Tag Archives: religion

Apr 19 2024

Threads of Pointers

Throughout history, there have been stories of the supernatural. These stories were often invoked to explain mysteries such as the origin of the world, the forces behind weather, the causes of disease, and the prevalence of coincidences. However, these stories often went beyond simple explanations and were personal accounts of people encountering things beyond natural, everyday experience. The fact that these things could also have explained some mysteries may have been interesting and possibly useful at the time, but was beside the point in many cases.

More recently, and especially over the last few centuries, many other unknowns either have not been explained by science or, like consciousness, have actually become bigger mysteries.1 In addition, mathematics has shown that there are fundamental limits of our understanding in any rational system, and science has discovered what appear to be fundamental limits in our ability to explain physical reality.2

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Mar 2 2024

Hope and Trust

In a previous essay, I introduced the idea of describing our beliefs as “hopes”, reflecting the reality that we cannot be certain about many metaphysical topics. However, a friend suggested that the way I was using the word made the belief seem too weak, and pointed out that I may have been using the word with a meaning that is now archaic.

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Feb 13 2024

Science, Religion, and Uncertainty

The idea that there is a war between science and technology is very common and it’s easy to believe it from some of the very public conflicts that have occurred. Because of this perception, it’s often difficult to have relaxed, interesting conversations about science and religion. Many of us instead just assume that it’s not really that important or even worth talking about. After all, this is the realm of metaphysics, something that doesn’t really impact daily life, right?

However, it turns out that metaphysical considerations are the basis for most people’s ethics, even when we don’t think about that. In other words, our views on things typically considered religious, such as a formal code of ethics, life after death, a moral creator, and so on, really determine our moral views. The fact that most people in the west have ethics based on Judeo-Christian ideals, whether they are Christian or not, is not widely understood.

So if it’s important to have a considered opinion here, how do we deal with the issue of their apparent conflict? Perhaps we can start by looking at where some of the conflicts seem to come up.

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Jan 22 2024

Science and Religion Conversations

Many people believe that there is a conflict between science and religion. This is often exemplified by debates about evolution, the age of the Earth, claims of miracles, and so on. Historically, events like the Galileo affair and the Scopes trial seem to illustrate the existence of a broad conflict. While these disagreements certainly exist, when looked at closer it turns out that they are isolated cases of disagreement based on specific ideas and do not necessarily represent broad conflict.

Most scholars today see the relationship between science and religion as more nuanced and dependent on each individual’s views. One common view is that science and religion deal with different domains entirely, so that as long as each stays in its proper domain, there could be no conflict. Others believe that there is interaction between them, and that resolving apparent disagreements is a way to improve understanding of both domains.

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Dec 29 2023

Exploring Love

The idea of “love” generally means having deep affection for others based on some sort of personal ties. For example, familial ties cause us to love our relations, and sexual attraction can move us toward deep affection. Often, however, we use the term “love” to refer to how we treat other people, such that sometimes it is used to refer to a sort of charitable behavior.

To better understand these subtleties, it’s interesting to look at this behavior from a cosmic standpoint.

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Dec 10 2023

My Belief System

A friend and I recently exchanged one-page descriptions of our respective belief systems. Here’s mine:

What is my worldview, my guiding principles for making life decisions?

A proper worldview includes elements of testing and continuing refinement since both individuals and the world are constantly changing, so is not static, but represents continual seeking to avoid dogmatism. The assumed goal of a worldview is to optimize personal and societal flourishing.

Three broad streams from which one can draw perspectives to inform a worldview are: personal experience, other human experiences across both time and space, and rational thought and related systems such as science. Although we commonly hold views in all these areas with great certainty, they are all in fact filled with fundamental unknowns. Thus, the challenge is to have a rational worldview despite the uncertainties.

My approach is to seek shared threads in these streams, to identify threads that exist across human experience and wisdom, that resonate with personal experience, and that also cohere with our best understanding of the world. My belief is that, while this can help eliminate irrational worldviews, there is too much uncertainty to define a single correct one.

One thing that exists across these is the universality of moral value systems, the recognition that there is good and evil, even though there is little agreement of what goes into each. This includes recognition of the fundamentally selfish basis of all life, the sense of this creation being broken in some sense, and the awareness that there are better possibilities. While it does seem that human society is advancing beyond this selfish bias, there is an inevitable tension with this intrinsic nature, making the only foreseeable solution a sort of mechanized, rule-driven society.

We recognize that a better way exists (love) that inverts the natural self-focused nature into one that is fundamentally self-less, in which we are agents of self-giving rather than self-getting. Imagine an existence in which everyone has this nature, perhaps all creation has shifted to this perspective. A simple model like this makes the end goal clear but is clearly not attainable without a transformation of humanity, possibly all creation.

Another thing that is consistently part of human experience through all cultures is a belief in some reality beyond the material. This often includes the existence of a transcendent agent that can interact with our physical reality, having created it, and interacts with humans who were created and reflect that transcendent nature. An implication of this is the idea of a cosmic purpose or direction, which typically shows up in the form of epic journey narratives, art and the awareness of beauty, the ideals of technological advance, and so on.

This implication links the two observations of morality and transcendence in that, while the first (recognition of brokenness) reveals the futility of achieving an ideal state in this world, the existence of something more than this world provides hope of a solution. The existence of an initial creator that is still involved in the ongoing improvement of the human condition provides hope of a re-creation into a final, unbroken state. Hope in a worldview is the best we can do because of the limits of knowledge.

This hope of a solution is best presented in the Christian narrative, in which the creator has described love as the ultimate reality but has given us the option of whether or not to recognize and accept it. The incarnation demonstrated the extended reality and has started the process of bringing this reality through changed hearts, which we see working out through human history, and the resurrection demonstrated the reality of re-creation. Our own transformation and re-creation, to participate in this hope, happens with God’s involvement. We are not alone.

Nov 12 2023

Secular Bias

Religious people are commonly thought to be biased towards believing things that cannot be proven, that must be taken on faith. Often, the idea of faith is taken to mean that there is no evidence at all. When this perspective involves science, the result is sometimes pseudo science – things that sound scientific but are actually implausible or even incorrect.

There is often also an implicit assumption that non-religious people do not have such biases, and that secular reasoning is more rational. However, it’s clear that isn’t always the case, since all people are subject to various biases and some examples from history illustrate this particular case.

It turns out that throughout history, new ideas have been put forth that stretch existing perspectives in ways that sometimes look like religion. It seems like this is more common when the discoveries are at the edge of known science. That makes sense, because ideas that truly extend our understanding are likely to look unusual. So if that unusual characteristic looks supernatural in some way, then it is easily dismissed out of hand by secular thinking.

For example, floods swept across the Pacific Northwest at the end of the last ice age. These are called the Missoula Floods. When they were first proposed, they went against the prevailing perspective that geologic processes were generally uniform over time, not catastrophic. In addition, the catastrophic nature of the proposed floods seemed similar to the Biblical flood narrative, and this association made acceptance of the proposal even harder for some people.

Similarly, when astronomical observations began to indicate that the universe was expanding and scientists realized this implied that it had a beginning, the Big Bang model was developed. However, many did not like that proposal, and instead promoted a steady state expansion. One of the difficulties that some people had with accepting the Big Bang model was that it was too close to the idea of a Biblical creation. In addition, the concept of a beginning to space and time raised the uncomfortable (and almost metaphysical) question about what might exist outside of our spacetime reality.

Even Einstein, when struggling with some of the strange ideas related to quantum physics, referred to them as “spooky action at a distance”, as if even the appearance of something supernatural was reason to suspect it.

In all these cases, the new ideas turned out to be right, but the bias of secular thinking caused some scientists to reject them.

A new area where similarly biased thinking may be happening is with research into the nature of consciousness. This is definitely a topic that is at the edge of known science, so it is very possible that new ideas may be needed. However, because consciousness seems to be immaterial, some of the emerging ideas seem to involve metaphysics even though they have nothing to do with religion or anything supernatural.

For example, some researchers use the term “soul” as a shorthand way of representing this seemingly immaterial aspect of consciousness, even when they are not talking about anything supernatural.

The danger, of course, is that some researchers will dismiss such ideas because of a potential link to religion, just like in the previous examples. However, while those examples took time to have significant societal impact, the need for us to understand consciousness may be coming faster with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The development of AI is beginning to raise a number of questions that would benefit from, maybe even require, a better understanding of consciousness. At some point, we will want to assess whether the things we are creating are conscious, how they relate to humans, whether they should be treated as people, and even how they might affect us as conscious beings ourselves.

Robust understanding of these things could guide the development and deployment of AI, but since we don’t currently have such understanding, AI is progressing in an unguided manner. Whether this turns out to be a problem remains to be seen, but in the race between developing and understanding AI, especially given the serious implications, it seems prudent to leave open all avenues of investigation without slowing things down due to unfounded biases.

Oct 5 2023

Eternal Hopes

In an earlier post, we looked at what it might be like to express our beliefs as hopes, at least those beliefs about which we cannot be certain.

We don’t have a complete understanding of reality since science is still incomplete, and yet we need to make choices about such things to guide our lives. We often treat these as firmly held beliefs based on rational thinking, but the reality is that we’re believing in things that we can’t know are true, yet we still expect with confidence to be the case. In other words, we hope these things are true.

We’ve looked at several examples of common beliefs to see what it looks like to express them as hopes, by comparing statements that could reasonably be made by atheists and Christians. These examples were the meaning of life and the hard problem of consciousness. In both cases, it seemed that expressing one’s beliefs about those topics as hope recognized the uncertainty that still exists. It also revealed a possible benefit in that such language may help defuse the often confrontational nature of conversations in these spaces.

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Aug 25 2023

Hope in Mind

In the previous post, we looked at what it might be like to express our beliefs as hopes, at least those beliefs about which we cannot be certain.

We don’t have a complete understanding about the nature of reality – the meaning of life, the possibility of afterlife, the nature of human consciousness, and so on. As it stands right now, our best scientific, rational understanding of these topics is incomplete. Despite this uncertainty, we all make choices about these things in how we let them guide our lives, and we often treat these as firmly held beliefs.

The result is that we’re believing in things that we can’t know are true, but we still expect with confidence to be the case. In other words, we hope these things are true.

In the previous post, we looked at an example to see how this works. That example was about the meaning of life. For another example, consider the “hard problem” of consciousness. It is considered a hard problem because we still know so little about it and it is so different from all other physical things that the path to better understanding is not at all clear.

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Aug 3 2023

Hope

Earlier posts describe one of the key ideas on this blog, that we don’t know enough to be certain of metaphysical truths. That means we have to make a choice about what to believe, and that choice is going to have some level of uncertainty.

Another way of describing this uncertainty is to say that our beliefs about metaphysical truths are really hopes – they represent what we hope is true, such that we act in agreement with that hope.

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