Atheism Is Also A Faith

“Religion is proving perfectly compatible with modernity in all its forms, high and low.” This conclusion by John Micklethwait, editor of the Economist, and Adrian Wooldridge, the magazine’s Washington bureau chief, seems calculated to enrage secular rationalists of all stripes.

Whether Marxian or Millian, socialist or liberal, secular rationalists have held one tenet in common: religion belongs to the infancy of the species; the more modern a society becomes, the less room there is for religious belief and practice. Never questioned, this is what lies behind the hot-gospel sermons of evangelical atheists: if you want to be modern, say goodbye to God.

At bottom, the assertion that religion is destined to die out is a confession of faith." More

Is There a Science of Happiness?

"Philosophers have been discussing the nature and possibility of happiness for as long as philosophy has existed. From Socrates on down, there have been many attempts to provide an understanding of the nature of happiness and the ways that individuals might attain it. Later, a more social theory of happiness emerged stressing the role education and knowledge play in creating a world free of superstition in which everyone has a chance to develop their capacities in a society that encourages self-development and the happiness of all. This movement culminated in the ethical theory of Utilitarianism, which self-consciously aims at promoting the happiness and well-being of the greatest number of people. The question before us now is whether there might not be a science of happiness in light of which we can collectively aim to create a better world in which increasing numbers of people have a chance to live happy and flourishing lives." More

How The Brain Unites Us All

OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat. "The Ballad of East and West," by Rudyard Kipling

Eastern and Western minds are different. Of that much, we can be sure, but the difference is cultural and we can learn to use both modes of mind.

"As A species, we possess remarkably little genetic variation, yet we tend to overlook this homogeneity and focus instead on differences between groups and individuals. At its darkest, this tendency generates xenophobia and racism, but it also has a more benign manifestation - a fascination with the exotic.

Nowhere is our love affair with otherness more romanticised than in our attitudes towards the cultures of east and west. Artists and travellers have long marvelled that on opposite sides of the globe, the world's most ancient civilisations have developed distinct forms of language, writing, art, literature, music, cuisine and fashion. As advances in communications, transport and the internet shrink the modern world, some of these distinctions are breaking down. But one difference is getting more attention than ever: the notion that easterners and westerners have distinct world views.

Psychologists have conducted a wealth of experiments that seem to support popular notions that easterners have a holistic world view, rooted in philosophical and religious traditions such as Taoism and Confucianism, while westerners tend to think more analytically, as befits their philosophical heritage of reductionism, utilitarianism and so on. However, the most recent research suggests that these popular stereotypes are far too simplistic. It is becoming apparent that we are all capable of thinking both holistically and analytically - and we are starting to understand what makes individuals flip between the two modes of thought." More at New Scientist.

Surviving The 21st Century

What if the world warmed by 4 °C? What if the best efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions fail? What if around the Earth climates continue to accelerate warming? "Some scientists and economists are considering not only what this world of the future might be like, but how it could sustain a growing human population."

First, the good news. Humankind can survive the various global catastrophes. That was to prepare you for the next sentence.

Now, the bad news. As part of the aggregate population, your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are not so likely to do so. That is, unless serious planning and implementation are undertaken very soon.

Certainly a very few people can and will survive, but many people? Not likely, according to mainstream climatologists unless nations the world over mobilize in a concerted effort.

"Alligators basking off the English coast; a vast Brazilian desert; the mythical lost cities of Saigon, New Orleans, Venice and Mumbai; and 90 per cent of humanity vanished. Welcome to the world warmed by 4 °C." More

Commodified Intelligence

"This is an Age of Commodified Intelligence, a time of conspicuously consumed high culture in which intellectual life is meticulously measured and branded.

Equal measures success and hubris are to blame. By the end of the last century, exponential gains in science and in living standards made advancement seem inevitable, progress a matter of putting one scientific foot in front of the other. The intellectual horizon felt flatter, more intelligible, more accessible. A rise in intellectual exuberance is therefore unsurprising. Enrichment has certainly been on the march.

Facebook is devoted to cataloguing this cultural rebirth. Here people curate their personas and project them at the world. Characteristic of the younger generations, the mood strains for the eclectic while feigning nonchalance. The alchemist arranges lists in search of gold: Shostakovich, Dresden Dolls, Justin Timberlake, Miles. "Mrs Dalloway" is popular, perched between "Harry Potter" and, simply, “The Russians”. Status updates remind you that a friend has just returned from an “HD Mozart Opera” while another is “getting into Herzog films”. This is an achievement panopticon; the participants are its prisoners. More

Is This The Beginning of The End of Capitalism As We Know It?

Marx turned Hegel on his head and used the Hegelian dialectic for his dialectical materialism, which is a fancy way of saying that he crammed reality into a theory based on the physical world rather than the spiritual.

He proclaimed that capitalism had in it the seeds of its own doom. The Soviet Union as well as the People's Republic of China used their progressive thinking, their might, and their cunning to try to prove Marx correct.

The Soviet Union has collapsed along with the Berlin Wall. Communist China has grafted onto its People's Republic an unlikely thing, the free market system. Russia has become a nation of robber barons and crony capitalists. Communist China keeps its elite and autocratic leadership while suppressing freedom of speech and other rights cherished by the West. (Bill Clinton had hoped that opening up world markets to China would democratize the country, not in a socialist sense, but in a Western sense of freedom for the individual and institutions.)

Now, along comes the current global crisis. Alan Greenspan, once a disciple of Ayn Rand, says he was wrong about the wisdom of the market. The efficient market is nothing more than a theory like Karl Marx's. Governments must regulate markets to some extent. So much for The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Whither capitalism, then?

"Just like the advocates of capitalism today, [monarchist] supporters then could plausibly argue that monarchies were rooted in nature. Then it was hierarchy which was natural; today it is individual acquisitiveness. Then it was mass democracy which had been experimented with and shown to fail. Today it is socialism that is seen in the same light, as a well-intentioned experiment that failed because it was at odds with human nature.

What happened to the military is another useful frame for thinking about capitalism’s future. We are only a few generations from societies where the military stood at the apex of status and respect. War was part of the natural order, the inevitable way to resolve disputes. Yet, against all odds, in much of the world armies were tamed and civilised, turned from often cruel masters into professional servants. . . . ." More

Hank WIlliams:An Impoverished Life in Wealth & Fame

You'll cry and cry and try to sleep
But sleep won't come the whole night through
Your cheatin' heart will tell on you. Composed and sung by Hank Williams

"In the early morning of New Year’s Day, 1953, chauffeur Charles Carr pulled his Cadillac into the lot of a drive-in movie theater in Oak Hill, West Virginia, to check on his passenger, the country-music superstar Hank Williams, who had not moved in the back seat for hours as they drove from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Canton, Ohio. Carr discovered that Williams wasn’t breathing. His skin was blue and cold. The music legend was dead at 29 years old." More at The Miserable Life, Death and Immortality of Hank Williams.

Change Blindness

Blame it partly on saccades, or rapid eye movements, but you see far less than you think you do. Apart from saccades, you even miss changes in large events. It's called change blindness, and probably not a day goes by that you are not blind to something that happens right in front of your eyes. It can result from saccades or a large scene that changes in front of you as shown in the video below. Your brain makes you think that everything is as it was. Your brain plays tricks like this all the time. Magicians are well aware of the fact.

(1)Puzzles of Science (2)Vic Mansfield: Reality Is Neither The Subjective Nor The Objective

We continue in our lives in the confidence that this is the way things are. Light is there; things we see are there. We think it all happens now, but it doesn't. We look at a tree. The light revealing it has taken 8 minutes to reach it from the sun. Whatever we see is in delay mode. We don't get things real time. The visual area of the brain simulates what is recorded on the retinas--not what is out there. We get approximations, not "reality." As well, consider this. There are many unsolved scientific puzzles. Here are a few:

Most of the universe is missing. We can only account for 4 per cent of the cosmos.

Two spacecraft are flouting the laws of physics and scientists cannot figure out why. This has been going on for a long time.

One thing we thought we could trust is the physical world, but "the fundamental constants of physics might not be so constant after all."

When you hear music is it all only a bio-chemical reaction? What explains the beauty you feel on listening to Bach? Or are you only "a bag of chemicals"? Science simply cannot explain the leap from what it understands to your sense of being you.

Check out other puzzles here.

Astrophysicist Vic Mansfield refused to think of his consciousness as merely a function of neurons and synapses. Nor did he reject the physical and turn to the spiritual. In his book Head and Heart he explained his point of view:

"This book tries to show that reality is both intrinsically rational and objective and, simultaneously, a super-rational and subjective unity underlying diversity. In other words, reality cannot be reduced to the objective world of science nor to the subjective unity of the mystics. It intrinsically has both these seemingly incompatible aspects. Failure to embrace them both artificially limits reality and diminishes both our experience of reality and our sense of what it means to be human. Such lopsided views lead to extremism, despair, and moral paralysis." From chapter 1 of Head and Heart, found here. His site is explained as "exploring the relation of science to our inner life."

Vic Mansfield, died in 2008 of lymphoma. His obituary is on a page at the above link.

Sherwin Nuland on The Biology of Spirit

Sherwin Nuland is author of How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter,How We Live, and Leonardo Da Vinci, among other books. As a former surgeon, he is aware of the body's marvelous capacity. It sustains our life, supports our pursuits of order and meaning. In this Speaking of Faith interview, he connects an evolved brain with the human spirit.

As to a characteristic of biology, one associated with altruism, here is a momma cat "rescuing" her kitten. Her child called for help and she came.

Philosophers & God: An Age-Old Debate

Atheists today have public intellectuals on their side, as well as neuroscientists and philosophers. These people sound their opinions far and wide and the mass media provides them with a means. For all their stridency, there are some who are amused and say it was ever thus. Consider the following on Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, whom the essayist, Alex Byrne, calls "the four horsemen of atheism."

"The question of God’s existence is one of those few matters of general interest on which philosophers might pretend to expertise—Dennett is a professional philosopher, and Harris has a B.A. in the subject. Still, of the four, it is Dawkins who wades the furthest into philosophy. So what can philosophy contribute? In particular, have philosophers come to a verdict on the traditional arguments for God’s existence?

Although it would be too much to expect complete consensus, it is fair to say that the arguments have left the philosophical community underwhelmed. The classic contemporary work is J. L. Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism, whose ironic title summarizes Mackie’s conclusion: the persistence of belief in God is a kind of miracle because it is so unsupported by reason and evidence. The failure of arguments for God’s existence need not lead straight to atheism . . . ."

Byrne's coda: "the devout do not know that God exists in the way it is known that dinosaurs existed, or that there exist infinitely many prime numbers. The funny thing about arguments for the existence of God is that, if they succeed, they were never needed in the first place."

Somebody who left a comment on the essay: "Any Christian who busies himself trying to prove or debate the existence of God is missing his true relationship in the world." More

Children, Theory of Mind, & Hard-Wiring For God

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins argues that religion is propagated through indoctrination, especially of children. Children are gullible, explains Dawkins, and they carry into adulthood what is imprinted on their brains at an early age.

Research indicates this is not the case. Instead, it argues that "god isn't going away, and that atheism will always be a hard sell." Children the world over seem to have an innate capacity to believe in god or gods. This is apparently how the human mind works. It is a kind of intuitive thinking that is part of our brain structure throughout life. In short, studies of children imply that belief in god is hard-wired into the brain.

"There is plenty of evidence that thinking about disembodied minds comes naturally. People readily form relationships with non-existent others: roughly half of all 4-year-olds have had an imaginary friend, and adults often form and maintain relationships with dead relatives, fictional characters and fantasy partners."

Still, the ability to think about disembodied minds, is insufficient to explain belief in God. There is also our natural inclination to think in terms of cause and effect. For a hunter-gatherer if the wind rustled a bush, the cause might be construed as spirits.

Something called common-sense dualism also plays a part. Babies "as young as five months make a distinction between inanimate objects and people." More at New Scientist.

Science Fiction and Religion

In his classic The Hero With A Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell wrote about the myths that shape cultures and civilizations. Borrowing from Carl Jung, he located an ur-myth, a foundation pattern for all stories--that of the hero going forth to do battle with a foe, vanquishing the foe, and returning.

As for religion, Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis provide a different kind of foundation pattern. It includes a need to vanquish evil, redeem the soul, and relearn or regain God's mercy. In Christian terms, they fell from God's grace by eating the apple of the Tree of Knowledge.

(In Buddhist terms, they illustrate that life is tanha, or off-center, because of dukkha, or desire. Buddha's Noble Eight-Fold Path points to the direction of return.)

By desiring the fruit of knowledge, Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, out of harmony with life, which is to say into off-centeredness.

So, too, Science Fiction and television use religious patterns.

"Messianic sci-fi movies and TV programs, despite their own interest in parthenogenesis [virgin birth], did not spring forth fully formed from the New Testament. Science fiction of the written kind has long taken advantage of the cultural power of the Christ story. In fact, two of the twentieth century’s most popular sci-fi novels, Frank Herbert’s Dune and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, were overtly messianic, a fact noted by the sizable critical literature that exists on the books."

Christian themes aren’t an entirely new development in filmed science fiction, either. More