Tag Archives: God

A Guide to Reality, Part 2

Posted on by

A couple days ago, I stated my intention (you might even say I promised) to work through Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without IIlusions right here at WOCS. That was in part 1. Believe it or not, this is part 2.

In his preface, Professor Rosenberg explains that he wrote the book for people who are ready to face reality. By that he means people who believe there is no God (atheists) or have serious doubts (agnostics) and who want to know what science has to say about a few perennial questions that keep some of us awake at night. He thinks the scientific view of reality has certain consequences:

The book is about those consequences. It provides an uncompromising, hard-boiled, no-nonsense, unsentimental view of the nature of reality, the purpose of things, the meaning of life, the trajectory of human history, morality and mortality, the will, the mind and the self (ix).

Rosenberg scoffs at attempts to reconcile science and religion. He holds that “an unblinking scientific worldview requires atheism” (viii), which explains why most of America’s leading scientists are atheists and those who aren’t atheists are mostly agnostics.

I don’t think it makes any difference to Rosenberg whether science leads us to atheism or atheism leads us to science. He started out in physics, ended up in philosophy, branched out to biology and economics, and somewhere along the way became an atheist. But someone might proceed in the other direction: doubting God’s existence and then looking to science to explain why the world is the way it is. His contention is that science and atheism are compatible, while science and religion (or theism) aren’t.

In my opinion, however, he exaggerates the conflict. You don’t have to deny God’s existence in order to be an excellent scientist. Instead, what you need to do is put thoughts of God aside when you’re doing science. Science is the search for natural explanations, not supernatural ones. Invoking God as the explanation for the existence of the human eye, for example, amounts to throwing up your hands and choosing a different subject. If you want to speculate about some god or other creating the universe and initializing the fundamental constants (like the mass of an electron) to values supportive of life, you’re not doing science. In this methodological sense, a scientist has to be an atheist.

But despite what Rosenberg says, nobody knows why or how the universe came into existence; or if it’s always existed in some form or other; or whether our universe is one of many. Even if scientists eventually figure out the answers to those questions, we’ll never be able to rule out the possibility that some creator or creative force beyond our universe got the cosmic ball rolling. Nor will we ever be able to prove that God, Zeus or Santa Claus isn’t watching right now to see if we’ve been naughty or nice. What evidence could there be to prove that kind of negative?

What we can say is that, historically speaking, science has shown a vast number of previously mysterious phenomena to be natural processes. There is no reason to think we need an entity outside space and time to explain why there are stars and galaxies, or why there are birds and bees, or why the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth. As fewer phenomena have seemed to require a supernatural explanation, it has seemed less and less likely that there is Anyone Up There. As we’ve learned more about our world, ancient stories have become much less plausible. So far as science is concerned, God is a dead letter.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean God is dead, however implausible that he, she, it or they either are or ever were “alive”.

Next time: stories and scientism.

What Made the Big Bang Bang?

Posted on by

Physicists believe our universe began with a “Big Bang” about 14 billion years ago. The evidence suggests that the universe was infinitely hot and infinitely dense before it rapidly expanded, resulting in the still-expanding universe of which we are a tiny part.

But the physicists don’t know why the Big Bang occurred or what, if anything, existed before it. Maybe an earlier universe collapsed upon itself and then bounced back in a tremendous explosion. Maybe our universe resulted from some kind of random quantum fluctuation — or from a really cool experiment carried out by a kid with blue skin and 12 eyes.

Another hypothesis, of course, is that God kicked off the Big Bang. I wouldn’t bet on that, but you never know (although you might get to know if you ever join the choir invisible).

It’s also been suggested by some physicists that a black hole in another universe may have had something to do with the beginning of ours. The latest theory along those lines is that a star in a universe with four spatial dimensions (not our familiar three) ended its life as a supernova, creating a 4-D black hole at its core and simultaneously ejecting some debris out into 4-D space. Our universe could be a 3-D sliver of this 4-D cosmic debris. Or something like that.

Something immediately struck me when I read an article about this latest theory. It wasn’t the plausibility of the theory, which I’m almost completely unqualified to judge. It was the sudden feeling that we’ve now figured out why the Big Bang occurred. And no god had anything to do with it! It’s just the cosmos and us after all!

If I were religious, this momentary reaction might be understandable. But I’m not. So why did the idea that there’s no god out there pulling strings make me feel suddenly lonely? I guess it’s hard to escape your upbringing, no matter how old you get. And all that space out there can make a person feel a little bit alone, even on a planet with 7 billion people and 3 billion internet users.

Of course, God could have created that other universe that gave rise to ours, or the even earlier universe that gave rise to that one, or the one that came before that other one, and so on and so on, but somehow it’s just not the same once universes start giving birth to new ones all by themselves. 

http://www.nature.com/news/did-a-hyper-black-hole-spawn-the-universe-1.13743

People Who Live in Glass Houses

Posted on by

Having lived in suburbs most of my life, I know one reason people live in such places. To get away from other people.

It can be a stunningly beautiful day, all’s right with the neighborhood, but if you take a drive, you’ll rarely see another person who isn’t in a car. If you take a walk, you might hear a child’s voice here or there, or see someone walking a dog, or bump into a jogger or two, but you’ll usually be the only person around. It’s as if you’re visiting a Potemkin village set up to advertise the beauty of suburban living.

There is something strange about living so close to people you can’t see. Which has sometimes made me wonder what it would be like if the walls of our houses or apartments were made of glass. Would we still ignore our neighbors? Would we lead better lives if we were always on display? What if the lights were always on? Maybe God was invented because our ancestors didn’t live in glass houses with 24-hour lighting.

Coincidentally, I recently got around to reading Lolita. Humbert Humbert had something to hide, so it’s understandable that his thoughts ran in this direction too:

“… all along our route countless motor courts proclaimed their vacancy in neon lights, ready to accommodate salesmen, escaped convicts, impotents, family groups, as well as the most corrupt and vigorous couples. Ah, gentle drivers, driving through summer’s black nights, what frolics, what twists of lust, you might see from your impeccable highways if Kumfy Kabins were suddenly drained of their pigments and became as transparent as boxes of glass!”

And later:

“I often felt that we lived in a lighted house of glass, and that any moment some thin-lipped parchment face would peer through a carelessly unshaded window and obtain a free glimpse of things that the most jaded voyeur would have paid a small fortune to watch.”

As the fortune cookie says, people who live in glass houses should put up lots of curtains. 

Saving God: Religion After Idolatry by Mark Johnston

Posted on by

Johnston tries to determine what God would really be, not the God necessarily worshiped by Judaism, Christianity or Islam. He develops the idea of the actual Highest One as “the outpouring of Existence Itself by way of its exemplification in ordinary existents for the sake of the self-disclosure of Existence Itself”. The teleological “for the sake of” is difficult to understand, which Johnston acknowledges, since he is suggesting a completely naturalistic view of existence. His view is panentheistic: God is wholly constituted by the natural realm.

Johnston’s argument leads to an extended discussion of how existence presents itself to us, how we are samplers of Presence, not producers of Presence. He rejects the idea that we perceive the world via representations in our minds. Perception is of the world itself. He concludes by suggesting that we survive death by identifying ourselves with the people who live on after us, an idea that must be discussed at much greater length in his slightly more recent book “Surviving Death”.  (5/7/10)