Tag Archives: science and religion

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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Sep 30 2023

To Be Open-Minded About Consciousness

One of the basic ideas of this blog is that our understanding of reality is still incomplete, so that even though we need to live according to some beliefs, it’s probably best to realize that they can be described as hopes instead of settled facts.

An example of this sort of limited knowledge is the challenge of understanding consciousness, and in particular, how it relates to material reality. In other words, is consciousness strictly a result of physical, material processes, or does it result from something outside of these?

Many believe that the material is all there is, that the brain (generally neuroscience) is sufficient for explaining everything we observe about the mind, including the nature of consciousness and self-awareness.

Others believe that there probably is something more than just physical substance involved, that even if the brain is necessary for everything we observe about the mind, the material brain is still not sufficient to explain everything.

Such views involve assertions about the relationship between the physical and immaterial aspects of reality, and perhaps whether immaterial things even exist. Of course, this is not the only place such questions have come up.

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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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Jun 23 2023

Sufficient Reality

The nature of consciousness is generally considered to be a big mystery. Is it the result of only physical, material processes, or is there something immaterial involved? Many experiments show a strong relationship between material and mental processes and a common viewpoint is that these correlations indicate that the material processes cause the mental processes. In other words, there is an implicit assumption that material processes are sufficient for generating the mind, that nothing else is needed beyond the material.

Of course, it’s well known that correlations do not mean causation – just because two items seem highly related, that does not mean that one must be causing the other. One reason for this is that the same thing can occur when one item is necessary for the system to function, even if it is not sufficient.

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Apr 20 2023

Complex Motives

Discussions of the weakness of religion sometimes end up attempting to address God’s motives with questions that start with an observation about God’s character, then question that observation based on what is seen in the world.

These challenges often take the form of: “Why would a loving God allow…?” or something similar.

The idea being that the characteristic in question, in this case a loving nature, is incompatible with what we see in the world around us.

One of the common responses to this from Christians is essentially that God’s ways are unfathomable to us, so we should not expect to understand why some things happen. However, this approach is often rejected, being seen as something of a copout – avoiding the question altogether rather than addressing it.

However, note how reasonable this answer seems when talking about human behavior. It’s well known that we need to be careful when trying to understand someone else’s motives because there are so many factors we don’t know.

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Feb 23 2023

Seeing Confirmation Bias

Photographers often strive to find new ways of seeing the world. In a sense, this involves looking for new information, which is a healthy way to live. Unfortunately, we tend to avoid this due to our innate tendency for something called “confirmation bias”.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. –Wikipedia

Confirmation bias makes it harder for us to adopt new perspectives, perhaps even to learn new ideas, because we will tend to avoid information that could lead us to change existing beliefs.

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Jan 6 2023

The Science-Faith Debate

There is an ongoing debate about the relationship between science and faith. Many believe that they are incompatible, that they are at “war” with each other. Others contend that they have nothing to do with each other, an idea sometimes expressed by describing them as “non-overlapping magisteria” — the idea that they only apply to unrelated aspects of reality and human experience.

However, an underlying assumption with both views is that we understand the universe well enough to be certain about our assessments. However, what if this isn’t true? What if it’s better to take a more humble position and admit that we cannot make a clear enough assessment, and therefore need to continue exploring the issues?

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Dec 15 2022

Implications of Consciousness


The overall theme of this blog is that we don’t know enough to be certain of metaphysical truths.* Because of that, and the fact that metaphysics deals with things beyond physical reality, we need to think about those topics using tools other than science, and move discussions away from trying to prove one view or another, to comparing differences and explaining our preferences.

A good example of this is our limited understanding of consciousness. Although many believe that consciousness is only a physical phenomenon, that view is by no means universal even among secular researchers. Other possibilities, such as the philosophical idea of panpsychism, have been proposed and seem to be growing in popularity.

Given the diversity of viewpoints among subject matter experts, the only rational position to take is some level of agnosticism regarding this topic. In other words, we need to acknowledge the possibility of immaterial minds even if that’s a viewpoint with which one personally does not agree.

To me, it seems that the possibility of an immaterial mind, whatever that might look like, has significant implications for an overall understanding of reality.

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Nov 13 2022

Seeing Better

An easy trap to fall into is to become complacent in our beliefs, to not pay attention to the full depth of a topic. Instead, it’s easy to stop with a limited understanding, form opinions that we like, then reinforce them by finding sources that agree with us. This tends to further solidify our thinking.

The reality is that some topics, such as those related to metaphysics*, have many different dimensions that are continuing to be explored. Our understanding of fundamental physical reality is so nascent, still so evolving, that to claim any certainty, especially without constant learning, is simply arrogant. Thus, it seems the proper posture is one of humility and continual learning rather than dogmatic certainty.

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