Church of the Churchless

Truth is all-important, in mysticism and everywhere else

Sometimes a comment is left on one of my blog posts that leaves me with a WTF (what the fuck) feeling. Meaning, I can't begin to understand where the commenter is coming from.

Here's a recent example that starts off with a quote from a post of mine.

>>If mystics claim to find a new reality, they need to prove it<< WHY? WHY do they need to prove it? No mystic owes anything to anybody.

Wow. The answer to that all caps Why is one-word obvious. Truth.

Truth is why a mystic needs to back up their claim of finding a new reality with solid proof. Reality belongs to everyone. Reality is the home of everyone.

No one gets to spread falsehoods about my home, which is your home, which is everybody's home -- reality.

Now, I understand that truth is taking a beating these days.

Here in the United States, a majority of people who belong to one of our two major parties, the Republican Party, have shown they don't give a shit about truth.

They wrongly claim that election fraud is widespread. They wrongly claim that the Capitol insurrection on January 6 wasn't carried out by Trump supporters. They wrongly claim that Georgia's new election laws are intended to expand voter turnout rather than suppress it.

Obviously I don't claim to always speak the truth or live the truth. Like everybody else, I make mistakes all the time when it comes to understanding things. 

But I've always pointed myself toward truth, even if I fail to reach it much of the time. Intention is all important when it comes to truth. Much can be forgiven if someone sincerely aims to embrace truth, rather than pushing it away.

One of the first posts I wrote when I started this blog in 2004 was called "Just have faith." Here's an excerpt that I still heartily agree with.

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.

Getting back to the comment about mystics not owing anything to anybody when it comes to making a claim about having found a new reality, back in 2006 I talked about the need for questioning such claims in "With God, from 'I believe' to 'I know' is a huge step."

Here's the core of that blog post. The A.H. Armstrong quote comes from my book, "Return to the One."

If you say to me, “When it comes to God, I don’t know,” we’re comrades in unknowing. Grab a chair and belly up with me to the clueless bar.

If you say to me, “When it comes to God, I believe…,” we can have an interesting conversation. I probably won’t agree with you, but I enjoy learning about other people beliefs, or lack thereof, in a higher power.

If you say to me, “When it comes to God, I know…,” we are going to have a really interesting conversation. For once you say “know” rather than “believe,” my skeptical radar sets off a Dogma alert! Dogma alert! siren inside my psyche.

I don’t expect reasons for beliefs. They’re your business. Just like sex, whatever turns you on. Go for it. But also just like sex, beliefs need to remain personal if they are to be unquestioned.

As soon as you say, “I believe _____, and you should too,” there’s going to be a stiffening of my argumentative spine. I’m pleased to be given advice by someone who is more knowledgeable about something than I am. However, that something needs to be objectively real, not imaginary.

And beliefs aren’t real, even though lots of religious people seem to think that they are.

Going further, some people actually claim that they know the nature of God or ultimate reality. Now, this requires some serious questioning. A claim like that, why, it’s amazing. I mean, in the entire span of recorded history there hasn’t been a single clearly evident, unquestionable, plain-as-day revelation about God or the divine.

So if you tell me that you know for a fact that God exists, or that God is such and such, or that God is realized in this particular fashion, then I’m going to be super-duper interested in how you’re able to back up that astounding assertion.

I want you to lay your cards on the table. Face up. All of them. Show me your four aces. And let me know in detail, exactly, precisely, how you were able to come up with that winning hand.

Of course, I know that this won’t be possible. If you’re just bluffing, and don’t really know about God, then you’ll be empty-handed. But even if by some miracle you truly are God’s bosom buddy, you still won’t be able to lay any material proof on the table.

I’m pretty confident about that, because nobody else ever has been able to do so, and I’m willing to bet that this run of “busts” will continue.

So, please, please, please. Pretty please with blind faith crumbs on top. If you write or talk to me and go beyond “I believe…” when speaking about God, bring your best stuff. Show me the money, as the saying goes. The proof.

I’ve shared this quotation before, but it’s worth sharing again. To my mind, classics scholar A.H. Armstrong hits just the right tone.

When claims to possess an exclusive revelation of God or to speak his word are made by human beings (and it is always human beings who make them), they must be examined particularly fiercely and hypercritically for the honor of God, to avoid the blasphemy and sacrilege of deifying a human opinion.

Or, to put it less ferociously, the Hellenic (and, as it seems to me, still proper) answer to “Thus saith the Lord” is “Does he?,” asked in a distinctly skeptical tone, followed by a courteous but drastic “testing to destruction” of the claims and credentials of the person or person making this enormous statement.

If mystics claim to find a new reality, they need to prove it

I've been enjoying the recent comment conversations between some of the Church of the Churchless regulars. Meaning, frequent visitors to this blog.

Having featured a comment from "Appreciative Reader" in a blog post a few days ago, I generally find myself agreeing with this person's perspective.

Which I'm not going to attempt to summarize, since that perspective is nuanced.

Instead, here's my take on a theme that features in the above-mentioned comment conversations: how someone can tell the difference between genuine and spurious mystical experiences.

My first assumption -- which seems inarguable to me -- is that while mystics and mystic-sympathizers like to say that mystical experiences can't be put into words, that's the case with all experiences.

Every experience is had by a subjective consciousness. I have my experiences. You have yours. Other people have theirs.

None of us has direct access to anyone else's experiences. They are directly experienced by the experiencer alone. This direct experience means there's a huge difference between saying "I ate a raspberry" and experiencing the sensation of eating a raspberry. 

No amount of words ever add up to a direct experience. I can feel happy and say to myself, "I'm happy today," but those three words don't begin to capture my experience of happiness.

So let's put to rest any notion that mystical experiences are special in regards to their ineffability, their inability to be described to others in anything but an abstract manner. Again, this is the case with all personal experiences, without exception.

Further, I don't consider these sorts of experiences to be genuinely mystical:

Feeling at one with the universe; being awestruck at the wonder of existence; having a sense that all is right with the world; intuiting that death is not the end of the road, but a turn in a never-ending journey.

Lots of people have profound experiences that alter how they look upon life. Heck, probably most people do. We humans are meaning-making creatures. Finding meaning is a favorite thing to do.

Let's turn then to the question of what distinguishes a genuine from a spurious mystical experience. 

The way I see it, mysticism rests on this hypothesis: there's a realm of reality apart from this physical universe, or if you will, the physical cosmos -- since there could be much more to physical reality than our single universe, as unimaginably vast as it is.

Thus a genuine mystical experience would occur through contact with a realm of reality separate from the physical universe. 

If mysticism simply led to an experience of a different aspect of physical reality, this would mean little or no difference between mysticism and science.

For example, if it were possible for a human mind to have ESP, Extra Sensory Perception, this capacity wouldn't be mystical, since it would occur via the physical brain and operate in this physical world.

That discovery of ESP would be groundbreaking, really big news. However, it would add to the store of knowledge of how humans experience the physical world, not a non-physical "spiritual" realm.

So based on my own personal experience of pursuing a mystical approach to meditation for thirty-five years (an approach I now have discarded), I can confidently say that the goal of mysticism is to experience a new reality, a reality beyond the confines of physical existence.

The question then becomes, how is it possible to tell whether such a "spiritual" reality exists, and if it does, whether someone has experienced it?

Words such as "I saw and heard God" aren't enough, obviously. Even if those words are uttered sincerely, people can be mistaken about what they experience -- the familiar "mistaking a stick for a snake" analogy.

Further, psychotic people can see and hear God. People who have taken LSD or some other psychedelic can see and hear God. People who are deeply religious can see and hear God. 

This doesn't prove that God exists. It proves that people have experiences that lead then to believe God exists. 

Similarly, people have experiences of a realm of reality beyond the physical. This doesn't prove that such a realm exists. It proves that people have experiences that lead them to believe the realm exists.

Thus it seems to me that if a mystic claims to have found a new reality, that person needs to provide some solid proof of that discovery before it can be taken seriously. Otherwise, that person is just one more of countless humans who have claimed to experience a realm beyond this physical universe.

Excuses won't cut it. 

"Impossible to put into words." Again, all experiences are impossible to put into words. So not being able to describe a mystical experience doesn't make it genuine.

"Can't bring anything back from that reality." OK, I can't bring anything back from the dreams I have at night either. That doesn't make dreams anything more than my subjective experience.

"It's a matter of faith, not of proof." Fine, have as much faith as you want, tons of it. Just know that I have no faith in your faith as a guide to reality. Faith leads people widely astray when it comes to knowing what is real.

I'll end by saying that I'm absolutely fine with people trying to have mystical experiences. I've been there and done that -- for thirty-five years. 

I'm also absolutely fine with people talking about their mystical experiences. I've read countless (almost) books along this line, enjoying each one. 

Just know that talk is much different from proof.

In my first book about relating the new physics with ancient mysticism, I observed that the Nobel prize committee would laugh at someone who wrote to them saying something like:

"I've discovered the Theory of Everything that others have sought for but never found. I'm unable to provide proof of my discovery, so you'll just to believe me. Nobel Prize, please!"

Why quantum is relative, as Buddhism surmises

For many years I've had a strong interest in quantum physics -- from the perspective of someone who knows next to nothing about its mathematics, but is fascinated by the philosophical side of it.

There's a "shut up and calculate" position that most quantum physicists embrace. 

The theory works. Spectacularly. If it didn't, our technological modern world would be much different.

So lots of scientists don't worry about the philosophical foundation of quantum physics. They're just interested in applying the mathematical underpinning to practical problems and applications. 

Then there are physicists like Carlo Rovelli.

He wrote a fascinating piece in the March 13 issue of New Scientist, "Why quantum is relative." The online version has a different title. Here's a PDF file.
Download Quantum weirdness isn’t weird – if we accept objects don’t exist | New Scientist

Rovelli has written a book about his take on quantum physics, Helgoland. It's to be released in the United States in May. Naturally I've put in a pre-order.

Here's the Amazon description of the book, which sums up Rovelli's approach.

One of the world's most renowned theoretical physicists, Carlo Rovelli has entranced millions of readers with his singular perspective on the cosmos. In Helgoland, he examines the enduring enigma of quantum theory. The quantum world Rovelli describes is as beautiful as it is unnerving.

Helgoland is a treeless island in the North Sea where the twenty-three-year-old Werner Heisenberg made the crucial breakthrough for the creation of quantum mechanics, setting off a century of scientific revolution. Full of alarming ideas (ghost waves, distant objects that seem to be magically connected, cats that appear both dead and alive), quantum physics has led to countless discoveries and technological advancements. Today our understanding of the world is based on this theory, yet it is still profoundly mysterious.

As scientists and philosophers continue to fiercely debate the meaning of the theory, Rovelli argues that its most unsettling contradictions can be explained by seeing the world as fundamentally made of relationships rather than substances. We and everything around us exist only in our interactions with one another. This bold idea suggests new directions for thinking about the structure of reality and even the nature of consciousness.

Rovelli makes learning about quantum mechanics an almost psychedelic experience. Shifting our perspective once again, he takes us on a riveting journey through the universe so we can better comprehend our place in it.

Since I'm supremely confident that if I tried to sum up the New Scientist article on my own, I'd screw it up, I'm sharing some excerpts from it that I found particularly compelling.

Read the whole piece via the PDF file above to get a fuller picture of Rovelli's quantum philosophizing. It sure seems like Buddhist notions of reality are extremely close to Rovelli's viewpoint.

Dig down deep enough, and things have properties that are independent of anything else, right?

Perhaps not. Quantum physics, which describes the bizarre behaviour of the physical world at the most elementary level we know, may be telling us the opposite.

Things don’t have properties exclusive to themselves: their properties only exist by virtue of their relationship to other things, just like there are really no “chairs” without someone around to interact with them and see them as such.

Coming to terms with this idea may clarify the persistently mysterious nature of the quantum world. It might even help make other mysteries, such as the nature of our conscious experience, a little bit less mysterious.

...A chair is the way it interacts with its surroundings. To talk about the properties of the chair by itself, when it isn’t interacting with anything, is meaningless.

All of the properties we commonly use to characterise a chair – its colour, its comfort, its weight – are defined through interactions with something else. And so it is for the properties of the single atoms or elementary particles forming the chair.

...As hinted at in the opening of this article, it isn’t a novelty to realise that aspects of the world are relational. Biology, psychology, economics and many other sciences focus on relations more than entities.

Physics itself is already full of relational notions: velocity is only defined with respect to something else, as are electric or gravitational potential and orientation, to name just some examples. The physical world seemed to provide a non-relational substratum formed by substances with absolute properties.

Quantum mechanics, I think, is the discovery that this isn’t the case: the world is woven by relationships that go all the way down to the smallest physical entities.

An understanding of the world in terms of relations rather than entities might even help us disentangle other thorny issues, for instance the nature of consciousness. If we think of the physical world as if it were made by little stones each with its own properties, the jump from this picture to the subjective experience of mental phenomena is huge.

But if the physical nature of the world is better described in terms of how physical systems, simple as well as complex ones, affect one another, perhaps the disjoint will appear less dramatic: products of the mind are just the complex phenomenon formed by the tangled and richly interwoven interactions between the world and the brain.

Our old metaphysical prejudice was that physical reality is made by some fundamental substance with absolute properties. Quantum theory questions this.

I think this is fine: our metaphysical prejudices have formed and evolved within the restricted domain of our everyday experience. We are used to thinking about the world in terms of things with absolute properties because this is what we experience, thanks to the stability generated by decoherence.

But we shouldn’t force what we have discovered about nature to align with these prejudices: rather, our prejudices should be modified by our discoveries about nature.

Quantum theory has altered our understanding of physical reality in ways that are even more profound than the Copernican revolution, when we learned that we live on a madly spinning rock. Digesting the full implications of Nicolaus Copernicus’s work has taken centuries.

We are only beginning to digest the full implications of the quantum revolution.

 

Religions are sort of like conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theories always have been around. But they've proliferated, in the United States, at least, in recent years.

Donald Trump deserves much of the credit, better termed blame. 

Trump never saw a fact that he didn't like to denigrate, calling every media story which irritated him "fake news." 

Of course, almost always there wasn't anything fake about the news. However, Trump's devotees came to feel like they were in a special club of People in the Know.

Meaning, people who think they know what is really going on in the world. Which is much different from actually knowing.

At the moment, QAnon is the craziest conspiracy theory, though it has lots of competition. 

What gives QAnon its special wacko flavor is that supposedly there's someone who goes by "Q" who's privy to deep dark astounding secrets, such as that Democratic politicians and other liberals are part of a pedophile ring.

More specifically, a ring "devoted to the abduction, trafficking, torture, sexual abuse and cannibalization of children, all with the purpose of fulfilling the rituals of their Satanic faith."

That's absurd. No one should believe it. But a great many people do.

Likewise, every world religion makes other sorts of absurd claims. And billions of people believe those claims -- such as that Jesus was born of a virgin birth and Muhammed had the Koran dictated to him by an angel.

Recently I came across two stories in The Atlantic about conspiracy theories that got me thinking about their relation to religious belief. 

"What Conspiracy Theorists Don't Believe" starts out this way. 

Some people believe the most extraordinary things. Earth is flat, and airplane GPS is rigged to fool pilots into thinking otherwise. COVID-19 vaccines are a pretext to inject thought-controlling microchips into us all. The true president of the United States is Donald Trump; his inauguration will happen on January 20, make that March 4, make that a date to be arranged very soon.

The question “How could anybody believe this stuff?” comes naturally enough. That may not be the most helpful question, however. Conspiracy theorists believe strange ideas, yes. But these outlandish beliefs rest on a solid foundation of disbelief.

To think that Trump is actually still the president, as some in the QAnon movement do, you first have to doubt.

You have to doubt the journalism practiced by any mainstream media outlet of any political persuasion; you have to doubt all the experts and the political elites; you have to doubt the judiciary, the military, and every other American institution. Once you have thoroughly disbelieved all of them, only then can you start to believe in Trump’s ascension being just around the corner—or in lizard overlords or alien prophets.

Religious fundamentalists also doubt. Notably, they doubt science and the scientists who produce scientific research. 

Without doubting evolution, for example, it is much more difficult to embrace Godly creation stories. Yet it doesn't really work to make believers in something unbelievable accept evident facts. Typically that just makes them harden their stance in favor of what they already believe. 

Instead, says the story:

When someone has dismissed the obvious facts, repeating them will not persuade him to see sense. But when people are given time and space to explain themselves, they may start to spot the gaps in their own knowledge or arguments. The psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil coined the phrase “the illusion of explanatory depth” to refer to the way our self-assurance crumples when we are invited to explain apparently simple ideas.

I like to do this when someone asserts that human consciousness isn't produced by the brain.

OK, then explain why anesthesia makes people lose consciousness? Or being hit in the head with a baseball bat? If consciousness isn't physical, why does Alzheimers change consciousness so much? Or a brain tumor?

The other story is "The Truth Seekers Are Coming." It talks about the people who claim to be devoted to truth, yet what they consider to be true is decidedly weird -- just like religious truth seekers.

Sometime in the middle of the pandemic year, and sometime in the middle of a prolonged and compulsive scroll through Instagram, the “truth seekers” came into my life. The term was showing up over and over in the bios and captions of the women I followed, so often that I was starting to feel as if I were seeing things.

The lockdowns seemed to have inspired a new kind of internet identity: There were truth-seeking fashion bloggers, truth-seeking travel influencers, and truth-seeking expectant moms who prayed that their daughters would be truth seekers too.

Some would even seek the truth across platforms, beckoning their followers to new podcasts about the truth, new Telegram group chats in which the truth was up for discussion, or new lines of truth-related merchandise.

“If Jesus were walking the Earth today, do you think you’d see him for his miracles?” a QAnon-obsessed fashion blogger and “relentless truth seeker” asked several weeks ago. “Or would you label him a conspiracy theorist?” I knew why she was asking, and it was not because she was leading Bible study.

It didn’t take me long to realize that the “truths” these women had in mind were highly suspect and disturbing ones.

They wanted all the facts about the Democrats’ scheme to harvest the blood of children, and all the evidence proving that the COVID-19 vaccines have microchips in them. The stress of that pursuit frequently culminated in angry speeches, delivered to a front-facing camera, about how Instagram was trying to silence their unpopular opinions and original perspectives.

Like-minded Instagrammers may refer to themselves as “critical thinkers” or “true journalists,” among other coded phrases, but the term I saw most often—the succinct and pretty hook that has pulled so many women down the rabbit hole—was truth seeker.

Buddhism can free us from evolution's delusion

It happened again this morning, a sign from the non-God. 

I'd tried to continue reading a couple of Buddhist books that appealed to me, aside from occasional mentions of supposed supernatural phenomena, which had been bothering me.

Today the bothering overcame my liking of the books. 

In the course of returning them to the Buddhism section of my bookcase, my eye hit upon a book by Robert Wright, "Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment."

Highlighting indicated that I'd read the entire book. But so far as I can tell, I never wrote a blog post about it. Well, that changes with today. And I'm sure I'll write more posts as I re-read the book.

Here's an excerpt from the first chapter of the book that I got through this morning. I really like Wright's writing style and his approach to Buddhist meditation.

Evolutionary psychology can be described in various ways, and here's one way I had described it in my book [The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life]: It is the study of how the human brain was designed -- by natural selection -- to mislead us, even enslave us.

Don't get me wrong: natural selection has its virtues, and I'd rather be created by it than not be created at all -- which, so far as I can tell, are the two options this universe offers. 

Being a product of evolution is by no means entirely a story of enslavement and delusion. Our evolved brains empower us in many ways, and they often bless us with a basically accurate view of reality.

Still, ultimately, natural selection cares about only one thing (or, I should say, "cares" -- in quotes -- about only one thing, since natural selection is just a blind process, not a conscious designer). And that one thing is getting genes into the next generation. 

Genetically based traits that in the past contributed to genetic proliferation have flourished, while traits that didn't have fallen by the wayside. 

And the traits that have survived this test include mental traits -- structures and algorithms that are built into the brain and shape our everyday experience.

So if you ask the question "What kinds of perceptions and thoughts and feelings guide us through life each day?" the answer, at the most basic level, isn't "The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that give us an accurate picture of reality."

No, at the most basic level the answer is "The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that helped our ancestors get genes into the next generation."

Whether those thoughts and feelings and perceptions give us a true view of reality is, strictly speaking, beside the point. As a result, they sometimes don't. Our brains are designed to, among other things, delude us.

In the rest of his book, Wright describes his exploration of Buddhist meditation and how it can lead us to a less deluded view of reality.

One reason I like non-supernatural Buddhism so much is that it flips around the Hindu conception of maya, the illusory nature of this world. 

In Buddhism the world is simply what it is, the world.  

There's no problem with the world. The problem lies with the human mind that is trying to comprehend the world, to find the world satisfying, to treat other people compassionately. 

This is one reason why the Buddha reportedly wasn't much interested in abstract discussions of how the world is. His focus was on how a correct view of the world can lead to much reduced suffering, which Wright suggests is better termed "unsatisfactoriness."

At the end of his second chapter, Paradoxes of Meditation, Wright cites the questions he's going to explore via the scientific foundation of a Buddhist worldview.

Why, and in what particular ways, are human beings naturally deluded? How exactly does the delusion work? How does delusion make us suffer? How does it make us make other people suffer? Why would the Buddhist prescription for dispelling the delusion -- in particular, the meditative part of that prescription -- work?

And what would it mean for it to work fully? In other words, does the elusive state that is said to lie at the culmination of the meditative path -- sometimes called enlightenment -- really qualify for that term? What would it be like to see the world with perfect clarity?

Great questions.

I look forward to learning the answers through a second reading of "Why Buddhism is True." I'm a different person than I was almost four years ago, when I bought the book in August 2017.

So my comprehension of what Wright has to say also will be different now.

Grappling with the fact that existence has always existed

Recently I got this email from a fellow marveler at the inescapable fact that existence must always have existed in some form, or the universe we are a part of couldn't have come to be. 

Hello Brian, I recently read this article of yours and was amazed how precisely it described the issue that's been on my mind for a long time. It seems inescapable to posit that something has always existed, something that never had a beginning. And as you point out in the article, trying to conceive and imagine that seems impossible: "the very possibility of cognizing an answer vanishes".

And I agree with that, but the reason I'm writing you is that this realization is a source of great anxiety to me. I can't seem to accept this incomprehensibility of existence. Do you have some word of advice or maybe some resources that could help me deal with this?

The article referred to was written in 2015 for the Spiritual Naturalist Society. I also shared the piece in a blog post, "Wow! Existence has always existed." Here's an excerpt.

Thus I’ve lost interest in the why of existence. Why is there something rather than nothing? is a meaningless question. As Kuhn points out, absolute nothing contains no way for existence to exist.

 

So while religious believers are awestruck at the supposed existence of God, I find an equal or greater measure of awe in the fact of existence itself.

 

This isn’t a feeling of being in the presence of something greater than myself. After all, I exist. A grain of sand exists. A subatomic particle exists. We all are on the same basic ontological level; we exist. For me it’s more like looking into a bottomless pit. I feel like I’ve reached the end of my knowing. And not only that: anyone’s knowing.

I could be wrong, an ever-present possibility.

Perhaps some human with a consciousness far different than mine, or an alien being with abilities beyond my capacity to fathom, would be able to look upon the mystery of existence and see it as…

Words fail me. Unsurprisingly.

I simply am open to the idea that however dizzying I find the notion of ever-existing existence, the necessity of existence having always existed, the blunt facticity of the cosmos that is at odds with my experience of everything else having a why, a cause — my mind could be as incapable of grasping the essence of reality as a chimpanzee’s is incapable of grasping calculus.

There’s another possibility: the mystery of existence is a non-existent problem.

So that's the easy answer to the question I was asked about how to deal with the incomprehensibility of existence: accept that some things defy human understanding, leaving open the possibility that some other form of consciousness could grasp a notion like existence has always existed. 

Assuming there is anything to grasp. 

My suspicion is that existence is simply a given, a brute fact incapable of being delved into. For any delving presupposes the existence of the entity wishing to grasp the existential nature of existence. 

In other words, there is no place to stand other than existence if one wants to ponder existence. Anything nonexistent isn't going to be doing any pondering, whether of existence or something else.

The way I see it, existence stands alone in this regard.

Consciousness might seem to be similar, in that any investigation into the nature of consciousness requires that someone be conscious. However, it's possible to study non-conscious entities, such as someone in a deep coma, in an attempt to learn what differentiates consciousness and a lack of consciousness. .

It may also be possible for machines to become conscious, which would provide valuable insights into the foundation of consciousness. 

But it isn't possible to do an experiment that compares existence with non-existence, since a comparison requires two existing things. Nothing obviously isn't a thing.

I've been dancing around the question I was asked because it is so difficult to talk about the anxiety of being confronted with an unanswerable question. Unanswerable, at least, by us Homo sapiens, whose sapience is bounded by the limitations of the human brain, as marvelously complex as it is.

For me -- and naturally I'm speaking only about myself here, not the person who wrote to me -- I find considerable comfort in simply acknowledging, "I don't know, and I never will." 

How is it that existence has always existed? I don't know, and I never will. 

It is difficult for me to feel anxious about something that I'm incapable of grasping. My anxieties relate to what could have been, but wasn't; to what might occur, but probably won't; to what is happening, which I wish wasn't. 

The idea that existence always has existed fills me with awe, not anxiety. I'm fine with living from birth until death with some Big Cosmic Questions unanswered. And not only unanswered -- incapable of any steps, even tiny ones, being made toward an answer. 

If someone said to me, "Have you ever wondered what it would be like if you never existed?" I'd say, "No." 

After all, if I had never existed, there would be no me to wonder about this, nor about anything else. Likewise, if existence hadn't always existed, there would be no anything. Something can't be produced from absolute nothing. 

I don't think I've done a great job responding to the person who emailed me. But this is the best I can do. 

My podcast interview with Marie D'Elephant was enjoyable

Yesterday I spent 1 hour and 48 minutes talking with Marie D'Elephant for a podcast that's scheduled to be released on February 4 via her Everyone's Autonomous Podcast site. 

Here's the description of what D'Elephant is up to.

During the Everyone's Agnostic podcast from 2015-2019, we shared our stories of religious trauma and the pain of deconversion. 

When that podcast went on a hiatus, a beautiful child was born: Everyone's Autonomous by Marie D'Elephant. She picks up the discussion by talking with guests and subject matter experts about how we can begin to move forward after having processed our toxic religious upbringings. 

How do we regain autonomy over our minds and bodies, AND respect the autonomy of others? How do we rejoin the human race and participate in this chaotic experiment of existence?

Great questions. D'Elephant and I covered a lot of ground in our discussion. She's a skilled conversationalist, which made the almost two hours we talked fly by in a pleasant fashion.

Several times in the course of our talk I spoke about "First there is a mountain, then there isn't, then there is." 

Today I met with an old friend for our usual Sunday afternoon coffee get-together. (We bring our own chairs and table so we can sit outside the Urban Grange coffee house in West Salem, even though both indoor and outdoor dining are prohibited right now because of Covid restrictions.)

When I mentioned the mountain saying to Jim, he said, "That was a Donovan song." Which I'd forgotten. The way Donovan put it in his 1967 song was "First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is." So I had it almost exactly right. 

However, the originator of the idea appears to be Qingyuan Xingsi, an 8th century Buddhist monk. According to Wikipedia, he wrote: 

Before I had studied Chan (Zen) for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and rivers as rivers. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and rivers once again as rivers.

The way I described the saying in my conversation with D'Elephant was that initially we take the world as it appears to be. Then some people -- which included me for about thirty-five years of religiosity -- consider that the world is illusory in some sense, with really real reality residing in another realm.

That's how Plato viewed things. This world is shadows on a cave wall, while the sun of reality is only seen by those who turn around and seek the source of that light.

I used to be a Platonist, Eastern religion variety. No longer, though. I'm now content with mountains being mountains and rivers being rivers, the endpoint of Zen Buddhism. 

Of course, I don't know how I came to this realization. I like to think that, like Qingyuan Xingsi, my thirty-plus years of meditation and other spiritual pursuits led me to pass through the then there is no mountain stage into the more refined then there is stage.

But another possibility is that I never really left the initial first there is a mountain stage, simply taking a lengthy side excursion through the land of perhaps there is something more without ever really viewing that territory as my home.

Regardless, I'm comfortable with there is a mountain, no matter how I got there.

After finishing up with D'Elephant and thinking about what we talked about, I realized that I forgot to mention one of my all-time favorite sayings. This is by poet David Ignatow.

I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment on my life.

Political and religious delusions have a lot in common

Reality only comes in one flavor: real. But humans aren't in direct touch with reality, so we have to struggle to make sense of the world, the universe, the cosmos.

Thus the flavor of reality for us Homo sapiens has many varieties. Really, as many as there are people in the world, since everybody looks upon life in a unique way.

Science is our most powerful means of coming to a consensus on the nature of reality. By and large, scientists the world over agree on core scientific tenets -- which is far different from the widely divergent ways politicians and religious leaders look upon things.

Still, whoever looks upon reality with a reasoned, open, unbiased mind likely will agree with others who have the same approach to knowledge.

This is borne out by the fascinating after-election goings-on here in the United States. It's been obvious since a week or so after the November 3 election that Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the presidential race. And it's been equally obvious that Biden's win had nothing to do with fraud.

Recounts and experts in election security both point to this fact: fraud was virtually nonexistent. This was the most secure election in American history.

That's reality speaking. Unfortunately, there are other voices spouting off about how unfair and rigged the presidential election was. The loudest voice belongs to the Sore Loser-in-Chief, soon to be ex-president Trump. 

He's been complaining non-stop about fantasized fraud. There's zero evidence of this, but that doesn't stop millions of his supporters from believing Trump's lies. Which might be termed falsehoods, if Trump actually believed them.

However, news reports are saying that in private Trump knows he lost the election fairly, so this means he keeps pushing the election fraud delusion as a political ploy to discredit the validity of Biden's victory, and to establish a " I was victimized" theme for Trump's likely bid to run for president again in 2024.

Likewise, I've seen surveys of Christian ministers that reveal a surprising percentage don't really believe in God. They simply look upon being a minister as a job, and likely find other aspects of Christian life to be more appealing than theology.

To offer another example, a book I'm reading at the moment says that most Buddhists don't meditate, even though meditation is a central part of Buddhist teachings. Thus it is common for both politicians and religious people to outwardly profess one set of beliefs, while inwardly having other beliefs.

This is understandable, since we all put on one face in certain situations (like a meeting with our boss), and another face in other situations (like having a beer with friends after work). 

What's more difficult to understand is how otherwise intelligent people fall prey to obvious delusions.

There are many examples in the religious sphere, such as the existence of God, life after death, and other supernatural notions for which there is zero solid evidence. All I can figure is that when someone really wants to believe in something, their critical thinking faculty goes on vacation -- which I readily admit to doing during my 35 years as a religious believer.

I do, though, have more sympathy for those who believe in something important (like God) that's unseen, since there's a chance, albeit a slim one, that it exists even without demonstrable evidence.

Better observational methods can result in amazing discoveries. Other galaxies only were discovered in the twentieth century as telescopes became more powerful. Maybe some forms of human consciousness are capable of discerning God. Maybe.

What I have a lot more problem with is failing to recognize the existence of things that clearly do exist like evolution and human-caused global warming. It takes a really blind eye to not see that these things are part of the fabric of reality. This can be ascribed to ignorance, unless the facts are so well known to someone they are purposely deluding themselves.

Today I heard that a politician who is a fervent Trump supporter wants to know where the evidence is that election fraud doesn't exist. Wow, what a thinking error. That's similar to demanding proof that God doesn't exist. 

As I've noted many times before on this blog, it is up to those who claim something does exist to supply the proof. I can't prove that fairies aren't making the trees in our yard grow. There's just no evidence of fairies, nor is there evidence of election fraud.

It's solely in the minds of those who, for one reason or another, can't admit that Joe Biden won the presidency fairly. The evidence for a fair election is no  sign of fraud, which is clearly apparent to those with eyes willing to see.

 

Behold my use of "Wittgenstein" in this blog post title

I've been hanging onto my copy of the October 19 issue of The New Yorker because it contains a book review ("Losing Propositions") about the state of philosophy in Europe after the First World War.

The review has numerous mentions of Ludwig Wittgenstein, "perhaps the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century." So this gives me the opportunity to use Wittgenstein in the title of this post -- which in my utterly subjective opinion, elevates the profundity of this blog to an even higher level.

What I liked most  about the book review were the parts dealing with language that seems to say something about reality, but which actually says nothing. 

This is the problem I have with religious, spiritual, mystical, and metaphysical writings that I used to enjoy, yet now strike me as saying a lot about not much at all. 

"God" "Soul" "Spirit" "Heaven" These sorts of words have meaning only in the sense that people use them in sentences that sound meaningful, but actually lack any substance grounded in reality.

"God is in heaven" is a proper English sentence, yet there is no way to tell whether what it says is true. On the other hand, "Joe Biden soon will live in the White House" is a statement that can be tested as of January 20, 2021. 

Read on for some excerpts from The New Yorker piece that, if nothing else, will enable you to throw some mentions of Wittgenstein into your own conversations and communications.

For Wittgenstein, the renovation of philosophy had to begin with language. Since the Greeks, Western thinkers had tried to understand the world using terms such as "being" and "becoming," "substance" and "essence," "real" and "ideal." 

But these abstractions gave rise to complicated arguments that went around and around, never reaching any definite conclusion. Now, in the early twentieth century, relativity and quantum theory were redrawing the map of reality in ways that could be verified by experiment and given precise mathematical expression.

In an age of triumphant physics, did philosophy still need to bother with metaphysics?

By declaring the answer to be no, Wittgenstein set modern thought on a new course. For the analytic philosophy he helped inspire, many of the discipline's traditional problems are actually just misunderstandings, based on an erroneous use of language. 

What philosophers need isn't profundity but clarity: as Wittgenstein says in the "Tractatus," "Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly."

...In most cases, determining whether a statement is empirically true or false is fairly straightforward. If someone says that the moon is made of green cheese, there are various ways to check: you could look at the moon through a telescope, or examine a moon rock, or calculate how a moon-size ball of green cheese would behave in outer space.

Even if false, "The moon is made of green cheese" is still a meaningful proposition, because it makes an assertion about the world that can be tested. 

Some statements, however, can't be proved true or false, because they are constructed in a way that violates the rules of language. Carnap labelled these "pseudo-statements" -- "a sequence of words [that] looks like a statement at first glance," but whose syntax or vocabulary renders it meaningless. 

He gave as an example "Caesar is and": if someone said this to you, you wouldn't say that she was right or wrong, just that she didn't know English syntax. 

For the Vienna Circle, the best hunting ground for pseudo-statements was metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that deals with fundamental concepts like being and essence, time and space.

...The problem with metaphysical statements is that they are generally unverifiable, which to the logical empiricists meant they are meaningless. 

In Carnap's 1932 essay "The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language," he asks us to imagine a man who invents a new adjective, "teavy," and who, when we ask him how to tell whether or not something is teavy, replies that "there are no empirical signs of teaviness." In that csse, Carnap says, "we would deny the legitimacy of using this word."

The same principle, he argues, should apply to metaphysical terms, from Plato's "Idea" to Kant's "thing-in-itself." Such impressive words may provoke "associated images and feelings," Carnap writes, but they have no actual meaning, so any explanation that relies on them is saying nothing at all.

Reality -- a horrible thing to waste (but Trump does)

Yesterday I wrote about Trump's COVID-19 diagnosis over on my Salem Political Snark blog in "Reality is the big winner in Trump's COVID-19 infection." Here's the most philosophical part of the post.

Being as deeply philosophical as I am deeply political, I now want to broaden my take on the meaning of Trump coming down with COVID-19. It's a big win for reality!

Not that reality needs any help. Reality always comes out on top in the end, because, well, reality is the only thing that is truly real. 

A short blog post isn't the place to discuss what I mean by "truly" and "real." So here's my brief take on those words. Everything that exists is real, or it wouldn't exist. Thus dreams are real, as are hallucinations. Fantasies are real, as are lies. Those things exist, but not truly.

To exist truly, something has to posses a certain substance and objective nature. As I said in "The best one-sentence metaphysics ever written," I love Phillip K. Dick's definition of reality.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

Donald Trump didn't believe in the seriousness of the coronavirus. He thought it would go away when the United States had just 15 cases. He thought it would go away in warmer weather. He thought this country had turned the corner on the pandemic. Those beliefs, and many more, were spectacularly wrong. 

No matter. Whatever Trump or anyone else believes about COVID-19 has no bearing on the coronavirus. It just keeps on doing what viruses are so good at: spreading. We humans have learned a lot about how to slow or stop that spread. Those measures work whether or not anyone believes in them.

Trump and others in his administration have a strong bias against reality. They believe that if a lie is repeated often enough and strongly enough, many people will believe it. Sadly, this is true. But I'm optimistic that most people won't.

Presidential election polling bears this out.

More Americans favor Biden than Trump. Biden has a vastly stronger truthfulness rating on PolitiFact than Trump does. Biden accepts the science of global warming; Trump doesn't. And Biden has been following public health guidelines in his campaigning, including wearing a mask, while Trump hasn't. 

Now Trump has COVID-19. He's been admitted to the Walter Reed Medical Center. He faces a potentially lengthy recovery period, though there is a chance that even at the age of 74 and with underlying conditions such as obesity, Trump will get well fairly quickly. Time will tell. 

What won't change with time is the primacy of reality. It always wins out in the end. Always. 

So it's fitting that in the month before the election where, hopefully, Trump is tossed out of office by voters, the Liar-in-Chief is suffering from the disease that he has been downplaying for many months. To adapt a familiar phrase, the wheels of reality turn slowly but grind exceedingly fine. 

Religions also have a shaky relationship with reality.

They love to talk about things for which there is no demonstrable proof of their existence. God. Heaven. Soul. Spirit. Devil. Afterlife. Angels. Etc. Etc. And they are reluctant to talk about things that clearly exist, such as evolution and the Big Bang.

In my morning reading today I came across some mentions of reality. I'll share those also. Here's passages from Steve Hagen's, "Buddhism Plain and Simple," one of my favorite books. 

The buddha-dharma is grounded in Reality. It is not pie in the sky, or wishful thinking, or a denial of what human life is. There's no attempt to cover up, to gloss over, to reinterpret the facts.

...You are already in reality, whether you see it or not. Reality is what's here, now. Thus you're here now, too. You know all this already, from direct experience. You're not separated from Reality. It's not "out there" somewhere, but right here.

And here's a passage from Sam Harris' fascinating book, "Making Sense: Conversations on Consciousness, Morality, and the Future of Humanity." Harris says:

One difference between religious dogmatism and scientific curiosity is the boundedness of the worldview that results and one's consequent tolerance of ambiguity and complexity. 

For a dogmatist, the final answers are already given. Reality can't be more complex than what's spelled out in his favorite book. 

But for a scientist, or for any truly curious person, the investigation of reality is open-ended. Who knows what we will learn in the future, and who knows how it may supersede our current understanding?

What is the problem religions are trying to solve?

One of the reasons I'm now an atheist after having embraced an Eastern form of religion for 35 years is that it eventually dawned on me that religions are trying to solve problems that don't really exist. 

This isn't the case with other cultural institutions. 

For example, health care agencies try to solve the problem of people getting sick. Environmental groups try to solve the problem of pollution. Educational advocates try to solve the problem of helping children learn.

It's possible to disagree with how these problems are being addressed, but not with the fact that these are real problems. By contrast, Christianity, along with other religions, sees a big problem with sin. Which raises the question, what are they talking about?

"Sin" is a concept. It isn't something real in the same way sickness, pollution, and a lack of learning are. It's an idea that sprang from the minds of humans. "God" is another concept that doesn't refer to anything real. It's another idea that sprang from the minds of humans.

Put those two concepts together, "sin" and "God," and you've got the makings of a religion -- Christianity. 

Most religious people, though, fail to realize how thoroughly they've bought into the concepts of their faith. So thoroughly, they never question the reality of those concepts. 

Notions like God, heaven, sin, karma, soul, spirit, and such are discussed as if they possessed the same reality as trees, air, sunlight, water, dogs, and other entities that clearly exist.

So my advice to religious believers is this.

Think clearly about what problem, or problems, your chosen faith is trying to solve. If all you can come with is a self-referential statement like "The Bible says humans have original sin that only Jesus can forgive," then you've embraced a bunch of concepts that have no grounding in reality.

An exception is Buddhism, which is why Buddhism often isn't considered a religion, but a way of living. 

Buddhism says that life is suffering. That's appealingly concrete. We know that life exists. We also know that suffering exists. Finding a way to deal with the problem of suffering is the foundation of Buddhism.

Somewhat similarly, my take on Taoism is that the problem it addresses is how to live in a flowing fashion, not being bound by rigid rules or attitudes.

"Flow" is a bit more conceptual than "suffering," but having been an avid student of Tai Chi for sixteen years -- Tai Chi being a physical expression of Taoist principles -- I can confidently say that flow is something that can be observed by others and felt by oneself.

Contrast that with the central concept of the Eastern religion that I belonged to for three and half decades: God-realization under the guidance of a Perfect Living Master. There's no evidence that God exists, so no evidence that God-realization exists.

Likewise, there's no evidence that a Perfect Living Master (or guru) exists. As I've observed before, if you stuck a supposed Perfect Living Master in with a bunch of other people and asked someone to pick out the perfect master/guru, there would be no way they could do this, because there is no concrete reality underlying the abstract concept of "perfect living master."

A recent issue of New Scientist has a column by Graham Lawton called "The war against reality." It deals with the thoroughly absurd notions promulgated by those who embrace QAnon. As Lawton writes:

To cut a long story short, QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory that contends the world is run by satan-worshipping paedophiles who traffic children for sex and for a life-extending compound that is extracted from their adrenal glands. 

It is named after a shady character called Q, who posts "inside information" on internet message boards. While it is all total and utter nonsense, two US presidents loom large in the QAnon narrative: Obama as one of the controlling elites and Trump as Q himself or the leader of the fight against the elites and the "deep state", a shadowy organisation that really runs the US.

Totally crazy, right? There's no evidence of what QAnon believes in. Yet a disturbingly large number of people think QAnon speaks the truth. Likewise, there's no evidence of what religions believe in, yet billions of people are religious.

Here'a another quote from Lawton's column that is a great summary of what turns me off about religion.

On a good day, I think of QAnon as a fascinating case study of human psychology and behaviour, laying bare how far from reality our minds can stray, how social forces can drag people into parallel universes and how we can sustain beliefs in the face of what is irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

There is nothing but now -- no past, no future

"Live in the now."

That is an utterly meaningless statement. It's akin to saying, "Exist in existence." Well, yeah. As if we had a choice. There's no place to exist but in existence. 

Where else are I supposed to exist? Non-existence? That'd be impossible.

Equally impossible is for anything, naturally including we humans, to exist anywhere but in the present -- now. So save your money on books that claim to teach you how to live in the now.

You're already expert at this. There's no place to be except now.

But what about thoughts of the past and future? Those are taking place now. Do you really believe that you can time travel into the past or future? I hope not. There is no evidence that this is possible. 

So if you consider that you can exist in the past or future, you're deluded. 

Ah, but what about the Theory of Relativity? People or clocks traveling at different speeds experience time differently. And light doesn't experience time at all.

(Leaving aside the fact that almost certainly, light lacks the ability to experience anything.)

Doesn't matter. Someone traveling at a speed that approaches 186,000 miles per second, light-speed, still would be having that experience now, not in the past or future. 

Yes, conscious beings in the space-time continuum can disagree about the order in which things happen. Past can be future, or the future can be past, depending on one's perspective according to the Theory of Relativity.

Still, my argument is that these perspectives are still occurring now, in the present moment experience of each observer.

Given my affection for mindfulness practices, I do consider that generally speaking it is good for us to be attending to what is physically present now, as opposed to thoughts of the past or future that are occurring now.

It's all now. We have no choice about that. But we can choose whether to be present to the world outside of us now, or present to the world within us now. 

True, in one sense everything is within us, since conscious awareness resides in the brain, and the brain is inside our head.

What I'm talking about is what the focus of our consciousness is -- the present moment of the physical reality that surrounds us, or the present moment of our thoughts, emotions, and such.

So enjoy the fact that you already possess the power of now, the title of an Eckhart Tolle book. And you didn't have to pay any money to Amazon, or another bookstore, to enjoy this power.

I try to explain my relationship with reality

Periodically I like to ponder my relationship with reality. Like, now.

Hey, movie theaters aren't open here in Oregon. My wife and I aren't eager to test our COVID luck by going to a gym or restaurant. My Tai Chi classes are on hold, though this week we started meeting on Wednesday afternoon in a park.

So I've had some extra time to contemplate ways reality and I can improve how we get along.

Of course, the first thing I realized is that the burden of improving the quality of our relationship falls on me, not reality, since I'm the one who is concerned about this, not the big wide wonderful world that exists beyond the confines of my cranium. 

Here's some of my current conclusions on this subject, which are definitely open to change at any moment, including the next one.

(1) When in doubt, look without, not within. I used to be a big fan of "going inside," as the meditation approach I followed for 35 years termed it. Meaning, ignore sensory impressions and focus on what lies within my mind or consciousness. 

Well, now I believe the exact opposite is, in general, a better approach. I feel happier and more grounded when I'm in tune with my physical surroundings. Also, less anxious.

A few minutes ago I watched our dog, who was sitting on our deck, tied to a railing by a leash, watch several deer passing through our rural Oregon yard, munching their way on whatever delicacies (like clover) caught their eye and nose. Our dog found the deer fascinating. I found the whole scene fascinating. 

Way more interesting than looking at the contents of my own mind, though I'm having to do that now as I compose this blog post.

(2) Pay closest attention to the physical now, not a mental past or future. The most real things are here and now. Not long ago this included our dog on the deck and deer in our yard. But now those things are a memory, so they exist only in my mind when I'm remembering them.

Ditto for everything that comes after me typing the word I'm typing now. I have a vague idea of what I want to say next. However, until a thought becomes converted to pixels on my laptop screen, it possesses less substantial reality. 

I often find myself worrying about what might happen in the future, or regretting something that happened in the past. It helps when I shift my attention to what is happening right here, right now. I remind myself that reality is immeasurably more vibrant when it is a concrete physical presence.

Memories. Thoughts. Worries. Anticipations. All the mental stuff inside my head is hugely less substantial. So I do my best to take it less seriously than my immediate physical surroundings.

(3) "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." As I've noted in numerous blog posts, and surely will note in more of them, I consider these words by Phillip K. Dick to be the best one-sentence bit of metaphysical philosophizing ever written.

I close my eyes. I stop believing in my MacBook Pro. I open my eyes. My laptop hasn't gone away. I'm sure of this, because my wife would let me know if I possessed the power of making my computer disappear by not believing in it. (If I could do this, rest assured that Donald Trump would disappear from the presidency.)

So what does go away when I stop believing in it? Or more generally, stop any mental activity about it. Notably, the past and future, since they are entirely mental constructs -- leaving aside the time-space continuum posited in Einstein's theory of relativity. 

Yes, the past and future may exist as a concrete reality if time is inextricably linked with space. But I'm not aware of anything other than the physical reality of the present moment. 

(4) Rumi has it right, even in translation. I've grown out of my previous obsession with Rumi, when I devoured every translation of his words I could find in English. Yet I still love this Rumi quotation, which I've committed to memory.

Fear the existence in which you are now!
Your imagination is nothing, and you are nothing,
A nothing has fallen in love with a nothing,
a nothing-at-all has waylaid a nothing-at-all.
When these images have departed,
your misunderstanding will be clear to you.

Wow, so seemingly true. What would reality be like without (a) our imaginings about what reality is like, and (b) our sense that each of us exists as a separate self?

That sense of independent selfhood is part of the imagining that keeps us from really knowing reality. As Rumi says, our imagination and our sense of self have fallen in love with each other. They have waylaid each other.

Yet neither truly exists. They are both nothings, or nothings-at-all. The departure of those images leaves behind... reality. At least, that's my current understanding. Tomorrow, or the next moment, I might look upon things differently. 

Blind belief feels good, but isn't a reliable guide to truth

Here's a nice "guest blog post" from Osho Robbins, who emailed it to me yesterday. I like what he has to say. I"m continually amazed at how people can believe crazy stuff that has no basis in fact, reason, or demonstrable evidence. 

They've just heard it from somewhere and embrace it because it feels like it could be true.

That's incredibly lazy. It also is why there are so many defenders of Trump's countless lies, so many people who feel that masks aren't effective in combating the spread of the coronavirus, so many deniers of the reality of human-caused global warming.

I came across this video.

A few things stand out. 

 

1. The caller, like many people, doesn’t have a clear understanding of meanings of words and just guesses and makes it up. 

 

2. The caller, again like many people, is just going by their feelings, but feelings, while they might seem to be important to the individual, are not a reliable path to truth. You can feel many things, it doesn’t make it the truth. I might for instance trust someone because I feel they are truthful. It doesn’t make it true, even though it might feel like it. 

 

3. When pushed to reveal “how and why” they think “it’s God” that is doing or responsible for XYZ, there is no logical answer the caller can give. 

 

4. Another huge logical fallacy that is common among believers is the appeal to authority. For example “I believe God does everything because it says so in the Sikh Granth sahib.” 

 

The truth is “so what?” 

How do you know it’s true? 

The answer again is because of trust and blind belief. 

 

This explains why so many people continue to believe everything that Gurinder Singh Dhillon [an Indian guru] says simply because he says it, regardless of how absurd the statement is. The hidden belief is “If the guru says it, it HAS to be the truth." The Sikh has a belief “if it’s written in the Granth ahib, it HAS to be the truth because the Granth sahib is the word of god.” 

 

To challenge those underlying core beliefs normally brings a robot-like response like “Everyone knows that the Granth sahib is the word of god” or yet another quote. 

 

Once you take away the “quote proof” and the “everyone knows” proof, and similar, suddenly the person realises they have no foundation. This is extremely uncomfortable, hence people avoid it at all costs. 

 

Those core beliefs are their comfort blanket and they will not let them go. Not ever. Because their whole life depends on them. 

 

Take away those beliefs and they cannot continue to live unconsciously anymore. 

 

That is why they fight for those beliefs so vehemently. 

 

The first glimpse of truth comes only when we question our core beliefs and it’s not comfortable at all. 

COVID reality is kicking Donald Trump in the butt

Reality can be harsh. And always, truthful.

That's why reality is feared by religions and politicians alike. At least, religious believers and politicians who have a vested interest in denying facts because the truth is inconvenient for them.

There's nothing positive that can be said about the COVID crisis here in the United States. According to a story I read in today's newspaper, the United States has 4.3% of the world's population but has suffered 25.5% of the COVID-19 deaths.

Why? 

Largely because we have a president who is utterly incompetent to manage a Little League team, much less a nation's response to a pandemic. Months ago Trump said that COVID was going to go away on its own. He repeated that lie today. 

Fortunately, facts don't lie.

Currently there are more new cases being reported than at the previous height of the pandemic in April. At Trump's urging, states reopened their economies before public health experts said they should. In fact, before White House's own reopening guidelines said they should.

Trump wanted a strong economy ASAP to bolster his reelection chances. However, his poll numbers have been dropping as the number of COVID cases has been increasing.

Americans aren't as dumb as their president. They realize that the COVID crisis in this country has been made much worse by Trump's habitual inability to listen to experts who know more than he does about a subject, and to act in accord with that wise advice.

Here's how the United States compares to the European Union, which has a population roughly comparable to ours.

The United States and the European Union have comparable population sizes, but the trajectories of their COVID-19 outbreaks have been vastly different. Data recently released by the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows that while there are around 4,000 new COVID cases in the EU each day, the United States is now recording over 40,000 new cases of the virus each day.

At least 11 US states broke records for the number of new cases reported over the past week. And while some politicians in the US have ascribed the difference to discrepancies in testing, a close analysis shows that the United States and the EU are conducting roughly the same number of tests per million people. Here's a look at the seven-day rolling average of new COVID cases in the EU and the US since March.

In the European Union science is broadly accepted by national leaders, while the United States suffers under the inept leadership of  a president who refuses to wear a mask in public, disparages people who do wear a mask, and said as recently as today that COVID will go away on its own one day.

No, it won't. That's a fact. 

COVID-19 is an especially dangerous virus. It is transmitted easily from person to person. It damages many different organs in the human body, not just the lungs. Unlike the flu, a COVID infection can leave a person debilitated for months. Check out this story by Portland's KGW News about a woman who is still suffering from an infection she got sick from on March 15.

I'm not saying that everything is fine here in Oregon, where I live. It isn't. The chart above shows that cases have been increasing since Governor Brown relaxed stay at home orders, allowing businesses to gradually reopen.

But unlike Trump, Brown listens to public health experts. She learns on the job. She changes her mind when fresh facts replace outdated ones. Masks have been advised in Oregon, but not mandatory, in indoor public places until recently (aside from a few counties, including mine, where COVID cases were higher).

Now, though, Governor Brown is requiring the wearing of masks in indoor public places everywhere in Oregon, with some exceptions for children and people unable to wear a mask because of a medical condition. That's leadership, since masks are proven to be effective in slowing the spread of COVID. 

(Not convinced? See here, here, and here.)

Like I said, the only good thing I see coming from the COVID crisis in my country is that Trump finally is being held to account for his failure to acknowledge reality. That's sort of worked for him when the truth of a situation can be disguised by lies. But death and disease don't respond to lies.

So the steadily increasing COVID cases and deaths testify to the ineptness of the Trump administration's response to this crisis. I'm confident that voters will keep that in mind when, hopefully, they kick him out of office in November. 

Mystery and Reality have an intriguing relationship

I'm a fan of both Mystery and Reality. I'm capitalizing their names to personalize them, as if they were beings we could actually interact with rather than abstract ideas.

Mystery is, well, mysterious. (I'll use "she" to talk about her because, being a man, I find females to be more of a mystery than males.)

You can't say much about her because there's not much to be said. She's what lies outside the bounds of our knowing. That makes Mystery intriguing, just as a beautiful woman in a suggestive dress makes us want to learn what lies beneath the surface of the cloth, while a fully naked woman leaves nothing to the imagination.

Reality obviously is open to view. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be calling him Reality. He isn't totally transparent to our understanding, of course, since there are many levels to him. It's fair to say that he's a complex guy. Just when you think you're privy to all of his secrets, Reality surprises by revealing hitherto unknown dimensions.

Frequently Mystery transforms into Reality. Less frequently, perhaps, Realty transforms into Mystery.

We can come to know something that previously we were completely clueless about. We also can realize that what was once a confident object of knowledge has become an enigma.

So Mystery and Reality are constantly dancing together.

But it's an unusual dance, because one of the partners is mostly, if not completely, unseen, while the other looks like he is shadow boxing (or rather, shadow dancing) all by himself. Together, they make a pair that provide endless enjoyment to humans as long as Homo sapiens has existed as a species.

Without Mystery, life would be boring, sterile, almost lifeless. Without Reality, life wouldn't exist as we know it, and probably not at all.

To offer up a familiar example -- TV shows -- last night I watched the final episode of Homeland, a captivating Showtime series that has engrossed me for quite a few years. It wasn't the final episode of a season. It was the final episode, period. Homeland is done.

I don't want to give too much away in case someone reading this is, like me until yesterday, making their way through a bunch of recorded episodes of the final season. Suffice it to say that, not surprisingly, I had no idea how Homeland was going to end up. It was a mystery.

However, I knew that within an hour or so all would be revealed. Mystery would transfer herself into Reality in an ontological sex change operation. From not knowing what would happen with the main characters would come a knowing.

Plots that preserve an ever-changing air of mystery are highly watchable. In truth I had no idea what was going to occur next, though often I wrongly believed that I did. My emotions were pulled this way and that as Mystery changed herself into Reality and then back again.

I'd silently scream things like "Carrie, you can't kill Saul! You just can't!"

But I knew that no matter what I wanted, the episode was a solid reality implanted on the hard disk of my DVR, digital video recorder. It was both pleasurable and painful to have my emotions manipulated in such a skillful way by the writers, actors, and director of Homeland.

In the end, Reality held center stage, as he typically does in TV shows and movies. I knew how Carrie and Saul ended their lengthy relationship, and it was exceedingly satisfying to me.

(Thank you for that, Homeland. I was worried you were going to pull a "Lost" on me; the final episode of that series left me with a What the Fuck? feeling, almost a sense of betrayal after so much time invested in following the unfolding mystery of the island, only to be met with a blah denouement.)

This points to a psychological truism, not quite a fact, but almost so: Often we want Mystery to reveal herself in a certain way. Of course, that goes against the grain of who she is -- hidden, unpredictable, enigmatic. So we love Mystery, until she disappoints by turning into a Reality we're uncomfortable with.

Naturally there's more to say about the relationship between Mystery and Reality. Likely I'll be doing that before too long.

I'll finish this blog post by saying that it turned out way different from what I first intended when I typed in the title, Mystery and Reality have an intriguing relationship. That's the beauty of writing, and of life. We set out in a certain direction, with a certain goal in mind, and before we know it we're exploring a very different territory.

Become an unknowing fool. It's the wisest thing to do.

Here's another post from the early years of this blog that I just came across in the course of choosing content for my second book of Church of the Churchless posts.

I'll probably keep on doing more of this "blast from the past" stuff until I'm finished with the second book, which doesn't have a name yet. The less time I spend on writing new content for this blog, the more time I'll have to work on that book.

As before, the italicized introduction is what will accompany the post. I like to share a few thoughts about how I view each old blog post now. Sometimes I still whole-heartedly agree with a post. Sometimes I'm half-hearted about it, since my views are evolving.

I’m still pretty sure that existence, life, and consciousness are unknowable, since they are the mysterious foundation of all our knowing. But I’m not absolutely sure about this. That’s the beauty of not-knowing. It leaves us open to all sorts of possibilities.

God calls me a fool. I agree.
May 28, 2006

Churchless brothers and sisters, God spoke to me this morning. Now the spirit is calling me to share the word. I’m just a tool. Also, a fool.

That was the message: “Brian, you don’t know.” To which I replied, “Oh God, you’re so right. I don’t know.”

Now, I can hear the skeptics asking, “How do you know that God was speaking to you if what you heard was, You don’t know?” Well, all I can say is that I know what I know, and I don’t know what I don’t know. And I know that God was letting me know that I don’t know.

Seems clear to me.

As so much often does in the morning when the caffeine is flowing through my hyped-up neurons and reading one of my holy churchless books tunes me into the harmonies of the cosmos’ deepest mysteries.

Like, the ultimate mystery: existence. And, the penultimate mystery: why something exists within existence. In this rarefied philosophical territory, I’m gasping fruitlessly for the air of even the slightest understanding.

As are we all. 

Such was the divine inspiration stimulated by my reading of John Horgan’s “Rational Mysticism.” In a concluding chapter he says that no one — not Jesus, not Buddha, not Muhammad, not Moses, nor any other guru, sage, or prophet, no one — could ever know the ultimate whys and wherefores of creation.

Why is there something rather than nothing? No one knows. And if you don’t know that, then any claim to knowing It All is spurious.

Laughingly so. Ridiculously so. 

Which helps explain why, after my not-knowing revelation had been revealed to me, I felt so good. For quite a while my meditation mantra became “I don’t know…I don’t know…I don’t know.” With every repetition I became more connected to the great Don’t Know.

There’s a joy in being a religious fool. 

I could feel the pressure of got to know… got to know… got to know dissipating. I felt emptier, lighter, freer. I realized that I’ll never know, you’ll never know, no one will ever know. Not everything. Not the deepest mysteries. They’re unknowable.

Existence. Life. Consciousness. Science doesn’t have a clue. Religion doesn’t have a clue. Humanity is clueless. That brought a foolish smile to my meditative face. The pressure to know is off. Accept it.

You exist. You’re alive. You’re conscious. 

But nobody can know what existence is, what life is, what consciousness is. To penetrate those mysteries you’d have to be non-existent, not-alive, unconscious. Who, then, would be around to do the penetrating? Or to be aware of what lies at the bottom of it all?

We are what we’re trying to know. It isn’t possible to know when there isn’t a sub-atomic particle’s distance between us and the object of knowledge. There can be no knowing when there isn’t a knower and the known.

But there can be fools who don’t know. I’m happy to be part of this august group. Which includes everybody on the planet. Including those who believe that they know.

Are they even bigger fools? Good question. Have to say, though: I don’t know.

Brian Greene: "Nothing supersedes the laws of physics"

I've been needing some cosmic scientific perspective during my morning pre-meditation reading time, given how the coronavirus pandemic dominates the news and peoples' psyches.

Physicist Brian Greene's new book, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe," has been meeting that need nicely. He's an excellent writer, thinker, and popularizer of scientific truth. 

Here's an example of what appealed to me in the first four chapters. I'm sure I'll be sharing more from the book as I get deeper into it.

Nothing supersedes the laws of physics. I love this bold simple statement. It rings true to me. If you disagree, feel free to leave a comment on this post in which you provide specific, detailed, persuasive, demonstrable evidence of something that lies outside the laws of physics.

Here's passages from the Information and Vitality chapter where Greene makes this persuasive claim.

By this point you may have concluded that life's molecules must have aced their studies of organic chemistry. Otherwise, how in the world would they know what they are supposed to do? How does DNA know to split down the middle and attach complementary bases to the ones it has exposed, creating a duplicate molecule?

How does RNA know to make copies of sections of DNA, transport that information to the appropriate cellular structures where yet other distinct but related molecules know how to read the genetic code and link up appropriate sequences of amino acids into functioning proteins?

Of course, the molecules don't know anything. Their behavior is guided by the blind, mindless, unschooled laws of physics. But the question remains: How do they consistently and reliably carry out a stunningly intricate series of complex chemical processes?

It's a question that harks back to my paraphrasing of Schrodinger's primary query in What is Life?: The jostling and careening of molecules within a rock are governed by the laws of physics. The jostling and careening of molecules within a rabbit are also governed by the laws of physics.

How do they differ?

We have now seen that the rabbit's particles are guided by an additional influence -- the rabbit's internal archive of information, its cellular software. Importantly, critically, vitally: This information does not supersede the laws of physics. Nothing does.

Instead, much as a water slide doesn't supersede the laws of gravity but through its shape guides riders along a specific trajectory they would otherwise not follow, the rabbit's cellular software is carried by chemical arrangements that through their shape, structure, and constituents guide various molecules along trajectories that they, too, would otherwise not follow.

...The point, then, is that information in a cell is not abstract. It is not a free-floating set of instructions that molecules need to study, memorize, and execute. 

Instead, the information is encoded in the molecular arrangements themselves, arrangements that coax other molecules to bump or join or interact in a manner that carries out cellular processes like growth, repair, or reproduction. Even though the molecules inhabiting a cell lack intent or purpose, and even though they are thoroughly oblivious, their physical structure allows them to accomplish highly specialized tasks. 

In this sense, the processes of life are molecular meanderings fully described by physical law that simultaneously tell a higher-level, information-based story.

For the rock, there is no higher level story. When you use the laws of physics to describe the bumping and jostling of the rock's molecules, you're done. But when you use the very same laws of physics to describe the bumping and jostling of rabbit molecules, you are not done. Not by a long shot.

Overlaid on the reductionist story is a whole additional story that tells of the rabbit's unique molecular arrangements that choreograph an exquisite spectrum of organized molecular motions. And it is these molecular motions which carry out higher-level processes within the rabbit's cells.

Indeed, for the rabbit, and for us, too, such biological information is also organized on larger scales, guiding processes that act not just within individual cells but across collections of cells, yielding the hallmark quality of coordinated complexity. When you reach for a cup of coffee, the motion of every atom constituting every molecule in your hand, arm, body, and brain is fully governed by the laws of physics.

Again, with gusto: Life does not and cannot contravene physical law. Nothing can.

But the fact that a huge number of your molecules can act in concert, coordinating their overall motion to cause your arm to reach out across a table and your hand to clutch a mug, reflects the wealth of biological information, embodied in atomic and molecular arrangements, directing a profusion of complex molecular processes.

Life is physics orchestrated.

Perfection is an imaginary ideal, a lifeless dead end

This morning I finished the book I've been blogging about recently, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, by Lesley Hazleton. It's a wonderfully thoughtful and well-written description of what it means to be an open-minded agnostic (or atheist), rather than a closed-minded religious believer.

Below are some passages that I liked in the concluding chapter, "Imperfect Soul." 

Hazleton starts out by debunking the notion of perfection. There's no such thing. Perfection, she says, is an idea, not a fact. This rings true for me, based on my 35 years of experience with an Indian religious organization whose teachings wrongly proclaim that there is such a thing as a "perfect living master."

Actually, there's no evidence that the Radha Soami Satsang Beas organization is led by a guru, or master, who is perfect. Far from it. RSSB gurus make mistakes. Their knowledge is incomplete. They are as clueless as anyone else about what will happen in the future.

In other words, the gurus are flawed human beings, as are we all. Yet their disciples cling to the idea of perfection as a concept with no grounding in reality. Hazleton writes:

Perfection may be an ideal, but whether it's a desirable one is another question. Ideals are by definition products of the imagination rather than of reality; they exist, that is, as ideas, not as facts.

The perfect truths of theology, claimed as "absolute truths," are thus inherently self-contradictory, because as William James noted, truth is always an evolving idea.

"It is temporary and constructed from our own experience..." he wrote. "The 'absolutely' true, meaning what no farther experience will ever alter, is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine all our temporary truths will some day converge." It is, in short, imaginary.

Then Hazleton explores the unappealing rigidity of perfection. The rigidity arises because the imaginary ideal of perfection doesn't tolerate anything other than 100% perfectness. Again, not in reality, but in the religious theology. That produces a dead-end, since there is no way forward once someone or something is viewed as perfect.

There's an icy starkness to perfection, a kind of echoing emptiness. Perfection, that is, is soulless. And lifeless. It's real meaning is right there in its origin: the Latin perficere, to finish or to conclude. A perfect life would thus be one that is completed, and there is only one way that can happen.

Perfection is literally a dead end. And to be alive is necessarily to be incomplete and thus imperfect, each person in his or her own particular way.

This is why the idea of perfectibility seems so hollow to me. The definiteness, the absolutism, the dead-endness of it -- all these leave no room for life.

The perfect tomato in the store turns out to be tasteless, genetically engineered fo shelf appeal, not for the palette. A flawless face seems blankly unapproachable, leaving me unable to do anything but puzzle at its unnatural symmetry. Complete agreement with whatever I might say leaves me gasping for intellectual air, longing for something more than a mirror of my own thoughts.

In the latter part of the chapter, Hazleton speaks about soul. It's a difficult word to define, since people use "soul" in so many different ways. The one thing we know soul is not, of course, is a supernatural something-or-other separate and distinct from the body, since there's no demonstrable evidence of this.

Perhaps you have to be slightly crazy to even try to talk about soul in secular terms. The more you try -- the more I try, in any case -- the greater the risk of falling into cliche, into the trite generalizations and warm fuzziness too often mistaken for spiritual insight.

...A strong whiff of sanctimony hovers over the word, burdened as it has been with such modifiers as blessed and immortal. That tyranny of the definite article -- the soul -- reasserts itself with impeccable conviction, and conventional theology again becomes more hindrance than help.

...Yet I persist, because I sense -- and sense is the only word I can use here -- that it's important to reclaim soul from those who still conceive of it as a thing with an immortal life of its own, independent of the body. 

However vague we may be about it, I think most of us recognize soul not as a thing, but as a dimension of being that defies the narrow lens of dogma, going far beyond traditional religious ideas such as those I grew up with.

Here Hazleton does her best to point toward what soul means to her agnostic self. It's a quality of being. It's an emphatic openness to reality, the opposite of walling ourselves behind dogmas of one variety or another. This takes courage, since it is easier to embrace  some form of religious absolutism where no doubts or questions are tolerated. 

Soul as a matter of courage? If so, it's not the obvious courage of a lauded hero, but the quieter, everyday kind of courage it takes to be open to the world. 

It's not that some people have no soul, but that the quality of soul in them seems to have shriveled, turned in on itself as though in retreat. They have taken a defensive position, and built a wall around themselves.

...You wall yourself off when you expect the worst. Better the devil you know, you tell yourself, than the unpredictability of the unknown; better to be ruled by the past than by hope for a different future. 

You try to persuade yourself you are strong because you have made yourself impregnable, but you live nonetheless in a state of fear. Your view is blocked. You have closed the gates and walled yourself off from the world -- even, at the extreme, against the world.

And if the gates remain open? 

Could having soul be a matter of being brave enough to be vulnerable -- to acknowledge the risks of being vulnerable, that is, and to willingly embrace them nonetheless? Because risks they are. Those I think of as brave souls know this.

In a way, they're the personification of soul music: they often bear the scars of bitter experience, and yet are not ruled by fear or resentment. Not that they are saints; they are as deeply flawed as you or I, but they accept their own flaws, and thus those of others.

And if they seem to have gained a certain ease with the world, it is a hard-earned one. It's as though they have persevered and come out the other end of hardship worn and weathered, but with a deeper appreciation of what it is to be alive.

They welcome both the unknown and the unknowable, explore without preconceptions, and place their faith in trust, preferring the chance of being proved wrong to the illusory certainty of always being right.

Open and closed: perhaps these are the terms in which we need to think. Not soulful or soulless, nor brave souls or timid ones, but open-souled and closed-souled. Where the latter contracts and retreats from others, the former expands, reaches out, is open to the world instead of guarded against it.

Few people are entirely one way or the other, of course. Most of us can open up on occasion, yet are still tempted to close ourselves off when under stress. 

We struggle with trust, and uncertainty, and doubt, and find ourselves searching for the security of conviction even as we recognize its falseness. We're brave at times, fearful at others; we're contradictory, and paradoxical, and fallible. Which is to say, we're human.

But at our best, we respond to soul with soul, as happened with someone whose real name I don't even know posted a comment on an earlier attempt of mine to puzzle out what we mean when we say that someone has soul.

"I'm not sure I understand," she wrote (a gentle way of saying that I hadn't been very clear), "but I think I recognize it. It's what makes my heart swell -- what makes me glad to be alive." And then: "Is this it?"

Magic is in the details of everyday life

One of the most important things I've learned in my 70 years of living is this: the world is way more interesting than I am.

So the more I can get out of my head, and into what surrounds me, the happier I am. By and large. There are exceptions to every rule, including this one. 

As I've noted before, and surely will note again, mindfulness has become my meditation. I'm no longer seeking enlightenment, mystical uplift, or even self-knowledge. 

In fact, I don't believe that I have, or am, an enduring self. The world exists. I exist. When I'm fully aware of the world, that's enough for me.

Sure, I also spend time aware of my thoughts, emotions, memories, anticipations, and such. These internal experiences just have come to seem less real, less absorbing, and less interesting than what lies outside of me.

Today's guided meditation on my iPhone's Calm app was titled Immersion. Tamara Levitt ended the meditation with the following words. I liked them so much, I transcribed what she said to share in this blog post. 
       

Immersion -- part of a guided meditation by Calm's Tamara Levitt

By quieting our mind and body and tuning in, we can open up to our inner landscape. And in doing so we also develop the capacity to be fully present with our external environment.

When we really notice our surroundings, we can tune in to a universe of detail, discovering magic in places we normally pass through on autopilot. 

And we don't have to be at the top of a mountain. Our practice can help us find that fascination even in the mundane places we go each day. 

The next time you find yourself in a familiar setting, use your practice to see it anew.

You might be standing on a subway platform, sitting in your car waiting for the light to change, or standing in a cafe waiting for your morning coffee. 

First, make a conscious effort to slow down and tune in to your senses.

Let them fully immerse you in your environment. Get really present, and tune into the orchestra of sounds around you. Take in all the sights and smells. Notice any movements. The spin of a ceiling fan. The quiver of a beam of light coming in the window. 

Take in the sounds, the voices, or vehicle. Notice the expressions on people's faces. Observe colors and patterns with an intricacy you never had before. 

Pour over all the details of this space you've seen a million times before, but have never really seen. And then bring that attentiveness into your day. And see what happens. Who knows what moments you might capture. 

A furry caterpillar climbing on a leaf. A sunset. Or a new friend sitting right beside you. 

To quote from the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." 

"The View from Nowhere" is a laudable goal

Quite a few years ago I heard of Thomas Nagel's book "The View from Nowhere," liking the provocative title. Nagel is better known for his What Is it Like to be a Bat? paper, which raised equally profound questions about subjectivity and objectivity. 

No human knows what it is like to be a bat. Only a bat does. 

The same is true of every species, and indeed of every individual within a species. I've been married to my wife, Laurel, for 29 years. So obviously I know her very well. But I don't know what it is like to be Laurel. Only she does. 

I perceive my wife from the outside, an objective perspective. She perceives herself from the inside, a subjective perspective. What Nagel seeks to achieve in The View from Nowhere is a philosophical argument for how subjective and objective views of the world can be harmonized.

I've only read part of this book, yet feel that I've grasped enough of Nagel's way of thinking to fashion a blog post based on the first five of his eleven chapters. 

Here's how Nagel encapsulates his goal.

A theory of reality with pretensions to completeness would have to include a theory of the mind. But this too would be a hypothesis generated by the mind, and would not be self-guaranteeing. ... The idea of a full conception of reality that explains our ability to arrive at it is just a dream.

Nevertheless, it's what we aim toward: a gradual liberation of the dormant objective self, trapped initially behind an individual perspective of human experience. The hope is to develop a detached perspective that can coexist with and comprehend the individual one.

That's certainly a laudable goal. It reflects what science is all about, though Nagel seeks a perspective that is universal, not limited to scientific investigations. 

Appealingly, he simultaneously asserts the truth of our inherent subjectivity -- the fact that each of us knows ourself from the inside, while everyone else knows us from the outside -- with a commitment to fashion our ways of knowing into a perspective that comes as close as possible to being a view from nowhere.

Meaning, an objective view that minimizes the biases of our species, and our personal individuality as a member of Homo sapiens. In the chapter that I finished today, Nagel says that a "double vision" is needed.

I'm not completely sure what he means by this, assuming that the rest of the book will lead to an explanation. It isn't bouncing back and forth between a subjective and objective view, but rather involves combining subjectivity and objectivity in some way that eludes me at this point in my reading.

Here's some additional passages from the Double Vision chapter.

When we view ourselves from outside, a naturalistic picture of how we work seems unavoidable. It is clear that our beliefs arise from certain dispositions and experiences which, so far as we know, don't guarantee their truth and are compatible with radical error.

The trouble is that we can't fully take on the skepticism that this entails, because we can't cure our appetite for belief, and we can't take on this attitude toward our own beliefs while we're having them.

Beliefs are about how things probably are, not just about what they might possibly be, and there is no way of bracketing our ordinary beliefs about the world so that they dovetail neatly with the possibility of skepticism. The thought "I'm a professor at New York University, unless of course I'm a brain in a vat" is not one that can represent my general integrated state of mind.

The problems of free will and personal identity yield similarly unharmonious conclusions. In some respects what we do and what happens to us fits very naturally into an objective picture of the world, on a footing with what other objects and organisms do.

Our actions seem to be events with causes and conditions many of which are not our actions. We seem to persist and change through time much as other complex organisms do. But when we take these objective ideas seriously, they appear to threaten and undermine certain fundamental self-conceptions that we find it very difficult to give up.

For sure.

Looking at other people and other living beings, we see that everything which lives, dies. Looking at other people and other living beings, we also see that if a brain is seriously damaged, the consciousness of the being with that brain is altered for the worse.

Yet most humans have a belief that some part of them will continue to live on after their death, often termed a soul, no matter what happens to their body and brain.

That's because from the inside our consciousness seems to be ethereal, unitary, and timeless in some sense -- since we have been conscious from birth until now, while our body and mental contents have changed in countless ways.

I share Nagel's goal of doing our best to view ourselves, and the world, in as objective a fashion as possible.

This requires that we subject our own beliefs and ways of knowing to scrutiny, which isn't at all easy, because how see our own self and the world typically seems so natural, it's difficult for us to envision how that perspective could be any different.

One of Nagel's key ideas is that an objective viewpoint has to include the subjectivity of the viewer as one aspect of what is being perceived. Otherwise we make the mistake of considering that we know everything about some aspect of the world, whereas actually that knowledge should include the knower.

I enjoy learning about neuroscience and human psychology for this reason. I just wish that religious people also would consider that their sense of knowing what God, spirit, soul, heaven and such are like could be mistaken. Not just by a little, but by a lot. Still, we have to keep seeking truth while knowing that it won't be possible to grasp truth completely.

Nagel writes early on in his book:

I believe that the methods needed to understand ourselves do not yet exist.

So this book contains a great deal of speculation about the world and how we fit into it. Some of it will seem wild, but the world is a strange place, and nothing but radical speculation gives us a hope of coming up with any candidates for the truth.

That, of course, is not the same as coming up with the truth: if truth is our aim, we must be resigned to achieving it to a very limited extent, and without certainty.

To redefine the aim so that its achievement is largely guaranteed, through various forms of reductionism, relativism, or historicism, is a form of cognitive wish-fulfillment.

Philosophy cannot take refuge in reduced ambitions. It is after eternal and nonlocal truth, even though we know that is not what we are going to get.

Deep thoughts about a typo in my new book

I'm eager to write about a newfound typo in my recently published book, "Break Free of Dogma," for a couple of reasons. One is that this gives me another chance to plug my book, which is prominently displayed at the top of the right sidebar. 

Also, I've got some deep thoughts about the typo that I just discovered in the book. It came to light today after I gave some copies of the book to my fellow Tai Chi students.

Handing a book to Jeremy, I told him that several of the mini-chapters refer to Tai Chi, such as the last one. I turned to that page, reading aloud the mention of how our Tai Chi instructor, Warren, reacted when I wore a t-shirt with the Chinese symbol for Wu, which indicates negation or nothing.

I was shocked to see that rather than saying I wore it to my Tai Chi class on Monday and today, in the book it says boon Monday and today.

Wow. The original blog post had "on," but when I copied the post content into a Pages file, autocorrect must have changed "on" to "boon." I then proceeded to proof read the manuscript at least three times, failing to see the typo each time.

This is common in human perception.

For example, our eyes don't faithfully reflect what is out there in the world, as a mirror would. Instead, the brain actively makes predictions about what it expects to see, filling in aspects of reality in surprising ways -- such as by eliminating the blind spot with surrounding images. 

Some process in our brains interpolates the blind spot based on surrounding detail and information from the other eye, so we do not normally perceive the blind spot.

I expected to read "on, in part because I'd written the blog post that became a chapter in my book. So my brain failed to recognize the "boon" typo.

The lesson is that we can't always trust what we believe we're perceiving, because the brain often fails to show us what is really there.

A classic experiment along this line is a video of a person in a gorilla suit walking through some people passing a basketball back and forth. When an onlooker is asked to count the number of times the basketball has been passed, typically they fail to notice the "gorilla."

Expectations play a large role in perception. This is one reason I'm deeply skeptical about tales of mystical experiences. Almost always these reflect whatever religious teaching the person embraces. Muslims rarely, if ever, have a vision of Jesus, but Christians do.

Likewise, followers of a guru will claim they had a vision of him or her, not a vision of the Buddha or Krishna.

Thus almost certainly mystical visions are produced by the mind of the person having the vision, since otherwise we'd have to accept that a supernatural realm is populated with every conceivable religious entity that has appeared to devotees of the thousands of world religions.

I came to recognize the typo in my book. But most religious believers never realize that they are creating their own inaccurate images of their chosen faith. 

So just as it makes sense to have several people proofread a book, something I chose not to do, claims of a mystical vision need to be examined extremely closely and skeptically, since chances are that vision has been fashioned by a human mind, not an actual divinity.

If God is beyond thought and language, then shut up if you're religious

I'd like to rephrase in a more blunt fashion what I quoted Donald Hoffman as saying in yesterday's blog post. Here's Hoffman.

If a system of thought, religious or otherwise, offers a claim that it wants taken seriously, then we should examine it with our best method of inquiry -- the scientific method. That is taking it seriously.

Some topics -- such as God, the good, reality, and consciousness -- have been claimed to transcend the limited scope of human concepts and thus the methods of science. I have no quarrel with someone who claims this and then, being consistent, says no more about these topics.

But if one does say more, then "What can be said at all can be said clearly" and probed with the scientific method.

And here's my blunter rephrasing:

If you believe that God, or anything else supernatural, is so ineffable it's beyond thought and language, then, please, shut the fuck up and don't say anything to the rest of us about what can't be talked about.

On the other hand, if God, or anything else supernatural, can indeed be discussed in thought and language, then be prepared for some damn tough questions about what evidence you have for your belief.

Do you get it, religious believers? You can't have it both ways.

Meaning, you can't blather on about God, soul, spirit, karma, heaven, astral regions, mystical powers, or any other sort of supernatural shit if you claim that all this stuff lies beyond the domain of human concepts, thoughts, and language.

Just be silent. Keep your ineffable experience to yourself.

Because believe me, there's nothing more boring than to have someone drone on about their supposed experience of God or something else divine, then have that person respond with "It was a personal experience" when asked to provide evidence of its existence.

Guess what?

Everything anyone experiences is personal. There's no such thing as an impersonal experience. But it's possible to talk about personal experiences when what's been experienced exists in a realm of shared reality. 

For example, yesterday my wife and I went on a bike ride at Black Butte Ranch in central Oregon with my daughter and granddaughter that involved stopping for a photograph in front of Black Butte. You don't have to take my word for it. Here's a photo. (I don't like to smile much, or at all, in photos because I don't like my smile.)

But no one really knows what my experience of the bike ride that included a stop to feed carrots to horses grazing in the Big Meadown was like. Yet obviously I don't go around claiming that everyone should do what I just did, and have the same experience that I did.

So why do religious believers talk endlessly about how everyone should love Jesus, follow the teachings of Muhammed, embrace a living guru, or whatever? I have much more evidence to support my experience of Black Butte Ranch than any believer has about a supposed supernatural experience.

The difference between us is that I know that my experience was of a genuine reality, so I feel no need to try to convince others that what I experienced was real. On the other hand, religious believers like to blab on, and on, and on about things that there is no evidence for -- except in their own minds.

This is why they should shut their mouths unless they're prepared to present persuasive evidence that what they experienced is true. Please, don't bore those of us who like to exist in reality with your fantasies. Look, I'm fine with fantasies, so long as they are acknowledged as such.

That's what every book of fiction is: a fantasy of the author's mind. Ditto for every movie other than documentaries, or every piece of art that isn't a photograph. I have no problem with people sharing supposed supernatural experiences if they admit that there's no reason for anyone else to believe that the experience was of something objectively real.

But as Hoffman said, once you claim to be able to express your religious experience of a supernatural reality in words or concepts, be prepared to have skeptics like me try to tear apart your arguments. Reality is too precious to be diminished to someone's personal fantasy.

"The Case Against Reality" seems more right than wrong

It's rare that I find it difficult to put down a non-fiction book because I'm so eager to read the final chapters and grasp the author's concluding arguments.

Such was the case, though, with The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth From Our Eyes, by Donald Hoffman. I hadn't planned to spend so much time reading the book this morning, but I carried on until I'd read all but a technical appendix.

Hoffman's Big Idea is this: evolution selects for fitness, not truth. If a living organism perceives reality well enough to be able to pass on its genes, that's what evolution is all about. Or at least, mostly about. In shorthand, FBT, Fitness Beats Truth.

Another acronym Hoffman uses a lot is ITP, the Interface Theory of Perception. Here's a paragraph that encapsulates key ideas in the book.

Perception is not about truth. It's about having kids. Genes that fashion perceptions that help us raise kids are genes that may win the fitness game and elbow their way into the next generation. The FBT Theorem tells us that winning genes do not code for perceiving truth.

ITP tells us that they code instead for an interface that hides the truth about objective reality and provides us with icons -- physical objects with colors, textures, shapes, motions, and smells -- that allow us to manipulate that unseen reality in just the ways we need to survive and reproduce. 

Physical objects in spacetime are simply our icons in our desktop.

This Big Idea strikes me as being more right than wrong. Which means that I agree with most of what Hoffman says in his engrossing book.

Still, a Publisher's Weekly review had some key words that reflect how I see The Case Against Reality. "Intriguing but overreaching treatise."

I'm a believer in objective reality. So I resonated with Hoffman's contention in all but the final chapter that objective reality exists. For example, he writes:

According to the FBT Theorem, if selection shapes perceptions, then perceptions guide useful behaviors rather than report objective truths about an independent world. Something exists independent of us, but that something doesn't match our perceptions. This feels difficult to understand because of our penchant to reify our interface. 

Hoffman notes that a Maserati certainly seems real. It can be seen, and touched with eyes closed. However, Hoffman says:

It proves nothing. It suggests, but does not prove, that there is something objective. But that something could be wildly different from anything you perceive. 

When you open your eyes, you interact with that unknown something and create a visual icon of a Maserati. When you close your eyes and reach out your hand, you create a tactile icon. The same is true for all the other senses.

OK, that seems reasonable.

There's an objective reality, but all sentient beings perceive it differently. We humans view reality in one fashion, while other species view it quite differently. An ant, bat, dolphin, and eagle all have their own way of looking upon the world, as would, almost certainly, aliens from a galaxy far, far away.

I certainly agree that there is no one way, or preferred way, to perceive reality. Evolution has led each species here on Earth to possess different reality interfaces, in Hoffman's language. So the icons that populate these interfaces also are going to be unique.

No two people perceive the world in exactly the same way, and certainly no two species do. Hoffman appears to be on solid ground when he says this in his Preface:

The purpose of a desktop interface is not to show you the "truth" of the computer -- where "truth," in this metaphor, refers to circuits, voltages, and layers of software.

Rather, the purpose of an interface is to hide the "truth" and to show simple graphics that help you perform useful tasks such as crafting emails and editing photos. If you had to toggle voltages to craft an email, your friends would never hear from you.

That is what evolution has done. It has endowed us with senses that hide the truth and display the simple icons we need to survive long enough to raise offspring. Space, as you perceive it when you look around, is just your desktop -- a 3D desktop. Apples, snakes, and other physical objects are simply icons in your 3D desktop.

Those icons are useful, in part, because they hide the complex truth about objective reality. Your senses have evolved to give you what you need. You may want truth, but you don't need truth. Peceiving truth would drive our species extinct. You need simple icons that show you how to act to stay alive.

Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons.

However, Hoffman casts independently existing objective reality aside in his final chapter. I found this intellectually dubious. He spends nine chapters arguing that evolution has fashioned interfaces for determining what is useful for us, fitness-wise. So what we perceive is objective reality filtered through both a species-specific interface and our personal interface.

(A blind person, for example, has a decidedly different interface than a sighted person.)

Then, in chapter 10, Hoffman casts objective reality aside. Or at least, objective reality that is independent of conscious agents. He writes:

"But," you might object, "didn't you earlier define 'objective reality' as that which exists when no one observes? And don't conscious experiences exist only when some agent observes? Haven't you contradicted yourself when you propose conscious realism, and claim that objective reality consists of conscious agents?"

Indeed, for sake of argument, I adopted a notion of objective reality that is accepted by most physicalists. Then I used evolutionary assumptions that are also accepted by most physicalists to make the case against physicalism and its notion of objective reality.

Now that I have presented that case, I am proposing a new ontology, and with it a new notion of objective reality in which conscious agents, with their experiences and structures, are central.

Well, I think his original ontology was stronger. Somehow Hoffman ends up arguing that "Objects, shapes, space, and time reside in consciousness. If the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be annihilated." 

That's a huge argument to make in the concluding pages of a book where Hoffman argued quite differently up to that point. Understand: he isn't saying that living creatures perceive space and time from their own unique evolutionary perspective. Rather, he claims that there is no such thing as space and time absent a conscious observer.

He may be right. Perhaps the universe was just sitting there doing nothing for billions of years after the big bang, waiting for conscious observers to bring it into being.

But how did conscious observers come to exist if there was no space and time for evolution to work its magic? This strikes me as a major flaw in Hoffman's replacement ontology. His final two paragraphs sound way too New Age'y for my tastes.

What is spacetime? This book has offered you the red pill. Spacetime is your virtual reality, a headset of your own making. The objects you see are your invention. You create them with a glance and destroy them with a blink.

You have worn this headset all your life. What happens if you take it off?

That said, I still hugely enjoyed his book. Again, it seems much more right than wrong. Check out his TED talk, and I think you'll agree.

Calculus is cool. Spiritual, even. Infinity rocks.

Astoundingly, I'm enjoying a book about calculus, Infinite Powers by Steven Strogatz. The subtitle is the reason: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe.

Hey, I'm all in on having the secrets of the universe revealed to me. Especially when the cost was a mere $16.52 to have Amazon deliver the book to my doorstep. 

I started this post with the word "astoundingly" because I was forced to take a calculus class in the first year of my Systems Science Ph.D. program studies way back when. (I completed the course work, but then gave up on being called Dr. Hines, as appealing as that prospect was.)

All I remember about the class was that I didn't like it. I passed, but I can't recall a single deep philosophical statement about the universe during that enforced dive into the equations of calculus, introductory variety.

I've only read 25 pages of Infinite Powers, yet already I'm fascinated by calculus -- because Strogatz, a Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell, is both an excellent writer and a talented expositor of this difficult subject. 

Here's a sampling in Strogatz' own words of what's intrigued me in the few pages I've perused so far. (The headlines are mine.)

Calculus is key to modern civilization.
Without calculus, we wouldn't have cell phones, computers, or microwave ovens. We wouldn't have radio. Or television. Or ultrasound for expectant mothers, or GPS for lost travelers. We wouldn't have split the atom, unraveled the human genome, or put astronauts on the moon. We might not even have the Declaration of Independence.

The universe is mathematical. 
For reasons nobody understands, the universe is deeply mathematical. Maybe God made it that way. Or maybe it's the only way a universe with us in it could be, because nonmathematical universes can't harbor life intelligent enough for us to ask the question.

In any case, it's a mysterious and marvelous fact that our universe obeys laws of nature that always turn out to be expressible in the language of calculus as sentences called differential equations. Such equations describe the difference between something right now and the same thing an instant later or between something right here and the same thing infinitesimally close by.

Calculus expresses the universe's operating system.
To put this awesome assertion another way, there seems to be something like a code to the universe, an operating system that animates everything from moment to moment and place to place. Calculus taps into this order and expresses it.

Infinity is what gives calculus its power.
Calculus succeeds by breaking complicated problems down into simpler parts. That strategy, of course, is not unique to calculus. All good problem-solvers know that hard problems become easier when they're split into chunks. The truly radical and distinctive means of calculus is that it takes this divide-and-conquer strategy to its utmost extreme -- all the way out to infinity.

Instead of cutting a big problem into a handful of bite-size pieces, it keeps cutting and cutting relentlessly until the problem has been chopped and pulverized into its tiniest conceivable parts, leaving infinitely many of them. Once that's done, it solves the original problem for all the tiny parts, which is usually a much easier task than solving the initial giant problem.

The remaining challenge at that point is to put all the tiny answers back together again. That tends to be a much harder step, but at least it's not as difficult as the original problem was.

Even the quantum world bows down to calculus. 
Admittedly, some aspects of our ever-changing world lie beyond the approximations and wishful thinking inherent in the Infinity Principle. In the subatomic realm, for example, physicists can no longer think of an electron as a classical particle following a smooth path in the same way that a planet or a cannonball does.

According to quantum mechanics, trajectories become jittery, blurry, and poorly defined at the microscopic scale, so we need to describe the behavior of electrons as probability waves instead of Newtonian trajectories. As soon as we do that, however, calculus returns triumphantly. It governs the evolution of probability waves through something called the Schrodinger equation.

It's incredible but true: Even in the subatomic realm where Newtonian physics breaks down, Newtonian calculus still works. In fact, it works spectacularly well.

Completed infinity is the original sin of calculus. 
Should we take the plunge and say that a circle truly is a polygon with infinitely many infinitesimal sides? No. We mustn't do that, mustn't yield to that temptation. Doing so would be to commit the sin of completed infinity. It would condemn us to logical hell.

...Like the biblical original sin, the original sin of calculus -- the temptation to treat a circle as an infinite polygon with infinitesimally short sides -- is very hard to resist, and for the same reason. It tempts us with the prospect of forbidden knowledge, with insights unavailable by ordinary means.

The sin of dividing by zero.
All across the world, students are taught that division by zero is forbidden... The root of the problem is infinity. Dividing by zero summons infinity in much the same way that a Ouija board supposedly summons spirits from another realm. It's risky. Don't go there.

...The transgression that dragged us into this mess was pretending that we could actually reach the limit, that we could treat infinity like an attainable number. 

...In the context of chopping a line into pieces, potential infinity would mean that the line could be cut into more and more pieces, as many as desired but still always a finite number and all of nonzero length. That's perfectly permissible and leads to no logical difficulties.

What's verboten is to imagine going all the way to a completed infinity of pieces of zero length.

That, Aristotle felt, would lead to nonsense -- as it does here, in revealing that zero times infinity can give any answer. And so he forbade the use of completed infinity in mathematics and philosophy. His edict was upheld by mathematicians for the next twenty-two hundred years.

Infinity is a dangerous temptress. 
Somewhere in the dark recesses of prehistory, somebody realized that numbers never end. And with that thought, infinity was born. It's the numerical equivalent of something deep in our psyches, in our nightmares of bottomless pits, and in our hopes for eternal life. 

Infinity lies at the heart of so many of our dreams and fears and unanswerable questions: How big is the universe? How long is forever? How powerful is God? In every branch of human thought, from religion and philosophy and science and mathematics, infinity has befuddled the world's finest minds for thousands of years.

Discrete and continuous become one. 
Consider how an old-fashioned analog clock differs from a modern-day digital/mechanical monstrosity. On the analog clock, the second hand sweeps around in a beautifully uniform motion. It depicts time as flowing. Whereas on the digital clock, the second hand jerks forward in discrete steps, thwack, thwack, thwack. It depicts time as jumping. 

Infinity can build a bridge between these two very different conceptions of time. Imagine a digital clock that advances through trillions of little clicks per second instead of one loud thwack. We would no longer be able to tell the difference between that kind of digital clock and a true analog clock. 

Likewise with movies and videos: as long as the frames flash by fast enough, say at thirty frames a second, they give the impression of seamless flow. And if there were infinitely many frames per second, the flow truly would be seamless. 

...So in everyday life, the gulf between the discrete and the continuous can often be bridged, at least to a good approximation. For many practical purposes, the discrete can stand in for the continuous, as long as we slice things thinly enough. In the ideal world of calculus, we can go one better.

Anything that's continuous can be sliced exactly (not just approximately) into infinitely many infinitesimal pieces. That's the Infinity Principle. With limits and infinity, the discrete and the continuous become one. 

Get real. Accept limits. Embrace continuous. 
From the beginning, calculus has stubbornly insisted that everything -- space and time, matter and energy, all objects that ever have been or will be -- should be regarded as continuous. Accordingly, everything can and should be quantified by real numbers.

In this idealized, imaginary world, we pretend that everything can be split finer and finer without end. The whole theory of calculus is built on that assumption. Without it, we couldn't compute limits, and without limits, calculus would come to a clanking halt.

If all we ever used are decimals with only sixty digits of precision, the number line would be pockmarked and cratered. There would be holes where pi, the square root of two, and any other numbers that need infinitely many digits after the decimal point would exist. 

Even a simple fraction such as 1/3 would be missing, because it too requires an infinite number of digits (o.333...) to pinpoint its location on the number line. If we want to think of the totality of all numbers as forming a continuous line, those numbers have to be real numbers.

They may be an approximation to reality, but they work amazingly well. Reality is too hard to model any other way. With infinite decimals, was with the rest of calculus, infinity makes everything simpler.

Science is our best guide to a possible supernatural reality

Here's another comment from David C. Lane on a recent post of mine that makes so much sense, I'm sharing it even before I've even lunch. Sometimes my hunger for transmitting truth is greater than my stomach's yearning for food. 

Didn't someone  once say, man does not live by bread alone? (or Trader Joe's meatless chick'n tenders).

Lane talks about his Remainder Conjecture in which supernatural claims should only be accepted after a rigorous examination of them through the lens of science.

This fits with David Hume's observation, which I wrote about yesterday, that we have a tremendous amount of evidence for the physical laws of nature, and extremely little evidence for any possible supernatural phenomena.

So any claim, for example, that someone was able to use ESP to predict a future event, or perform a miracle that violated the laws of nature, has to be viewed extremely skeptically absent very convincing evidence that the supernatural event actually occurred.

After all, we humans are mistaken all the time about what happens in our minds. We accept illusions as fact. We conjure up stories that fit with our desires and sense of self. We forget things. We lie to others and sometimes to ourselves.

Science generally wants to know how something happened, though this is less important when accurate predictions can be made about what is happening. For example, the basics of genetic inheritance were understood before DNA was discovered. And quantum physics is marvelously successful without understanding what exactly is going on at the quantum level.

But if someone makes a claim about having experienced a supernatural phenomenon, we need to ask how that happened. What in the human brain is able to contact a supposed supernatural realm? Of if that capacity isn't in the brain, then where is it? In an immaterial soul? OK, if that's hypothesized, then where is the evidence for soul?

Below Lane's comment I've shared an excerpt from an essay he shared in another recent comment, "The Virtual Reality of Consciousness." The basic message of the essay is that our consciousness doesn't reflect reality as it is, but as our mind makes it out to be. 

Enjoy. I really like Lane's contention that those who view paranormal phenomena as being real should welcome each and every explanation for those phenomena that utilizes the normal.

Spence,

The movie the "remainder conjecture" is to actually open up a blind spot, not hide one.

For instance, if we exhaust physical explanations first (for instance, trying to understand the neural correlate theory of consciousness) and we find after intensive and comprehensive research that it is insufficient to the task, then it opens up a window, what I call a "remainder", which gives us suggestive indications that something ELSE is needed beyond the physical parameters we explored.

So, ironically, those most in favor of the paranormal should be at the forefront of exhausting each and every explanation that utilizes the normal.

This in itself doesn't discount the supernatural in the least, but means that we won't be duped into confusing a purely physical event for a psychic one, which has too often happened in the past.

Science actually starts with ignorance since it doesn't assume (theologically or prematurely) to have any absolute answers and thus from this state then proposes guesses and models and then tests those to see which one best fits the situation and which one provides the greatest predictive value.

Therefore, science is always doubting, always questioning, and in so doing has been wonderfully progressive in terms of understanding that which before was misunderstood.

Also, what used to be seen as magical or mysterious or produced by a god, has often turned out to be generated by physical means. The sun and nuclear fusion (see Hans Bethe for more) is a good illustration of this.

Same with the idea of gravity. Einstein's general theory of relativity made predictions that could be tested.

However, some things like "gravitational waves" were so subtle that it took a 100 years for us to detect them, which was a great breakthrough that just came to light.

The same, of course, with the subatomic physics when physicists knew that there was a missing piece in the Standard Model..... In the early 1960s they theorized a missing Boson, later found and called (after one of its more well known theorizers) the "Higgs Boson."

The Nobel prize in physics was awarded for this breakthrough, though it took decades for the proof needed to verify it.

My point is a simple one. The more patient we are in science to look for physical causes first the better off we will be, since in that pursuit we won't be duped into magical and transcendental temptations too early.

I don't think it is at all absurd to try to find an explanation for all that we can. Indeed, that is why science is science, since it doesn't simply quit but rather chugs onwards..... and in so doing the most remarkable things can happen.

Often people forget that in the early 20th century there were many that felt that the secret of genetics would never be found and instead opted for Elan Vital..... thankfully, biologists and chemists such as Linus Pauling, Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkings, and James Watson were not deterred in looking for physical causations.

Indeed, they were influenced by Erwin Schrodinger's book, WHAT IS LIFE, which argued for looking for a physical medium by which information (genetic and otherwise) could be universally transmitted.

And, lo and behold, the double helix structure of DNA was discovered in 1953..... and it has radically changed our understanding of how life works.

So, again, let us pursue the Wilsonian idea of Consilient reductionism first..... and if that exhausts itself and there remains a "remainder"..... then we have something to build upon.

Or as Blaise Pascal said (or was attributed in saying), which I think goes to the heart of how science proceeds:

little faith, little doubt
great faith, great doubt

and

infinite faith, infinite doubt.

Here's the video Lane made about the Remainder Conjecture.

And here's the excerpt from Lane's essay, "The Virtual Reality of Consciousness." 

Yet, there is a downside in possessing a higher form of consciousness since it allows its owner to ponder all sorts of improbable events that will never actually happen.

We too often can get ensnared with our ideas, our fantasies, our projections and begin believing all sorts of nonsense. For a robust virtual simulator to work it must conjure up a plethora of scenarios that mix and match incongruent narratives.

In other words, for imagination to work it must be massively elastic. The glitch is that sometimes our simulations over take us and we get entrapped within their corridors.

To the degree that we can test our imaginings in the empirical world and acknowledge their successes and failures we are regarded as somewhat sane; to the degree that we cannot we may be viewed as somewhat insane. It is a thin line indeed that separates the two.

Changing your mind is a superpower. Use it.

I have a superpower. But unlike those with superpowers who inhabit the pages of comic books and the screens of movie theaters, my astounding ability is available to everyone.

It's called changing your mind. 

I'm sure you've used it  -- many times. After all, we change our minds about countless things during the course of our lives. For example, I've changed my mind about my...

Politics (Used to be conservative, now I'm a liberal).
Cars (I've gone from a 57' VW bug to a 2017 VW GTI, with many other makes in between). 
Marriage (Got divorced, then remarried).
Profession (Earned a master's in social work, then went into health planning/research).
Eating (Loved meat until I became a vegetarian in 1970).
Residence (Grew up in the country, then lived in cities, now back in the country again).
Religion (Was Catholic for a while as a child, then a believer in an Eastern religion, and now an atheist).

So how is changing your mind a superpower? After all, everybody does this, all the time. True, but since we're so used to changing our minds, it's easy to overlook how marvelous this ability is.

First, to change your mind you need to have one.

Rocks don't have minds. Nor do stars. Living beings, though, have various sorts of minds. We humans have a powerful one. Other primates, ditto, though to a lesser degree. Plants have some sort of cognizance, but probably not a mind. Computers are very adept at certain tasks, yet so far lack what we would call a "mind."

Thus people are able to learn, adapt, modify our thinking, feeling, intuition, and such.

Because very little of human behavior is controlled by instinct, we have the capacity to transmit knowledge between people and across generations. We can read Plato and understand a great mind that lived thousands of years ago, thereby altering our own.

One of the best things about being able to change our mind is how good it feels, and how freeing it is. 

Yesterday I wrote on one of my other blogs about how I struggled to figure out why my DR Field Mower wouldn't start. I changed my mind several times over several days, with a foolish "fried battery" mistake thrown in. But in the end I learned what the problem was, with the aid of a friend who is much more knowledgeable about machines than I am.

I watched him methodically evaluate possible reasons for the mower not starting, with his mind changing about the various possibilities as he went along. This is similar to what a doctor does when arriving at a diagnosis, or a scientist when testing a hypothesis.

If a mind stays stuck, it can't move in a more productive or realistic direction. We have to be willing to give up an idea in order to embrace a better one.

Of course, "better" and "worse" can be difficult to discern in some situations.

When a mower won't start, it's easy to tell which is the better idea. It's the one that, when followed, leads to the mower starting. (In my case, we disabled the neutral switch, which was broken, and the mower started just fine -- so that was a good idea.)

In the examples I gave above about some of the areas in which I've changed my mind during my 70 years of living, most people would agree that in these areas, there aren't objective criteria about which of my mind-changes were better or worse.

Subjectively, though, I can confidently say that my current 2017 VW GTI is a much better car than the 1957 VW bug that I drove in college.

For one thing, the heater works in my GTI, so I don't have to scrape ice from the inside of the windshield while driving along, like I had to at times in college. But if someone is a collector of old cars, a '57 VW bug (or beetle) could be much more attractive to them than the modern car I have now.

Ditto for the other areas.

Though I'm a proud progressive, I'd never say that this is the only valid way of thinking about politics, since conservatives can have equally good reasons for thinking the way they do. And when it comes to marriage, my first wife and I were pleased to be done with each other after 18 years of wedded bliss that eventually turned into non-bliss.

Yet she and I both found other partners with whom we were wonderfully compatible. That's the nature of life: it changes. And as life changes, so does our mind (or, as our mind changes, so does life).

I'm not saying that change is always welcome, or even tolerable.

That isn't what I mean by changing your mind being a superpower. Sure, it is possible to reduce anxiety, fear, suffering, and such by altering one's thoughts and feelings, but I'm not aware of anybody who can remain completely unmoved by severe pain, disappointment, or loss. 

What is possible, though, is altering our psyche to embrace a new reality, even though it may be unwelcome. That's a superpower in and of itself -- the ability to say "This is...," no matter what those three dots stand for.

Here's some examples of what I mean.

On this blog I've been writing quite a bit about the legal, financial, and ethical troubles involving the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), Gurinder Singh Dhillon. I was a member of RSSB for 35 years, so I like to use this organization as an example of how religions can be wrong, and do wrong, since I'm so familiar with it. 

(If I'd remained a Catholic for 35 years, then became an atheist, likely I'd be using Catholicism as an example of bad religion.)

Fairly frequently commenters on my blog posts about the Dhillon family's alleged criminality will say something like, "Brian, when it turns out that the guru did nothing wrong, you're going to be unable to accept this." 

That really isn't true. 

Because I'm adept at changing my mind, if the Indian legal system ends up exonerating Gurinder Singh Dhillon, I'll accept that reality with very little trouble. In the same fashion, back in November 2016 it took a few days for me to fully accept that Donald Trump had been elected president of the United States.

But it didn't take long for my mind to adjust to a new reality.

Now I'm hoping Trump will be a one-term president. If that doesn't happen, and he is re-elected, I'll be disappointed. However, I won't deny that this happened. (I do worry, though, that Trump won't be able to accept the reality of a 2020 defeat.)

I'll end by noting that even though I'm used to many varieties of religious craziness after 15 years of regularly writing here on the Church of the Churchless, it still surprises me when a commenter expresses extreme surprise at how I could have changed my mind about the validity of the RSSB teachings after being a member of the organization for such a long time.

Often I'll ask them how many things they have changed their mind about during their lifetime. Have you stuck with the same job, same car, same residence, same friends, same political views? Almost certainly not.

There's something about religion that encourages a rigidity of mind that isn't nearly as evident in other areas of life. Members of some religions, like Mormonism or Scientology, will shun people who leave the religion. Yet if someone changes their mind in a way that leads them to join the religion, that's not only fine, it's marvelous. 

For many fundamentalists, mind-changing is a one-way street. It's great if you convert to their religion, yet horrible if you deconvert.

Strange? Yes.

But since just about every religion believes that it, and it alone, is privy to the eternal ultimate truth of the cosmos, this encourages true believers to denigrate anyone who embraces that religion, then chooses to leave it. I guess changing one's mind makes those fundamentalists fearful that their chosen faith really isn't true.

Which, almost certainly, it isn't.

I feel good about having changed my mind to realize this. It's much more pleasurable to accept reality as it is, or at least as it appears, than to cling to a rigid way of thinking that no longer makes sense to me.

I'm an atheist with more faith than any religious believer

A week ago I came up with the title to this blog post.

The next day I wrote a comment in reply to someone who goes by "In Search Of" that ended up being a good start to explaining why I consider that atheist me has more faith than religious believers.

Here it is.

Following my comment you'll find excerpts from one of my first Church of the Churchless blog posts from way back in 2004, "Just have faith." I'm pleased that while I've become more of an atheist over the past fifteen years, my basic faith in reality hasn't changed.

In Search Of, you asked: "Brian, help me out here. Am I being unreasonable? Why can't I get an intelligent response to my question? Are we unable to differentiate between logic and faith? Or are the two at opposite poles? Is this the real question we're trying to answer? And is it an answerable question?"

Great questions. Interestingly, I came up with the title of a future blog post yesterday that I wrote down for future reference: "I'm an atheist with more faith than any religious believer." In brief, here's what came to mind that led to the idea for this blog post.

I have faith in reality.

Not just bits and pieces of reality, but reality as a whole -- the entire unimaginably vast cosmos, including the aspects that we humans currently know about and also the parts that remain a mystery. Sure, I also have faith in discrete entities. My doctors. Scientists. My VW GTI. My MacBook Pro.

But it isn't possible to have 100% faith in anything discrete.

For example, every finding of science is open to revision if new facts are revealed. Ditto for my faith in my car, which has had defects that needed to be fixed. And certainly ditto for religious leaders, even those like Gurinder Singh Dhillon that are supposedly "perfect masters."

Yet even given all that, I believe in a cosmos that operates according to some beautiful laws of cause and effect.

This applies at the quantum level also, though the laws appear to be more probabilistic than deterministic. Still, probability is a law, or quantum mechanics wouldn't be such a precise science that's responsible for much of our modern technology.

So my mantra is: "I open myself to reality, however it may appear." I wrote a blog post about this: "An atheist meditation that pleases God."

Where I went astray during many of my 35 years of being devoted to RSSB and the Sant Mat meditation practice was having undue faith in a particular aspect of reality. Namely, RSSB and the gurus in that tradition. My observation is that many others fall into the same trap.

They ignore evidence that doesn't fit into their mental model of what reality is like.

But reality doesn't give a shit about our mental models. Reality is simply what it is: reality. As another favorite saying of mine from Philip K. Dick puts it, "Reality is that which, when we stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

The guru's financial dealings/wrongdoing aren't a matter of belief. They're well documented. But RSSB devotees are so used to relying on belief, they aren't able to accept that no matter what they believe, reality remains.

So no, I don't believe that faith and reason are opposed.

At least, not in how I view faith: as trust in a reality that exists independent of our beliefs about it. Thus my view is that it's up to us humans to do our best to understand reality, not for reality to comport with our beliefs about it. That latter option leads to magical thinking.

I see it all the time in comments on this blog. RSSB devotees feel that if they only scream loudly enough into cyberspace, "The guru did nothing wrong! The guru is God! Stop criticizing the guru!", somehow this will change the reality of the guru's behavior.

All of our mental models are false to some extent.

However, we get so attached to them, often there is no crack in the mental model armor where greater and more accurate knowledge can enter.

Religious people are especially prone to this, because their need to believe that not only this life, but also their afterlife, is in the hands of a higher power is so strong, so compelling, so desperate, their reluctance to adjust their mental religious model is equally strong.

With my VW GTI, which I like a lot but am not hugely devoted to, I still found it difficult to accept that a creaking in the sunroof really was a major defect. I tried quite a few ways to fix it before it finally dawned on me, and my dealership, that the whole thing needed to be replaced, basically. See: "My VW had a creaky sunroof. Here's the tale of a 5-week repair."  

There's an analogy here.

Sometimes an entire mental model needs major refurbishing, or even replacement. That's what happened with me and the RSSB teachings. Well, looks like I just wrote a good portion of the above-mentioned planned post. Thanks for giving me that head start.

And here's the excerpts from the above-mentioned "Just have faith" post.

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.

...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.

We humans are stuck in The Matrix of our own brains

Most religions, mystical practices, and spiritual paths assume there's a truer reality than our everyday existence. Few people, though, think deeply about how it is possible to tell whether Reality X is more true than Reality Y -- assuming that both actually exist.

Historian Yuval Noah Harari does think about this sort of stuff, though. Today I read the Science Fiction chapter in his newest book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. 

Harari notes that movies like The Truman Show and The Matrix show people trapped in an illusory reality that they have to struggle to get out of.

However, both movies -- despite their brilliance -- in the end recoil from the full implications of their scenarios. They assume that the humans trapped within the matrix have an authentic self that remains untouched by all the technological manipulations, and that beyond the matrix awaits an authentic reality that the heroes can access if they only try hard enough.

The matrix is just an artificial barrier separating your inner authentic self from the outer authentic world. After many trials and tribulations both heroes -- Neo in The Matrix and Truman in The Truman Show -- manage to transcend and escape the web of manipulations, discover their authentic selves, and reach the authentic promised land.

This is pretty much the basic plot line of the aforementioned religions, mystical practices, and spiritual paths. Something is preventing us from reaching "the authentic promised land." Original sin. Karmas. Maya. Worldly desires. Attachments. Etc. Etc.

What, though, if all of the ways to get out of the constricted box of illusion are just another form of the matrix? What if attempts to get out of the box we think we're trapped in just lead to a different sort of box? Harari goes on to say:

The current technological and scientific revolution implies not that authentic individuals and authentic realities can be manipulated by algorithms and TV cameras but rather than authenticity is a myth. People are afraid of being trapped inside a box, but they don't realize that they're already trapped inside a box -- their brain -- which is locked within the bigger box of human society with its myriad fictions.

When you escape the matrix the only thing you discover is a bigger matrix. 

When the peasants and workers revolted against the tsar in 1917, they ended up with Stalin; when you begin to explore the manifold ways the world manipulates you, in the end you realize that your core identity is a complex illusion created by neural networks.

Then Harari talks about the common assumption that Life Will Be Really Great only if we can get outside of the box that we feel we're trapped in that limits our capacity to be happy, contented, satisfied, at peace. Since I've been to Fiji, and don't remember being much, if any, happier while i was there, I can relate to this passage.

People fear that if they're trapped inside a box, they will miss out on all the wonders of the world. As long as Neo is stuck inside the matrix and Truman is stuck inside the TV studio, they will never visit Fiji, Paris, or Machu Picchu. 

But in truth, everything you will ever experience in life is within your own body and your own mind. Breaking out of the matrix or traveling to Fiji won't make any difference.

It's not that somewhere in your mind there is an iron chest with a big red warning sign that reads OPEN ONLY IN FIJI! and when you finally travel to the South Pacific you get to open the chest, and out come all kinds of special emotions and feelings that you can have only in Fiji.

And if you never visit Fiji in your life, then you missed these special feelings forever. No. Whatever you can feel in Fiji, you can feel anywhere in the world, even inside the matrix.

This is very much in line with what I said in a 2018 blog post, "Keep the feeling of religion, and discard the theology." 

I don't believe in God. But I believe in the feelings that accompany belief. 

So now that I've realized the falsity of religion, I've discarded the theological aspects of my former belief system and kept the positive feelings.

Here's some examples.

I used to enjoy the feeling that God was looking out for me, managing my life in such a way that even bad experiences were aimed at bettering my long-term salvation chances. This made me feel hopeful about the future, since I considered there was a trajectory to my life that would end with me becoming familiar with divinity, and maybe actually merging with it.

Now, I'm simply hopeful. The feeling is the same. I've just eliminated the crazy theological reasons I had for believing that the future would turn out fine.

Serving God (or a guru, for I was a member of an organization that believed the guru was God in human form) was another enjoyable feeling. Back in my true believing days I engaged in a lot of seva, as it was called, which is an Indian term for service, or volunteering.

Well, I still like to feel like what I'm doing is benefitting others.

But I've discarded the notion that there's some sort of special benefit to being of service to a supposedly Godly person or organization. This allows me to enjoy the sensation of "selfless service" without having that feeling rest on an imagined theological foundation.

People cling to religion because they like the good feelings that come with believing. 

What I'm suggesting is that those feelings are separable from the theological framework, rituals, holy books, forms of worship, and other trappings of a religion. 

In the same fashion, happiness is a feeling. But obviously there are many ways for someone to be happy. There isn't a single cause of happiness, just as there isn't a single cause of the good feelings that people enjoy from embracing religious beliefs. 

You can give up religion and keep the feelings. 

Even if those feelings are happening within a box, or matrix. Here's Harari's thoughts about that.

Perhaps we are all living inside a giant computer simulation, Matrix-style. That would contradict all our national, religious, and ideological stories. But our mental experiences would still be real. If it turns out that human history is an elaborate simulation run on a supercomputer by rat scientists from the planet Zircon, that would be rather embarrassing for Karl Marx and the Islamic State.

But those rat scientists would still have to answer for the Armenian genocide and for Auschwitz. How did they get that one past Zircon University's ethics committee? Even if the gas chambers were just electric signals in silicon chips, the experiences of pain, fear, and despair were not one iota less excruciating for that.

Pain is pain, fear is fear, and love is love -- even in the matrix.

It doesn't matter if the fear you feel is inspired by a collection of atoms in the outside world or by electrical signals manipulated by a computer. The fear is still real. So if you want to explore the reality of your mind, you can do that inside the matrix as well as outside it. 

Harari is an ardent practitioner of meditation, Buddhist variety. I wrote about this in "How meditation helped Yuval Harari write 'Sapiens,' a terrific book." 

Religions forget that we humans are animals

Calling someone animalistic isn't an insult. It is a fact.

We humans are animals. Just unusual ones, since members of no other animal species can write articles (or blog posts) about the fact that they're animals.

Thus our bodies do what other animal bodies do. 

Pee. Poop. Breathe. Have sex. Play. Feel. Sleep. Eat. Drink. And so on. 

Sure, we also think about all kinds of stuff. The structures we build are more impressive than a termite hill. Our social relationships are more complex than a wolf pack. 

Yet the fact remains, we are animals.

One reason I've come to reject religions is that almost all of them deny our animalistic nature. Religious moral codes are filled with ridiculous attempts to ignore the needs and urges of the human body.

Sex is supposed to only occur between a married man and woman. Not out of wedlock. Not between two people of the same gender. (And certainly not between more than two people, regardless of gender.) 

Alcohol is OK in certain religions, though not in others. Recreational drugs like marijuana or psychedelics rarely are. Why? Who knows. Probably because of bullshit like "the body is a temple that must be kept clean and holy."

Other animals enjoy being intoxicated. But only the human animal feels guilty about it, mostly thanks to ignorant religious dogmas. 

For 35 years I bought into some of that body-denying dogma, Eastern mysticism variety. 

I didn't drink alcohol. I didn't use marijuana or any other drugs. I kept my sexual urges within the confines of marriage. But after I got divorced in 1990 from my first wife, and then "divorced" from my religion in 2004, I loosened up.

I realized that life needs to be lived happily, not fearfully.

I stopped worrying about following commandments and rules that no longer made sense to me. I enjoyed sex with my eventual wife-to-be. I enjoyed a glass of wine. I enjoyed smoking (or vaping) marijuans.

Nothing bad happened to me. No thunderbolts rained down from the sky. The heavens didn't part to reveal a god proclaiming you are a sinner! I simply felt more relaxed, more human, more natural, and yes, more animalistic.

So if you're a religious believer who feels like you're being confined in a life-denying box, I highly recommend breaking out. Life is too short to live it anyway other than fully.

The oft-heard adage, among adherents of my previous religion, at least, is flat-out wrong. We aren't spiritual beings having a human experience. We are humans being deluded into pursuing dogmatic spiritual experiences.

Genuine spirituality gets contaminated by religiosity. There are no rules that can't be broken. Everyone who seeks the deeper meaning of life is an army of one. Once you allow yourself to follow in someone else's footsteps, you are unable to find your own way.

Spirituality isn't opposed to the body. It is part and parcel of it. Pleasure is holy. Denying our animalism is a sin against our true nature. 

Why atheist me isn't interested in religious views

Recently a regular commenter on this blog, Spence Tepper, proposed an experiment. Basically, it was a sort of "reflective listening" exercise, where before arguing for your own position, you state as clearly as possible how someone opposed to your position feels/thinks.

Here's what Tepper said:

In fact, Brian, I would like to offer a social psychology experiment for those of us participating here regularly. Let's all work with you to create a list of our names and our current position on matters of Atheism, Agnosticism, Theism etc. And the opposite position. Then, for one week, each day we comment on a blog post you provide talking the exact opposite point of view to our normal perspective.

For example, I would argue purely for Anti-theism and point to the amoral and corrupting influence of all forms of theistic belief, including RSSB. You might choose to adopt the role of a devout Catholic... Arjuna and One Initiated might assume the roles of Atheist and Sceptic. Etc... If any of us falters or appears not to make the best case of the role, anyone is free to call us on it.

And we will be bound to deepen our case for the opposite view, or to do some research on that view and return with a stronger argument for it. My hypothesis is that, after a week of doing this with full sincerity, we will change our position. It might only change a little, or we might actually be firmer in understanding why we actually believe what we do now. But I believe our post experiment position will change permanently.

I also believe that each of us will report an understanding and greater respect of the opposite view we don't have now, which we would be unable to develop without stepping into that role ourselves. Well? Any takers?

Here's why I'm not interested in the idea.

(1) Been there, done that. Not every atheist used to be a religious believer, and not every religious believer used to be an atheist. But often this is the case. When it is, the person who switched sides, so to speak, has a very good understanding of how the other side thinks, because they themselves used to think that way.

This applies to me.

In my teen and early college years, I was an atheist. Then for 35 years I was a devotee of an Eastern religion. And for the past 13 years or so I've reverted to atheism. So I understand the religious mentality because it used to be a core part of my psyche. Meaning, I don't need to put myself in the role of a religious person, since I played that role for many years.

(2) Objective reality doesn't have two sides. Reality isn't this and that. It simply is. 

Of course, when we aren't sure what reality is like, various hypotheses can be put forward, since no one knows which is true. For a long time people debated whether the sun revolved around the earth, or the earth revolved around the sun. Now that debate is over.

Ditto with whether human-caused global warming is happening. I have little or no interest in understanding how global warming deniers think, because their thinking is wrong. Likewise, I consider that anyone who believes in God or the supernatural is wrong, because there is no demonstrable evidence for those beliefs. 

Yes, I understand that lots of people feel that God and the supernatural are real. I used to feel that way myself. But I don't see any point in trying to understand a viewpoint that is almost certainly incorrect. 

(3) Facts would change my mind, not another mind. I love politics. I love discussions. I love newspaper opinion pages. So part of what Spence Tepper suggested appeals to me -- the part about examining the basis for opposing positions. In fact, in my blog posts I regularly ask religious believers to provide solid evidence that God or the supernatural exists. 

I'm very much open to changing my atheist mind, but so far no one has provided that evidence.

However, it isn't understanding a religious believer's mind that would cause this change. Like I said above, I used to have that sort of mind. I remember how I used to think, and now I don't think that way, since it no longer makes sense to me.

In some cases, knowing how another mind feels about something is instructive. I like to read Top Critic reviews on the Rotten Tomatoes web site when deciding whether to watch a certain movie. But when it comes to deciding whether God exists, or the supernatural exists, for me this isn't a matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact.

Again, I already understand why people believe in God and the supernatural. I'm sympathetic to those beliefs, since I used to have them myself. Yet I don't see any reason to restate them, as Tepper suggested. The facts are on the side of atheism, and that's much more important to me than the mental mindset of a religious believer. 

Join the godly, supernatural, mystical "I Don't Know For Sure" club

It gives me great pleasure to invite not only visitors to this blog, but everybody in the whole freaking world, to join a non-exclusive club I've just formed:

The I Don't Know For Sure club. 

Admission is free. There are no dues. Also, no meetings. Nor any sort of organization. This club exists only in the minds of those who answer "no" to a simple question.

Are you 100%, completely, absolutely, without-a-doubt confident that what you believe about god, the supernatural, and mystical experiences is objectively true?

Now, though this question is simple, I still feel a need to explain it.

What I'm after here is getting people to consider whether there is at least the tiniest sliver of doubt that their spiritual/religious beliefs, or lack thereof, are true.

And I've used "objectively" to define true.

Meaning, I'm not asking about whether someone has an absolutely firm belief that, for example, God either exists or doesn't exist; that life after death either exists or doesn't exist; or that it is possible or impossible to experience a supernatural realm.

A belief is subjective. I'm asking about objective reality. For it sure seems that either God exists, or God doesn't exist, no matter whether humans believe or don't believe in God. 

I've become an atheist. I no longer believe in God, life after death, or supernatural mystical experiences. Yet here's the thing: 

I don't know this with absolute certainty. So I'm a non-card-carrying member of the I Don't Know for Sure club, with a membership number of #1 (which, as noted above, only exists in my own mind).

If you also want to join this club, leave a comment on this post to that effect.

And if you like, mention whether you're (1) a religious/spiritual believer who isn't 100% sure that what you believe is objectively true, (2) if you're an atheist who isn't 100% sure that your non-belief is objectively true, or (3) someone in-between who isn't sure whether whatever it is you believe or don't believe is objectively true. 

My theory, which admittedly may not hold up, is that despite the obvious great divide between religious believers and atheists, there's a thin bridge that unites most of them: a recognition that what they consider to be objectively true, may not be.

In my case, I see atheism as being much more probable.

But this means there's a chance I could be wrong. I readily admit this, and have done so frequently in my churchless blog posts. That said, I don't think there's a high probability I'm going to live on in some ethereal form after my bodily death.

However, if this happens I'll be overjoyed to tell whatever loving divine being I meet on the "other side," Wow, I sure was wrong. (If it's a hateful devilish being, I won't be as enthusiastic about this.)

Admitting that no one knows for sure strikes me as a wonderful way to bridge the gap between religious belief and atheism. Sure, it isn't a wide bridge, given that I suspect many, if not most, people would say they're at least 99% sure that, say, God either exists or doesn't exist.

But any admission of "I don't know for sure" leaves open the door to looking upon those with different views with a kinder, gentler, less dogmatic eye.

And this is a very good thing in our current world where people are increasingly divided into opposing tribes that find little or nothing good to say about the other side, or see little or nothing they have in common.

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.