (For example, see here, here, and here.)

So I was all eyes and ears as Hawking led three ordinary people -- meaning, non-scientists -- through exercises designed to get them thinking in a scientific way. Clips can be viewed on the PBS web page devoted to Episode 3, along with the entire hour long show. 

We see them marveling at floating plates in a room within an English castle. Not surprisingly, this isn't the result of magic, but magnetism. The lesson learned is that scientific understanding of the laws of nature is the way to comprehend the world, not supernatural explanations.

Then the three Genius explorers tackle a difficult problem: how to knock an olive on a toothpick that's balanced on the edge of a cocktail glass into the drink. Without touching it with their hands.

A pendulum device on a long chain looks promising. The swinging round ball definitely has what it takes, but the scientific students keep either missing short (no contact) or long (too much contact, so the glass breaks). After many tries, and many refills of the drink by a bartender in the room, they figure out what to do.

Use a board with markings to get the ball in a precise spot, and use a button that deactivates a magnet holding the ball in place so the "push" on the ball is exactly the same every time. It doesn't take long for them to find the sweet spot where the olive is gently knocked into the glass. 

And they can do this repeatedly. Lesson: if something is done in exactly the same way, the same thing will happen according to the laws of nature. 

A replication of the famous Libet experiment about conscious vs. unconscious choice gets us directly into questions of free will. The three people are asked to push a button (which sets off fireworks!) at a moment of their choice while staring at a large clock projected onto a castle wall. 

They note the time they consciously chose to push the button. As Libet found, and as other researchers have confirmed, a conscious decision to do something is preceded by unconscious activity in the brain. So this teaches the threesome that free will doesn't really exist, since the sense of "I freely choose to do this" is an illusion.

Actually, brain processes outside of our awareness determine what we choose. Thus they learn that determinism resulting from the laws of nature rules the universe, and us.

I was nodding along agreeably with Episode 3 up to this point. The points Hawking was making seemed eminently justified, being in line with familiar scientific principles I'd read about in numerous books and articles.

But then the episode took a turn.

A Doppelganger challenge featured many people wearing masks of the three Genius explorers. They lined up behind the real person. Then each individual decided to take a step to the right or left when a loud "beep" sounded. Before long these choices resulted in the Original and Doppelgangers being considerably out of step with each other, so to speak.

The lesson Hawking was teaching here struck me as way more scientifically problematic than what had been presented before. This exercise pointed to the Many Worlds (or Many Universes) theory of quantum mechanics. 

As a Wikipedia article discusses, the notion that all possible outcomes occur, that the "universe splits into all possible universes all the time" (as Hawking says near the end of Episode 3) is by no means a settled understanding of science. The Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics has a lot of fans, but the article quotes a critic: "And who here believes the laws of physics are decided by a democratic vote?"

Yet Hawking and some other scientists, such as physicist Sean Carroll, speak as if it is virtually certain that every possible action or choice does occur in a parallel universe. 

Now, obviously there's no problem entertaining this hypothesis. It makes a lot of sense, and resolves some difficult questions about the quantum world. My problem is with how Episode 3 related free will to the Many Worlds theory. I failed to see how everything happening that could happen saves free will, as one of the threesome seemed to believe.

After all, Hawking had just led the three people to several understandings: the laws of nature rule the universe, and unconscious brain processes determine our conscious choices.

So someone decides to step to the right when hearing the beep in the Doppelganger exercise. This wasn't a freely willed choice. Yet certainly a different choice -- step to the left -- could have been made by the person's brain, given different causes acting within the brain.

I fail to see how everything that could happen, does happen has any relevance to free will. If anything, the Many Worlds theory points to Determinism Gone Wild. Not only does one thing happen according to the laws of nature, everything happens. 

Assuming the Many Worlds theory of the quantum realm is true. I'm not aware of any empirical evidence that it is. Thus Hawking's conclusion in Episode 3 struck me as poetic and appealing, but not convincing: "The universe you see is the one that gives rise to you out of all possible universes."

A member of the threesome said, "It took a whole universe to make me." OK, granted. The Big Bang can be viewed as the cosmic event that led to the present moment. Another quote from the episode: "We are a product of the universe, but the universe we live in is personal to us."

Well, sure.

We all experience the world through our own subjectivity. And the Many Worlds theory takes this farther, since there supposedly are countless other "me's" having subjective experiences in parallel universes. Naturally the only universe I'm aware of is the one I'm in.

It makes sense for Hawking and his collaborators on "Genius" to end Episode 3 on a semi-uplifting note after effectively putting free will on a skewer and roasting it to death. The basic answer he gives to the episode's main question, Why Are We Here?, is that we are here because we're not in an infinity of other parallel universes. 

Again, how this relates to free will and choice eludes me. But maybe the universe simply has determined that I'm not supposed to understand this.

2016 Portland Atheist Festival: Laurel Hines rocks the stage

Yesterday my wife, Laurel, and I made a non-religious pilgrimage northward up I-5, where we (and three other faithless Salem friends) took part in the first-ever Portland Atheist Festival.

Laurel volunteered to walk around with an "Atheists rock!!" sign and handouts. Which, not surprisingly, she handed out to people who wandered over to check out the booths in downtown Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square.

 

This video shows Laurel taking part in a "coming out" feature of the festival, as described in an Oregonian story, "Upcoming Atheist Festival hopes to coax non-believers out of the closet." 

This Thursday, one person after another will step up to a microphone in Pioneer Courthouse Square to boldly tell the city what he or she believes.

Or doesn't believe.

It is, after all, an event for atheists, agnostics, secular humanists and freethinkers.

Laurel's t-shirt reflected the commitment to science and reason she talked about in the video: "I think therefore I'm Atheist."

I did my own "coming out" thing on stage. However, since I shamelessly used the microphone to plug this blog that I started in 2004, my deep skepticism toward religion wasn't exactly a revelation.

Best I can remember, this is the gist of what I said:

Religions come in both Western and Eastern varieties.

Back in 1970, it was the time of the Beatles/Maharishi, psychedelics, Tibetan Book of the Dead, Timothy Leary, sex, drugs, rock and roll. Like so many others I wanted more reality, more life, more living. 

So I was attracted to an Indian guru who promised that with several hours of meditation a day, I and other disciples could experience higher regions of reality. We could leave this world behind and soar with our astral self, causal self, soul self. 

I ended up writing several books for the guru's organization. I gave talks about the teachings. In most of the talks, I'd quote Philip K. Dick, a science fiction author: Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

But often when I'd mention in a talk that I hadn't yet experienced those higher regions of reality -- cosmic light and sound -- sone fellow disciples would come up to me afterward and say, "Thank you for saying what you said. I thought I was the only one who wasn't experiencing those things."

It turned out that, so far as I could tell, nobody was.

So it began to dawn on me that when I and others stopped believing in the guru's teachings, when we stopped thinking about them, the supposed Extra Reality of which those teachings spoke did indeed go away. 

Thus the hours I was spending each day in a dark room, meditating, actually was taking me away from reality -- the reality of this world, the only evident reality there is. 

Now, I still meditate. Just for twenty minutes a day or so, though. And I don't try to escape from this world to some supernatural realm. Rather, I focus mindfully on my breathing and whatever else I'm aware of in my surroundings. 

Reality is a terrible thing to waste. Embrace science and this physical world, not religion.

Here's a few more photos from the Atheist Festival (and the surrounding area):

"Freedom is the distance between Church and State." Another good t-shirt slogan.


Buttons and other atheist paraphernalia on one of the festival displays.

A few blocks away from Pioneer Courthouse Square I found a gleaming Secular Cathedral that drew me in: the downtown Portland Apple Store.

I felt ever so comfortable after I entered the Cathedral, joining others who enjoy worshipping at the altar of all things Apple. Who needs the promise of God when, seemingly, an upgraded MacBook Pro lineup is supposed to be announced next month?

Non-believers in religion urged to come out of the closet

Here's a Guest Opinion by my wife, Laurel, that is in the current issue of Salem Weekly -- our city's alternative paper.

In it she plugs the May 26 Portland Atheist Festival. Laurel and I are signed up to be some of the people who will speak for two minutes about why they're proud to be atheists.

Non-Believers Come Out of the Closet
by Laurel Hines

If you are one of the ever-growing numbers of people who don’t believe in a religion, you are “a-theist” (not part of a religion). If you don’t like the religious dogma that Ted Cruz and others hope to inflict on the nation, you must come out of the closet and declare your “a-theism”. If it worries you when legislators make policies based on religion instead of modern science, you must come out of the closet and declare yourself as “a-theist”!

A Pew Research survey recently found that 23 percent of the U. S. population is nonaffiliated, and a third of Millennials identify now as non-religious. Yet few are willing to declare themselves as atheist or even agnostic (uncertain about God’s existence). Yet politicians will continue to ignore secular Americans until they are convinced that there is a price to be paid for doing so.

The Catholic, Evangelical, and other religious lobbies, meanwhile, have significant influence in our government. The non-believers avoid the atheist label because of the tendency of people to assume only the religious are moral and good people. Yet those of us who are atheist/non-believers know that is hog-wash, and that actually the opposite is true ( atheists are under represented in prisons; some churches are awash in child molesters in the clergy).

Morals are inherent in social beings, and religion is not necessary for moral behavior.

Secular non-believers need to assert that our numbers are growing and significant, and that we vote. But it takes joiners to create a lobby!

Freedom of conscience for all – which exists only in secular democracies- should be a top concern for the non-religious.

Unless we non-believers accept a label and unite under a label, and join organizations that take action by fighting to keep our government secular (like Atheists of America or Freedom From Religion), we face legislation based on religious morals and beliefs,  and not science, reason, or facts.

On Thursday, May 26th, from 11 AM to 2 PM, the first ever Portland Atheist Festival will be held in Pioneer Courthouse Square (https://www.facebook.com/portlandatheistfestival/).  Come and meet an atheist, or come and declare your atheism! We need to come out of the closet and show the world who we really are. The success of LGBTs in the past couple years shows that coming out of the closet and demanding to be heard can create major change for oppressed groups. Atheists are oppressed because we don’t declare ourselves and we don’t unite.

So let’s do it! Come to the Atheist Festival May 26th.

Laurel Hines is a retired clinical social worker/psychotherapist. She now volunteers at Willamette Humane Society, is an active animal advocate, and champions reality that can be supported by science and reason. She is part of a growing group of Salem Freethinking Atheists.

"Free will isn't. Existence is." My hoped-for TEDx talk.

Well, it's time for my third annual TEDxSalem speaker application.

I was rejected in 2014 and 2015, having pitched Grand Talks About The Cosmos that, obviously, didn't strike the speaker selection committee as being such marvelously interesting topics as I considered them to be.

Noting that the deadline for prospective speakers to apply for the 2016-17 event was coming up on April 18, I decided to pitch another talk idea. This time, Free will isn't. Existence is.

If nothing else, another TEDxSalem rejection will add to my Tortured Artist (or Misunderstood Genius) resume.

In my old age, well, more accurately, my even older age, I can picture myself sitting at the end of a bar, or better, an Oregon cannabis smoking lounge (once they're legal), drowning my tortured artist/misunderstood genius woes with mind-altering substances, telling whoever will listen about my brilliant ideas that have been rejected by an uncaring world not yet ready for The Truth As Known By Me.

Here's how I answered the question, "What would your TEDxSalem talk be about?  What is your 'idea worth spreading?' What revolution do you want to start in our community? Describe your talk."

"Free will doesn't exist." This is a revolutionary neuroscientific fact that hasn't yet been widely embraced. Like Darwin's Theory of Evolution, or Copernicus' sun-centered cosmology, it will take time for the massive implications of this unsettling understanding to be fully understood.

Criminal justice, personal relations, social welfare programs, politics, conceptions of self-awareness -- these all have to be looked at in a new light under the glow of "Free will doesn't exist." And a closely-related fact: The brain is us.

While many people will initially feel chilled when the comforting blanket of illusory free will is taken away by modern science, the warmth of a philosophically unarguable proposition remains: Existence is.

Almost certainly there is no independent conscious will guiding things on either the cosmic or individual level. "Stuff just happens" is a pithy three word encapsulization of the best 21st century understanding of both the world outside and inside of our heads.

But with this realization comes peace of mind, love, interconnectedness, awe at the endless workings of the laws of nature via cause and effect. Once our mind is blown by the fact, "Free will doesn't exist," we are open (not free!) to explore the many positive implications of this revolutionary worldview.

Damn, I'd find this talk super fascinating!

I guess I could just give the talk to myself, if my application is rejected. Or re-read some of my blog posts on the subjects of Free Will Isn't and Existence Is. Here's a sampling:

Free Will Isn't -- here, here, here, and here

Existence Is -- here, here, here, and here

Understanding reality (including religion) is a matter of "likely"

After almost a dozen years of writing Church of the Churchless posts, and reading comments on them, I'm familiar with the arguments religious people use to justify their beliefs. 

When I point out that there is no demonstrable evidence supporting a belief in God, heaven, soul, spirit, angels, the afterlife, or any other form of supernaturalism, frequently I'll hear something like this:

Hey, Brian, you can't prove God doesn't exist, so there's no proof for your skeptical view either.  Thus, it's a tie! There's no proof God exists, and there's no proof God doesn't exist, so it's up to each person to decide which "no proof" to accept.

Well, typically I respond by saying that the way both science and common sense works is that we believe in the existence of something when there is good affirmative reasons to say "it exists."

If we demanded proof that something doesn't exist before giving up a belief in it, there would be no end to the absurd views of reality that would result. Such as...

"Fairies make the flowers in gardens grow. I know this because you can't prove fairies don't exist." 

Today I was reading a book I bought recently, "Human Universe" by physicist Brian Cox (it is based on a BBC program). Here's a passage that nicely presents the scientific point of view that I share, but can't express as well as Cox and Richard Feynman did.

Brian Cox writes:

I'll put my cards on the table here. I believe in UFOs. That is to say, I believe that there have been sightings of flying things in the sky that the observers were unable to identify, some of which were objects. 

But I do not believe for a moment that these were spacecraft flown by aliens. Occam's razor is an important tool in science. It shouldn't be oversold; nature can be complex and bizarre. But as a rule of thumb, it is most sensible to adopt the simplest explanation for an observation until the evidence overwhelms it.

My favourite response to the criticism that dismissing the possibility of alien visitations to Earth is unscientific was provided by physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman in his Messsenger Lectures at Cornell University in 1964:

'Some years ago I had a conversation with a layman about flying saucers -- because I am scientific I know all about flying saucers! I said "I don't think there are flying saucers". So my antagonist said, "Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it's impossible?"

"No, I said, "I can't prove it's impossible. It's just very unlikely." At that he said, "You are very unscientific. If you can't prove it impossible then how can you say that it's unlikely?"

But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. 

To define what I mean, I might have said to him, "Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extraterrestrial intelligence."

It is just more likely. That is all.'

The Cosmic Significance of how I get back to sleep

Here's how I ended my previous post, "When trying to get back to sleep: to think or not to think?"

Now, does this insight have any Cosmic Significance regarding the Big Questions of Life? Damn, I sure hope so! But that's a subject for another blog post. I'm starting to feel sleepy... very sleepy...

I don't want to leave the question of Cosmic Significance hanging out there.

Sure, I might be the only person on Earth who cares about the answer. But since I'm pretty darn important to me (leaving aside the issue of whether there's any difference between us), I want to tackle the question sooner rather than later. 

Like, now. 

Here's why I do believe that how I get back to sleep when I wake up in the middle of the night does indeed have Cosmic Significance. Though this seems mundane, it points to profound assumptions about the nature of reality as we humans perceive it.

Things just are. Until we assign meanings to them. 

In my current churchlessness, I no longer believe that the cosmos has any meaning other than what is assigned to it by sentient beings. There is no God, no divinity, no cosmic consciousness who assigns some sort of objective meaning. Whatever meanings we find in reality, they're our own subjective creations.

But this often goes unnoticed. We confuse the inherent is'ness of things, with the ought'ness human minds assign to them. 

For example, I wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, then return to bed. That's a fact. It happened. It is. Now, I can add an ought, a statement of what should be. This is optional.

"I need to get back to sleep quickly; I've got an important meeting early tomorrow morning." 

Problems are mental creations. Real, but not really. 

I'm awake in the middle of the night. It'll be a problem if I can't get back to sleep. OK, true enough. However, the first sentence possesses more truth, more reality, than the second sentence. 

Even more so are these two sentences: God exists. It'll be a problem if I don't return to God.

In this case I've made a problem out of something that almost certainly isn't true, the existence of God. Yet billions of people around the world devote huge amounts of time and energy trying to bridge the gap between them and God. 

(I have extensive personal experience of this, having been one of those people for over three decades.)

So when I stop viewing being awake in the middle of the night as a problem, but simply as a fact, I'm taking a stand for natural reality.

Human-made mental realities are something different. Highly important. Essential, in fact. Yet cognitive creations shouldn't be confused with natural reality.

Embracing what is real typically works better than imagining what isn't.

Here's how I put it in my previous post:

I've found that instead of thinking about some pleasing future state of affairs, or envisioning how good I'll feel if this or that happens (which could be "getting back to sleep"), natural reality as it is in the present moment contains all the contentment I need. 

Thus now I walk back from the nearby bathroom, slide into bed, pull the covers around me, and simply... be. 

Well, a bit more than that: I simply am aware of my being. 

My bodily being, because there isn't anything else to be aware of when it comes to "me." Brain, body, mind, awareness -- these are all physical. It makes no sense to divide myself into physical and non-physical, body and brain, matter and spirit.

Sleep is a physical phenomenon, as everything is.  

More: sleep is an entirely natural physical phenomenon. I have a natural urge to sleep, just as I have a natural urge to eat, drink, defecate/urinate, and have sex (though I hasten to add, not all at the same time!).

When I wake up in the middle of the night, bodily me, the only me, knows how to get back to sleep. So I've found that it works better to just be aware of how I feel physically in the present moment, rather than think or imagine something outside of bodily now.

In the same way, I no longer go through my day imagining God or any other immaterial divinity. I embrace the reality of what is really present, which doesn't include a hypothetical supernatural being.

So, yeah, how I get back to sleep after waking up at night sure does have Cosmic Significance. In my mind at least, the only place Cosmic Significance can exist.  

Since everything is "sacred," no particular thing is

I liked this letter in New Scientist a lot. It won't please religiously-minded people, because religions like to divide the world into parts -- like sacred and profane, godly and devilish, spiritual and material. 

That sort of thing.

But as letter writer Howells says, the word universe starts with uni, one. Meaning, a whole.

Once we start making manmade divisions such as sacred and profane, we're moving away from reality and into unproductive abstractions.

Wisdom leads us to either think, everything is sacred or nothing is sacred. They really amount to the same thing. Read on to understand why.

Editor's pick: The trouble with the sacred

From Dave Howells

I agree with Mary-Jane Rubenstein that we do not need to choose between God and the multiverse and that we should think differently about what is sacred (19/26 December 2015, p 64).

The problem, it seems to me, is that to define what is sacred defines, by default, what is not sacred – what is profane or mundane. Surely, it is that which has contributed so largely to our sad, violent history, and given us a licence to exploit our world with no sense of respect; which in turn has led us to our current ecological crisis.

But whether we look at it from a scientific or Western religious perspective, it has never made sense to split up the universe in this way. Perhaps the most basic assumption of science is that the universe – everything – is one coherent whole. The body of scientific knowledge we have built sees any potential divergence from that as a problem.

Religion, too, holds that the universe is God's creation. So, logically then, everything is sacred, and it would be a travesty to deem anything as not sacred. (Mystics enthusiastically tell us this, and I must say that I see their point.)

The worst we can do is redefine the sacred – we should give up the whole idea. Which leads me to the question: why do some of us feel the need to deem anything sacred?

Magazine issue 3058 published 30 January 2016

The universe is indifferent to us. But religions believe we're special.

Here's a big reason why religions appeal to people: they claim that humans are special.

Christianity says we are made in God's image. Eastern religions like Hinduism have a similar notion, since the soul (Atman) supposedly is essentially the same as God (Brahman).

Not only that, but almost every religion teaches that the cosmos has a special relationship with us Homo sapiens. We're being looked out for, guided, loved, and embraced by the Creator of It All. 

Even when it comes to the Devil or other sorts of negative cosmic powers, human beings are viewed as being the special focus of the dark side. It isn't my dog who is at risk of being led astray by Satan; it is me.

I no longer believe in this crap. 

Sure, I understand the appeal of feeling special, unique among all the other inhabitants of the universe, chosen by the highest divinity for a starring role in the grand scheme of things.

But reality argues otherwise.

Here's some passages from Mihaly Cskikszentmihalyi's classic 1990 book about the psychology of optimal experience, "Flow." (Somehow I've never read it before; I finished the first chapter today and am finding it highly enjoyable.)

The foremost reason that happiness is so hard to achieve is that the universe was not designed with the comfort of human beings in mind. It is almost immeasurably large, and most of it is hostilely empty and cold.

...It is not that the universe is random in an abstract mathematical sense. The motions of the stars, the transformations of energy that occur in it might be predicted and explained well enough. 

But natural processes do not take human desires into account. They are deaf and blind to our needs, and thus they are random in contrast with the order we attempt to establish through our goals. 

A meteorite on a collision course with New York City might be obeying all the laws of the universe, but it would still be a damn nuisance. The virus that attacks the cells of a Mozart is only doing what comes naturally, even though it inflicts a grave loss on humankind.

"The universe is not hostile, not yet is it friendly," in the words of J.H. Holmes. "It is simply indifferent."

...How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe.

Imagine, as John Lennon did, that all the time, money, and effort people pour into trying to get on the good side of God or some other divine power was devoted to making things better here on Earth. 

Imagine that instead of praying for special supernatural dispensations from a higher power, people focused on how best to align themselves with the laws of nature -- understanding them as fully as possible, and putting them to use for the betterment both of humanity and our planet as a whole.

Imagine that human beings came to look upon themselves simply as parts of a greater natural whole, the universe, nothing special, yet also nothing not-special.

I like these imaginations.

Because they're eminently capable of being made real. Atheists like my wife and myself are living our lives this way, as are many other people around the world. We're not yet a majority, because feeling special is so addictive to religious believers.

But the ranks are growing of those who realize how harmful and false it is to put human beings up on a special pedestal. This isn't conducive to either individual happiness, or communal well-being.

When we separate ourselves out from the rest of existence as something uniquely precious, good things don't happen. Love, harmony, compassion, generosity to all -- these flourish when people feel humbly average, not egotistically special.

Deal with these scientific facts, religious believers

I'm a proud believer in reality. That's my god, now that I've deconverted from religious belief: natural reality. 

Science is the best, and arguably the only, way we humans have of knowing solid facts about the universe, which is the only natural reality available to us.

One of the reasons I'm enjoying re-reading "The Atheist's Guide to Reality" (by Alex Rosenberg) so much is that Rosenberg -- though a philosophy professor -- has a solid background in science. 

His philosophical conclusions don't come out of thin air. They're grounded in fundamental understandings of modern science. 

Below are some of those understandings. If anyone reading this blog post wants to challenge them, describe your reasons in a comment. Hey, who knows? Maybe you know more about natural reality than the world's scientists.

If so, a Nobel prize could await you -- if you have solid evidence for your hypothesis that goes beyond a Church of the Churchless blog post comment.

If not, these scientific understandings constitute a knowledge fence within which any attempt to place God, spirit, soul, heaven, or such must contend. Meaning, any religion, form of spirituality, or mystical teaching has to conform to these facts to have a chance of being believable. 

Understand: by "facts" I don't mean unchallengeable truth. Science doesn't work that way. Scientific facts always are open to modification as better knowledge about reality becomes available. 

But given our current state of scientific understanding -- which is hugely more accurate than religious conceptions of the cosmos -- these are solid facts about the universe that, as Rosenberg says in his book's title, are the best guide to reality for those unwilling to accept fanciful religious theologies.

(1) The universe began with a big bang 13.7 billion years ago.

(2) Everything in the universe is made up of fermions and bosons (basically, matter and force fields/energy).

(3) "All the processes in the universe, from atomic to bodily to mental, are purely physical processes involving fermions and bosons interacting with one another." (A Rosenberg quote)

(4) Evolution through natural selection explains how life has come to be as it is on Earth.

(5) Core morality enabled early humans to better survive by cooperating with each other, an evolutionary advantageous trait that persists today in us social creatures.

(6) Determinism, which is different from "fate," rules the universe at levels of reality above the quantum realm.

(7) The mind/brain produces consciousness, and does everything else, through complex interactions of neural circuits.

(8) There is no non-material self within the human body, just physical mind/brain goings-on.

"The Atheist's Guide to Reality" -- a mind blowing book

I like books that take some of my cherished assumptions about how the world works and chew them up into tiny pieces before putting them in a Truth Blender where they're dissolved into unrecognizable thought-mush.

"The Atheist's Guide to Reality" by Alex Rosenberg is such a book. After reading it four years ago (I blogged about it here, here, and here) I've finished re-reading the second half of the book. 

And, yes, once again it has blown my mind. But in a different way from the first time, because I'm a different person now. 

Being a habitual highlighter and back-of-book note writer, I've found that what struck me the most about Rosenberg's ideas back in 2011 often isn't what hits me hardest now, in 2016. 

Basically, I'm finding that Rosenberg is the most radical writer about science and atheism I've ever encountered. He takes no prisoners when it comes to debunking myths about how the mind/brain works, whether these are tales told by religion, philosophy, or the humanities.

(Rosenberg is the Chair of the Philosophy Department at Duke University, so he's a heavy hitter.)

Below are some excerpts from a final chapter. This will give you a feel for the thesis of "The Atheist's Guide to Reality," though only that... a feel. It really takes reading the entire book to understand the subtleties of what Rosenberg is arguing for.

Which isn't so much complicated as, like I said, mind blowing. 

I need to point out that how Rosenberg uses scientism is very different from the usual definition of the word. Here's how I described this in my first post about the book.

Standing in Powell's Books, thumbing through "The Atheist's Guide to Reality," what made me decide to buy the book was a positive mention of scientism that I came across in the first chapter. 

Almost always this word is used in a perjorative manner. Meaning, scientism is considered a viewpoint that fails to recognize the legitimate limits of scientific inquiry, a reductionist philosophy which ignores aspects of reality beyond the bounds of science.

Appealingly, Rosenberg proudly appropriates this word. He stands tall for scientism, and a scientistic outlook on life. 

But we'll call the worldview that all us atheists (and even some agnostics) share "scientism." This is the conviction that the methods of science are the only reliable way to secure knowledge of anything; that science's description of the world is correct in its fundamentals; and that when "complete" what science tells us will not be surprisingly different from what it tells us today.

We'll often use the adjective "scientistic" in referring to the approaches, theories, methods, and descriptions of the nature of reality that all the sciences share. Science provides all the significant truths about reality, and knowing such truths is what real understanding is all about.

You may not agree with Rosenberg. But if you read his book, I guarantee that he will make you think. He will challenge your assumptions about how the world, and you, are. I'm getting mini-revelations on almost every page. 

Here's the passages from a final chapter.

Fatalism is very different from determinism. Fatalism tells us that no matter what happens, the outcome is unavoidable. It claims that no matter what route life takes you down, all roads lead to the same place. Determinism is quite a different matter.

If the universe is deterministic, then where you end up depends on where you start out (plus the laws of nature). Start at different points, and almost every time you will pass through altogether different places and come to a different end.

Determinism does not dictate that you'll end up in the same place at all. 

Of course, we are all going to die. The difference between fatalism and determinism is this: If fatalism is right, you'll die of the same thing no matter what you do. If determinism is right, how you die, what you die of, depends on what you did in life. 

(Did you smoke, overeat, wear your seat belt?) That's a big difference. Some deaths are worse than others. Which we experience will be determined, but not fated.

...Everything that happens in your life is determined. That doesn't mean that reading this book can't make a difference to your happiness, well-being, or adjustment to reality. That you bought, borrowed, or otherwise acquired this book was determined. So was its effect on you, if any.

If your brain is organized in roughly the same way mine is, there are neural circuits that have produced disquiet in you, along with the illusion of thoughts about the persistent questions. 

Reading this book has rearranged a large number of neural circuits in your brain (though only a very small proportion of the millions of such circuits in your brain). If those rearranged neural circuits change their outputs in certain ways when triggered by inputs seeming to pose the daunting questions, then this book will have worked.

The process will be the same one psychotherapy employs when it works. It will have changed your neural circuitry, unconscious and conscious. You will acquire the correct information about the matters that keep you up at night. You will almost certainly undergo the conscious illusion of thinking about these questions in a new way, as finally having been answered.

Don't take narratives too seriously. That is the most obvious moral of our tour through science's version of reality. By now you can see why this advice is important and also hard to follow.

After all, the human brain has been shaped by millions of years of natural and cultural selection to be addicted to stories. They are almost the only things that give most of us relief from the feeling of curiosity. 

Scientism has nothing against stories. It just refuses to be an enabler. Stories are fun, but they're no substitute for knowledge. In fact, the insistence on packaging information into narratives is an obstacle to understanding how things really work.

Scientific findings, along with the models, laws, and theories that explain them, can't be squeezed into the procrustean bed of a good detective story, or any other kind of story for that matter. 

...This advice goes double for anyone trying to sell you on religion. But if you have read this far, you don't need to be warned off stories with spooky plots that always end well for the good guys and badly for the bad guys.

Religion and some of those who make their living from it succeed mainly because some of us are even more given to conspiracy theories than others. But none of us is entirely immune.

We need continually to fight the temptation to think that we can learn much of anything from someone else's story of how they beat an addiction, kept to a diet, improved their marriage, raised their kids, saved for their retirement, or made a fortune flipping real estate.

Even if their story is what actually happened, the storytellers are wrong about the real causes of how and why it happened. Learning their story won't help you figure out the real causal process from rags to riches, from misery to happiness.

...Once you adopt scientism, you'll be able to put lots of the strife and controversies about politics into perspective. You will also be able to cease taking seriously aesthetic and ethical judgments that offend you.

When it comes to politics, you will be able to sidestep disagreements in which other people try to force you to choose just by pointing out that the dispute is at least in part a factual one, and the facts are not in. You will be able to undercut some arguments just by pointing out that they make assumptions about reality that science has already shown to be false -- for example, that humans have souls or that there is free will or that most people are selfish.

...We can organize our own lives in the absence of real purpose and planning. We do so by reorganizing the neural circuitry that produces these very illusions of design and forethought. 

Neuroscientist David Eagleman: the brain creates our reality

Somehow my wife and I missed most of the original showing of the 6-part PBS series, "The Brain - With David Eagleman." We saw the final episode, and wanted to catch up on the rest.

So last night we streamed What is Reality?, the first episode. It's available on iTunes and Amazon Prime, with clips on the PBS web site. Here's one of the clips:

Really interesting.

The basic neuroscientific message of this episode is that reality doesn't directly stream into consciousness through our senses, or by any other means. Instead, the brain does all sorts of processing of raw sensual data (photons, sound waves, scent molecules, etc.) before it reaches awareness.

So this supports a point I make frequently on this blog: there is no such thing as "reality as it is."

Sure, this phrase, and others like it, often is found in Buddhist and nondual writings, along with other spiritual, mystical, and meditation literature.

It doesn't have any foundation in fact, though. Eagleman shows quite a few experimental examples of how the brain selectively makes sense of the world by comparing incoming information with previous experiences.  

This explains why we don't see a mysterious shape supported by round thingies. We see a car. The brain's processing of sense data occurs automatically, so usually it goes unnoticed. But Eagleman describes what happened when a man who became blind when he was three years old was able to see again late in life.

His eyes functioned perfectly, but he hasn't been able to see normally. One reason is that parts of his brain devoted to vision were converted to areas that process touch, sound, and other senses during his lengthy blindness.

Even for those of us with normal sensory inputs from birth, it doesn't matter how mindful or attentive we are to the world. We humans, along with every other sentient being, only are aware of a small fraction of reality.

And like I said, the portion we are conscious of gets heavily interpreted by the brain before we're aware of it. I recall Eagleman saying that more information flows from the cortex to a sensory area (thalamus, I believe) than the other way around.

Meaning, our awareness of reality is more dependent on previous experiences, than on what is being perceived by the senses here and now. The brain, Eagleman said, is continually updating its understanding of reality by processing mismatches between past and current experiences.

Another fascinating part of the What is Reality? episode was a description of what happened to a man imprisoned in Alcatraz who was put in a sensory deprivation "hole" part of the prison as a punishment. He was there for about three weeks, I recall.

No light. No sound. No contact with other people. 

Soon he was seeing things. His brain, Eagleman explained, dealt with the lack of sense data coming in from outside by producing it from the inside. 

And it wasn't just that he hallucinated sights and sounds. Rather, the man said, he began to experience a whole other reality. He was immersed in this new world, not just experiencing hallucinations in his jail cell. 

Or, rather, he was, but the prisoner wasn't aware of this.

Just as a dream seems real while we're sleeping, the man entered another reality of his brain's own making during much of the time he was in the "hole." This reminded me of stories about mystics who spend months or years meditating in a dark room, cave, or wherever.

Given Eagleman's explanation of what the brain does when it is deprived of sensory input, it sure seems very possible, if not likely, that when these mystics describe other realms of reality that they supposedly entered, the "realms" actually were produced by processes within their own brains.

This hypothesis is supported by the fact that no one who claims to have experienced some sort of ethereal "heaven" has come back with verifiable knowledge of some previously unknown fact about our reality -- or any other evidence that what they experienced was objectively, rather than subjectively, real.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing the other episodes of the PBS series that we missed. I've also ordered a copy of David Eagleman's companion book, "The Brain: The Story of You."

On a bike ride, I embrace natural reality and ignore a manmade rule

Philosophically-inclined guy that I am, I can find profound meanings in just about any everyday experience.

Today I rode my Streetstrider outdoor elliptical bike at Salem's Minto Brown Island Park during a (partial) break in the heavy rains that have been hitting the Pacific Northwest all week. 

I'm a big believer in the adage I expressed in a 2009 blog post, "There are no rules (including this one)."

Now, there are no rules points back at itself. Meaning, there are no rules. Unless you want to follow a rule. Feel free. There's no rule that says "never follow a rule."

We all do this: follow rules. Life would be unlivable without them. 

How could I turn on my TV if I didn't press the right button on the remote control? The important thing is to remember that rules are made to be broken when they need to be.

I saw this sign only after I'd already broken the implied rule -- having ridden my bike down the trail from the other direction, where I'm pretty sure there wasn't any Trail Closed Ahead sign posted.

Which shows the difference between natural reality and manmade rules. Because the trail wasn't closed. Not physically. Just in the mind of whoever, with the best of intentions, put up the sign.

Which did make quite a bit of sense for most people. Because the wooden bridge across a low area in the park was indeed flooded. Several inches of water covered the boards. 

However, when I rode down the slope from the other direction and saw the water, I made a quick decision: Ride through it, dude! (At my age, I like to call myself "dude"; it makes me feel younger.)

Standing on my trusty Streetstrider -- no seat on an elliptical bike -- my feet are quite a ways off the ground. The rest of me, even more. My wallet and iPhone etc. were drily packed away in the yellow waterproof pack. 

So what the heck, I thought. What's the worse that could happen?

I get stuck halfway across and have to push my bike the rest of the way. My feet get wet. I can survive that. I didn't want to reverse course and ride back the way I'd come.

Try something new! I'd never ridden the StreetStrider through standing water this deep. 

Upon reaching the other side, I felt good. Which is how I always feel when I ride my bike at the park.

After using the elliptical machines for many years at the nearby Courthouse Athletic Club on River Road, I now hate to do my aerobic exercising indoors. 

Today, like every day at Minto Brown Island Park, I encountered nature doing its natural thing: wind, rain, sun, rain-and-sun, a rainbow. Branches had fallen on the trails. Pools of water had accumulated. Per usual, it felt like whichever direction I was riding, a strong wind was pushing at me as I pedaled.

In other words, I was in a secular heaven.

Natural reality, mostly, intermixed with the asphalt trails and wooden bridges that made it possible for me to bike along through the park. 

Unless the weather is really bad, I much prefer exercising, even while cold and wet, in what I view as The Real World, rather than being warm and dry inside. I amend the fishing saying to "The worst day riding my bike in nature is better than the best day on an elliptical machine in an athletic club."

I love how nature just does what it does, uncaring of what I prefer. At Minto Brown I have to flow what with nature gives me -- heat, cold, rain, wind, whatever.  

I've got a bunch of stuff in the backseat of my car that lets me adjust to conditions.

Heavy and light jackets. Waterproof gear. Hats for all seasons. Several types of gloves. There's something deeply satisfying -- in this age of human domination over our planet -- to fully embrace what nature produces on any particular day. 

Sure, I still get irritated when I was expecting dry, and cold rain starts hitting me in the face as I ride. But it doesn't take along for me to realize that what I want natural reality to be has exactly zero effect on what it actually is. 

Similarly, I've learned that a manmade sign saying "Trail Closed Ahead - Flooding" may or may not comport with reality. It only may be closed to people on foot who don't want to get their feet wet. Or the sign may have been left up even though water has receded.

Again, natural reality is what it is. Human ideas about this reality may be right, or they may be wrong.

Experimentation, testing, observation, experience -- getting out on a park trail and seeing for myself what is there -- that's the best way to know what nature has wrought.

We have so many ideas... about so many things.

I love ideas, just as I love nature.

But there's a time and place for thinking about what is real, and there's a time and place for experiencing what is real. Riding my StreetStrider at Minto Brown Island Park reminds me of the difference between the two, thinking and experiencing. 

I can read a sign and think, "The trail is closed," when it actually isn't.

Conversely, I don't remember seeing a sign before I encountered this flooding on the south side of the dog park.

Yeah, I realized, this trail is really closed. Ducks could use it. Walkers could probably hike around it. But me and my elliptical bike weren't going to get through the water. 

So I turned around, rode to a bark path leading to the dog park, and walked my bike to an unflooded trail. Natural reality. You've got to go along with it. 

Human rules, not so much. Only when they make sense. 

Does Santa Claus exist? Depends on the nature of belief.

With Christmas coming in a few weeks, it seemed just the right time to read a book by Eric Kaplan called "Does Santa Exist? A Philosophical Investigation."

Now, I'm not quite done with the book, and I also don't want to give away what I suspect Kaplan's ending will be. So I'll focus on the existence of Santa Claus in another post.

Here I'll zero in on a thought-provoking thought experiment about beliefs and reality that Kaplan throws out in the introductory chapter. It's a good example of what I like most about the book: a pleasing blend of quirky humor and pretty darn sophisticated philosophizing. 

Which isn't surprising, since Kaplan had five years of philosophy graduate school at Columbia and UC Berkeley. He's becoming a bit irritating with his emphasis on Kabbalah near the end of the book, but I'm hoping he'll bounce back from this semi-religious detour in the final chapters.

Anyway, here's the thought experiment.

Imagine a field so big we can play the biggest game of red rover in history in it. Imagine we could open up our skull and have all the beliefs get out and stand on one side of the field, holding arms. On the other side of the field stand all the things. One by one, the beliefs call out what they are all about.

When the belief in Africa calls out his name, "I'm a belief in Africa!" the actual object -- Africa -- raises its hand, and they go off to a side field labeled TRUE BELIEFS. "Bees! I'm a belief in bees!" "Great! We are bees!" And they go off together. "I'm a belief in the planet Neptune!" "I am the planet Neptune! Let's get a drink!" And off they would go paired up.

At the end of the day, a few beliefs would be left standing on their side of the field. They raise their hands: "I'm a belief in the lost continent of Atlantis!" And nothing answers on the other side. There is no lost continent of Atlantis. "I'm a belief in pixies!" No answer. There are no pixies. "I'm a belief in Santa Claus!" No answer because there is no Santa Claus. The belief in Santa Claus is wrong because there is no Santa Claus to correspond to it.

When I got this far in Kaplan's description of the thought experiment, I almost thought that the book had reached a conclusion.

That didn't make much sense, of course, since I was on page 11 of a 255 page book. And an almost-professional philosopher like Kaplan (he also is a comedy writer) isn't going to come to a conclusion on such an important question as "Does Santa Exist?" so quickly.

But I'll admit that the notion of beliefs calling out and not getting a response from the things that actually exist appealed to me. This fit with my basic world view, as cogently summarized in one of my favorite quotations. It was written by Philip K. Dick.

        Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

In Kaplan's thought experiment, a belief without an actual thing corresponding to it ends up lonely. The thing indeed goes away when called by the belief.

Well, more accurately the thing can't go away, because it doesn't exist. The belief just stands there by itself, not getting an answer from the thing because reality doesn't contain the actuality of the thing -- just the belief in it.

Kaplan went on, though, making me realize that beliefs and things aren't related in a simplistic fashion.

The first problem is that our beliefs don't separate themselves into little bits. How would we count beliefs? Is my belief that Africa exists a super-belief made up of beliefs in all the people, countries, and animals that I believe are in Africa?

Or is it part of a larger belief that the world is divided into land masses? Or a still larger belief that there are such things as physical objects of which Africa is an instance? All and none.

My beliefs form a web or, better yet, a world. If anything corresponds to anything, it is the assemblage of beliefs, all linking arms, who correspond to the whole assemblage of facts, all linking arms. My mind corresponds to the world as a whole.

OK, a bit of pondering led me to believe that this take on beliefs made sense. The human mind does indeed operate with a world view, not a view of isolated individual things. I've read lots of neuroscience books, and they all say this in one way or another. 

Our previous experiences, memories, thoughts, emotions, and such influence how we perceive reality in the present moment. We try to fit new things into our understanding of old things. If this wasn't the case, we wouldn't have cognitive dissonance, described by Wikipedia as:

The mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, performs an action that is contradictory to one or more beliefs, ideas or values, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values.

For example, I believe in human-caused global warming.

But my belief in this is connected to many other beliefs, such as the efficacy of science, the accuracy of historical accounts of industrialization, basic principles of chemistry and physics, and so on.

If in Kaplan's thought experiment, a belief called out "Global warming! I'm a belief in global warming!" and got no answer from an actual thing, this would call into question a lot more than just the reality of global warming. A whole world view would be on shaky philosophical ground.

(Fortunately for science-minded folks like me, there is very little chance of this happening.)

Here's the final part of the thought experiment.

But there's a much more serious problem. When we imagine playing our game, we imagine that we ourselves are standing in the field somehow adjudicating the game. We are looking at the beliefs on one side and the things on the other. 

But when we look at a thing and see it, that is just another way of saying we believe that that thing exists. There is no way to step outside ourselves and examine the world and our beliefs from the side.

Consider this classic sketch that illustrates epistemology: [picture of a man with an apple inside his head looking at an outside apple] 

What is inside that head that looks like an apple? It's just a bunch of atoms, or if you prefer, neurons and glial cells, or if you prefer, an organ consisting of a prefrontal cortex, a cerebellum, the periaqueductal gray, the hippocampus, and so forth; but there is nothing in there that looks like an apple.

And when can we stand where the picture invites us to stand -- looking at the belief and the apple from the side? Never. We have to be within our beliefs, developing them.

We can't examine apples and beliefs separately and figure out if the beliefs match the apples, because the beliefs and the apples are part of a single phenomenon. They evolve together, much as flowers and bees' eyes do.

Yes, I was on board with this perspective also. After all, I'd written this in a 2014 post, "In a God's eye view, who does the seeing?"

I've heard the term, "God's eye view," before. But I haven't given it much thought. Maybe it was because I believed in God for so many years.

I never questioned the notion that there could be a way of looking upon reality that was godlike. After all, even scientists -- not just religious believers -- assume the cosmos can be viewed from some sort of detached objective transcendent perspective.

This is the way things are. 

OK. But says who? And where is that entity?

If inside the cosmos (which I define as everything that exists), then this being with a supposed God's eye view isn't seeing everything, since it is within everything. It is a part of reality, of existence, of the cosmos.

Thus this being not only can't see itself, it has its own perspective. It is situated within some aspect of the cosmos. For us this means time and space. Or more accurately, the space-time continuum.

This isn't nowhere. It is somewhere. 

When we imagine God being aware of everything, what does the vision consist of? For me, I either picture myself looking through God's consciousness (a fantasy, for sure) or see God as if from the outside, gazing upon everything (another fantasy).

In the latter case, I'm definitely taking a God's eye view of God.

Yet also in the first case, more subtly. Because I am picturing myself looking through God's consciousness, which is a perspective on God's perspective.

The Big Question is whether a God's eye view makes any sense.

Can any being really understand reality as it is -- detachedly objectified -- or is reality always a matter of subjective perspective?

Well, I'd answer my own question this way: it's a bit of both.

We can never detach ourselves from reality and view it as an object. There always is a strong element of subjectivity in our perspective. However, even though objectivity and subjectivity are inextricably linked, this object/subject mashup ranges from highly-subjective (dreams) to highly-objective (physics). 

It'll be interesting to see how Kaplan looks at the question, Does Santa Exist?, in his book's final chapters. Like I said, his excursion into Jewish mysticism seems like a detour to me. But it could very well be an essential foundation to his final philosophical conclusions.

Which I'll relate in a follow-up post.

Asked to say something about love, I'm pretty much speechless

Yesterday I got an email message:

Dear Mr. Hines ,

Your blog is very honest and nothing is more beautiful save love itself. Please tell us more about self-less and mutual love  and your views on the subject.

Sincerely, __________

Reading those words, I realized that I haven't written much explicitly about love during the eleven years this blog has existed.

This will be post # 2,140. When I used the search box in the right sidebar to see what popped up when I put in "love," almost all of the Google results for my two blogs were on my more personal and political HinesSight blog.

I've written about loving my iPhone, a Salem outdoor store, taxes, the "24" TV show, and other things. On this churchless blog, the most relevant post seemed to be "I'd love my self if I had one."

Which started out...

Proving, or not, that profound insights are found in the strangest places, I'll share some of the lyrics to an atonal song that I made up and love to "sing" (using that word in its absolutely loosest sense) in the shower.

I love my dog.
I love my cat.
Only problem is, 
I don't have a cat.
It's hard to love
What you don't have.

This is how I also feel about loving God. Or, my self. 

Except seemingly there's more evidence for a "self" than for "God." Buddhism, though, seizes on that seemingly and runs with it to an intriguing, reasonable, and scientifically defensible conclusion.

I don't have a self. No one does. Meaning, as agnostic Buddhist Stephen Bachelor says in his wonderful book, "Buddhism Without Beliefs":

As a human being I am more complex than a pot or a daffodil, but I have also emerged from causes and am composed of diverse, changing features and traits. There is no essential me that exists apart from this unique configuration of biological and cultural processes.

This helps to explain why I haven't written much about love. I agree with my email correspondent that love is beautiful. But I have no idea what those three words, love is beautiful, really mean. 

Nor would it help to delete "beautiful" and substitute any other word after love is...

Love, like me or you (as Stephen Bachelor said), isn't something separate and distinct from the beings who feel this ineffable emotion. Whatever love is, it is an ever-changing process, not a static entity. Especially, it isn't an other-worldly entity.

So my feeling is, the less we analyze and speak about love itself -- as contrasted with talking about what we love -- the better. Abstracting love diminishes this way of experiencing reality.

Meaning, I don't believe that love exists without a lover and an object of adoration.

How could love exist as a free floating something-or-other? This would be like being angry, yet not being angry about anything. At the least, an angry person would be angry about being angry, which counts as being angry about something.  

I'm not really a Buddhist, but I resonate with certain Buddhist principles -- such as the selflessness and mutuality mentioned in the email message I got.

As was noted in the above-linked post, we don't have to do anything to be selfless. This, it seems from both a Buddhist and neuroscientific perspective, is how we are: without an enduring changeless self. Such is the Buddhist notion of "emptiness."

Here's another quote from that post:

Emptiness is Buddhism's shorthand term for this absence of intrinsic selfness or thingness. Living and lifeless entities are equally devoid of independent, free-standing, unchanging existence.

The world is interconnected, with never-ending matrices of causes and effects stretching back to the big bang, and likely beyond. Out of this creative ferment arises...

Me. You. Religious beliefs. Scientific discoveries. Blogs. Books. Life. Death. Joy. Pain. Questions. Answers. Everything.

It isn't exactly true that we are all one, because obviously there are lots of different things that have manifested as Everything. But it's clear that the cosmos is a whole, so now I worship at the altar of scientifically defensible wholeiness rather than imaginary holiness.

Everything is interconnected. Everything is dependent on other things for its existence. No thing and no one is an island, compete unto itself. Reality is an interwoven web with no dangling threads. 

So the way I see it, love is an integral aspect of the way things are.

Meaning, reality (including us human beings) is bound together by unbreakable connections. We can't escape being attracted to this and that, because such is the way of the world, of the universe, of the cosmos.

And so is hate: lack of attraction, disengagement, disinterest. It isn't possible to have love without hate, just as there is no such thing as up without down, or hot without cold. 

We can't be equally connected or attracted to everything in existence. Neither can unconscious entities. If this were the case, reality would be a featureless blob. Life is a flux, a flow, an ever-changing dance. 

We come closer; we grow apart. We smile; we frown. We feel at peace; we feel at war.

For me, "love" points to all of this.

It is the way things are: interconnected, in relationships, yet with no fixed essence or state of being. There's no way to put words to this, because it's what reality is, was, and always will be absent human conceptions.

That said (or unsaid), maybe it makes sense to say, "love is acceptance of everything that really exists." I used the word love in the title of my post, "Respect reality, not religion, if you love the Ultimate."

At every moment, each of us is enjoying a great gift: reality.

Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches connect us with a world that exists independent of our subjective consciousness. The proof of this is that we can say to someone else, "Do you see that? Do you hear that? Doesn't this taste great?", and learn that what we consider to be real, actually is.

For me, mindfulness of the present moment has become my religion (speaking loosely; mindfulness is far removed from traditional religiosity). I try to separate my senses from my stories. Reality is different from our beliefs. 

Why we believe in things we know aren't true

It's a well-worn saying here in the United States: "Denial isn't just a river in Egypt." 

We all deny reality. We all prefer to feel good about a falsity rather than embrace a harsh truth.

But some people struggle against our human inclination to believe in things that aren't true, while others make little or no effort to resist the lure of denial. 

A piece in the New York Times, "Believing What You Don't Believe," casts light on what's going on here. 

How is it that people can believe something that they know is not true?

For example, Kansas City Royals fans, sitting in front of their television sets in Kansas City, surely know that there is no possible connection between their lucky hats (or socks, or jerseys) and the outcome of a World Series game at Citi Field in New York, 1,200 miles away. Yet it would be impossible to persuade many of them to watch the game without those lucky charms.

It’s not that people don’t understand that it’s scientifically impossible for their lucky hats to help their team hit a home run or turn a double play — all but the most superstitious would acknowledge that. It’s that they have a powerful intuition and, despite its utter implausibility, they just can’t shake it.

So our quick intuitions can lead us astray. The role of slower reason, logic, and deliberate consideration of evidence is to correct those intuitive errors. 

Psychologists who study decision making and its shortcomings often rely on the idea, popularized by the psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” that there are two modes of processing information.

There is a “fast system” that is intuitive and quickly generates impressions and judgments, and a “slow system” that operates in a deliberate and effortful manner, and is responsible for overriding the output of the fast system when the slow system detects an error.

However, often this doesn't happen. So people continue to believe in things they know aren't true.

Strange? Yes. Weird? Yes. But the human mind is undeniably strange and weird. If it wasn't, religions wouldn't have the fertile mental soil in which superstition and dogmatism establish such deep roots.

But as one of us, Professor Risen, discusses in a paper just published in Psychological Review, many instances of superstition and magical thinking indicate that the slow system doesn’t always behave this way.

When people pause to reflect on the fact that their superstitious intuitions are irrational, the slow system, which is supposed to fix things, very often doesn’t do so.

People can simultaneously recognize that, rationally, their superstitious belief is impossible, but persist in their belief, and their behavior, regardless. Detecting an error does not necessarily lead people to correct it.

Wow. My wife convinces me she's enlightened.

If you think I'm churchless and irreligious, you haven't met my wife, Laurel -- who is now surpassing me in skepticism about all things godly. 

She's even enlightening me about enlightenment. 

Driving home from central Oregon this afternoon, with plenty of time to converse during the two hour trip, Laurel said:

Why are so many people concerned about being enlightened? It's just about embracing reality. Which is right here, right now. So understanding there's no such thing as enlightenment, just reality, is true enlightenment. 

I couldn't add much to this bit of wisdom.

Mostly I just marveled at Laurel's evident enlightenment. Perhaps even more than me, she's come to understand that searching for an illusory SuperSized Consciousness is a recipe for wasting one's time.

Now, I realize that many people disagree with this. I would have disagreed with Laurel myself a decade or so ago, when I still believed it was possible to dissolve the illusion of everyday reality. 

Today, like my wife, I consider that the illusion is believing there is any illusion to dissolve. Sure, there's a lot to learn about the world -- both on a personal and communal level. 

But there's no convincing evidence that anything other than one's ordinary mind is needed to gain increased knowledge and understanding of what life is all about, a notion shared by John Gray in his new book, as I wrote about in my previous post.

I quoted Gray:

We do not know how matter came to dream our world into being: we do not know what, if anything, happens when the dream ends for us and we die. We yearn for a type of knowledge that would make us other than we are -- though what we would like to be, we cannot say. Why try to escape from yourself?

Accepting the fact of unknowing makes possible an inner freedom very different from that pursued by Gnostics. If you have this negative capability, you will not want a higher form of consciousness; your ordinary mind will give you all you need.

Today I came across a piece, "Alan Watts on What Reality Is and How to Become What You Are." Watts, of course, also was big on living an ordinary life without making it into anything other than what it naturally is.

The piece has a quote from Watts' book, Become What You Are.

Some time ago a group of people were sitting in a restaurant, and one of them asked the others to say what they meant by Reality. There was much vague discussion, much talk of metaphysics and psychology, but one of those present, when asked his opinion, simply shrugged his shoulders and pointed at the saltshaker.

He was amazed to find that no one understood him, yet he had intended to be neither clever nor obscure. His idea was just to give a commonsense answer to the question, on the ordinary assumption that Reality is whatever exists.

He was not understood because his friends, in common with many others, regarded Reality as a special kind of existence and Life (with a capital L) as a particular way of living. Thus we often meet those who talk about the difference between being a mere clod, a mere “animated stomach,” and a real person; between those who simply exist and those who really live.

Which is followed by another quote:

We have all met those who are trying very hard to be real persons, to give their lives Reality (or meaning) and to live as distinct from existing. These seekers are of many kinds, highbrow and lowbrow, ranging from students of arcane wisdom to the audiences of popular speakers on pep and personality, selling yourself and making your life a success.

I have never yet met anyone who tried to become a real person with success. The result of such attempts is invariably loss of personality, for there is an ancient paradox of the spiritual life whereby those who try to make themselves great become small.

The paradox is even a bit more complicated than this; it also means that if you try, indirectly, to make yourself great by making yourself small, you succeed only in remaining small. It is all a question of motive, of what you want. Motives may be subtly concealed, and we may not call the desire to be a real person the desire to be great; but that is just a matter of words.

John Gray's "The Soul of the Marionette" -- perplexing and persuasive

I enjoy books that present familiar ideas in a fresh way. I also enjoy books that, when I read the last page, leave me with as many questions as answers.

John Gray's "The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry Into Human Freedom" is such a book. 

I finished it last night, having read the 168 pages in just a day and a half. Once I started Gray's book, I found it so fascinating, I felt compelled to get to the end as soon as possible -- so I could grasp its conclusions.

Problem was (if it is a problem, and I suspect it isn't), I read the final pages, closed the cover, and then felt a big ???????????... settle over my mind. 

Meaning, I wasn't sure what the meaning of the book was. 

But my next thought was: Gray's lack of evident meaning was the meaning of "The Soul of the Marionette." This fit with my reading of his previous "The Silence of Animals," which I blogged about here.

I'm tempted to share some quotes from his new book and leave blog visitors to figure out what they mean.

Resisting that temptation, I'm going to share my intuitions about "The Soul of the Marionette" in my own words -- which might, or might not, reflect Gray's intentions.

Gray starts out with a compelling tale of someone who wrote a story about marionettes, puppets. Puppets can dance about with amazing grace because they aren't bound by gravity as we are. They are controlled by the puppeteer, a "higher power" so to speak.

Likewise, humans have a strong desire to surrender themselves to some force greater than themselves. Gray speaks of how theists seek to know the will of God; Taoists seek to act in harmony with Tao; scientists seek to know the Theory of Everything that explains why things are as they are.

So the most intriguing aspect of Gray's book for me is how he persuasively argues that seemingly disparate aspects of human culture, such as religion and science, actually are bowing down to the same belief: that it is possible to eradicate mystery and ignorance, revealing the nature of the cosmos through a form of Gnosticism.

The original Gnostics held a view common to many religions and mystical teachings. This world is a reflection or shadow of a much more vibrant and real higher realm.

Either some malevolent force, such as the Devil, actively prevents us from knowing that reality, or ignorance is a passive block to this knowledge, or gnosis. Regardless, both ancient and modern forms of Gnosticism hold out the promise that we can know the puppeteer, so to speak. 

This knowledge can bring us to a state where we willingly surrender our belief that we have free will, that we are independent actors on the stage of life, and accept that some power greater than ourselves is making us speak, dance, and do.

Again, this doesn't have to be a supernatural or divine power.

It can be nature as known by an all-knowing science that has revealed what lies behind the apparent reality of this world. Thus Gray argues that a form of Platonism, an assumption that it is possible to turn our gaze away from illusory shadows and see the light of Truth, pervades both theistic religiosity and secular humanism.

Scientifically-minded atheistic progressives like me, for example, consider that it will be possible to have a much better nation and world once certain political/cultural obstacles are removed. Progressives, not surprisingly, believe in progress.

So do Christians, who believe in salvation through adherence to Jesus' message. So do religious people of many other faiths, who similarly believe that following certain practices can elevate humanity to a higher level of, dare I say it, evolution. 

Gray challenges these beliefs. He does so, though, not in a philosophical way, but in more of a literary manner. In most of his book he shares erudite descriptions of writings most people (certainly me) have never heard of.

The authors of these writings either share Gray's basic skepticism that humanity is on the upswing, and will remain on that elevated cultural platform, or are used to show the folly that it ever will be possible -- or even is desirable -- to "know the puppeteer."

In his closing pages Gray returns to the puppet analogy after a long absence. He speaks of the uber-marionette, "The human being that knows it is a machine. Must it envy the graceful automatism of the puppet?"

I now feel that I should break my previously mentioned intention of not sharing quotations from Gray's book. After all, I just did. Might as well dive deeper into the Quote Pool. 

This passage is one of my favorites in the book, especially the final sentence. 

In Kleist's essay humans are caught between the graceful automatism of the puppet and the conscious freedom of a god. The jerky, stuttering quality of their actions comes from their feeling that they must determine the course of their lives. Other animals live without having to choose their path through life.

Whatever uncertainty they may feel sniffing their way through the world is not a permanent condition; once they reach a place of safety, they are at rest. In contrast, human life is spent anxiously deciding how to live.

So true: Human life is spent anxiously deciding how to live. 

We doubt ourselves. We doubt others. We doubt religion. We doubt science. We doubt government. We doubt nihilism. We doubt the wisdom of the ages. We doubt the newest knowledge. 

We're continuously trying to find the Better, if not the Best. Even if we aren't hungry for material goodies, we're ravenous for other sorts of Goods -- political, cultural, philosophical, whatever. 

Gray describes how the science fiction author, Philip K. Dick, came to believe in a paranoid form of  Gnosticism.

Though it was marked out by his own traumas, Dick trod a path that has been followed by many before him. Like human beings in every age he wanted to believe that events of his life formed part of a pattern. So he created a story in which his life was shaped by secret agencies, some of them from beyond the human world.

But a world in which nothing happens by chance is an enclosed space that soon proves maddening. Dick found himself stuck in such a place -- not the radiant, meaning-filled cosmos he was looking for, but a dark prison.

...Dick summarized what his experiences had led him to believe:

1. the empirical world is not quite real, but only seemingly real;
2. its creator cannot be appealed to for a rectification of redress of these evils and imperfections;
3. the world is moving toward some kind of end state or goal, the nature of which is obscure, but the evolutionary aspect of the change states suggests a good and purposeful end state that has been designed by a sentient and benign photo-entity.

DIck, by Gray's account, was pretty much off his rocker psychologically when he wrote those words. But isn't this close to how most people view the world? 

As having all sorts of problems at the moment, but moving toward a much more desirable end state -- perhaps not with certainty, but with a high degree of probability. 

Again, most of us have an underlying, and largely unconscious, assumption that some "puppet master" is at work behind the scenes. Could be God. Could be Gaia. Could be self-balancing Laws of Nature that will restore equilibrium to a world gone bad.

Regardless, we like to tell ourselves stories about our own life, and the life of humanity as a whole, that make sense and have a happy ending. Underlying these stories is a belief that we know what is going on, and will steadily know more and more as time goes on.

Well, here's how Gray ends his book. Hang on for a wild ride, persuasive while perplexing.

In the story told by Herr C., human beings become free when they become fully conscious. For these godlike creatures, there can be nothing that is mysterious. Mystery fades away with ever greater conscious awareness, and true freedom means living by that inner light.

This is, of course, a very old faith -- the faith of the Gnostics, and also of Socrates. Both believed that freedom was achieved by the possession of a special kind of knowledge. Modern rationalism is another version of this religion.

Contemporary evangelists for evolution, trans-humanists and techno-futurists are also followers of this creed. All of them promote the project of expelling mystery from the mind.

The trouble with this project is that it has the effect of confining the mind within itself. In a world where there is nothing that cannot be explained, everything that happens fits into a hidden scheme. 

In Gnosticism, the world is the plaything of a demiurge. For conspiracy theorists, history is scripted by occult agencies. For secular rationalists, enlightenment is thwarted by the sinister forces of superstition and reaction. 

There is a pattern here: if you aim to exorcize mystery from your mind, you end up -- like Philip K. Dick -- locked in a paranoid universe and possessed by demons.

From being seemingly annihilated by Christianity, Gnosticism has conquered the world. Belief in the liberating power of knowledge has become the ruling illusion of modern humankind. Most want to believe that some kind of explanation or understanding will deliver them from their conflicts.

Yet being divided from yourself goes with being self-aware. This is the truth in the Genesis myth: the Fall is not an event at the beginning of history but the intrinsic condition of self-conscious beings.

Only creatures that are as flawed and ignorant as humans can be free in the way humans are free. 

We do not know how matter came to dream our world into being: we do not know what, if anything, happens when the dream ends for us and we die. We yearn for a type of knowledge that would make us other than we are -- though what we would like to be, we cannot say. Why try to escape from yourself?

Accepting the fact of unknowing makes possible an inner freedom very different from that pursued by Gnostics. If you have this negative capability, you will not want a higher form of consciousness; your ordinary mind will give you all you need.

Rather than trying to impose sense on your life, you will be content to let meaning come and go. Instead of becoming an unfaltering puppet, you will make your way in the stumbling human world. Uber-marionettes do not have to wait until they can fly before they can be free.

Not looking to ascend into the heavens, they can find freedom in falling to earth. 

Why religious Personal Beliefs are usually Personal Delusions

A few days ago astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted out something so-true:

If your Personal Beliefs deny what's objectively true about the world, then they're more accurately called Personal Delusions.

Beautifully said. 

This makes most religious dogma delusional. In fact, I probably should have said all religious dogma, since if something is objectively true it belongs in the realm of science and other forms of generally accepted knowledge, not the realm of religion.

Now, in a reply to someone who commented on this tweet, Tyson clarified what he meant. He was asked, "What if your personal delusions don't deny what's objectively true about the world?" Tyson's reply:

Then they're not Delusions. They're just Beliefs. My Tweet does not reference these.

This gets us to the question of what is objectively true.

If there is positive demonstrable evidence for some fact, such as that the big bang brought the universe into being some 13.7 billion years ago, then clearly a belief that the universe was created by God a few thousand years ago is delusional.

But what about accepting the existence of God? Or heaven and hell? Or eternal soul? Would this be a delusion or a belief?

I strongly lean toward Personal Delusion. After all, this is an objective truth about the world: there is no convincing demonstrable evidence that God, heaven, hell, or eternal soul exist.

Speaking more broadly, lack of evidence that something exists is a fact about the universe. Yes, a provisional fact, because evidence could always pop up in favor of that thing existing.

If clear and convincing evidence of God appeared tomorrow -- some observable cosmic event or miracle that scientists couldn't explain any other way -- then I and almost all other atheists would be pleased to admit, "We were wrong. God is real."

Until this happens, though, it is justified to call someone delusional who embraces the notion that God exists. Not delusional in most regards, as a deeply psychotic person might be -- just delusional in this regard.

Tyson's distinction between Personal Belief and Personal Delusion enters into the fervent current national discussion about what sorts of religious beliefs deserve to be accommodated in a society governed by secular laws, such as the United States.

I say, very few, if any. 

For one thing, when dug into usually these beliefs are at odds with objective truth, which make them delusions. 

Kim Davis, for example, is a county clerk who wants her religious belief that same-sex marriage is against God's will to be accommodated under a federal religious liberty law. Davis claims that she is acting under "God's authority," which supersedes the Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage.

Well, this only makes sense if it is objectively true that (1) God exists, (2) God rules over human affairs, and (3) God has decreed that same-sex marriage is wrong.

Since all three statements are at odds with what is known about objective reality -- there's no evidence for 1, 2, or 3 -- Kim Davis is embracing a Personal Delusion. 

I'd argue that even if it was viewed as a Personal Belief, she still doesn't have the right to ignore the law of the land, as Jeffrey Toobin says in the above-linked piece, "Kim Davis's Cafeteria Government."

Now Davis is seeking to extend the concept of accommodation even more—to government officials, like her, who want to pick and choose which legal obligations to honor. It’s one thing to allow cafeteria citizenship; Davis wants cafeteria government.

The problem, as Scalia recognized more than two decades ago, is that there is no logical stopping point for the accommodation principle. People have sincere religious beliefs that obligate them to engage in, or refrain from, all kinds of behaviors that the law allows (like same-sex marriage) or requires (like paying taxes).

So while people are free to hold both Personal Beliefs and Personal Delusions, these shouldn't be confused with Objective Truth. As the saying goes, you're entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.  

The weird interwoven world of general relativity

Let's get this straight right away: I don't really understand general relativity. 

I've read a lot of explanations about it. Briefly I'll feel like I grasp what general relativity is all about in a non-mathematical sense. 

A few days later, or even sooner, that understanding has slipped away and I'm basically as clueless as I was before. Which is strange, because usually I can conceptually grasp scientific truths much more fully. 

So there's something weird for me about general relativity. Which probably is best explained by the fact that almost everybody feels the same way. 

Spend two minutes watching this video of Neil deGrasse Tyson trying to explain gravity, which is the centerpiece of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Even Tyson starts off his explanation in a quizzical fashion.

 

Now, while Tyson says that Einstein said the following, actually it was theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler.

Spacetime tells matter how to move;
Matter tells spacetime how to curve.

It doesn't matter who was the source of this quote. As Tyson's interviewer says, that's poetic. It's my favorite explanation of general relativity, because I can grasp these two sentences even as I don't understand them.

A recent special issue of Scientific American is devoted to "100 Years of General Relativity." Here's a passage from one of the articles in the issue that says much the same thing.

Einstein's goal as he pursued his general theory of relativity was to find the mathematical equations describing two interwoven processes: how a gravitational field acts on matter, telling it how to move, and how matter generates gravitational fields in spacetime, telling spacetime how to curve.

So even though I don't begin to grasp the mathematics of general relativity, I have an, um, general conceptual feeling for it -- at least as it pertains to gravity.

It's that word, "interwoven," that seems key here. We're used to hierarchies, since human life and culture is full of them. This rules that. This causes that. This is above that. 

Yet nature rarely, if ever, works that way.

Like gravity in general relativity, this causes that and that causes this. Interwoven loops abound. Nature is much more of a circle than a straight line. Everything is interconnected, even though we humans do our best to break things apart and view them as discrete entities.

This is one reason why the concept of God no longer appeals to me. Like most religiously-minded people, I used to look upon God as The Big Man Upstairs, the cosmos' CEO who occupies the coolest office on the top floor. 

But this doesn't mesh with either common sense or scientific understanding.

For example, if God created the cosmos and now rules over it, who or what created God? If the supposed answer is no one, because God has always existed, then why can't the cosmos always have existed without a God?

An interwoven cosmos, or universe, seems considerably more likely than a hierarchical one. I've talked about this sort of thing before in posts such as:

"No beginning, no end. The universe simply is."
"Enlightenment made simple: it's reality."
"Relationship is the essential nature of reality."

I'm obviously not capable of capturing the essence of the cosmos in a few pithy sentences, as Wheeler did with gravity. About the best I can do is...

The universe causes me to do things; the things I do change the universe.

Naturalism needs to rule public policy debates

Below is an essay that I wrote for the Spiritual Naturalist Society (I'm a contributing writer), but which struck them as too political for their tastes -- politics and policy-making apparently not being part of what they consider to be a "spiritual practice." 

So, boo-hoo, it was rejected for their site.

I'm going to present some arguments to the Spiritual Naturalist Society folks about why no bounds should be placed around a naturalistic worldview. If there is no supernatural realm, it doesn't make sense to me to consider some aspects of a naturalistic person's life to be spiritual, and some aspects non-spiritual.

I meditate every morning. I go for a walk in nature every day. I do Tai Chi almost every day.

If these activities are "spiritual," then why isn't writing elected officials to advocate for some policy position, such as signing the deal with Iran or doing more to avert global climate change, or testifying at a city council meeting?

And also, fighting the interjection of faith-based supernatural religious beliefs into public policy debates, which, as you'll read below, was a big part of what our nation's revolutionary deistically-inclined founders strongly held to be true and good.

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Naturalism needs to rule public policy debates

There’s no place for supernatural religious beliefs in discussions of public policy.

So, please, believers, leave out all mentions of God, soul, spirit, divine will, and such when you want to weigh in on abortion, embryonic stem cell research, LBGTQ rights, or other morally-fraught issues.

Being a political activist, my Christian friends (whether liberal or conservative) recoil when I speak like this. They feel it is fine to express their religious views in debates about how government should deal with matters of public policy.

I disagree.

After reading Matthew Stewart’s marvelously written and researched book, “Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic,” I’ve got fresh argumentative ammunition to bolster my long-held contention that religious views founded on supernaturalism shouldn’t be brought into the public sphere.

(See my 2004 blog post, Religious values have no place in politics.)

The founders of our nation intended the United States to be an Empire of Reason. Stewart writes:

Human beings achieved self-government only after they learned how to discard the politically dangerous delusions that arise from the common religious consciousness. At least, that is more or less how America’s founders saw the matter.

…The cultivation of the sciences and the development of culture and the arts become not just the route to advancing the other interests of the state but the end of the state itself.

The enlightenment of the people becomes their own true religion, while the shell of tradition vanishes into empty symbols of the life of individual and collective self-realization.

True piety in a reasonable world is the pursuit of happiness through the improvement of the understanding. Call it the religion of freedom.

Stewart dives into some deep historical and philosophical waters in “Nature’s God.” Its 435 pages aren’t the easiest to read or summarize succinctly.

So here’s a couple of metaphors that, to me, do a good job of showing why Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, Thomas Young, and other leaders during revolutionary times worked so hard to make reason, not faith, the foundation of our nation’s governance.

Imagine that you’re part of a residents’ committee charged with managing the common property of a housing development. The group is looking at a grove of trees, some of which may need to be removed to restore views.

A member of the committee interrupts the discussion. “I’m not in favor of taking down any trees,” she says. “I believe there are tree sprites, invisible fairies, living in them. The sprites would be harmed if any tree was removed.”

How could you respond to that? You want to tell the woman, “What you’re saying is crazy,” but that would sound impolite.

So you reply with, “Well, you’re welcome to your beliefs, but this committee is responsible for doing what’s best for our community. We have to base our tree removal decisions on what everybody knows to be real, not on the supposed desires of supernatural tree sprites.”

This is closely akin to how many religious people approach the question of abortion.

They believe that an immaterial soul enters the embryo at the moment of conception, or soon thereafter. Other people look upon abortion as a secular matter, a decision to be reached between a woman and her doctor based on personal moral and health concerns.

Once fervently-held religious supernaturalism enters a public policy discussion, it is difficult, if not impossible, to engage in an open debate where reasoned arguments are put forth, factual evidence carefully considered, and a fairly-arrived at decision determined.

Consider this second metaphorical example.

A group is playing poker. A hand has been dealt. The cards have been played. Everything is on the table for examination. A player with four aces prepares to pull in the chips she has won. Until she hears…

“Stop. I won this hand. I’ve got a straight flush, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 of clubs.”
“No, you don’t. We can all see your cards. You’ve got nothing.”
“Ah, those aren’t my real cards. My real cards are invisible. Only I can see them — give me the chips I’ve won.”

Who would do that?

The game has been played fairly. The only cards that count are the physical ones handed out by the dealer. There are rules for deciding which combinations of cards win out over other combinations. If someone brings in supernatural invisible cards, this makes playing a fair game of poker impossible.

Though I’ve used simple examples of tree cutting and poker playing, the same principles were at the root of why the American Republic was founded as a naturalistic Empire of Reason rather than a supernatural Empire of Faith.

Here’s another passage from “Nature’s God” where Stewart speaks of how our nation’s founders viewed private and public religiosity.

The separation of church and state that emerges from the early modern revolutions in philosophy and politics does not in fact imply that the modern secular state is or ought to be neutral with respect to religion in every sense of that term. Rather, this separation at least implicitly involves the creation of a certain kind of public religion.

This new public religion is indeed tolerant of every religious belief -- but only insofar as that belief is understood to be intrinsically private. It does not and ought not tolerate any form of religion that attempts to hold the power of the sovereign answerable to its private religious belief. It also does not and ought not tolerate any attempt to shield the doctrines and practices of any religion from critical scrutiny.

…In short, the state may adopt as a part of its public religion only whatever may be safely dissolved back into reason.

In the context of the American Revolution, Stewart’s mention of a sovereign doesn't refer to a king, queen, president, parliament, or congress. Rather, it means the people of the newly formed United States.

Thus it is the power of the people that isn’t obliged to answer to any private religious belief.

If someone tries to interject a faith-based doctrine that isn’t answerable to reason into a public policy question, this is as inappropriate as someone arguing that a tree can’t be cut down because of supernatural sprites, or claiming to have won a hand of poker because of invisible cards.

Here’s a succinct explanation of what Stewart means by “public religion.” Basically, it is deism, which in his conception isn’t far removed from atheism, being a naturalistic view of the universe.

The popular deism or natural religion that America's revolutionaries hoped to promote was distinguished above all by its commitment to the defining value of the Empire of Reason: the improvement of the understanding.

Thus the goal of these radical nation-building philosophers wasn’t so much to exclude God from the American Republic, as to include all of reality. This is the only way genuine understanding of what is true and good can be achieved.

In keeping with the guiding principle, it [an immanent rather than transcendent view of morality] says that whatever moves us, like whatever moves anything in the infinite universe, must be explicable. So the good always comes with reasons for its goodness; those reasons must refer to those motives that we generically identify as pleasure and pain; and those reflections on the affections can always be the subject of further reflection, elaboration, and qualification.

Given the diversity of these United States, our Constitution — as serious as it is — reminds me of a joke that begins with “A Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, Atheist, Wiccan, Muslim, Taoist, and Rastafarian walk into a bar…”

Except, the bar is our nation. And there are many more types of citizens than the nine I mentioned. One could argue, as many types as there are individuals living in this country, since every person is unique.

What is the common ground on which we all can stand during our debates and discussions about what is best for us?

What evidence and facts can be brought into attempts to reason our way to some sort of consensus on complex controversial issues?

The answer to both questions is Nature and Nature’s Laws. Everybody lives in the same natural world. We all breathe the same air, drink the same water, walk on the same Earth, gaze into the same sky.

Yes, humans also hold a wide variety of ideas about what, if anything, might lie beyond the physicality of this universe.

But those hypothesized supernatural conceptions divide us, while the actuality of science, and the understanding that flows from reasoned consideration of what is known to be real — that unites us.

Such was the unparalleled vision of our nation’s founders. Near the end of his book, Matthew Stewart speaks of what remains for this vision to be fulfilled.

In our tolerant age, we like to say that everybody is entitled their own worldview, that every worldview comes with its own “narrative” of the history, and that all such narratives are created equal.

So, according to the wisdom of polite society today, it’s a matter of personal preference whether the modern world emerged out of humankind’s emancipation from the shackles of religious superstition or whether instead it sprang directly from the head of Zeus, or was delivered in the form of a bountiful continent to this or that group of sectarian zealots.

But the only choice we really have is whether to be conscious or to persist in destructive delusions. Of course, it remains just as fashionable now as it was in Jonathan Edward’s day to lament the nihilism that supposedly grips us when we shed the false certainty of ignorance, and to bemoan the doom that will surely befall us when we depart from the simple faith of our fathers.

But the fact remains that the common power of humanity — the capability for cooperative action that is really just another word for our moral well-being — was never greater than after we lost our religion.

…The founding of the American Republic did not bring freedom to the slaves. It did not give justice to Native Americans. It did nothing to liberate women. And it still hasn’t prevented malefactors of great wealth from twisting the political process to their advantage. 

All of these struggles fell to subsequent generations, and the provisional victories obtained thus far have been the work of those who have understood in one way or another that the American Revolution remains an ongoing concern.

The main thing we can learn now from the persistence in modern America of supernatural religion and the reactionary nationalism with which it is so regularly accompanied is that there is still work to be done. For too long we have relied on silence to speak a certain truth. The noise tells us the time has come for some candor. It points to a piece of unfinished business of the American Revolution.

Aliens test the faith of Earth's religious believers

So here's a thought experiment to ponder, religious believers...

Aliens have come to Earth. They're from an advanced civilization in a galaxy far far away. Their spaceship is way beyond anything our scientists have even imagined. 

Technologically, it's immediately apparent that we are as sophisticated in their eyes as a chimpanzee with a termite-removing twig is to us. 

Fortunately, the aliens haven't come to destroy humanity. Well, let's rephrase that: they're fine with destroying us Homo sapiens one at a time. It's part of a game they like to play with denizens of the planets they visit.

The rules are simple. They ask intelligent beings (though, obviously, nowhere near as intelligent as they are) questions about reality. 

Not super-tough questions. The aliens understand that few, if any, cultures on the worlds they visit possess knowledge about the cosmos that's anywhere near as complete as what they know. 

So their game is to quiz members of the most advanced species on this planet, Earth, about things we should know. The aliens are expert at gauging the overall planetary I.Q. of the worlds they visit.

What they like to do is test individuals on their knowledge base -- sort of like an educator with a Ph.D. quizzing pre-schoolers on what they should have learned about the world. 

Except, in this game a wrong answer has a nasty consequence: death. These aliens are like planetary ant farmers. Aside from simply being fun to them, their game ends up with a planet inhabited by the beings most knowledgeable about reality.

Which to them is an open book.

There's a few nooks and crannies of the cosmos they don't totally understand, but not many. So they play a fair game -- especially since they only ask questions of humans that people should know the answers to.

Called to play the game (naturally you don't have a choice), you're pleased to see that the first questions you're asked are easy to answer. 

Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. Photons move at the speed of light. Our planet is spherical, not flat. You're beginning to feel pretty confident about winning this game and staying alive.

Until you hear the final question: "Does the God you believe in actually exist?" 

The aliens know your religious beliefs. After all, they know virtually everything. It won't work to respond with "I don't believe in God." They know that you do. 

Your problem with this question, compared to the others, is that you had good reasons for answering the aliens' previous queries the way you did. Facts are facts. A religious belief though... that's very different. 

The aliens are waiting for your answer.

You're tongue-tied, but your mind is racing. After all, for as long as you can remember you've been sure that God exists. Your faith is super strong. You've had no doubt, none at all, that the God of your religion is the most real entity in the cosmos.

Yet here you are, faced with aliens who know the truth about God in the same way they know the truth about every other significant fact about reality. There's no way to argue with them. They know if the God you believe in exists. 

What's your answer? Yes or No. Choose the wrong answer and your life is over. (The only upside is that you've learned whether your God is real before you die; the downside is that you're dead.)

Of course, the aliens could ask a similar question of human atheists: "Does any God actually exist?" We'd find it easier to answer, though, since the evidence points to "No." Religious believers are the ones who will have a much tougher time with "Does the God you believe in actually exist?"

So how would you respond deeply religious person? Are you willing to stake your life on your belief, knowing that the aliens possess the factual answer? 

Boundless Existence is grander than anything, even a God

l enjoy marveling at a primal marvelousness: That the cosmos exists. Recently I wrote a piece for the Spiritual Naturalist Society about this -- "Wow! Existence has always existed."

I boldfaced That because there's a unbridgeable gap between the What and That of existence. We can talk about What existent things are. It is impossible to talk about the That'ness of existence: That existence exists.

Recently on a bookshelf I came across Milton Munitz' "Does Life Have a Meaning?", one of my favorite books. For the third time, I read it.

Munitz  also was fascinated by the brute fact of existence.

Being a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, in this book, his last, Munitz was able to ponder the difference between things that exist, which can be described with all sorts of What's, and Boundless Existence. 

Few people, he says, have an awareness of Boundless Existence. I can't be sure that I have the same sense of it as Munitz did, since it is very difficult, if not impossible, to put this awareness into words that begin to capture the intuitive experience of it.

Here's a quote from "Does Life Have a Meaning?"

If one accepts the distinction between the existent universe and Boundless Existence as drawn by the world picture I have sketched, then it is part of that acceptance to recognize that Boundless Existence is neither an existent, a collection of existents, nor even the supposed totality of existents.

Since it is not an existent, Boundless Existence cannot act on us, nor can a human existent interact with it. Since, too, it is not an existent in the way in which the observable universe or any of its parts is, it cannot be explained, modified, perceived, investigated, or understood.

Moreover, it is a fundamental dimension of Reality, and as such is not only to be accorded equal status with other fundamental principles on an ontological level of the world picture we are exploring, but should also receive full and equal attention in a philosophy of life that purports to serve as a schema for envisioning our place in Reality, i.e., as a guide for our actions and as a way of judging the possible values of life.

As far as we know, it is exclusively given to human existents not only to interact with and progressively understand other existents, but to become increasingly aware of Boundless Existence. 

To bring Boundless Existence into intensified awareness and to let its presence permeate and affect all our interactions with other existents, is, however, for the vast majority of human existents, a relatively rare achievement and practice. Whatever benefits such awareness could bring is, therefore, absent from the lives of most human existents or the dominant philosophies by which they are guided.

In other words, most people are only concerned with existent things, not Boundless Existence. Yet even if a God were proven to exist who created everything in existence, this divinity would "only" be another existent thing. The mystery of Boundless Existence that makes existents possible remains.

Munitz writes:

The capitalized expression Boundless Existence represents the basic ontological and epistemological fact that the very Existence of the observable universe (as distinguished form the type of potentially intelligible existence exhibited by any interactive existent) is transcendent both to any form of conceptual understanding -- to the use of any scheme of conceptual bounds -- and of course beyond even the slightest degree of human intervention or control.

Boundless Existence is everywhere associated with the observable universe and its contents as an irreducible and uneliminable aspect of it, though it defeats and transcends all ordinary cognitive modes of access relying on observation or understanding.

The notion of Boundless Existence, as I employ it, is to be distinguished from the way the term "God" is employed in most theistic religions. Boundless Existence does not stand to the universe in the relation of a creative source to its created product. Nor does Boundless Existence stand to human life in the way this is construed in most theistic religions and philosophies.

As viewed under the aspect of the omnipresent "emptiness" of Boundless Existence, the lives of human existents cannot find any preassigned purpose or intelligibility in the Boundless Existence of the observable universe. 

In contrast with theistic conceptions of God as the source for the existence of human life and the ultimate focus for a person's worship, obedience, or love (theism's standard view of the basic goals and standards for a spiritually meaningful human life, a deep awareness of the dimension of Boundless Existence enforces the conclusion that such meanings as humans can find in their lives are not generated by, or selectively, supported and controlled by, Boundless Existence.

Instead, they largely emerge from the choices and responses that human existents, as autonomous agents, make in their interactions with other existents. 

Well, I don't agree that we humans are "autonomous" agents. Unfettered free will seems impossible in this lawfully interconnected cosmos. 

Otherwise, though, I resonate with Munitz' central thesis. Along with him, I accept the fact of Boundless Existence.

More... as noted above, I marvel at Boundless Existence. Here's a quote from one of my earliest posts on this blog, which I included in a 2010 post, "The Beauty of Boundless Existence."

My head hurts when I think too much about existence. But I get an enjoyable chill up my spiritual spine when I simply try to wrap my psyche around existence. Not in a wordy way. In, well, an existential way. This happens when I try to let the stark reality of existence blow the roof off all my notions about what exists, when I try to strip away thoughts about all that is until the skeleton of a bare is remains.

For me, existence pure and simple is absolutely real, though I’ve never seen, heard, smelled, touched, or tasted it. I have no idea what it is, this essence of everything that can’t be a thing itself and certainly isn’t nothing either. I feel it much more than I think it. Not emotionally, but like sensing an invisible presence in a dark room that you know you’ll never be able to put your finger on.

Here's other posts I've written about Munitz' book and Boundless Existence.

Boundless Existence -- the backdrop to life's meaning
Meaningful meaningless meditation
Boundless Existence -- meaningless backdrop to a meaningful life