Edit A Repost Religion, As It Is March 25, 2011 at 1:21pm I was raised by a Practical Nurse mother who was a very devout Christian, from an Amish/Mennonite background, who insisted I read the Bible and learn all its stories and go to church. Despite my many years as a scientist I still find comfort in praying to God even though I know God might not exist/care. Consider this: there are 2000+ religions on the globe, and everyone already knows what its like to be an atheist, because all you need to do is look at someone elses religion and say Well its patently ridiculous that you would believe in that, and of course theyre looking back at you and thinking the same thing. Try an experiment: the next time you meet someone new/random, whether its on an airplane or in a bar, ask them if theyve ever heard of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Experiment. I guarantee you the number of people who have will be outweighed heavily by the number who havent. But everyone will be able to tell you all the details of whatever cultural story they grew up on. You dont need to be an anthropologist to recognize that our nervous systems absorb whatever our cultures pour into us. So if you grew up in Saudi Arabia, chances are you love Islam. And if you were born in Rome, you probably love Catholicism; in Tel Aviv, Judaism; in Springfield, Ohio, Protestantism (apologies for the broad brush strokes here, Im clearly overgeneralizing, but I think you get the point). So its not a coincidence that theres not a blossoming of Islam in Springfield, Ohio, and theres not a blossoming of Protestantism in Mecca. Its because were products of our culture, and we accept whatevers poured into us. If there were one truth, you would expect that it would spread everywhere evenly, but clearly the data doesnt support that. The crazy part is, our cultures pour this stuff into us, and then sometimes people are willing to fight and die over their particular stories. Are you familiar with the creation story of the Bakuba kingdom of the Congo? It goes like this: There was a white giant named Mombo who had a sharp pain in his belly, and he vomited up the earth and the sun and the moon and the stars. Then he had a second pain, and he vomited up the animals and people and trees. Included in that second ejection was the leopard, the anvil, the eagle, woman, the monkey Fumu, firmament, medicine, man, and lightning. If you find the creation story of the Bakuba to be an unlikely explanation as to how we got here, keep in mind that if you were Bakuba, you would find equally bizarre the Western story of the naked couple and the talking reptile and the prohibited produce. AND if you were Bakuba living in Kansas, you would be fighting to get your story into your childrens textbooks. The holy books written by the worlds religions are often quite beautiful, and crystallize hard-won wisdom, but keep in mind the fact that these were written millennia ago by people who didnt know about the size of the cosmos, the atom, or what molecules were, or the Big Bang, or bacterial infection, or DNA, or computation, or even very much about neighboring landscapes/cultures. Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out that the religious stories of one generation become the literary entertainment of the next--and indeed, you can see that nobodys fighting over Isis and Osiris anymore, or the Greek/Roman gods. Im not suggesting that the Bakuba story is wrong or that the Adam and Eve story is wrong because the two are competing stories...as a scientist, Im suggesting that theyre wrong because all the available evidence weighs against them. For example, the biblical story suggests that the world is 6000 years old while our best science tells us that its 4.5 billion years old, which means the biblical account has to somehow explain how the Japanese were making pottery 4000 years before the earth existed. For my money, this sort of thing puts me somewhere in the middle. Ive felt for a long time that we know too little to commit to strict atheism, yet we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story. So what surprises me is the amount of certainty I find out there. When you walk into a bookstore, youll find books by the neo-atheists and books by the fundamentally religious, and they argue with each other and they polarize each other and they spend all of their energies on that. Maybe there should be another voice here? That seems far too limited for a modern discussion. Because if you think about the space of possibilities... Take the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions--bam! Thats one point in the possibility space. Take the eastern religions--bam! Thats another point. The idea that were just mechanical pieces and parts and we shut off when we die, thats yet another. We were planted here by space aliens...sounds absurd, but heck, its still a possibility. When you start populating the possibility space with these 2000+ data points, what you realize is that there are vast landscapes in between these possibilities as well. All of these points are infinitesimally unlikely, but together they add up to this possibility space, and there hasnt been enough discussion about this space as a whole. Instead, the discussion has been limited to what I consider a false dichotomy, God vs. no God. And thats where the conversation has ended! True, there are some people in the middle, and they sometimes describe themselves using the term agnostic. I dont use that term because its typically used as a weak term. Often, when people say theyre agnostic, what they mean is Im not sure if the guy with the beard on the cloud exists or doesnt exist. So I call myself a Possibilian. And the belief behind Possibilianism is an active exploration of new ideas, and a comfort with the scientific temperament of creativity and holding multiple hypotheses in mind. As a Possibilian, anything goes, but only at first. Then, I import the tools of science to rule out parts of the possibility space. For instance, while it would be really cool if ESP existed, to the extent that we can measure things now, we can’t find any evidence to support it. Possibilianism basically picks up where the toolbox of science leaves off, when we no longer have the tools to address the questions we have, and must simply understand the space of possibilities, some of which we can rule out, but others which we are unable to at this time. The reason it is so important to keep that open-mindedness about the parts that we dont know is because we know for certain about the magnitude of things we dont know. In every generation of scientists, people have always felt that they have all the pieces and parts that they need in order to answer what is going on around them in the cosmos. But just imagine trying to explain the Northern lights without an understanding of the magnetosphere, or trying to explain the heart before the concept of a pump was invented, or trying to understand how muscles work before electricity was discovered. You would make theories, but you would be doomed to be incorrect. And thats where, in many instances, people found comfort in religion, superstition and the supernatural. Most people go through life without giving a second thought to anything beyond this planet except for their superstitions concerning life after death. But, there are a few of us who would like to understand a little more than this ‘anthill’ we live on. So, we take Newtonian physics, and Einsteinian physics and quantum mechanics, and we think, ok, maybe we can construct a plausible explanation of the cosmos without resorting to invented Gods, Snakes, Spirits and Fallen Angels. If we don’t have all the pieces and parts, we have a lot of the pieces and parts, especially in the realm of Mathematics. With Mathematics, astrophysicists look at the movement of the planets and galaxies, and they look at the gravitational pull, and they realize something is missing. Theres something out there that we cant quite see or smell or touch, but it must be there to make the equations work. So, they call this fudge factor dark matter. We dont exactly know what it is, but we require it to make the equations balance out. Our telescopes and sensors are just not that sophisticated! Some of you may already know: dark matter isnt a small fudge factor, its 90% of all known matter! Even I have to admit thats a lot to sweep under the rug! But it is no worse than believing Eve doomed all of Humanity by eating of the ‘Fruit of Good and Evil’ then offering a bite to gullible, unsuspecting Adam! If you were blind and I dressed you in a metal suit and placed you equidistant between two powerful magnets where you would be unable to advance toward one or the other, you may not know what to think. You may very easily believe your parents if they told you spirits had disabled you. My point is, we have great facility to believe what out parents taught us. That is why the vast majority of us believe pretty much what our parents believe. Consider the human brain. Its the most complicated device we have ever found; its essentially an alien computational material. It is so dense in its connectivity that if you were to take a cubic millimeter of brain tissue, there are more connections in there than stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Yet somehow, this wet, mechanical networked system is YOU. Its all your hopes and dreams and aspirations and emotions. If you were to lose a little part of your pinky, you wouldnt really be any different, but if you lost an equivalently sized piece of neural tissue, that would completely change your conscious state. The problem is, we dont know how to take mechanical pieces and parts and build private subjective experience out of that. Imagine if I gave you a trillion tinker toys and told you to start hooking them up. At what point do you add one more tinker toy and say, Ah-ha! Its experiencing the taste of Parmesan Regiano cheese now? Thats the problem. We dont have any way to apply our equations to determine how we perceive the redness of red or the smell of a pear. Not only do we not have a theory of how the brain works, we dont even know what such a theory would look like. All of this calls for a bit of intellectual humility. Despite so many people who think they can prove the existence of God, some would ‘burn me at the stake’ if they could; I also can not disprove the existence of God or Gods, for that matter. Remember, the 2000+ religions? Being unable to prove God doesn’t exist, doesnt necessarily mean God exists or is a ‘he or she’! Our current tools are simply insufficient for the task. So I keep both Religion and Science at my side. But both Science and Religion have to be looked at objectively. I am perfectly willing to give Religion the same ‘fudge factor’ I give Science. Remember the ‘Dark Matter’? What I can’t stomach are the ‘Intellectual Primitives’ who have no ideas of their own and are simply parroting what they were taught by their equally primitive parents, and swear they, and only they, know the ‘Truth’, whatever that is; and everyone else who thinks differently is ‘Damned’! These people need a dose of Intellectual Humility! I am not saying you should disbelieve everything your parents taught you. There are some domains where its appropriate to be decisive and believe what you were taught, and some domains where its not so appropriate. Would you stop a random person in the middle of town or in the middle of nowhere and ask him or her if he or she thinks there are extraterrestrial civilizations? Do you care what his or her opinion is? Would you value his or her opinion more than, say, an astrobiologist’s opinion? Many people would, particularly, if the person in question was not random, but rather someone trusted! Therein, lies the problem. Humans are more likely to believe someone they trust over someone unknown, even when the trusted person has absolutely ‘no knowledge’ about the thing you are inquiring about. The second part of the equation is that people are more likely to believe those who reinforce their own beliefs! That helps explain the 2000+ Religions I wrote about previously. I feel, and I think there are some other people who think as I do, sick and tired of people acting as though theyre certain about things that they cant possibly be certain about. As Voltaire said, uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd position. As a Possiblian, I would rather geek out and be creative, look at new narratives and hold multiple possibilities in mind with comfort. If I had the gift of gab and the power of persuasion, I would try to impart one thought to the ‘know it all primitives’. In my opinion, the most important aspect of Science is : I don’t know. By admitting, I don’t know; I am more likely to stumble upon a plausible explanation if I am using scientific principles in my research; as opposed to someone who ‘thinks they know‘ and finds a ‘trusted primitive‘ more believable than me! For anyone struggling to reconcile the conflict between Religion, as it is, and Science; keep an open-mind and actively explore new ideas. This is important for our education, for our legislation, perhaps even for the future of our warfare, or lack thereof. Why not live a life free from dogma, bias and superstition? Live a life full of awe and wonderment and curiosity. Live a life that celebrates possibility, and praises uncertainty and welcomes change and the exchange of new ideas!
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 22:49:15 +0000
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