Tag Archives: spirituality

Nov 6 2025

From Nihilism to Love: Searching for a Life of Purpose

Although compelling arguments exist on both sides of the debate between atheism and Christianity, each worldview is often associated with a central philosophical difficulty. For atheism, the most intractable challenge is nihilism. For Christianity, it is the problem of evil.

Nihilism, in this context, is the claim that if reality is purely physical and devoid of any transcendent source of purpose, then life ultimately has no intrinsic meaning. This conclusion seems to stand at odds with our lived experience, which instinctively points toward purpose, value, and significance.

The problem of evil—or suffering—presents an equally serious challenge for Christianity. It asks how a benevolent, omnipotent God could permit profound suffering, especially the suffering of the innocent. The emotional and philosophical weight of this question has made it one of the most enduring objections to Christian belief.

Yet both worldviews have developed thoughtful responses to their respective challenges.

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Jun 13 2024

Boundaries of Physicalism

A common objection to the idea of any sort of transcendent domain is that, if that domain can affect the physical domain, then it is simply an extension of the physical domain and therefore not transcendent. As such, truly transcendent domains do not exist.

When discussing supernatural claims in particular, this argument is often used to assert that there is no such thing as the supernatural because if it can affect the natural, then it is simply a part of nature. Similarly, this argument is used to disprove mind-brain dualism since, if the mind can affect the world (specifically, the brain), then the mind cannot be immaterial because it is interacting with the material.

This objection makes sense at some level, but also seems to miss the mark when it comes to explaining the phenomena that people refer to when invoking transcendent domains like the supernatural or the mind. Even if the assertion is logically valid, it has no explanatory power and adds no detail to support exploration, model creation, testing, or any other sort of careful thinking.

Even when domains are fundamentally similar in some way, understanding is usually improved by articulating persistent differences and the nature of any boundaries and interactions.

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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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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.

Jun 5 2023

Human Identity and the Uncertainties of AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently a hot topic that’s being talked about in many media outlets as it continues to roll out. It still remains to be seen whether this activity will begin to cool off, as often happens with new technologies, or truly start to transform society.

Even a brief look at the ways that AI is being used makes it clear that there are enormous possibilities for both good and evil. This is certainly true in the short term, because people will find both good and evil things to do with it like we do with virtually all new tools.

There are even greater uncertainties in the long term, however, when we will start to deal with things like Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which may be able to solve problems that humans cannot, and machine agency and consciousness, which will raise the possibility of AIs acting on their own in ways that may not be good for humanity.

A common theme across all these possibilities is the great uncertainty about what will happen. One of the sources of this uncertainty is the level of mystery in our understanding of how both machine and human intelligence works. It’s common to hear how current AI developers are surprised at the things that their creations are able to do. This uncertainty is mirrored by the amount that we still don’t understand about the human mind, which is often the primary model for designing these systems.

Consciousness, for example, still remains a great mystery even though all humans experience it. Despite this universal experience, and many different investigations, it still isn’t clear whether consciousness can be fully explained with strict materialism. This has resulted in a growing number of researchers proposing additions beyond the current materialist models that enable consciousness. They do this in ways that avoid having to resort to the supernatural, yet still point to something beyond the physical.

In other words, there seems to be a persistent metaphysical aspect to consciousness that has not yet been explained. Our lack of understanding of consciousness extends to its most fundamental nature, illustrating our lack of understanding of the nature of reality itself.

While such immaterial viewpoints are actively rejected by many researchers, it’s also well-known that there is a deep human need for the metaphysical, for transcendence. So while there is still this uncertainty regarding the mind, we need a story that allows us to remain human in this way, that allows us to accept the personal experience of self as something real and not just a tricky behavior of matter.

We need to keep open the possibility of a fundamental difference between humans and machines.

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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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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Sep 15 2022

Beautiful Fading

We seem to find beauty in unlikely places. Evolution says we should be attracted to those things that benefit us, and so it seems that we should find beauty in those things that support flourishing. However, we also sometimes find beauty in things like austere mountain peaks, desolate lunar wastelands, and sometimes even in dying foliage.

For example, one of the most common pictures of the end of summer, the shortening of daylight, is fall colors, yet these represent life being pulled back from the leaves in order to prepare for the coming season of scarcity. Hardly a cheery thought, and yet it’s considered an iconically beautiful scene.

In a like manner, this scene struck me as beautiful even though it features flowers that are in decline.

This sense is sometimes explained as our evolutionarily-bequeathed aesthetics misfiring, being activated incorrectly. In this line of thought, what we perceive as something wonderful, is really just a mistake.

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Apr 7 2019

The Sense of Waterfalls

MCFx2This is Majestic Falls, in McDowell Creek Falls area, taken on a morning that was supposed to be cloudy but turned out sunny. Fortunately we made it there before the sun became a problem. Taken with a long exposure, the falling water appears silky smooth, almost like a wisp.

This photographic approach is very popular. One reason may simply be the aesthetic of silky smoothness. But also, something about this style seems to capture what we feel when we see a waterfall — the sense of pure unbroken flow.

In other words, the smooth lines of flowing water give a sense of what we experience, but may not be an accurate representation of what we physically see.

I think this is an interesting distinction — the difference between what we observe with physical senses, and what we consciously understand. What is the difference between what we see, and what we perceive? It’s tempting to think that what we see with our eyes is the “real” waterfall, and perception is not. But if the perception does represent something of what we experience, isn’t that also real?

It is as real as our own sense of identity and awareness. It’s as real as we are as individuals.

In other words, if the picture captures anything of what you experience when looking at the waterfall, then it is as real as you are, as the people you know, as the relationships in your life. Not physical things, but real nonetheless. And in many cases, those things that are most important.