Crib Notes
It has been an eventful summer. Lots of opportunity for reflection.
My father died in August and I had a good chance to float my philosophical canoe down some of life's white water. It held out well, but not without a bit of patching and some dramatic moments.
Philosophically speaking there are two issues at the bottom of things: What is the world like and what are people like? Then there are the questions of how we relate to the world and each other. It's hard to simplify but there are a few things you can say at the outset -- things that seem far from obvious to most folks I run into.
We do know a lot more about the "real world" than the ancient sages did. But, if we are smart, we know that what we know is a drop in the bucket. The Universe remains mostly a mystery and with everything we learn we discover a host of new questions. While we grow in power and insight, we also become more full of wonder and humility. As far as we can tell, the Universe (out there) is immensely logical but also chaotic and, in some fundamental sense, out of reach of the most obvious conclusions of human logic.
On the human side, we face a similar bottomless mystery. We must accept that we know next to nothing about own minds, let alone the minds of others. Recent advances in neurology have pulled off the covers of what we used to call the "self", revealing what the sages were always telling us -- that what we experience as "reality" is just an illusion -- sort of :)
So what is left of "ancient wisdom" and the packaged answers of religion?
Well.
The idea of "God" seems far too small and simple-minded to answer the questions we now have of the world. The whole discussion around this idea passed its "best before" date about 500 years ago. People who try to shoe-horn ideas like evolution and the big bang into Biblical theology are suffer from self-inflicted cognitive dissonance -- forced to think one way from Monday to Saturday and another way on Sunday morning.
Although immensely popular, ideas such as "fate" and "karma" never made much sense anyway.
Along with all these dusty ideas, we can at last put aside questions like "Why did my little girl need to die?" and "Who do I need to kill to make the world pure and perfect?"
Of course, 99% of humanity will continue to struggle along with these ideas just because they are too busy to think things through or because they have no access to the alternatives.
We need not be too smug. Physics tells us that matter is nothing more than a convenient fiction, there are no such things as particles, only "fields". What we "see" "out there" depends in an unsettling way on the questions we ask, the experiments we perform and the way we interpret the experiments. Yet, the fundamental limitations of physics are beyond the reach of even the most hard nosed and objective of us. Those of us who have a sense of history have an uneasy feeling that fields, too, will turn out to be little more than a useful mathematical trick. In fact, although those who are skeptical of religion imagine themselves to trust only (what somebody told them) Science says, we are just like our ancestors, only a bit further down the road.
For myself, I've come to a rather shaky compromise ...
My father died in August and I had a good chance to float my philosophical canoe down some of life's white water. It held out well, but not without a bit of patching and some dramatic moments.
Philosophically speaking there are two issues at the bottom of things: What is the world like and what are people like? Then there are the questions of how we relate to the world and each other. It's hard to simplify but there are a few things you can say at the outset -- things that seem far from obvious to most folks I run into.
We do know a lot more about the "real world" than the ancient sages did. But, if we are smart, we know that what we know is a drop in the bucket. The Universe remains mostly a mystery and with everything we learn we discover a host of new questions. While we grow in power and insight, we also become more full of wonder and humility. As far as we can tell, the Universe (out there) is immensely logical but also chaotic and, in some fundamental sense, out of reach of the most obvious conclusions of human logic.
On the human side, we face a similar bottomless mystery. We must accept that we know next to nothing about own minds, let alone the minds of others. Recent advances in neurology have pulled off the covers of what we used to call the "self", revealing what the sages were always telling us -- that what we experience as "reality" is just an illusion -- sort of :)
So what is left of "ancient wisdom" and the packaged answers of religion?
Well.
The idea of "God" seems far too small and simple-minded to answer the questions we now have of the world. The whole discussion around this idea passed its "best before" date about 500 years ago. People who try to shoe-horn ideas like evolution and the big bang into Biblical theology are suffer from self-inflicted cognitive dissonance -- forced to think one way from Monday to Saturday and another way on Sunday morning.
Although immensely popular, ideas such as "fate" and "karma" never made much sense anyway.
Along with all these dusty ideas, we can at last put aside questions like "Why did my little girl need to die?" and "Who do I need to kill to make the world pure and perfect?"
Of course, 99% of humanity will continue to struggle along with these ideas just because they are too busy to think things through or because they have no access to the alternatives.
We need not be too smug. Physics tells us that matter is nothing more than a convenient fiction, there are no such things as particles, only "fields". What we "see" "out there" depends in an unsettling way on the questions we ask, the experiments we perform and the way we interpret the experiments. Yet, the fundamental limitations of physics are beyond the reach of even the most hard nosed and objective of us. Those of us who have a sense of history have an uneasy feeling that fields, too, will turn out to be little more than a useful mathematical trick. In fact, although those who are skeptical of religion imagine themselves to trust only (what somebody told them) Science says, we are just like our ancestors, only a bit further down the road.
For myself, I've come to a rather shaky compromise ...
- From Zen and its parent philosophies (Buddhism and Taoism), I take the idea that most of our personal grief comes from excessive attachment to what is, after all, a temporary phenomenon -- the self. I don't go so far as to devote a lot of effort to annihilate the self, since it is also the source of pleasure and meaningful action.
- From Zen, I also appropriate the skepticism of ideas that are just talk and even ideas themselves. Ideas and talk are not identical with the reality they describe. This applies even to mathematical "talk". In fact, the more you understand the "math", the clearer it is that there is a profound and mysterious gulf between "reality" and the way we talk about reality.
- From Christianity and the other religions of the book (Islam and Judaism), I accept what I regard to be the central moral challenge posed by the prophets-- to stand up with the poor and unfortunate against the rich and powerful. Of course this is a bit ironic since I am, myself, relatively one of the rich and powerful. I need to deal with the paradox, which doesn't bother me since Zen is the path of paradox.
- From Skepticism (which is just as applicable to "religion" as it is to "Science"), I cultivate my bullshit detector.
- I continue to be fascinated by Science and Technology, along with all the strange and wonderful things we discover almost daily. On the other hand, I see it as important to dig a bit deeper than "Science News". Deep understanding is hard. You cannot avoid the "math" of things. You need to put on your thinking cap and make the effort to follow long and complex arguments that lead to the basic insights of Science.
So, that's it as of October 2013. Crib notes for the Christian Skeptic.
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