Feb 26 2025

The Conscious Universe: A Counterpoint to Cosmic Indifference

There is a statement made by Richard Dawkins that is often quoted as a succinct, simple description of the mechanistic nature of the universe. It is from his 1995 book called “River Out of Eden”:

“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
—Richard Dawkins in River Out of Eden, 1995.

This oft-quoted statement presents a stark view of our universe—one devoid of design, purpose, good and evil, and possessed only of “blind, pitiless indifference.” While this mechanistic perspective may appear compelling when contemplating the vastness of cosmic scales, it falters significantly when we consider the extraordinary phenomenon of consciousness that exists within this same universe.

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Feb 2 2025

Extrapolating Scientific Confidence

Throughout human history, our understanding of the natural world has grown exponentially through scientific inquiry. This remarkable progress has led many to conclude that science will eventually explain everything, reducing all mysteries to well-understood physical processes. However, this conclusion relies on a dangerous form of extrapolation that fails to account for recent developments in our understanding of knowledge itself.

When analyzing any system, mathematics allows us to estimate unknown values through interpolation – predicting behavior between known data points. While this approach is generally reliable, extending predictions beyond known observations through extrapolation is far more precarious. This distinction becomes crucial when we examine our assumptions about the future of scientific knowledge.

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Jan 16 2025

The Paradox of Christian Criticism: A Case for Constructive Engagement

The criticism of Christianity for historical injustices such as holy wars, patriarchy, and slavery presents an intriguing paradox. While these criticisms appear valid through a modern moral lens, they overlook a crucial historical reality: the very moral framework we use to condemn these actions largely emerged from Christian teachings themselves. Taking this into account suggests different ways of engaging in these debates.

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Dec 2 2024

The Pendulum Swing of Evidence

It is often stated that there is no evidence for God. That’s an easy conclusion to draw if we limit our understanding of the world to the way it seems to operate in day-to-day life. This includes the level of science and technology that we encounter on a regular basis today – things like smart phones with GPS and instant worldwide communication, modern medicine with vaccines and transplants, and AI that has made computers conversational and seemingly creative. In all these things, most people see no clear evidence for God’s existence and in fact, see evidence for the success of modern science and technology.

Given such observations, our minds usually generalize and conclude that they represent the fundamental nature of reality. In other words, what we see is all there is.1 We construct a story that explains what we see and then believe that the story represents all reality. It is then easy to reinforce this with selective learning, confirmation bias, and so on.

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Nov 11 2024

Critical Thinking and Religion

I’ve heard it said by atheists that religion lacks critical thinking. The general idea seems to be that there’s no rational basis for being religious, so anyone who is, must not be thinking carefully about it. If they did think carefully, they would presumably realize that they were in error.

Although the term “critical thinking” is not always used, I think it does capture the essence of the critique.

Obviously, I don’t agree with this viewpoint; I think that there are many religious people who think carefully about their beliefs. While it might be interesting to address this idea directly, when hearing such a statement being made recently, I started thinking about what we mean by “critical thinking” and what some of the challenges are in general with thinking carefully.

A simple place to start is with the Wikipedia entry for Critical Thinking, which lists a number of abilities that critical thinking calls for. These include things like recognizing problems, thinking clearly and logically, understanding and communicating well, and so on.

One particular group of items in the list has to do with the necessity of seeking information on a topic and testing our existing ideas. This group from Wikipedia is:

  • Gather and marshal pertinent (relevant) information
  • Put to test the conclusions and generalizations at which one arrives
  • Reconstruct one’s patterns of beliefs on the basis of wider experience

These seem to describe the need to look around and get relevant information, use it to test our beliefs, and do this on an ongoing basis as new information becomes available and perhaps as our life experiences grow. Implied in the first bullet, I think, is to make sure the information gathered covers the topic completely and is not cherry-picked such as when we fall prey to confirmation bias and echo chambers.

In a nutshell, to test our beliefs on an ongoing basis.

Whether this is a perfect list or not, I think it presents the idea that we need to be open and that doing so is a deliberate and ongoing choice.

All too often, and perhaps this is one place where religion falls short, we limit our search for information to places that are likely to have the same biases that we do, thereby reinforcing our opinions rather than testing them.

This is well-known behavior for religious people, reinforced by communities of faith, regular church activities, and so on. As a result, it can take real effort for religious people to learn about other metaphysical views and to test their own. Considering the list above, this may, indeed, be one way that religious people lack critical thinking, if they are not engaging with alternate viewpoints.

It’s less clear that secular people encounter such regular reinforcing activities other than the fact that our culture is increasingly secular. However, this is not a trivial influence, especially in today’s science and technology-dominated world. If I was a secular person interested in learning more about carefully considered religious views, I probably wouldn’t know where to start, unless I was lucky enough to know someone.

Certainly the popular presentations of religious beliefs wouldn’t work.

As a result, whether intentional or not, it seems that secular people can fall into the same trap as religious people of not really learning about different views in the variety and depth needed to test one’s own perspectives. Both groups being composed of people, the common tendency to stay in our own intellectual comfort zones likely operates both ways.

Personally, I’ve had a hard time finding places for deep, considered discussions of such metaphysical topics. If we were talking about something that had little or no practical impact on society and life, perhaps like sports, this might not be a big deal. But these issues are society-shaping questions that influence how we treat each other, and they form the basis of our systems of morals and ethics.

It seems to me that if one is going to feel strongly enough about these matters to comment on other’s beliefs and perhaps even work to silence them, then it’s incumbent upon us to think critically about these things from both sides, and this includes listening and learning carefully.

Oct 18 2024

Dismissing Experts

I recently finished reading Daniel Dennett’s book “Consciousness Explained”. It was a significant read, full of detailed arguments and illustrations. Although there were some provocative ideas in it, most of them seemed a bit dated, probably because the book is now nearly 30 years old. In addition, the tone of the writing was a little off-putting, with Dennet apparently very confident in his model, even to the point of often deprecating other possibilities in a cringy manner.

The thing is, it seems this sort of writing often shows up when the author is making a point that seems strained, not totally convincing, and it’s as if the writer knows that and feels the need to resort to emotional manipulation. Of course, it may just be the writer’s personality, but it does seem that if a writer feels the need to resort to emotional manipulation, one can’t help but imagine that this is done because even they don’t feel that the rational arguments are sufficient.

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Oct 3 2024

Pretending Expertise

During the Covid pandemic, there were strongly differing opinions about things like social distancing, vaccinations, masks, and so on. Although experts gave recommendations, in most cases with good alignment between them, it was common for people to say that “I did my own research”, and claim a different, generally “better” understanding of any given topic. This phrase was so common that it became a catchphrase that’s still used to highlight people’s tendency to distrust experts.

However, it has also taken on the connotation of bad decision making because experts are generally correct much more often than lay people, and it’s not hard to find examples where someone’s “own research” was wrong. This aspect of the phrase was captured by a popular meme that circulated for a while in which the phrase was on a headstone.

Although this quote was mainly about people investigating Covid-related topics, the principle can be applied elsewhere. And perhaps it illustrates a general tendency for us to approach matters with a level of overconfidence.1

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Sep 8 2024

Art, Photography, and Consciousness

In this blog, I explore metaphysical topics with an eye towards religion, mainly from a science perspective. After all, the title of the blog is taken from a speech from one of history’s great scientists. However, it’s well-known that there are limits to science, including the fact that some topics are difficult to address with scientific methods.

Because this is the case, we need to be careful with our level of certainty about topics which are not yet well understood. For example, more and more research is being conducted to understand consciousness. This is becoming increasingly relevant with the recent developments of artificial intelligence. However, there is no way to directly probe consciousness with the tools and methodologies of science; the work done by neurologists and similar and investigate things related to consciousness, but not the phenomenon itself. This is because consciousness is a strictly subjective phenomenon.

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Aug 14 2024

A Different Definition of Consciousness

Definitions are important, especially when discussing complex topics. For example, the topic of consciousness is so fraught with subtleties that discussions about it really need to start with a clear definition of what it means. Definitions themselves are often the first step in exploring an idea, so creating one can be an act of investigation. In other words, proposing different definitions for a concept may help us explore what is really important or fundamental about it.

Continuing with the topic of consciousness, some define it as just information processing, some define it as the phenomenon of experience. These are very different definitions that generally reflect different metaphysical positions – strict physicalism versus somewhat more open views. I wonder if it would be possible to develop a definition based on something that cuts across these global perspectives.

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Jul 27 2024

A Set of Hopes

In an earlier post I suggested that, because of fundamental limits of what we understand, an appropriate way to think about metaphysical matters is as “hopes”. In other words, because we cannot be certain about things like the existence of God, or life after death, or the ultimate nature of reality and the destiny of the universe, we need to hope that certain things are true about these questions.

In related posts1, I describe some examples of using this way of thinking to compare Christian and atheist perspectives, describing both as specific hopes. This post will focus on describing just Christianity as a series of hopes in certain metaphysical perspectives.

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