Seeker of Truth

My Comments to Sean Card. O'Malley's Blog Entry Justifying the Edward Kennedy Funeral

2009-09-08T15:21:00.000-07:00

Your Eminence, This Mass may well have soothed the sore feelings of your Boston constituents, for whom Kennedy worship seems at times more important than worship of Christ, but it cannot wipe away the stain that the late Senator has left on the religio-political landscape of America. I think we all can agree to pray for him and forgive him as we hope our Father will forgive us. This, however, is a far cry from putting up a spectacle of the magnitude we have just witnessed. Would St. Augustine have celebrated a grand Mass for a Roman senator who held openly manichaean, donatist, or whatever was the heresy of his times, views? Would St. Thomas of Aquino have presided over the exaltation of a Cathar? (Excuse me if my heresies are off the timeline, I am not a historian, but I think you get the point). In fact, we now look back at times when the Church seemed so beholden to powerful temporal interests of its times, that Cardinals and even Popes compromised Orthodoxy for political expediency. I do hope these times are not coming back. Sincerely, one who is certainly no more worthy than any other sinner, but who would at least feel shame if such a spectacle were considered for his funeral.

Doubts and Some Certainty

2006-08-01T20:59:00.000-07:00

The singularity of the incarnation of God as Jesus the Nazarene, at a given time and place, that is not easy to accept. Why then, why there, why the jews? Why not India or China, advanced cultures at the time? Rome? Same as above. America? Africa? What do they lack that the Middle East has?
Why did Jesus only teach for the last few years of his short life on earth? Why did he not say more, make things clearer, explain that this is not just about the Jewish people being wayward once again? The few things he left are so subject to interpretation...
But then there is the Holy Spirit, the Church, and a tradition without which nothing would go. And I realize that a document the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica would not be large enough to avoid doubts, misinterpretation and heresy. And if, through Divine might, it was written so unambiguously as to avoid all that, then there would by corollary be no true free will. Only a complete fool would then be able to doubt in God and hence act in a sinful way. No faith, no hope, no charity, no virtue at all. Big brother is watching, therefore we better all be good.
I am learning to except the miraculous, the scientifically unthinkable: That God came to us, walked among us, left his imprint on our world, gave us enough to find our way home. More than enough, maybe.

Why were the Middle Ages so Bloody?

2006-07-29T08:24:00.000-07:00

People did not expect to live forever, quite simply put. Maximizing longevity was not their goal, hence their wars, their justice, their general conduct was one where death held much less fear for them than it does for the 20th century agnostic who tries to create paradise in this world.
People went on crusades, for the honor and the glory of the faith, as well of their own, of course. Not only some arrogant noblemen whose boredom drove them to adventure, many commoners did so as well. Men and women all over Europe went on pilgrimages over unsafe roads, with no hotels, restaurants or hospitals to ease their journey, but with bandits, disease, and hunger their daily companions. Can we imagine what it must have been like for a medieval pilgrim to journey from the heart of Europe to the Holy Land? Modern tourists will shun a destination because of some political upheaval or epidemic. How many of us would go on a journey if there is a significant chance of dying from the hazards of it? We even think of curtailing space exploration because it is too dangerous.
Of course, the medieval person did not travel for idle distraction from the meaninglessness of his or her life. Their journeys had purpose, often in relation to God. Only the most depraved were so far from this common ideal, that their motives might be akin to those of today’s men, i.e. completely secular. And those people, in perfect congruity with their Weltanschauung, were outlaws, highwaymen, robbers. Only modern man entertains the pretense of being civil and benevolent without belief in a higher authority which would validate such a morality.
Is our precious peace of a few decades that we like to consider as the hard fought for product of scientific humanism, merely a temporary aberration, then? Will our glorification of the body beautiful, the life in the here and now eternal, fade away like so much Hollywood glamour? Is strife and conquest the natural condition of man, a symbol of our fallen state? Maybe the Middle Ages were the norm, with our goal of life preservation at all costs a kind of subtle perversion, yet one more heinous than its obvious cousins. It makes cowards of us, bends our spirit, and finally drains it, as we struggle toward our unreachable goal of not having an accident, not having our party spoiled, not dying, at least not before our time? But when is our time?

On Historicity

2006-07-24T22:07:00.000-07:00

Is Adam historical? And if not, would there be no fall, no need for Christ, and no validity to Christianity?
Here is one argument:  It was necessary to formulate 'doctrine' in a way that very primitive people could understand and transmit undistorted through centuries. Could God have explained to stone age jews the concept of evolution, of any other scientific prerogative to a creation story that would hold water with us today? And what if our understanding changes radically once more, in 100, 1000, whatever years? The early transmission of the essence, not the particulars, were the most important, I postulate. Later on, there would be dissent anyway, and also an ability to understand allegory as allegory.
Another point to ponder is free will. If we are serious about that - and we must be if we want personal responsibility and ultimately meaning for our lives, then we cannot have a revelation that explains all in detail, from beginning to end, leaving no room for human faith, exploration, good works, bad works, choice.
Furthermore: What if our current understanding of creation and evolution is flawed by the fall? Can we ever prove that scientifically? What if science is, like other ways of knowing reality, just a transitional step? It has only been atround in a strict sense for a few hundred years, and may yet be obscured by some newer method, impossible to predict in its particulars. The ancient Greeks, Romans, even Egyptians could easily have pursued science or scientific methods, doing experiments, validating theories derived by them, corroborating results, etc. They somehow could not conceive of that, anymore than they could conceive of a steam engine. Why? We don't know. It does suggest, however, that our current way of doing things and conceptualizing them may not be the end of all. I have elsewhere speculated on science's inability to envision an ever-ongoing string of new discoveries, rather than the prevailing attitude of having nearly solved all big questions and merely needing to flesh out the particulars. Here I am proposing something more radical, namely the obscuration of scientific method with other, more effectively revealing and relevant ones, which are able to probe mysteries of 'creation' not accesible by what we currently understand as experimental science.

On Rationality and Religion

2006-07-15T09:55:00.000-07:00

Mystics and scholastics, that is what I remember learning in high school about the two strands of thought that shaped Christianity in the Middle Ages. It goes back much further, of course, all the way to Plato and Aristotle at least.
Much has been accomplished by the rational approach, such as the establishment and continuity of Western civilization. But there are tremendous pitfalls in logic applied to religion, and we are now reaping the fruits of those. From Occam and Wyclif on, a kind of rationalism began to dominate the culture, that at first seemed relatively benign, even superior to many previous ideas. Yet it was the beginning of the road into reductionism, relativism and the usurpation by science of the position of ‘truth giver’.
I believe that all rational approaches carry this danger, that if taken too literally or even used too exclusively, they will lead to reductionist absurdity. Aquinas, Augustine, none of the greatest scholars of religion can be exempt from that rule. Does it mean we have to abandon reason altogether? I do not think so. However, we have to remain eternally conscious of the fact that our most elaborate systems of thought are mere approximations, even metaphors, that our formulae, our theorems, do not capture truth, not in science, not in philosophy or logic. Aristotle seems quaint when we look at some of his assertions with our scientifically trained hindsight. We may look even quainter to somebody living in A.D. 3000. Or maybe not. Maybe we will be known as the true Dark Ages, where man’s hubris sought to replace God with the democratic/scientific process. Maybe John Lennon, who so famously wrote ‘Imagine there’s no heaven...’ will become a character of fable, as posterchild of a well-intentioned but fatally flawed system of belief that almost brought the world to that brink of destruction from which it had sworn to save it.

Does Yoda have DNA

2006-07-11T18:57:00.000-07:00

Or critical thoughts on evolution. If DNA encodes amino acids, which encode proteins, which build all manners of structures, a reasonable questions is ‘what all can actually be built with this DNA?’ Could an extraterrestrial being use the same encodings as earth’s evolutionary tree or are there very clear limits to the kind of structures possible without going outside of our 4 bits of code? A case in point is evolution which presents us with a vast array of life-forms, albeit ever so slightly in a discontinuous fashion. There are lots of different dogs, for instance, but no cat-dog. We find fossils of birds that look a bit like reptiles, and such, but we do not have a phylogenetic tree in all its shades, as far as I know. The point is, given any particular species, there are only so many mutations possible on that particular genome, many of them lethal, some intraspecies variations, some leading to a new species. While we can easily say that there is a path from dinosaurs to birds, as it is a fait accompli, the question is, can we define possible paths without relying on hindsight, or in other words, can we emulate DNA algorithmically? And if so, will our models show that there are only a fairly limited number of possible developments, meaning evolution was almost bound to come up with what we perceive, or will there be a virtual infinity of possible creations, making our particular manifestations a sort of accident.
It seems at first thought, that the latter hypothesis ought to be the correct one, as there are so many combinations possible of the base-pairs, and hence the aminoacids encoded by them. But then, a tremendous amount of combinations is probably meaningless in terms of proteins created. Also, the DNA is not at all like a blueprint, a miniature replica of the organism in encoded form, but rather like a program, a small number of instructions without a one-to-one correspondence to their output. So, while Yoda is by all appearances a close relative of humans, breathing air of roughly the same composition, having muscles, bones, eyes, a brain, bilateral symmetry, a skin and digestive tract, he may be one of those outputs that is not obtainable from the available nucleotides. I believe the situation is analogous to mathematics, or formal logic, where a given set of theorems can only produce a certain set of statements and not others, even though they all look plausible.
A fantastic limit of this scenario would be where only one very finite set of organisms could be produced, namely the ones that historically existed on earth. In this case, there is no real evolution. Related to this idea is the one where no smooth transitions exist and species are like crystal lattices of a complex organic salt, that can solidify in a large but distinct number of configurations.
While neither of these scenarios is a proof that there is a creator involved in the process, the discovery of significant limits to the variety of lifeforms that can be encoded via our DNA weighs a bit toward the existence of God, much like a discovery that we are truly alone in the universe, or at least in the galaxy.

On Heretics and Crackpots

2006-07-10T20:04:00.000-07:00

Religion and science both have their renegades, people who decide to run with their own quaint ideas of what constitutes truth, rather than bow to the mainstream doctrine. In science we have the perpetuum mobile inventors, the faster than light travelers, the action at a distance aficionados. These people are quite rightfully ostracized, marginalized, disempowered, made fun of etc. It is not simply that they are wrong, but how they are wrong: maybe at some point we will have faster than light travel, or action at a distance, but if so, it certainly won’t be via the theories proposed by the current scientific dissidents. The same goes for the currently popular creationism, intelligent design, related theories. If God makes the world, he seems to make it pretty much self-contained, organic as it were, not a curious patchwork of incongruous pieces. As such, living species hang together very nicely, with a common method of inheritance, structures, chemistry etc. Does it ultimately mean that there was no God creating these phenomena? No, he could have made them all in one day, in one second, and made it look like it took billions of years from big bang to now. We are in creation, in time, in space. God is outside of either and all, I believe. Not being much of a theologian, I tread on unfamiliar turf, it does make sense, however, to me, to conceive of things that way. Claiming this does in no way invalidate scientific discoveries, merely relativizes their significance as belonging into the world, rather than being outside, leaving that area to the divine.
Does religion have its equivalent of the scientific crackpot, the man with the idea that is blatantly ridiculous, like the hollow-earth advocate, or has been refuted numerous times but is being kept alive tediously, like some romantic dream of a better world? Junk science replaces the complexity of true science with simpler formulae, explanations, theories. Junk religion does the same. Instead of worrying about how God’s all-knowing nature can permit free will, the protestant of Calvin’s or Luther’s bent simply does away with it, postulating predestination. I have previously written about the problem with determinism in a scientific universe. It does not get much better in a religious one. If the saved ones are known and pre-elected, there is not much sense in keeping a religion, is there?
The main difference I see is the fact that science has a somewhat better PR factor when it tries to clean its stable from heresy, while in Christianity all manners of heresy are not only tolerated, but the orthodox church itself is often maligned as being unnecessarily autocratic. I wish to state here for the record that I do not blame the vast numbers of lay people who were raised under and believe in some form of protestantism. I do however, take umbrage with their clergy, who ought to know better. How can an Anglican bishop, for instance, defend a church that was founded on the lustful inclinations of a British monarch, and the greed of that nation’s aristocracy for Catholicism’s riches? What about the ‘liberal’ protestant who denies the divinity of Jesus, the resurrection? It is one thing to be an atheist denying God. It is another thing entirely to be a Christian denying Christ. The first position is in itself logical and consistent, and implies certain difficult to answer questions, which are nonetheless legitimate - how to define values, how to circumvent the determinism conundrum. The second one is blatantly stupid, no other word suffices here. It is my conjecture that most forms of protestantism, particularly those of post-medieval European descent, are doomed to die from their own inanity, and are just a bit slow in doing so. I do not know enough about the pentecostal-type forms of Christianity to consider those. In general, I believe that a religion can easily sustain mysteries, i.e. areas incomprehensible to human intellect, but it must never provide pat answers to life’s difficult questions.

About the Fall: Why do Religion and Science Differ in Their Theory of the World

2006-07-02T07:33:00.000-07:00

From paradise, that is. How would such an event be both possible within the realm of the physical, i.e. not merely a metaphorical description of something, and reconcilable with what we know of the universe we live in?
With such an event, one would postulate perhaps a radical change in the laws of physics or their effects, akin to a substance going from liquid to solid, a container being turned inside out, electricity animating some circuitry, or stopping to.
I have always been critical of those who would try and advance some scientific framework for religion, and am about to cross that boundary myself, yet there has to be a connection between the two somewhere, and this would be a good place to start speculating.
What physical concepts would one associate with a fallen state? Entropy comes to mind, any form of decay, and limits certainly, such as the speed of light. Wether any of this is relevant I am not prepared to wager on, but certainty is less important at this stage than inquiry.

Some more thoughts: The fall is a must, if we posit the truth of Jesus’ life and passion. Else, why would God not have created a perfect world in the first place? Only with free will, the fall, the redemption, do we have a coherent whole of Christian doctrine. No fall, no Christ, no God, no Heaven, and so on...
So, how does the fall fit in with big bang, evolution, the age of the universe?
First, one would have to posit it ‘before’ any of these other facts, and I don’t necessarily mean before in the time as we measure it scientifically. It might be an ‘outside’ of what science sees as the universe.

Materialism's Conundrum with Determinism

2006-06-29T18:17:00.000-07:00

Wether it is a clockwork or a computer, a materialistic universe is typically envisioned deterministically, even if this is not made explicit by the ones theorizing. Wether it is the biological basis of human behavior, the working of genes and memes on human society, any respectable and recent scientific theory dealing with people does away with free will. This is really quite a pity, as without it there is no true science, or truth in general. If our cognitive processes are indeed determined and any shred of free will an illusion, then it cannot validly be stated that we have developed a new theory, debunked some religious myth, or done any other great deed of scientific exploration. Our finding one idea superior to another would be just as much the product of determination and inevitability, as if it had happened the other way around. A second independent researcher verifying our data or failing to - determination, not proof that we are correct. Ten, a hundred, all scientists believing the same thing - the meme has won, not the truth. Of course, me writing this blog, you agreeing or disagreeing, maybe laughing at my simple reasoning, or marveling at the depth of my understanding - all meaningless and irrelevant. It is determined like the rest. Truth and lies, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, all goes by the wayside of inevitability.
One might even conceive of a situation where a certain truth, e.g. the existence among us of a parasitical race of mind-draining martian vampire zombies, along with all their activities, is concealed from everybody while in full plain view, simply because these alien derelicts have found a way to prevent our deterministically functioning brains from ever registering them or their doings. A bunch of them might right now be feasting on your boy/girlfriend’s brain and you might instead perceive - her fainting? stumbling? feeling weak and nauseous? having a seizure? We will never know, will we, for there is no way to pierce the shield of causality that imprisons our consciousness?
Is there a way around? Many things have been proposed, from quantum indeterminacy to blissful ignorance of the problem. I am not sure if the future might be able to show that the laws of causality break down, or at least loose their timeline in complex feedback systems with self-awareness, like our brains are. After all, our ideas of causality are mainly assumptions validated on systems lacking complexity. However, if complexity can bring forth truly novel qualities, like indeterminism in the sense that there are no time-linear simple processes accounting for the outcome of the whole system, then I believe we have broken a big chunk of scientific dogma. It also means that materialism is not the be-all/end-all of creation, that there are significant events that do not fit into its explanatory framework.

How to Survive the End of the Universe - Bottom Up

2006-06-28T19:08:00.000-07:00

The questions is obviously linked to that of its origin. Current theories of the big bang are not conclusive (yet?) and recent theories of 'multiverses' include models of contraction/expansion that had fallen out of favor when the rate of cosmic expansion was deemed to preclude a 'big crunch'.
Cyclical or not, is there any hope for a perpetual survival of intelligent life in one form or another? Assuming proton decay, entropy, all the possible dooms of the universe, the answer seems to be a clear 'no'. Even with local areas of cosmic inflation and consequent renewal, intelligence relies on structure, whether in the form of biological bodies or cybernetic ones, and structures do not survive cosmic upheaval very well. At least not as far as we can understand right now, and this is always a caveat. What 'realms' then might survive cataclysms such as an inflationary bubble, a cosmic crunch, two 'branes' colliding? One hope is the black hole/wormhole type of scenario, I believe thought up by Freeman Dyson, whereby a very advanced civilization might skip from one point in the universe to another, avoiding local disaster, where local might measure billions of light-years across. Another hope may be to hide inside a black hole, based on the theory that information does not get lost, ever, even if it falls into a black hole. A variety of this idea is Professor Tipler’s theory that intelligences can learn to steer the collapse of their universe so as to ‘cushion’ the big crunch and survive at the threshold of the thus created singularity in a virtual eternity.
What about 'emulating' our brains/processors in dynamic systems that have no clear structure, but are fluidly stable nonetheless, like vortices in water? I am not thinking of anything so simple and macroscopic, of course, but what about the random processes of empty space? Might one gain control of what happens at a quantum or 'subquantum' level there, imposing patterns that take on a periodicity, hence stability, and can interact with each other, hence process and store information? Might miniaturization lead to devices so small, they fall below the threshold of entropy, of thermodynamics? And if so, could one devise a process of translation from ordinary space into 'subspace' and back of such structures to ‘dive’ and ‘surface’ in a sense?
All these ideas presume a kind of functionalism of the human mind, i.e. that the cognitive processes of the brain can be replicated in virtually any kind of computing medium. Implicit in that assumption, then is materialism, or in more theological terms, any concept of a higher reality.

Thoughts About Scientific Method

2006-06-21T20:50:00.000-07:00

The replacement of religion by science proceeds approximately along the lines that science, first, develops an explanation for some physical phenomenon, in other words, it is able to use mathematics or a similarly simplifying method to describe the process under scrutiny. E=mc2, evolution through natural selection, the periodic table. Some of the theories are very concise and coded in symbols, others describe a set of simple, standard steps, such as evolution, to describe a complex phenomenon, such as the vast number of different animal and plant species and how they relate to each-other.
Second, as science is successful in one, than many, than seemingly all areas of research, its adherents reason that nothing else is needed to account for the world as it is.
The problem is that if God created a universe that follows rules, and no matter what rules he chose, sooner or later some kind of scientist would come along and discover those rules, and then deduce that the rules explain the world. The question is not if there is evolution, or if God plays dice with the universe, but wether our discoveries mean what many scientists claim, namely that God does not exist. If God makes the universe knowable through discovery of its laws, then it must follow that the discoverers can make the claim that God does not exist.
There is really nothing in the above sentence that would link the first to the second part causally. The missing link is ‘Occam’s razor’ or the assumption adopted by Western science that the simpler explanation, i.e. one that can do without recourse to the supernatural, divine etc. is the correct one. Funny to think that Occam was a catholic friar. His ‘contribution’ to post-medieval thought may be the greatest curse that our civilization has ever suffered, insidiously poisoning the foundations of our reasoning.

A Catholic Planet, part 2

2006-06-01T18:54:00.000-07:00

If we set out to take religion seriously and accept the truth of the Catholic/Orthodox belief, we must also allow for the possibility of a world that structures its institutions and customs along those tenets. Not a theocracy in the sense that the religious leaders have the temporal power, but that religious prescriptions do have reflection in temporal law: usury comes to mind, and charity, and chastity, of course.
Critics will quickly point accusing fingers at the example of the Middle Ages, citing all sorts of misconduct by Church officials, from pope down to parson all across the clerical fabric of European life. And then they will point at the Christian worldly rulers and their excesses, comparing them to the benign and loving humanistically oriented personae from our recent democratic past.
Two arguments against those nay-sayers come to mind immediately: One, that imperfection is a necessary correlate of the fallen state of mankind and its institutions. Neither Church nor King are exempt from that condition, where Evil constantly strives to undermine Good, corrupting and twisting the works of man. These flaws are blemishes on a fundamentally intact whole, though. Errors are eventually corrected, Good overcomes Evil in a never-ending struggle.
The second argument expands on the first one. While there were weak popes, and bad ones, and greedy rulers who called themselves Christian, there were also many worthy ones. If one looks at the balance of religious vs pagan society, it does not look so good for our age: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the list goes on. So we are to only consider those atheists or materialists who are good, by whatever standards we measure it? Just how good? Is any politician, philosopher or other leader of men who professes sympathy with communism a good man? Many in our society would have no trouble reconciling the two, distinguishing - in my opinion artificially - between the ‘good’ theoretical communism, and some of its bad manifestations. Those are admitted reluctantly, while always emphasizing how much good they really brought, especially compared with some greater evil, like nazism, or the Czar’s rule. The same arguments of course were used by defenders of nazism, and probably of any other tyranny known to man.
Furthermore, why should materialists have the luxury to make such allowances, but Christians be prohibited from distinguishing the true doctrine from its degradation into sin? Is it not simply a matter of who has the current opinion authority, the louder voice in the debate? Communists and other totalitarian ilk have always been good at screaming their message out to anybody, whether it was welcome or not. Does this make them right?

So, if we accept the possibility of a Christian world order, what would its features be?
For one, it would not be capitalist in any way we currently understand the concept. I have mentioned usury, and charity already; there is also the question as to how much value we allot to labor. This is where we say good-bye to our protestant brethren, especially those of the calvinist persuasion, and wish them a happy soft landing in whatever circle of hell the heretics find themselves. For the tolerance and even encouragement of usury and zealous pursuit of worldly accomplishments are hallmarks of their creed, not of ours. Our economies would probably be dismally slow compared to the frantic pace King Mammon commands, on the other hand, a home might cost a fraction of what it does with money lending being sharply curtailed. As a result, the cost of most services would be much cheaper, while manufactured goods would likely be more expensive.
The environment ought to be cleaner, as we are stewards of the world God provided us, but environmentalism in its fanatical manifestations would not be respected. The same is true for all para-religious forms of worship, whether its nature, animals, beauty, sexual indulgence. Hedonism in all its forms might find its rightful place again in the realm of sin, rather than be elevated to the new meaning of life, as it is at present.
There would be absolute values, and an ongoing struggle to define them clearer, better, and to discriminate accurately between true and false, good and evil, sin and virtue. For that purpose alone, education would have to shift its emphasis from skill building to character formation again.
to be continued...

The Quest for Values in a Godless Universe - bottom up

2006-05-20T09:55:00.000-07:00

I once met a very nice lady, who professed to being both an atheist, and a pacifist. I guess there are a lot of people like her. Many of my non-christian, non-muslim non-jewish etc. acquaintances are truly 'nice' persons, perfectly friendly, a bit charitable, good-natured overall. Maybe it is the influence of their genes, programmed no doubt to produce efficient survival machines, alas pleasant ones. Or possibly their brains have been infested with goodness memes, blocking any stubbornness of reasoning which might question why a person who is not bound by any higher authority should adopt a personal philosophy not altogether different from a religiously motivated one. My problem with this situation is, that I find no foundation for such ‘goodness’ other than vague concepts like character, constitution... A religious person can surely be a great sinner, and outdo the best of his pagan competitors in wantonness. History has given us many examples of that. However, it also abundantly clear, that such behavior is wrong within that person’s cultural beliefs, and those are not mere individual fancies without base, but edifices of thinking which have been contributed to by countless people before him, and have cropped up in numerous civilizations. Often they are referred to as ‘natural law’ because those concepts of right and wrong are thought to have been laid down by God himself.An atheist/materialist, on the other hand, might be a ‘good’ person simply because they have not considered deeply enough the basis for their actions, thereby missing the fact that the best that can be said for their conduct is that it is a sort of self-domestication. During the twentieth century, when both fascism and communism rose so rapidly to power and infamy, secular people in the remaining free nations found it difficult to erect an intellectual defense against such doctrines, and were it not for the fact that nazism was eventually the formal enemy in a world war, there would probably be as many nazi sympathizers here in the US as there still are communist ones. Especially intellectuals and artists, who consider themselves above superstitious beliefs like religion, fall prey to the lure of totalitarian utopias, in one form or another. It is hubris that leads them there, the conceit that their own intellect is formidable enough to discern the truth without recourse to a guiding framework. The simple man, devout in some theological belief system he does not fully comprehend, can nonetheless reject aberrations of human thought easily. ‘They are evil’ he might say, and be done with it.How do we then establish values in a materialist universe? One notion is game theory and related mathematical frameworks, which might serve to weigh decisions properly. But then the questions becomes: What is a proper course of action in a world without an absolute standard? Ladies and gentlemen, much can be said about the atrocities committed in the name of religion, first by Christians, now by Moslems, and others, of course. But at least all those who believe in religion have a yard stick to gauge their actions against, even if they do a horrible job of it. The materialist has none, and I have some dire predictions how ‘morality’ might be enforced in the technocratic society of the future. More of that in a later post.

The Purpose of Life

2006-05-14T11:54:00.000-07:00

Believing in God, in heaven, in an afterlife all would seem to make for a significantly different outlook on life than a rational-materialistic view of things:Medicine would be the most important technological issue for the non-believer, as it adds precious days and years to his otherwise limited existence. That and safety, from accidents, from violence, war, natural disaster. At virtually any price. At the expense of any value, of friendship, honor, marital or family bond. Note, that many atheists/materialists may disagree with that assessment, and may indeed practice a different way of life. My point is, that from a purely objective/rational perspective, none of these alternatives are justifiable, and are in fact inconsistent with the premise that there is no higher reality.Pleasure, in the form of material riches, entertainment, mind-altering drugs, is easy to justify and consistent with the atheist world-view. Hedonism and egotism are logical and the norm; cooperation with others would be instituted according to principles of game theory and similar scientific constructs.True elitism ought to flourish: A minority would coalesce into a cooperative by virtue of a simultaneous realization of the benefits of doing so, and a lack of scruples. Those 1 or 10 per cent of the populace would ‘domesticate’ the rest, maintaining in this so-formed ‘herd’ the illusion of the old value system. They would encourage a work ethic, honesty, and above all, pacifism and obedience to authority - namely to them who rule. I am not sure that we do not already have such a system in at least its early stages - note the number of cultural icons whose status is completely unchallenged by the people. One can be as undeservingly rich and wanton as one wants to be, as long as it is as an actor, singer, athlete or the like. A celebrity, in other words. Of course one has to pay lip service to ‘leftist’ beliefs, pretend to fight for the people, but words have always been cheap, and action is not really required.For the believer in God and the life after death, there really is no sense or meaning in technological progress, whether medical or otherwise. Death is an opportunity to ascend into the heavenly realm, sickness a temporary inconvenience compared to the timeframe of eternity, and earthly luxury can only be a pale imitation of paradise.As a child, growing up in a catholic milieu, I never understood why people would be so upset about the death of a loved one, especially if the person was of an age where people tend to die. I was rebuked by my family that I was too young to understand then. I guess I am still too young, and my charge remains: People who overly mourn death while professing to a belief in an afterlife are hypocrites. The same sentiment goes for all those who hoard money, who indulge in carnal pleasures, and so on...By the way, it is not scientific evidence, but anecdotal, yet I see very few grossly obese people in catholic church, far fewer than at the secular government agency where I work. Proof of my theories?Living consistently with one’s values would be the most important thing to do for the believer. Misery and death ought to be preferred over ethical compromise. Not an easy route, compared with the ‘hedonistic conspiracy’ scenario outlined above.

Are we alone?

2006-05-06T11:46:00.000-07:00

In the universe that is top-down, made by God, it is entirely possible that we are the only inhabited planet in a multi-billion lightyear edifice, or an even bigger one, for that matter. Why that should be so, I cannot begin to imagine. Maybe at some point, we are meant to inhabit it all :)What about a bottom-up universe? How unlikely would life have to be for us to be alone? Limitations have been postulated, about the lack of technologically advanced civilizations, about their propensity to die out, by their own hand or through whatever catastrophe might befall them. Then there is the speed of light limitation, and cosmic radiation, all of which make interstellar propagation near impossible.Are those realistic barriers, though? Our own lack of technological know-how makes every generation of scientists believe that they have almost discovered all there is to discover, with just a few points to clear up. Nobody, of course, can fathom things that lie completely out of one’s frame of reference, such as relativity and quantum mechanics were a good hundred years ago for the scientists of the day.Which brings us to the sociological arguments: Advanced intelligences do not contact us, because a) they do not want to interfere in our development, b) they are so far ahead of us that we do not even recognize them as lifeforms, c) the universe is so big that nobody has happened upon us, or d) some combination/variation of the above.Part of why these arguments are so hard to meet is the fact that they are essentially faith, of a non-religious type. We are asked to accept their underlying premises, not in so many words, but still. There is a good deal of anthropomorphization going on, the attribution of human characteristics to non-human entities. For instance, the non-interference theory stems largely from the currently trendy belief that european imperialists destroyed all these thriving indigenous cultures world-wide by their arrogant meddling, and by extension, that any truly advanced race would never commit such a faux-pas. One might of course quite equally argue that any truly advanced civilization would meddle exactly this way in any primitive civilization it encounters, and thereby raise it up, or destroy it, or whatever. In short, we are bringing our (or rather, some people’s) current world-view, whose validity is unknown, to bear on a situation equally unknown.Fact is, there is a very large universe with probably lots of planets, at least some of which ought to sustain life, or maybe even places we don’t consider habitable might give rise to life, to consciousness and to technology. Nobody has made contact with our planet, and our search for extraterrestrial life, or rather technology, has yielded nothing to date. Maybe it’s too early to tell yet, but then, what if there is nothing anywhere, except for us? SIgn of divine plan or freak accident of nature?

A catholic planet!

2006-05-06T07:53:00.000-07:00

What if the whole planet was Catholic/Orthodox? Country after country, the same faith, with local color, mind you, but the same nonetheless. One church, one religion... (Pagans, Jews, Protestants et al may substitute their own religion of choice here. The difference within the bounds of our thought experiment may or may not be negligible) What would a global religious monoculture mean for politics, for science, for the arts? And how much would the flavor of this world-religion matter? I will look here strictly at the Catholic example, and assume that Catholicism somehow just ‘won out’ over all other religions, i.e. there was no force involved in bringing about such a result:One would expect a firming of morality, with a sharp decrease of all types of hedonism. Assuming the world population actually believes and follows the tenets of its creed, we should have a massive change in pop culture, away from themes of sex, violence and other sensual pleasures. One would likely find an increase in hypocrisy, a ‘doing behind closed doors’ of what is publicly unacceptable. Heresy would become an important sociocultural issue again. No more free for all when it comes to the establishment of religions.Both major political camps would suffer substantial losses: Capitalism for its emphasis on material production and cult of wealth, socialism for its materialist underpinnings and lack of stable values. Possibly a whole new party system might emerge with factions we cannot imagine. The church would itself become a major political force, and would probably have to strengthen regional independence to avoid fracture. At this point we have roughly an Eastern Orthodox and a Western Catholic branch, which are separate but almost in complete communion, close enough to look at them for working models on how one would structure a world church and avoid an endless succession of schisms because the cultural differences are too large from one region to the other. I foresee this as much more of a problem if the church is universal, as she is not now.Science would likely slow down because of the lessening of the capitalist drive toward consumption rather than from church efforts at dogmatic control. This will be a crucially important relationship to regulate, similar to our current distribution of democratic powers. For I do foresee that in a religious monoculture, politics would take a backseat to the dialogue (or struggle) between religion and science.All other religions would have been either assimilated or died out. This process is impossible for me to conceive in detail, but not in principle. It is what would contribute the most to the regional and ethnic flavor of the church. We do not want our religion to be a Wal-Mart, or a McDonald’s, where each store is essentially the same as every other. Our church would be like true human culture, with numerous regional and local idiosyncrasies.What we call the third world would likely see an upswing of its fortunes, mostly because its dictators would not be tolerated. With corruption and violence declining sharply, modest wealth will be possible.What pitfalls are on our road to glory?Human nature: Many prefer violence to peace and will try to take advantage of the essentially peaceful nature of a religious society. Turning the other cheek will not work with the bully-boys that one encounters at all levels of a tyrannical regime. Reproduction control based on abstinence is a very long shot, increasing populations worldwide and endangering the future welfare of humanity on this planet.Degeneration into debauchery as happened at various times in the church’s past, with widespread hypocrisy and mere lip-service to religious tenets. Another protestant reform is only one such failure away.Autocratic tendencies within the church, overemphasis of central control, or its opposite, a dilution and provincialization of the creed.

What is outside the world

2006-04-29T10:48:00.000-07:00

A few follow-up thoughts to my last post:If our world is bottom-up, materialistically founded and determined, the interesting point is: what is outside? A believer of physics may claim that question to be irrelevant, as even such basics as the dimensions of space and time are solely defined within our universe, and to speak of an outside is thus nonsense. I have objections to this kind of argument: Physics, or any science dealing by definition with observable and repeatable phenomena that are of this world, cannot claim to know what is outside its own domain; to say it does not exist is an overreaching of its self-defined bounds. Secondly, the notion of just how encompassing the universe is, changes. Now we have the beginnings of theories that do posit a time before the big bang, of universes sitting in a metaverse, etc. Physics does not have the privilege of defining the boundaries of the world simply in line with its own current thinking, to change it for convenience at any time. Thirdly, no matter how many meta-meta-universes one postulates, there is always a meta+1-universe conceivable that lies outside all this lower metaness. Infinite recursion ensues without solving anything. Maybe one needs a metaphysics to deal with the metaverses, no?If the universe is created, life is much simpler. The endless recursion of what is outside ends right there, as God is not part of or subject to our laws of thinking. Hence no 'metagod' needs to be postulated. Physics and its associated disciplines dutifully explore the ‘inside’ of creation, never being called upon to fulfill a task they are not meant to do, namely to explain the nature of it.

Proofs of God - top down

2006-04-27T21:06:00.000-07:00

Greater minds than mine have ventured here, and have been refuted. Faith alone stands between the gentleman believer and the hordes of the materialist barbarians. Certainly I will not fare any better than those before me, yet try I will.
1) The density of water is highest - or at least at a local maximum - at 4 degrees centigrade. This sounds mundane, but is such a convenient exception to allow carbon-based life, it has the smell of design.
I am aware of arguments that say something like 'the reason the laws of nature are the way they are is simply that otherwise we would not be here to observe them'. True, but not very explanatory. An even grander theory along those lines assumes an infinity of universes, all of which have different laws, in fact all laws are being given expression in one of all possible worlds. I am not sure what 'all' might be, but likely it is an infinite number, unless there is some form of 'meta-law' that defines which laws are being expressed.
2) The universe is something that started with a bang (or not) and while limitless, is not necessarily infinite, either in space or time. Therefor, there is something 'outside' it, a higher reality, and that is God. Well, maybe there is nothing outside, and if there was, it would just be a 'meta-universe' and so we have proved nothing. The point is, however, that no science can predict outside the realm of the physical, of our space and time, and God would certainly reside outside of that. We have achieved a draw!
3) This leads to the next point, namely the fact that a God-created universe is quite similar and possibly indistinguishable from a simulated one. An interesting discussion about this can be found at http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html and also on wikipedia under 'simulated reality'. The movie 'The Matrix' portrays a simplified version of this idea, where the simulation is merely local, i.e. of earth itself. Apparently, the probability of us living in a simulation is considered quite high, provided certain other factors are true as well. Here is the interesting point: As far as I understand it, these theories all posit that the 'real' world, which runs our simulation, is just like ours in its laws. Needless to say, this is by no means necessary. Perhaps the real world has twenty seven dimensions, no entropy, five axes of time, or nothing even resembling our ideas of space and time. Maybe the real world is heaven, and God is our creator...
This is all I can think of for now, more will hopefully follow.

On Theories and Abstractions - bottom up

2006-04-20T17:27:00.000-07:00

I have been reading G.K. Chesterton lately; he writes about how the world is entirely magical, while our 'laws of nature' are not: even the simplest abstractions are derived from examples that exist around us. When we say that 2 plus 3 are always 5, and that if x is the son of y then y is the father of x, then those are conditions or relationships we observe in the real world. Once we abstract, we loose something, and our derived laws are never true representations of reality, no matter how sophisticated we make them.
I believe that this is true for all of mathematics, physics, the much debated theory of evolution, biology in general, you name it. Much can be learned from forming such abstractions, but much gets lost if we take them to be absolute truth. If the Greeks had experimented with geometry on all sorts of surfaces first, before jumping to conclusions, we may have had Riemann's and Lobachevski's discoveries millennia earlier, to give an example.
Physicists are looking for the G.U.T., the grand unified theory of everything, a formula in essence that can explain the fundamental physical forces and entities, and from there, everything else. They do not seem clear as to how close they are, but I sense optimism in their books and articles. I wonder if they have thought this all the way through. The GUT is essentially the end of physics, and sooner or later of all other natural sciences. It may take centuries to apply such a lofty formula to all processes and phenomena, but sooner or later, within a foreseeable time, the work ought to be finished. Then what? Will the GUT explain everything worthy of explanation, define once and for all which technological endeavors are reasonable and which are not, enabling great feats of engineering? Past breakthroughs have done so, giving rise to the unprecedented technological expansion of the past two centuries. But what will happen once nature's secrets have been exposed to the light and are known to everybody? There can of necessity not be another breakthrough, unless the GUT is not the GUT but something smaller, at which point we might go on and search for the super-GUT, and so on ad infinitum.
The point here is, the universe might not at all be comprehensible, or describable by scientific methods. Like a flashlight in a large cave, science may be able to elucidate only a finite area of reality at any one time, and never in all its mystical detail.

Doubt

2006-04-17T20:23:00.000-07:00

These are the areas I have a hard time believing 'official doctrine' whether it's science or religion: If our universe is bottom up, materialistic, determined by laws of physics, our human/social relations defined by genetics and maybe the action of memes on the software running in our brain, then how can we behave as if we embraced certain values? Or free will, for that matter, and hence responsibility for our actions? How can we even claim something to be true, as that very belief itself may be the inevitable outcome of the deterministically firing neurons in our few pounds of wetware that we call brain?
Right and wrong? Meaningless words. Same as beautiful, ugly, good and bad, you can see where this is going. But then, if all our thoughts are merely products of natural laws, such as the laws of electrochemistry, or even cybernetics, then there is nothing to restrain our actions in any way. We would do well to emulate Stalin, or any great materialist dictator, and exploit our fellow humans as much as we want for our own gain, and with the clear knowledge that they are in no way less than us, or deserving of any such abuse. But neither do they have the right to be spared, to be treated with dignity, nor any other right for that matter.
This to me is the great pitfall of all 'scientific' explanations of the world, that in order for their often claimed humanism to be plausible, they have to stop thinking the thread through all the way to the end.
If the universe is top down, however, then what is its purpose? Why make it so hard to see God and his will, why hide him from us, why construct a world that functions so smoothly by deducible and seemingly ultimate laws? Also, if man is fallen, has sinned, why not clearly mark the way to salvation? What about those born retarded and unable to tell right from wrong, or who are psychopathic, autistic or whatever? If theistic religion is true and condones some behaviors while forbidding others, don't these people start with a significant handicap? Or are they exempt from the rules? And why would God make humans who have no or a sharply reduced choice in their actions?

There are others:         If man is the centerpiece of God's creation, then why is the universe so large? So old?
                        If science claims to explain everything, why are its laws becoming so muddled at the smaller levels?
                        Can we trust our senses and our reasoning, if our brains' actions are materialistically determined?

Intro - continued

2006-04-13T17:54:00.000-07:00

I have decided to label my postings as either 'top-down' if they assume a Higher Being, are theistic in nature, and as 'bottom-up' if they posit a strictly materialistic/scientific paradigm. I may get to the point where this distinction will fail, not through a lack of theoretical rigor, but because my ideas are straining the framework that seeks to contain them. I will consider myself very lucky if I get that far. Sometimes I will try my hand at short stories to give an example of what I am trying to describe.

Introduction

2006-04-12T20:58:00.000-07:00

What lies at the root of the world? Do we live in an ultimately material universe, driven by the expansion of space, doomed by entropy? Is matter but a by-product of some great consciousness and the laws of physics its habits?
If this is an age of near total relativism, the only, and the most important question immune to it, is the one about fundamental reality. For if our world is 'bottom-up' i.e. materialistic, then it is hard to postulate any absolute principle, or value. If it is 'top-down' or created by a higher being, then there may be indeed one truth, one right way only.
This blog will be my attempt to clarify the issues, to hopefully generate some insights, and maybe to encourage discussion. I cannot for myself imagine a more important question than this: Is there a God, a being that created the universe and who may have a goal for its creation, or are we terrestrials just a passing phenomenon in a self-organized structure without plan or goal?