Joseph Campbell and the Masks of Eternity

A while ago I was asked to blog about Joseph Campbell, and after months of not knowing how, here it finally is. It’s hard for me to try to condense what I understand and love about Joseph Campbell into a few ideas. I’ve been watching The Power of Myth ever since college, after I read The Hero with a Thousand Faces (I still have the book I “borrowed’’ from my mom), when I saw it on TV and decided I had to buy it. I once described it as food for the soul. So for one, it resonates with me. For another, it deals with the human experience (as all myths do) and so it is universal and un-specific, and thus it is hard to specify. But anyway, it’s difficult to sum up what Joseph Campbell means to me... but this blog wasn’t created for summations that distill great meaning into digestible portions of meaninglessness, so I will do what I can. To not do that.

After watching the last episode of The Power of Myth, “The Masks of Eternity,” and writing down everything awesome (which filled nearly three pages), I am resisting the urge to quote the entire thing. But I think there is one part where Joe explains a statue of the Hindu god Shiva which encompasses most of the main themes he talks about.

 “The dance of the world – the dancer whose dance is the Universe. In this hand he has the drum of time, which shuts out eternity, and we are enclosed in that; and in this hand a flame which burns away the veil of time and opens us up to eternity; and in his hair is a skull and a new moon, the death and rebirth at the same moment, the moment of becoming.... The goal of your quest in your life is to find that burning point in yourself, that becoming thing in yourself, which is fearless, and desireless, but just becoming.”

Drum of time: The beat of the drum symbolizes time and shuts out eternity, which is timeless. Thought is temporal. Symbols are expressions of thought. The great mystery transcends thinking and symbols. “God is a thought – God is an idea – but its reference is to something that transcends all thinking. It is beyond being! Beyond the category of being and non-being! Is he or is he not? Neither is or is not.” So the idea of God that most people have is a symbol of the eternal, but it is not the eternal. Everything that exists, exists in the field of time, and things like unicorns merely do not exist, but the eternal refers to the transcendence of such dualities and is not then, or there, but in the ever-changing moment.

Flame of eternity: The flame which burns away the veil of time opens us up to eternity. It is a cleansing fire. To be open to what is instead of what you desire or what you fear is also to give up your ego and your identification of self with your thoughts. You are not your thoughts, and you are not your fears. This is the experience of the sublime, which opens you, but which may be terrifying, detaching you from what you had identified as yourself – your house, your car, your job, your country, what you are good at, what you hate, what you find funny – The “dismantling” process talked about in I <3 Huckabees, this is it. You are the blanket.

Death and rebirth: In the “moment of becoming” you have the symbols of death and rebirth, creation and destruction, and the idea of unified duality. Duality is expressed by the world and its opposites – being and non-being, light and dark, good and evil, up and down, true and false – and in the unity of duality, as in the symbol of the Yin Yang, polar opposites are understood as existing coherently and inter-dependently – for if there were no such thing as dark, then light would be meaningless. In one episode Joe talks about how Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the garden of unity, eat of the fruit of knowledge of the pairs of opposites and are cast out. From Heaven to Earth truly: from transcendence to existence. This is not to say that Heaven is a place, for that gives it the property of existence. Heaven is an idea, whose “reference is to something that transcends all thinking.”

Burning point of becoming: The statue of Shiva is understood as metaphorical, as all myths are, of the human mystery, and so the “quest in your life” is not to worship the god Shiva but to find the Shiva-ness in yourself that is “desireless and fearless.” The hero’s journey is a symbolic undertaking that represents this quest: the hero leaves the world of the known to obtain rejuvenating life for the community. The hero finds and brings back fire, dies and is reborn, kills the dragon, becomes enlightened... but myths, religions, and rituals can be understood in terms of the hero’s journey because the hero is a symbol of you, and his journey symbolizes your life. “Have you died to your animal nature and been reborn?” Have you killed your dragon of ego and greed?

Well, how do you do that? Find that point of fire within yourself: “Follow your Bliss.” (Or, as he later remarked, follow your blisters.) This is not what makes you happy but what makes you energized, or makes you “feel the rapture of being alive.” It increases the awesome and decreases the suck. It is the immovable center, the eternal, the God, that is in you. It is your hero quest and your great adventure. For Joseph Campbell, his Bliss was in the study of mythology. Sometimes mine is writing this blog. However:

“Words are always qualifications and limitations, and that’s why it’s a peak experience to break past all that, every now and then, to realize: ‘Oh, ah.’ I think so.”

As do I, Joseph Campbell. As do I.

Guest Post: Breathless

Luckily for my readers, I am not the only one with deep thoughts. Not only is Steph a doctor of astrophysics and an immaculate karaoke singer, she has decided to single-handedly combat bad science in the guise of a fiction novel. Her book review was recently published in the Reports of the National Center for Science Education and can be found here. Thanks Steph, and keep up the good fight!

Breathless
by Dean Koontz
New York: Bantam, 2009. 352 pages
reviewed by Stephanie LaMassa

The plot of Dean Koontz’s novel Breathless centers on the mysterious appearance of two furry white creatures in the Rockies. The size of young children, they have attributes of dogs, cats, and otters, yet resemble none of these, having hands with opposable thumbs. The two main characters, Grady Adams, a craftsman, and Camilla Rivers, a veterinarian, spend the majority of the novel acquainting themselves with these animals and speculating on their origins. The animals’ eyes are their most enchanting feature, larger in proportion to their head than any known animal’s and colored in various hues of gold.

Seemingly unrelated subplots persist throughout the book and are ultimately tied together in the conclusion. One such subplot focuses on Lamar Woosley, who holds a PhD in both mathematics and physics, specializing in chaos theory. His musings on the nature of scientific inquiry set the tone for the climax of the book, where the target of his criticisms of unfounded theories and the scientists who cling to them is ultimately revealed: evolution.

These new creatures signify the end of the acceptance of evolution and the beginning of a new way of thinking. Where do these creatures originate? From “out of infinity into the finite, from out of time into time” (p 305). Such an alternative to evolution is certainly not a viable scientific one, but as a novelist who often writes about supernatural phenomena, it is neither Koontz’s obligation nor his intention to promote this sudden appearance as a realistic truth. Rather, he is focused on inciting his readers to question the validity of evolution.

Koontz utilizes a two-prong approach to achieve this end: portraying scientists as dogmatic and closed-minded and debunking evolution using specious arguments commonly used by anti-evolutionists. For the first prong, he insists, through his character Woosley, that it’s unscientific ever to regard a scientific fact as settled: a scientist who does so has “ceased to be a scientist, and he’s become an evangelist for one cult or another” (p 300). Indeed, scientists are apt to “become so committed to a theory that they spend entire careers ever more desperately defending it as new discoveries ever more rapidly undermine it” (p 300). By declaring that evolution is such a theory that survives despite the contradicting evidence, he implies that evolution is a “religion” (p 216).

For the second prong, Woosley offers several lines of evidence against evolution, correcting the “misconceptions” Grady and Camilla, representing the non-scientific public, held. Koontz’s message seems to be that non-scientists accept the fallacious arguments supporting a debunked theory since they are  ignorant of the evidence to the contrary. However, these counterarguments are not based on an accurate understanding of evolution or scientific evidence and therefore lend no credence to the claim that evolution has been scientifically refuted. I consider three examples.

Fossil Record. When Grady points out to Woosley that the fossil record supports evolution, he is told that it provides no such evidence. His major points to back up this claim are that Darwin predicted thousands of dead-end species but none has been found, and that no evidence exists for transitional forms in the fossil record. Supposed transitional forms may be unrelated species that have since gone extinct; moreover, dating techniques are not precise enough to date fossils sequentially. The first claim, lack of evolutionary dead-ends, is quite perplexing, for evolutionary biologists have found numerous such fossils, even in the human fossil record. Also, his second claim contradicts the first: if the fossils observed do not represent transitional forms, but rather separate species that have gone extinct, then these would be dead-end fossils. Beyond contradicting the first claim, this second claim also reveals ignorance about the scientific process, since the age of fossils have been accurately determined using independent radiometric dating techniques.

Not Enough Time. Woosley claims that the earth has not existed long enough for evolution to occur. Assuming that each “bit of data” (Koontz’s phrase) in a gene is obtained from mutation, and the fastest this change can occur is the time it takes for the speed of light to transverse a molecule, the amount of time needed to accrue enough changes to evolve from a single-celled organism to a simple one, such as a worm, is much longer than the age of the earth (which he correctly cites as four billion years old). If a worm could not evolve in such a short amount of time, how could anything else, much less a human? (Apparently, the skills of a chaos mathematician are needed to multiply and divide a couple of numbers to refute a biological theory.) This statement demonstrates a lack of understanding about the evolutionary process since not each “bit of data” needs to be acquired through mutation.  Evolution occurs through a number of processes, and scientists have demonstrated that these mechanisms can account for evolutionary change within the history of the earth.

The Eye. Though the argument is never made explicitly, it is suggested throughout the book—from the mesmerizing nature of the new creatures’ eyes, referred to as a “more impressive engineering feat than in the human eye” (p 119), to how the “principal challenge they offer [a geneticist and physiologist] is the impossible nature of their eyes” (p 274), it is not coincidental that these creatures’ eyes are their most stunning attribute or that the background on the book’s front cover is a rendering of this eye. For those well-versed in anti-evolution rhetoric, this is a reference to one of the most often used claims of antievolutionists: the complexity of the (vertebrate) eye cannot be accounted for by evolution. True, the eye is complex, but not irreducibly so. Evolutionary biologists have shown how this system could have evolved naturally, and it almost defies reason that this often refuted anti-evolution claim still persists.

Koontz should take the advice he gives to his readers, namely to look beyond what they accept to discover the truth. In his attempts to discredit evolution, he only reveals his (seemingly willing) ignorance on this topic and becomes an “evangelist” for misinformation. His time would have been better spent to learn what the scientific consensus on this issue is and how such tired arguments have been often refuted in the scientific literature. One can only hope that his readers are not swayed by his specious arguments but are instead encouraged to learn the scientific truth—rather than taking science lessons from a novelist. Fitting with the title, Breathless’s dissemination of false information in the guise of bemoaning the stagnation of scientific inquiry can be best described in the words of Judge Jones from the Kitzmiller v Dover decision: “breathtaking inanity.”

About the author:
Stephanie LaMassa has a PhD in astrophysics and is a post-doctoral scholar at Yale University, studying the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and galaxies.

What is Quality?

Preamble: I wrote this in August 2007, probably shortly after I read Lila, Robert Pirsig’s long-winded sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Zen etc. is a great novel with some philosophy and metaphysics interspersed that introduces his notion of Quality, and I recommend reading it, whereas Lila is a metaphysical exploration of these ideas with bits of a novel interspersed and is very boring. Both were thought-provoking enough to make me write this, though I am aware some of it only makes sense if you’ve read both, and some of it only makes sense to me. (Also, I apologize for the cheesy ending.) Anyway, without further ado, enjoy, and comment, especially if you are feeling philosophical! (If not, consider opening some wine.)

Is the lack of meaning over which I’ve been lamenting the same as lack of Quality?

Example which brought about this question: receiving scarves, gloves, and picture frames from Mom’s friend at Christmas and birthdays; a nice gesture, devoid of meaning – for me, worse than nothing?

This is to be the beginning of a discourse on Quality… or something.

Quality: the process by which the experiencer experiences the experience; the relationship between subject and object; the “pre-intellectual awareness” of object by subject; the connection between mind and matter, the perennial false dichotomy, two polar opposites residing in the same circle; an event; Reality.

Sweetly pondering chaos… “It is my path, though not my choice, and I will know the meaning.”

What is meaning?

I have and still do maintain that “the meaning of life” does not exist.  What is the meaning of a flower?  There is no purpose for which humanity exists, that guides or should guide our actions.  There is no striving from inorganic to biological to social to intellectual forms of static quality, no fight between static and Dynamic any more than there is a fight between mind and matter, subject and object, ideas and reality, or whatever terms suit you best.  Some believe ideas are the only way to truth, others experience.  Some like it hot.

I feel like I can interpret Zen etc. in such a way that it makes perfect sense to me, but that my interpretation would mis-represent what Pirsig is trying to say, as evidenced by Lila.  Why do good ideas always turn bad when they attempt to solve everything?  If Quality is composed of static and Dynamic, but static is lower-case and Dynamic always capitalized, and they are always opposed… what’s the point of introducing the static?  Indeed, it makes an easier subject for a Metaphysics, being definable and categorical; but these are the very things that Quality is not, and seemingly neither is Dynamic Quality, and so one wonders how static quality is Quality at all.

If one is better able to repair a motorcycle when they are open to Quality, does it mean one’s actions have intellectual quality?  Does a bolt have more inorganic quality when it is placed in the correct position on the bike, so as to hold it together?  Does the bolt care where it is placed; does it strive toward being assembled, being a part of a larger machine; does this give the bolt meaning?

What is the meaning of a bolt?

Humans are a process that has become aware of itself.  (Switching philosophical novels for a moment…)  But are we really more aware than, say, a squirrel?  It may not be able to tell that a car is coming, but it’s driven by hunger and the need for nuts.  It wants to survive, but sometimes its desire for better nuts somewhere else leads it to ruin.  We may not be able to tell that our foreign policy moves will lead to war, but we are driven by our own need to survive, and historically this has been at the expense of other tribes/nations/belief systems.

Are Meaning and Quality the same thing?

There’s something in me that loves certain objects, like my dragon candle for example, because of their meaning.  Obviously this is a meaning with which I imbue them, and exists for me and me alone.  It is a state of connection between myself and the thing.  In this way it is indeed very similar to Pirsig’s Quality.

However, I can’t believe that it has existence of its own, as a primary “pre-intellectual” reality, on par with the Tao.  Quality, an event, the phenomenon of awareness perhaps – awareness without thought – can be seen as the primary reality, out of which subject and object spring.  Does anything exist which cannot be perceived?  Common sense says of course, but philosophy says we can never know.  So maybe my aversion to giving Meaning this same status is the result of a lingering intuition that primary reality must be unchanging, constant, eternal, universal.  Okay, by “unchanging” I don’t mean it doesn’t change over time, but that in each instant of time it is the same everywhere…. But what is “everywhere”?

Anyway, perhaps I resist saying that meaning is the same as Quality because this raises meaning from a personal phenomenon to a universal primal Meaning of Life; it becomes Capitalized, a caricature of the thing itself, at once everyone’s contradictory ideas of it.  All of a sudden it has some Special Significance.  It is the Answer.

What was the question?

If I stick with my explanations (not definitions) that Quality is an event or process which connects subject to object, then the problem is solved.  Instead of elevating meaning (whose lack I lament) to the status of some Reality un-defined as Quality, I can instead realize that this mysterious quality can be understood to be the same as the meaning which gives objects, events, actions, etc. a fullness and wonder the absence of which is characterized by meaninglessness.

So when I receive a gift of another cheap scarf, it is not the item I miss, but the meaning behind it.  That is to say, I would rather receive something which connects me to this un-defined Quality, where I could say that this item has meaning and this meaning brings me outside of myself.  I would desire a gift that brings to me a feeling that someone cares.

Ah, good, I wanted to talk next about Pirsig’s notion that the inverse of Quality is caring.  It is hard to imagine an inverse of an un-definable pre-intellectual awareness event which creates subjects and objects, but such is the failing of words made plain.  You have to care to realize Quality, and opening to Quality entails caring.  “Caring about what?” is perhaps the wrong question that we are inclined to ask.  Caring is an investing of energy to the task of understanding; it is the desire to understand.  To understand is to achieve Quality, to have your perceptions of reality come from reality itself instead of preconceived notions, emotions, or drama.  To say that a thing lacks Quality is thus to say that it is meaningless, which is to say that understanding is not possible; but if one could understand the thing, Quality would be found.  It is as misguided to think that some things have Quality while others don’t as it is to think that some things are more real than others.  Thus the answer to the question which has been bugging me in some form ever since reading Zen etc. and Lila, that is, “How does one thing have quality while another doesn’t?”, which can be rephrased as “Does x have quality?”, can be answered: “Do you care?”

If you are open to understanding (that is, you care… see previous musings for more), then Quality shines forth.  That is to say, “A sacred place is a place where Eternity shines through Time.” (Joseph Campbell)

In my head, all of these ideas are really describing the same thing; all these words are explicating the same wordless reality, the indefinable, unfathomable, etc. etc.

“Eternity is Now” – Frank Herbert, Dune

“Follow Your Bliss” etc. – Joseph Campbell

“Quality blah Victorians blah blah” – Robert Pirsig

“The Tao that can be Named is not the Eternal Tao” – Lao Tzu

“A deep, abiding, living change” – Krishnamurti

“Bother” – Winnie-the-Pooh

I’m still left with the feeling that this is simply not enough.  It may be true, beautiful, and simple, but is that enough?  What would someone reading these ramblings think?  Obviously, it would depend on their past thoughts and experiences, but what can possibly be communicated here?  I see all these things as coming from a common thread which humanity shares, which human myths express; it resounds in me and fills me to overflowing, like a good piece of music.  But that’s just me.  I’ve had certain thoughts, reflected on certain other people’s thoughts, had certain experiences, possess certain personality traits and proclivities, which combine to form these lofty ideas.  I enjoy thinking in this way and attempting to open myself to wondrous new ideas, and finding their place in a coherent whole.  These things connect with me in a powerful way; but how can such a connection be communicated?  It is exactly the problem of “defining Quality,” of “Naming the Tao,” which Pirsig was drawn to do in Lila while at the same time acknowledging its impossibility.

Of course it’s impossible.  Wholly and completely impossible, but utterly necessary.  Humanity has some choices to make in the near future, and it is no longer a question of isolated groups surviving or not.  We are a global system, and forgetting to care about this amazing truth could spell disaster.  Then again, disaster is a part of life.

And we are life.  All of us.  Every one.  We are nature, and we are civilization.  We have become aware of ourselves, but we do not yet understand ourselves.

In the end, to care is a choice that all of us must make on our own.

Coffee or Tea? A discourse on Discourse.

By now everyone has heard about the Tea Party, but I doubt many are aware of the Coffee Party or their horribly-named “Enough is Enough!” rally planned for October. According to their mission statement: 

The Coffee Party USA believes that the influence of money, and the politics of fear and exclusion, stand in the way of a government of, by, for the people.

I can get behind a lot of their ideas, but more than that I support their focus on process: they advocate civil discourse and believe change can come about by “seeking and spreading accurate information” and providing a place for the “respectful and honest exchange of ideas.”  In a Coffee Party USA video, co-founder Annabel Lee asks some tough questions: “How do we make these really hard decisions? What values do we use?”

Presumably, when deciding which political candidate to support, we are supposed to research what their positions are on the various issues we care about. This is seen as responsible voting, as opposed to being swayed by soundbites or charisma. However, I am more interested in knowing how they make decisions. The process is more important than the eventual result, because a good process has the capability of producing the best results. How do they get their information? What effort is made to understand the facts? Is their reasoning logical, and are they aware of common biases? 

Another important aspect of how people make decisions are their foundational assumptions (whether or not they are viewed as assumptions), because these will influence every decision. These are the starting point, the axioms they take as given, so that even if the logic is sound and there is a good process of making decisions, wrong axioms will lead to wrong conclusions. Optimally these foundational assumptions would also be tested against available facts, but this is not always possible, such as when they represent moral and ethical values (i.e. beliefs about how things should be instead of how they are).

The current political discourse, much of it driven by the Tea Party, is dominated by fear and panic. This is not an environment conducive to a sound decision-making process, but it does get a lot of people motivated and willing to listen to a leader who will tell them what to do. As columnist Mark Shields said on the Newshour:

I think, you know, it's an angry electorate. I mean, if you are angry, Rick Perry is your candidate. If you are nervous, Rick Perry might not be your candidate. But if you are angry, he is. And, I mean, Jon Huntsman is reasonable. He's thoughtful. And I don't know if there is a constituency out there for him to win.

Being thoughtful and reasonable will not win you votes. It is boring, and doesn’t connect with people, unlike anger.

What is fueling this anger-driven discourse? There are probably many complex issues at work, but I learned a few things reading Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker article, “The Transformation of Michele Bachmann.”  On page 4, we learn that one of the people Bachmann was influenced by, Francis Schaeffer, believed Roe v. Wade signified that “they” (The Supreme Court, the federal government, and humanism) are evil, because “now ‘they’ are killing babies.” It goes without saying that abortion is a very emotionally-charged issue, but this way of thinking makes some sort of sense to me. I disagree with both the proposition (they are killing babies) and its conclusion (humanists are evil), but if the federal government were really killing babies, wouldn’t you also think it evil? Wouldn’t it make you angry? And what would you do about it?

Another gem we learn about is Dominionism, which was also recently featured in articles about Rick Perry’s evangelical roots (here, and here; more here and here; another op-ed suggests caution when associating Christian conservatism with political conspiracy here). According to Sara Diamond, the philosophy that resulted from the Schaeffer’s idea of Dominionism, which is the idea that man has dominion over all things of the Earth (Genesis 1:26), is that Christians "are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns.” This is far from a mainstream Christian idea, and it is unclear to what extent (if at all) the candidates themselves believe it, but it is there and it is not going away.

We should be concerned, not with what the articles tell us about Bachmann or Perry, but about the movement they represent. And this movement is not the Tea Party; the Tea Party is merely the latest manifestation of the fundamentalist and evangelical Christian surge for political power. (Also, everyone watch  “Jesus Camp.”) Their ideas may be crazy, and these ideas may be held by a small minority, but they are a loud minority that enjoys lots of national media coverage (perhaps because their craziness is entertaining). We should be concerned. It is one thing to recognize that only a small minority of Muslims want to blow themselves up or crash airplanes into buildings. It is another to ignore the fundamentalist movement in our own backyard.

But that is a horrible analogy! It is incredibly unfair to all the fundamentalists and evangelicals who don’t actually want to blow anything up. It comes out of my own fears about where this country is headed and what kind of people want to lead it. They simply do not share most of my core values, and I worry about their vision of the world that is willfully not based on reality but on a 1600 year-old text. I worry about the thought processes that lead people like David A. Noebel, the founder and director of Summit Ministries, to believe that the “Secular Humanist worldview” is one of America’s greatest threats. My initial reaction is that “they don’t understand what it means to be a secular humanist,” but maybe that’s not it at all. If truth comes from the Bible, then being secular and not acknowledging any god will surely lead away from truth. If we are to put ourselves below God in all ways, then a human-centered worldview is prideful and selfish. I disagree with their foundational assumptions and their unwillingness to question these assumptions, and they disagree with mine.

How are we then to have a constructive dialogue? How is civil discourse even possible when both sides strongly disagree with the other’s foundational beliefs? Especially when one of those beliefs includes a mistrust of doubt and an ingrained sense of rightness? … Okay, most likely all sides have an ingrained sense of rightness. As much as I try to abandon certainty, I also believe that I am right, and that it is the correct way to view the world. I am certain about being uncertain. So perhaps what we could all use is the willingness to be wrong.

 

However, that is harder than it sounds. The other aspect of this discourse on discourse is the psychology of why people reason the way they do (i.e. unreasonably) and the science behind it. I suggest you read this entire article by Chris Mooney (which has lots of scholarly references), but here is one of the key points (emphasis mine):

The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience: Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.

This is something that we all do to some degree. It is a challenge to constantly check whether your emotions may be clouding your judgment. But must we completely remove emotions from decision-making? Perhaps then we wouldn’t care about the outcome one way or another. Mooney suggests that we take them into account: “Given the power of our prior beliefs to skew how we respond to new information, one thing is becoming clear: If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn't trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.”

A good example of motivated reasoning is how most Republicans don’t believe in evolution or global warming, despite the overwhelming scientific support for both. In addition to Mooney’s book “The Republican War on Science,” famed economist Paul Krugman recently wrote about “Republicans Against Science” in his op-ed. (I almost talked about how even the libertarian favorite Ron Paul has said he doesn’t “believe in evolution” but, according to a post comment, that video was edited, and Paul is actually agnostic on the matter.) The fact that the evolution “debate” has been phrased as something for which people can have different opinions is what makes it so frustrating. This isn’t a choice between being a Christian or believing in evolution! It’s about whether you think the findings of science can be thrown out according to personal preference; it’s about whether you think it’s acceptable to ignore rational conclusions when you don’t like where those conclusions may lead. A lot of people don’t like falling from heights, but if they stop believing in gravity that won’t make it any less true! But the theory of gravity doesn’t challenge anyone’s foundational beliefs, and apparently evolution and climate change do.

I don’t have any answers. I’ve phrased the discussion in terms of Coffee vs. Tea, but the Tea Party is a well-funded political machine with the backing of a major news corporation that is focused on getting its candidates elected, and the Coffee Party is a lone voice saying “why don’t we listen to each other for a change?” Frankly, the current political discourse disturbs me greatly. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity was great but did nothing of the sort. People are still crazy! Even non-crazy people are crazy! According to the motivated reasoning article, we are very resistant to facts we don’t like, and being more knowledgeable only enables us to find counter-arguments to explain away the facts.

Oh well. I guess I can say that I’m glad the Coffee Party exists, however small and ineffectual it may be.

Nature's Wrath

I woke this morning to the sound of thunder. As my alarm was about to go off anyway, this didn't bother me but did what thunder always does, and so I thought to myself, "awesome." I love thunderstorms. I grew up in Florida, which should be called the "Sunshine - except during the afternoon thunderstorm" State, and on many summer nights watching the lightning was our entertainment.

I have always been fascinated by the weather in general, secretly hope to witness a real tornado, and once considered Meteorology as a profession, so crouching under my desk during my first ever earthquake was probably the coolest thing that will happen to me all year. The ground itself was shaking throughout most of the Northeastern United States! Amazing! Much of geology involves slow processes operating over thousands or millions of years, but in an Earthquake, the Earth's crust is disturbed with such force to create pressure waves, like sound waves, that "cause the entire planet to quiver or ring like a bell." How cool is that?!

Such a strong earthquake in this part of the world (the Central Virginia Seismic Zone) is quite rare because the faults are very ancient, having settled down in their old age after spending their wild youth creating the Appalachian Mountains and separating North America from its cross-Atlantic cousins. According to Dr. David Applegate of the USGS (see full transcript here), this is also the reason why these earthquakes are felt so far away from where they occur:

Out in California or in Alaska or where the Earth's plates are grinding against each other, the rock is much more broken up. Here, we have very stable continental crust. It's old crust. It's cold. It transmits the energy very well over long distances.

Additionally, the eroding of the Appalachians has built up thick sediments which amplify shaking. Over 100,000 interested people have weighed-in on what they felt during the earthquake to produce the USGS Community Interest Intensity Map showing that light shaking was felt as far North as Canada.

And now we have a hurricane threatening to make landfall in the same area this weekend. It is another rare thing - hurricanes usually hit much farther South.

Every day, all over the world, Nature shows her wrath. For me, violent weather will always be a reminder that Nature is alive. The forces of Nature are going about their business with complete disregard to how humans are spending their time, but we are not separate from Nature, we are Nature, and Nature is Awesome!

This wine is ethereal

That last post was a bit heavy... sort of chewy, with firm tannins, complex structure, and a lingering finish. The next posts I have planned are similar, so in the meantime why not something a bit more refreshing? Something light, clear, perhaps slightly sweet, and lively in the mouth. (A real wine person said that last one to me once. No joke.)

If you know me, then you know that I enjoy wine, and that it has a tendency to make me philosophical. I also encourage people to describe wines by just saying whatever comes into their heads, not trying to sound like a professional but making things up because that's what the professionals do - except they know what they mean while we think they sound like pretentious assholes. To help in the effort of describing wines, the internet has come to our rescue with a list of wine tasting terms and a more fancy set of wine descriptions. (There are probably thousands more pages but these will do!)

So the next time you are drinking wine, pull out your wine dictionary for a way to put your tasting experience into words. And then make things up! You could call that organic Pinotage from South Africa "earthy," or you could say it tastes like dirt. Congratulations, you sound like a pretentious asshole!

(Full disclosure: I did this exact thing at a wine tasting once, and probably sounded like a (very drunk) pretentious asshole.)

Once you have your wine descriptions set, you can brush up on your philosophical terms for the next time we drink and I inevitably try to be profound.

Hawking’s Curiosity

Stephen Hawking was recently featured in a Discovery Channel Curiosity episode, asking “Did God create the Universe?” Videos of the show, plus the panel discussion which followed, can be found at Discover's Cosmic Variance blog.

It starts with a whole bit about Vikings yelling at an eclipse, with the point being that now that we can explain eclipses using science, we don’t need to scare away the sun-eating Wolf God anymore. Awesome! But this is actually setting up the whole tone of the show: science has replaced God as an explanatory force for the natural world. For example, it is explained that the universe’s total energy adds up to net zero, including positive energy in the stuff and negative energy in the vacuum, so you don’t need anything extra to create it. OK, got it. But at some point Hawking says something like “let’s see what the laws of nature tell us about whether we need a God.” No, let’s not! The laws of nature don’t tell us anything about God because they are laws of nature and therefore of things that exist!

After some Galileo, Einstein, and modern physics, Hawking is basically saying: because the universe works the way it does, i.e. the known laws of nature are what they are, we don’t need to explain its existence using God; they provide a better explanation themselves. The problem here is the implication that the laws of nature could have led us to the conclusion that God must exist, which is patently not possible! The laws of nature tell us about nature. And btw, these “laws” are constantly changing as our understanding grows and as we collect data about the universe. Inserting God as an explanation at any point is giving up in the same way as the anthropic “landscape” explanation for the value of the cosmological constant is giving up. The natural laws don’t always make sense (for example, who really understands quantum mechanics?) but that doesn’t mean they require supernatural explanation, and inversely, to get back to Hawking, our ability to understand the laws of nature can neither prove nor disprove the existence of a supernatural being.

The final point relates to how the Big Bang was a singularity, and like in a black hole, time stops, so with the Big Bang we’ve “found something that doesn’t have a cause because there is no Time for a cause to exist in… no Time for God to create the Universe in.” This argument, which Hawking spends a lot of time with at the end, can be easily refuted by saying that God is outside of the Universe and therefore outside of Time (a common theological idea is of God Eternal), and so God can create Time itself along with the Universe. Hawking doesn’t get any points here.

Overall, what’s wrong with the episode is the same problem I have with Sean Carroll’s "God as a theory" argument, which is the method of positing God as a theory that explains things, then proving how the theory doesn’t work. The problem is, God is not a scientific theory, so the fact that science wins such arguments is meaningless. This is the God vs. Science argument. It is a valid way of talking to people who think the Bible disproves evolution or global climate change, but does nothing for rational theists. To most people, God is not an explanation for why the world works the way it does but a more personal entity.

No, you don’t need God to explain the world, but you also don’t need modern cosmology and particle physics to explain why you don’t need God. In some ways it is embarrassing to have this simplistic, materialistic, and somewhat condescending narrative as representative of both cosmologists and atheists. Most atheists did not reject the God hypothesis only after several years of graduate physics! Most cosmologists don’t go around thinking that the fascinating universe they study also disproves God! The real stories for both are undoubtedly way more interesting, and complicated, than this episode implies. Maybe it has been useful for opening a dialogue for those who are curious, however, because I’m sure everyone can find things in it they disagree with!

Then there is the follow up “Curiosity Conversation” hosted by David Gregory. A lot of it is frustrating as a direct result of the reasons why the show itself was frustrating. Here is the play-by-play:

Paul Davies says what I said, that Hawking’s idea of God as existing in time doesn’t match up with what most theologians talk about. A lot of the early discussion is about how science has now explained God away, that “after years of careful study” Hawking has concluded that God didn’t create the universe. As if! Sean Carroll reiterates that “we don’t need God to explain cosmology,” which is mundane because it’s true. Michio Kaku brings up the multiverse as if to say God must explain that (even though there is no evidence for a multiverse! string theorists….) Jennifer Wiseman brings up that people believe in God for a multitude of reasons other than to explain why the universe exists. Jon Haught says Hawking is redefining what science is capable of, which has traditionally avoided questions of God, morality, meaning, and purpose, and that most scientists would be uncomfortable with Hawking’s treatment. (I think science can and does say a lot, but the questions themselves about what these concepts mean are not scientific in nature.) I like Carroll’s point: if your idea of God interacts with the physical world, judge the scientific merits of that idea, and if God doesn’t interact with the world, go nuts! Then he stands up for skepticism, woot! Haught says theology answers why the universe is intelligible, which is a basic assumption of science. That is an interesting point that could lead to a whole different discussion, but suffice it to say that I don’t think God is the only possible explanation for why the universe is “intelligible” for a reasonable definition of the term.

Near the end there is a nefarious question by David Gregory based on Paul Davies’ comment that religion can let people live better lives: he says to Sean Carroll, roughly, “you are saying to people, you can do that, find inspiration from the Bible and live a better life, but you can’t believe in a creator without denying what science is telling us as of now.” Hold Up! No, religion doesn’t necessarily give people better lives, it can in fact go both ways, depending on the morality of the religious beliefs (yes, I think I know what morality is better than many religions, so there). No, you aren’t denying science if you believe in a creator, but you certainly aren’t justifying your belief through science. And then Carroll responds by saying “I think that’s right”!!! He goes on to say something very true about basing what you believe in on reality instead of imposing what you want on reality, but still! He complained about the editing, though, in his live blog post, so maybe that’s it. 

All in all, despite its faults, at least the show happened at all. Stephen Hawking is popular enough to pull it off, and we shouldn’t be afraid of talking about science and religion in the public sphere instead of theologians and scientists keeping to their respective selves. Now to read Carroll’s “Why (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists.”