Standing on Your Own Two Feet

On a Facebook group that I read, a young man posted the following:

So... I'm kind of struggling right now, and I want to reach out to try to receive some support from those who have been where I am now. 

Friends, it's like every morning I'm waking up feeling more and more depressed. When I first started questioning, I felt hopeful because I still had a commitment to many of my old standards... but now, as I have questioned and deconstructed more, it feels as if my moral compass is shattering. It's as if I no longer know what things are healthy for me and for society, and I am scared of giving in to only my baser desires now that I have lost whatever used to counteract them. 

Has anyone been here? How did you cope? Is there a place beyond this in which I can hope to recover healthy restraints for myself, ones that are authentic for me and in which I believe?

Here is my response:

This is the nihilistic phase. If you have grown up in the church, you were like a vine growing on a trellis. Suddenly the trellis is removed and you feel the loss of both the support and the protection it gave. I can best explain with an analogy.

When you were a boy, perhaps you learned to ride a bike with the help of training wheels. If you did, you might remember how you felt when those training wheels were removed: a sense of exhilarating freedom, a release from the constraint of those wheels. But that sense of freedom was probably not unmixed with fear and a little vertigo. With those training wheels off, you could ride anywhere as fast and freely as you wanted. You could fly like a bird, but you could also crash and injure yourself. With that freedom came a scary but wonderful sense that you were now wholly responsible for keeping yourself alive and safe.

When the religious framework on which you had built your life to this point dissolved from underneath you, you initially experienced the exhilaration of sudden freedom. You are now experiencing the great and terrible realization that you alone are responsible for your actions and your life. You miss the certainty of relying on the idea of absolute truth and you are scared that you will make a terrible decision and ruin your life or wreak havoc around you. 

But there is reason for confidence and hope. You are no longer a frail, thin shoot that collapses to the ground if the stake holding it up is removed. You are a grown man with a strong, substantial stem that can support itself.

You have a lifetime of experiences to draw upon to show you how to be a good man. Look around you and find the examples of good people living vibrant lives of honesty and integrity. Also look around you to see examples of the results of bad choices and dissolution.

You know inside you what it is to be a person of worth. Your inner voice is still there and will guide you if you listen to it. You just need to dig down inside and feel that sudden rush of realization that you are a free and independent person and you can take charge of your destiny and succeed!

Once this happens, you will no longer live in fear that you will offend God. Do you want to do something that the church forbade you. Fine! You are free to do it! You are free to jump in and experience that sensation. But also remember you are responsible -- only you -- for the consequences. Think first. Think of yourself. Think of those around you. Ask yourself if the action you are contemplating is consistent with being a man of integrity. Ask yourself if that action will bring harm to yourself or another. If the benefits outweigh the risks and the costs, then you are right to pursue that course of action. If your inner voice advises you to steer clear, then give it a miss. 

The church teaches some good and right things. That is why you loved it. The church also teaches some indifferent or dubious things. That is why you doubted it. The church also teaches some wrong and bad things. And that is why you left it, at least in some sense. Keep the good. Discard the indifferent. Eschew and decry the bad.

Several years ago, I left religion and have since entirely discarded all belief in the supernatural. What I used to call the influence of the Holy Ghost I now simply refer to as my inner voice. It still speaks to me as strongly and consistently as it always has, perhaps even more. I have a clear and strong sense of right and wrong. That which increases the total happiness in the world is right, that which decreases it is wrong. I know that if an action brings me some benefit, but only at the expense of another or at the expense of my own integrity, it is wrong and I will eventually regret it. That is the only measuring stick you need to carry around with you to live a good life, free from the unnatural constraints of religion.

My dear young person, take a lesson from someone a little further down the path: if you can increase the amount of light in your life and be a beacon, reflecting that light in the lives of those around you, you will have a happy and fulfilled life. Seek out the good with an unprejudiced heart and an open mind. Discard the bad and banish it from your mind and your life. Peace, Love, and Music.

The Cosmos and I

I no longer entertain any belief in religious doctrines or deities, but I am nevertheless sympathetic to the impulse to invent an explanation that helps us forget our intolerable nothingness relative to the majesty and grandeur of the cosmos.

It also makes me dizzy to contemplate the atoms of my body relative to my whole body so many orders of magnitude larger. We stand, as it were, midway between the inconceivably small and the incomprehensibly vast; and, as quantum physics has shown, we cannot really understand or relate to either extreme.

Ever since the emergence in our genome of the apparatus to support consciousness, memory and language, we have made discoveries about ourselves and our world that we couldn't account for. So we have made up stories to explain the unexplainable.

As our capacity for Reason has grown and our technology has expanded our ability to perceive and understand the inner workings of things very small, very large and very far away, we have been able to discover that the stories we invented in the infancy of our species were just whistling in the dark.

The time has now come when to continue to rely on the supernatural is to deny the real font of every blessing: Reason, Science, Ethics, Technology, and our own ingenuity and drive to understand and improve ourselves and everything around us.

We are in the habit of associating ethical behavior with religion, but that association is nothing more than a happenstance of history. We can learn and teach ethics better and more effectively without the divisiveness that religions invariably impose on their followers.

I do not know whether the thing that thinks my thoughts will continue to exist after my body ceases to function, and frankly I don't really care, not deeply anyway. If I do continue to exist in some form, I hope it will be an agreeable existence. If I don't, I won't be around to be bothered by it.

But whatever state follows this one, if any, my stunningly improbable little spark of consciousness, my brief flicker of existence in the cosmos, though just a ripple in an inconceivably vast ocean of matter/energy, is nevertheless glorious to me.

 

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Sculpting Species

Today on Facebook, someone posted the comment: "nothing evolution designs is rational." This got me to thinking along the following lines. I'm not so sure that statement is true. I don't mean to turn this into a word game by twisting definitions to suit my purpose, but let me try to recast that phrase for purposes of discussion: "because none of the adaptations that have resulted in an increased chance of survival is the result of ???" The result of what? Conscious deliberation? Is that the only thing that can possibly qualify as logical or rational. What about suitability for a particular purpose? Is it a rational or logical outcome if something is repurposed to fill a role that suits its particular nature?

Take feathers, which first appeared on the evolutionary stage as an insulator, a role they're well suited for. But when they chanced to also confer an increased survival advantage by enabling the organism to briefly take to the air, were not their particular properties really being put to a use even more striking than insulation? I think one could argue that it is a rational use of the feather to enlist it in the task of flying.

To design is a deliberate act. It is natural and easy to speak of evolutionary processes in terms that suggest the exercise of a conscious will because organisms so often display such an elegant commingling of form and function. But it is a misleading metaphor and one that contributes to peoples' reluctance to acknowledge its role in speciation. 

I think sculpting is perhaps a more apt analogy for how evolution actually works. We've all seen examples of a block of stone turned into a beautiful statue. No one doubts that these works of art are deliberately created by human artists. But beautiful works of art and magnificent creations can also be created by nothing more than the constant movement of water or air on rock. 

The exigencies of survival exert a similar influence on species of living organisms over time. A tiny random change gives a slight survival advantage to an organism and the genetic code that produced that change is passed on. Later, another tiny random change results in another improvement and is likewise introduced into the species' genome. Other random changes occur that are neutral or harmful to the organism and thus do not confer a survival advantage. Over a very long time and many, many generations, these tiny random changes that pass through the sieve of natural selection gradually accumulate. In invisibly tiny increments they refine the contours of the species, outfitting it ever more perfectly to make a living in its particular ecological niche. 

The reason we know this works is because we have used the principle of exerting selective pressure of our own manufacture, exploiting the gradual accumulation of random mutations to create countless varieties of dogs. All it takes is time and enough genetic variability to give us options.

So to circle back to the original point: I think there is a type of inevitability to evolution. Given a particular set of ecological conditions, species will gradually acquire traits that make them increasingly fit to occupy a particular niche in that ecology. For me, there is a beautiful, but perhaps unconventional rationality in that process.

You are stupid. No, You are stupid.

I was thinking about what people like to call "confirmation bias" and about why it is easy for you to see my confirmation bias, but I, an otherwise rational person, am blind to it myself. It all boils down to the way we think. And that's why the religious and the non-religious can sometimes both appear stupid to the other. This was prompted by someone giving this example:

When someone says they prayed for something (let's say a job to provide for their family), and they don't get a job but they get a surprise sack of groceries on the porch. And they say that God answered their prayer because He took care of them. But then they get kicked out of their house and they say that God answered their prayer because He's blessed them with a trial, which strengthens and humbles them (more blessings) and then they get church welfare. And that's God again, answering their prayer because the Lord provides. What is this called? Is this some sort of logical fallacy?

If your fundamental mindset centers around a belief that a benevolent higher power is personally interested in your happiness, you will interpret the world and all the events of your life in that context. If you are convinced of this deep down, then you are acting with perfect rationality and good sense when you interpret events to fit into this framework.

Conversely, if you are someone who places a high value on evidence and skepticism, i.e. a non-believer, the believer's outlook seems unjustified and you will tend to view his thoughts and actions as irrational, unsupported by evidence, the result of confirmation bias, and stupid. But there, you are trying to fit him into your worldview, and the only slot he fits in is the "stupid stuff" slot.

The believer feels the same way about you. According to his worldview, it is you who are blind, irrational, and your actions shocking and unaccountable. So he is forced to place you in one of the cubbyholes provided by his worldview: you are deceived by Satan, blinded by the world, past feeling, a lost sheep, hardened in sin, etc.

I'm not saying which of these worldviews is "right" and which is "wrong" and, frankly, for the purposes of this discussion it doesn't matter. The point is that the two of you are speaking fundamentally different languages. Each of you is deceived, by the fact that you're both speaking English, into thinking that the other person understands by your words the same meaning you intended those words to convey.

But in reality, your words, which seemed sound and rational when you spoke them, got translated into gobbledygook by the other person's worldview filter, and vice versa. So you're not communicating in any real sense of the word. If you're both patient and kindhearted, you feel mostly pity for the other's delusion. If you're quick to anger, you're mostly annoyed and outraged by the other person's deliberate, intentional intransigence and obstinate refusal to understand what is perfectly clear to you and to any other "rational" person (meaning someone with the same worldview as you).

The key to this dilemma is to try to transcend your worldview and understand not only its limits, but the fact that we all fall into the trap of thinking that our worldview is actually the world. Some escape that trap and some do not. Have pity on those who do not.

Why I Don't Believe

A person posted a testimony on a Facebook group that I follow and the post was liberally sprinkled with the phrase: "we need to believe." I responded as follows:

Why is it necessary for us to believe those things? The world is full of things that we don't have to believe in: this book, that chair, the light coming in the window, the gravity that keeps us from floating away. Those are all things that we can see or feel or experience for ourselves in an unambiguous way and others can do the same.

Let us say I have a chair. I tell people it is the most wonderful chair in the world and so divinely comfortable that every other chair pales in comparison. They will naturally want to see it and sit in it. But what if I don't let anybody ever see it or sit in it? They might suspect that I'm exaggerating or perhaps don't even have a chair at all. Would they be wise or foolish to doubt my word?

Some would say: "show us the chair and then we'll be able to decide for ourselves whether it lives up to your words." Would it be right for me to accuse them of non-belief and to heap scorn on them because of it? Of course it would not be right. Why should I expect people to believe me if I can show them the chair and they can decide for themselves? If I'm telling the truth I have nothing to fear and my word would be vindicated.

It is only if I were not telling the truth or could not produce the chair that I would have to make belief into such a virtue that people would feel guilty or ashamed to admit that they did not believe me. But why would anyone do that? What do I have to gain from their credulity?

Perhaps I could invent another world and tell people that they would go there after they die if only they just believe me. And then, if they believe enough, they will have a chair of their own in that next world. So if things seem tiring in this world, they can comfort themselves with the thought that they'll be able to sit and rest in divine comfort forever in the next life.

If I can get people to believe me, I can invent rules that will place doubt on whether they will go to that good place. Why I could even invent a bad world with no chairs at all where people would go if they didn't believe me. Then think of what I would be able to demand from them -- if they believed me.

Growing up in the church and serving diligently for over 4 decades, I heard much about believing but it wasn't until a few years ago that I started thinking about that. What use is belief? Why would God want to cultivate the characteristics of obedience and belief in his children? We have seen many times that obedience and belief can be misused. Who has not heard of former Nazis claiming they were only following orders? Who has not heard of or experienced snake oil salesmen or other charlatans trying to get people to trust them so they could cheat them out of their money? Blind obedience and belief without evidence are the keys to these bad outcomes.

So I ask again: "why would God primarily want to cultivate these particular characteristics in his children?".

The answer is: "He doesn't." It is only men who claim to speak for God who make credulity and blind obedience into virtues.

Thus when you say "we need to believe", I cannot help but wonder why it is necessary for me to suspend the faculty of Reason in order to accept your words. You say you have a testimony, but feelings you have in your heart are not something I can experience. You say I need to have a testimony, but I have been misled by feelings in my heart before. I have not been able to fully rely on those feelings as a guide for my actions.

And so, I thank you for the kindly intentions of your words, for I feel that they came from your heart with the best of motives. But I think you are deceived and that you would do better to conduct your life by the light of Reason, requiring evidence before allowing yourself to be persuaded to sacrifice your means to another.

Cause and Effect

On a Facebook group that I follow, a person posted the following rant:

Just sent this to an atheist on YouTube...BLEW HIS MIND! I get atheists there to REALLY think about the nonsense they believe in, totally irrational as you see here.
"What do you believe? A first cause which was uncreated and with no beginning or end? No different than me, I just choose to believe that it was God who was uncreated. Evolution breaks the law of cause and effect. Big bang had a cause, and THAT had a cause and THAT had a cause until you MUST reach that first cause which caused everything. This first cause would have to be uncreated, if it was, then you break the rule of cause and effect, it not, then you have an eternal chain of causes going backward for eternity and never has a beginning, thus, you would still be believing in something that does not start anywhere!!! Either way, you CANNOT escape that fact that SOMETHING without a beginning started everything, either God or matter. But if matter, then again it HAS to have a cause which brought it into existence. Now your going backwards again through a never ending eternal chain of causes which never has a beginning, cause if it ever did, it would have to be God since matter cannot create itself from nothing without a cause, here we go backwards again!!! You can't escape God GET IT NOW???"
He wrote back and was PISSED! I notice they get mad, but none have refuted it. They can't.What nonsense do atheists believe in, Steve? It's not a group that makes you proclaim allegiance to a creed before you're allowed to go in the door. It's just a bunch of people who think it's a good idea to have evidence before one can make claims about things. That's about all they have in common.

Here was my response:

You keep saying that science has a law of cause and effect. What is that law? Who formulated it? What facts about the universe is it meant to explain?

The concept you're talking about in this post has a name. It is called an infinite regress. Introducing God into the picture triggers an infinite regress. If I may employ your line of reasoning that everything must have a cause, and we define cause, as you seem to require, as the willful act of a sentient being, then did not that being require a cause to bring it about? And what brought that about? And that? And so on. God does not solve the problem.

The fact of the matter is that we don't know what caused the singularity that preceded our universe, or what caused it to blossom into a universe of immense (to us) size. Reputable science makes no claims on this topic. Why? Because there is no evidence from which to posit a hypothesis. Some people speculate, nothing more, that the universe is engaged in an endless cycle of big crunches where all matter falls into a single point, and big bangs, where it explodes out again into a brand new universe. The thought is intriguing. But we may never know.

All I can say is this. Since the recorded dawn of our species, pretty much everything that could not be explained at the time has been attributed to supernatural power. With the invention of the scientific method, we hit upon a tool that has helped us to systematically discover how things actually work. The history of science is one long train of events where something that had previously been attributed to supernatural influence, was found *and proven* to be the result of discoverable, testable laws. Every single thing to which we have applied the methods of science has yielded the same result. At no time has the answer ever turned out to be "God did it." Not ever. So then why should we now throw our hands in the air and give up trying to understand the universe? Invoking god is a cop out. And a dishonest, lazy, defeatist one at that. I say No Thanks!

Thoughts on the Big Bang

This was my response to a post on a Facebook group that I follow regarding the Big Bang. The poster had been in the habit of berating people for thinking that a Big Bang type of event could be responsible for the universe as we know it. He also tended to insult people for thinking that evolution could be responsible for ... well, anything.

If a lightning strike fells a tree, where was the purpose in that event? It is not possible (I think) to discover the causal chain of events that led up to the final demise of the tree. The felling of that particular tree at that precise second was the result of a discharge of electrical power that had many elements of randomness. One minute there was a mighty oak tree, and the next, there was just a wreck. It had been standing there, growing for decades and a random event destroyed it in an instant.

What were the odds that lightning strike would happen at that precise place at that precise instant? Astronomical. And yet, it occurred. That is the nature of probability. When you're dealing with immense amounts of time and immense amounts of matter interacting in all sorts of ways, it would be surprising if something as rare and astonishing as life did not emerge from time to time.

Here's the second thing I wanted to say. Where would we be today if Kepler and Galileo had just thrown in the towel and said "God makes the planets move. It is not for us lowly humans to question the will of God. Let us not question why. Let us just accept."? They had every reason to throw in the towel. They were as devoutly religious as it is possible to be and were appalled by their findings. They were pressured on every side to just let it be. But the evidence compelled them. So, against their instincts, their better judgment, and their fervent wish that things were otherwise, they bravely incurred the undying enmity of the church and published their findings.

The knowledge they discovered and refined with so much effort and risk has brought us riches beyond price. Truly their contributions kicked off a revolution that has transformed the world from a place where people lived for thirty years on average in the most primitive, filthy, disease-ridden, pain saturated conditions imaginable. It is science that has transformed the world, not religion. Remember it was the church that fought progress every step of the way, decrying it as unnatural, an affront to God, and condemning its followers to eternal damnation.

So where would we be if we just thew our hands in the air and said "well, we'll never understand so we might as well just give up trying."? At every opportunity when we have pushed against the boundaries of knowledge, we have found that what had previously been thought to be in the domain of God's will was really just the operation of discoverable, testable laws working blindly, relentlessly in their particular domains.

There are a million small and large things that science had done to improve our lives. What has religion given us? Persecution, intolerance, inquisitions, jihads, holy wars, Protestants bombing Catholics, Catholics bombing Protestants, Shias murdering Sunnis, Sunnis murdering Shias, Buddhists and Hindus at each other's throats: an endless list of examples of man's inhumanity toward man.

And why do we put up with this state of affairs? Because we persist in believing in the existence of supernatural beings who command us to behave in these terrible ways. So we revere religion that has been the curse and the bane of this world for millennia and we deride and scorn science that has given us long life, prosperity, light, and truth. Can anyone imagine a state of affairs more absurd?