I have been asked, on occasion, whether atheism leads one to despair. Normally, I shuffle off the question without much grace, loathe to insult someone's religion unprovoked--I say things like, "Oh, I just don't think about it much," or "It can be a downer, but you know," or even "I'd really like to believe in a religion, but I can't."
All of those are evasive half-truths. My worldview is essentially a positive one, despite of course being open to healthy doubt and questioning. I am not an atheist because it makes me happy. But I am one, and it does make me happy. I shall endeavor to explain myself a little.
The fundamental thing which is cited as a cause of the atheist's despair is mortality. Yes, death is very sad. It is quite tragic that every person throughout history, and with all likelihood every person ever to come, will eventually die--geniuses and tyrants and children and family. There is no softening of this blow to the atheist worldview. Death is not Donne's poetic comma : "One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally, / And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die." Death is not a pit stop on the way to something more, for the atheist. It is the final termination of a regrettably short and finite time that my consciousness spends on this earth. When my brain flatlines, I shall be no more. And that is that.
How horrible! you exclaim. What a horrid thing to imagine. Never being able to reunite with your family? Never knowing anything better than the short dismal blink of life on earth? Nothingness...nonexistence. It is unfathomable. Should not you recoil from such a belief, just from the sheer horror of such conclusions?
I say nay. In fact, I say that the atheist's finite life is a more happy prospect than the cheeriest eternal bliss. How could that be? Like so:
Imagine, for a second, the prospect of eternity. You can't, of course. It is as incomprehensible as nothingness. One cannot conceive of infinity. An eternity is a period of time so long that the most fascinating and wonderful heaven should become the darkest hell.
I shan't even touch on the subject of eternal torment. Obviously, it is more appalling than any earthly torment could possibly be, many times more appalling, an infinity times. Such is the nature of eternity.
Heaven, though. Surely heaven could not get boring! One can speak to all the (good) human beings who have ever lived. Twice. Ten times. An infinity of times, even. One has so much time, that one can exhaust every possible combination of words (grammatical or not!) in any chosen language(s) with every sentient person in heaven. And still, not one blink of eternity has passed.
But surely, one can do whatever one wants in heaven, so that would never be boring, would it? But wait...can one do whatever one wants in heaven? It stands to reason that one cannot sin. After all, that's what heaven is for--to be perfect and eternal, devoid of all sin. So then, one cannot do what one wants. Indeed, if modern-day apologists are to be believed when they say that God created evil and sin in order to give us free will, then it stands to reason that where there is no sin, there is no free will. Oh my.
Now heaven seems like a dismal proposition. It will be boring. One can exhaust the enormous (but definitely finite) list of things to do a million times over, have every conversation there is to have, enjoy every amusement possible...and still there is an eternity of time. And now, we have discovered that the people who inhabit heaven are necessarily automatons, devoid of free will and the ability to choose for themselves. Heaven becomes static, timeless, unchanging--happy, we are reminded again. We will be happy with this. We will have no choice.
Is not this vision of heaven more terrifying by far then the unfortunate but commonsensical belief that life just...ends? I know which fate I would choose. I know which would lead me to despair.
But eternity, besides being horrific to contemplate, further causes grief. If heavenly "bliss" is eternal, stretching on to infinity, than our lives here on earth are of less importances than a single grain of sand on the beach. They do, apparently, gain us entrance into the heavenly or the hellish realm. But besides that, they are absolutely insignificant. Everything pales before eternity. All earthly suffering is for naught. All striving and success. Why feed the hungry? Why aid the suffering? Why cure sickness? This life is but the title page and dedication of a much grander book, a book which goes on forever.
Again, such a conclusion is horrible. I feel my own suffering and joy. I see it in others. I feel its importance, its significance, in the world I live in. And although I may make little difference in my short lifetime, I do make a difference in others' lives. The alternative is meaninglessness. I cannot accept that.
People have asked me what, as an atheist, I see as the meaning of life. Usually, I shrug off this question as well. Now, I turn it back--what do the believers see as the meaning of life? When faced with the unfathomable certainty of eternal reward and punishment, what meaning can our paltry lives (confessed unworthy) possibly have? Before an all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing God, what meaning can my life have?
As an atheist, I believe that my life is finite, like all lives, and I will die. I believe that there is no world after this one, that we each have a precious amount of time to be conscious and sentient, to experience joy and love, to be alive. And because of this belief, I accept the responsibility of making this world the best damn place I can. Because I only get so long, and you only get so long, and ditto for everyone else. I want my life to be as happy as I can possibly make it, and I want yours to be too--because this is all there is, and I have human empathy for all my brethren on this tiny blue planet. I will do unto my neighbor as I would have him do unto me; because I am instilled with the human value of compassion, because my neighbor is like me, and his life is precious and finite just like mine. I will live--not recklessly, or selfishly--but joyfully, and recognize every second of every lifetime of every person on this earth should be made as good as it can be, because this is all there is.
I woke up this morning and lay in bed for a moment, listening to my heart beat, its patient lub-dub the work of millions of years of natural selection guided by nothing. I meditated on the life, the universe, and everything, and was struck with a sudden sense of awe and wonder, an appreciation, a great sense of belonging and joy. It was not a religious experience, but there are few words of a secular nature that describe such feelings. The beauty and complexity of the world is inspiring--without invocations of a Supreme Being and a godly plan. And without such beliefs, I am free to treasure every moment of this existence in its entirety. It is a good world. I do not need anything more.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Analogous.
I am fairly addicted to extended analogies, (which is probably somewhat indicative of how my mind works), so forgive me this digression. I need a metaphor sometimes; I may or may not be willing to tweak reality a little to fit, depending on the aptness of the metaphor, haha.
A question atheists are often asked is why they are not agnostics, or at least ambivalent about the possibility of there being a God, or some god-like supernatural consciousness. I have earlier written of the reason why agnosticism and atheism are philosophically indistinguishable in the case of any modern religious text or faith-based religion. (I appear to have lost that essay already; I shall perhaps rewrite it some time.) Whether or not you have certain knowledge as to the existence of God is irrelevant to whether or not you have faith in the existence of said God, which is why agnostic believers are entirely possible.
But the rules change when we are no longer discussing a Creator-God; Moses' or Jesus' or Mohammed's deity. My dad often stresses to me the point: there are many conceptualizations of God that aren't constrained by the faults of their respective holy books; there are Gods that do not answer prayers nor smite the unworthy; Gods that can be termed collective consciousness, or love, or nature, or some sort of ineffable sentience.
These are not concepts that I would choose to term "God," for the simple reason that most of the world accepts a personal Yahweh, or Jehovah, or Allah as their God. My dad responds sometimes by calling this unconventional supernatural substance the Aether (or Ether, if you prefer). I find that nomenclature strikingly accurate.
In physics, the luminiferous aether was a theory put forth to solve a simple problem: we know light is a wave, like water or sound waves, so what does it wave in? Out in the vacuum of space, there was no answer, so physicists postulated a substance called the luminiferous (light-bearing) aether which permeated the universe for light to travel in. With the wisdom of hindsight, of course, we can see that it was a flawed question--light, for one reason or another, is able to wave entirely on its own.
Framing the question of God like this is similar, to me, although perhaps the analogy is only the product of a fevered mind fed by too many layman's-level physics books. The question God is put forth to answer is as follows: the universe is tremendously complex, who made it like that? And thus God is postulated, much like the luminiferous aether, to explain a concept that we do not yet understand.
Beginning with this flawed question, aether grew in explanatory power. Aether became related to the absolute frame of reference that Newton's laws and Maxwell's equations seemed to require: the absolutely accurate tick of the ineffable clock, and the perfect stillness of the infinite meter stick. I couch my phrasing here in vaguely supernatural terms; it was a vaguely supernatural idea. Absolute time is God's time.
Analogous is the philosophical expansion of the concept of God from merely the name we give to the unknown into a dynamic figure that decides right and wrong, plans, answers prayers, and ultimately decides what will occur. (I am tempted to make a further analogy between absolute space/absolute time and absolute good/absolute evil, but I leave the metaphor of absolute morality and absolute spacetime as an exercise to the particularly enthusiastic reader.)
And yet, for all this successful philosophizing the aether aids, there were a few significant problems. Firstly, no one had ever seen the aether; it was, as far as science could determine, undetectable. Secondly, in order to transmit light, the aether had to be a solid more rigid than steel, and yet in order to fill space it needed to be completely fluid. Moreover, it necessarily had no viscosity, no mass, was incompressible, and had dozens of other sufficiently magical qualities that no one had ever seen or detected. In fact, the most miraculous quality of the aether at all was its complete invisibility. We were sure it was there. Very sure. It was just remarkably hard to find.
I really can thing of no better analogy for a deity, even the non-traditional deity of a collective consciousness, etc. Undetectable by scientific means. Any perceived paradox of the aether, such as its lack of drag on the planets, was merely prescribed as a new property of this unique substance; much as I often am told God's marked reluctance to answer prayers is due to his desire not to reveal himself. And above all, above all, the absolute certainty that it is there.
In the late 1800s, some experiments were carried out to test aether theory: the results were as one might expect. There was absolutely no drag on the Earth from the "aether-wind," nor any other detectable effect. Some rather clever scientists (one of whose name was Lorentz, I think, hence "Lorentz contraction") decided that objects moving through the aether must contract spatially in the direction of their motion in order to explain the null result.
Then Einstein came along and said right, right, that's good, except the aether part. His special theory of relativity destroyed absolute space and time, and soon after that aether was abandoned. It no longer performed a necessary function--a new worldview had supplanted it.
There is no one theory of relativity for atheism, but the point is there. Relativity was not a perfect theory (although it is probably as close as we have come)--it had, as all theories, holes and unanswered questions and kinks to work out. Aether was thrown out as a hypothesis, but it is not because aether was incorrect. Aether almost certainly is incorrect, but there is no way of knowing. How can we be sure that there isn't a massless, viscosity-less, undetectable substance out there? No surer than I am that an invisible pink unicorn does not follow me around.
No, aether was thrown out because of Occam's Razor, which is more than the simple adage that "The simplest explanation is best." Scientists' Occam's Razor is more like a paraphrase of Einstein, "A theory should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." Ideas with explanatory power are entertained. Ideas that are akin to "what if the universe were actually like this, even though it appears exactly the same as it does now and I have no way to check" are dismissed.
But more to the point, the death of luminiferous aether was an accomplishment because it killed a supernatural theory in favor of a natural one. Supernatural ideas invoke forces or powers outside of nature--not "things that we don't understand yet" (science invokes these often), but "things that we can never and will never understand." Natural theories can be as uplifting, as spiritual, as empowering, and as positive as supernatural ones: indeed, I find them more so. Supernatural theories close a door. Natural theories open one, even if only to say "I do not know what is beyond this door."
I dislike the idea of some ineffable collective consciousness or common human spirit not because I dismiss the concept. There may well be something connecting us, be it our genetic human nature, our shared ability for empathy, or some more remarkable collection of ideas and emotions over time and space. What I dismiss is the idea that the problem cannot and should not be approached scientifically, with the goal of understanding. We may never completely understand anything, let alone such a concept. But why stop trying now? Science has limits, surely, new limits every decade, some of which are temporary and will be rolled back, some of which may well be permanent. But we don't know which. Let's not cement any limits in stone, and say "beyond this point, science can know nothing." Give science a chance. You may be surprised.
After all, we worked out the aether thing okay.
A question atheists are often asked is why they are not agnostics, or at least ambivalent about the possibility of there being a God, or some god-like supernatural consciousness. I have earlier written of the reason why agnosticism and atheism are philosophically indistinguishable in the case of any modern religious text or faith-based religion. (I appear to have lost that essay already; I shall perhaps rewrite it some time.) Whether or not you have certain knowledge as to the existence of God is irrelevant to whether or not you have faith in the existence of said God, which is why agnostic believers are entirely possible.
But the rules change when we are no longer discussing a Creator-God; Moses' or Jesus' or Mohammed's deity. My dad often stresses to me the point: there are many conceptualizations of God that aren't constrained by the faults of their respective holy books; there are Gods that do not answer prayers nor smite the unworthy; Gods that can be termed collective consciousness, or love, or nature, or some sort of ineffable sentience.
These are not concepts that I would choose to term "God," for the simple reason that most of the world accepts a personal Yahweh, or Jehovah, or Allah as their God. My dad responds sometimes by calling this unconventional supernatural substance the Aether (or Ether, if you prefer). I find that nomenclature strikingly accurate.
In physics, the luminiferous aether was a theory put forth to solve a simple problem: we know light is a wave, like water or sound waves, so what does it wave in? Out in the vacuum of space, there was no answer, so physicists postulated a substance called the luminiferous (light-bearing) aether which permeated the universe for light to travel in. With the wisdom of hindsight, of course, we can see that it was a flawed question--light, for one reason or another, is able to wave entirely on its own.
Framing the question of God like this is similar, to me, although perhaps the analogy is only the product of a fevered mind fed by too many layman's-level physics books. The question God is put forth to answer is as follows: the universe is tremendously complex, who made it like that? And thus God is postulated, much like the luminiferous aether, to explain a concept that we do not yet understand.
Beginning with this flawed question, aether grew in explanatory power. Aether became related to the absolute frame of reference that Newton's laws and Maxwell's equations seemed to require: the absolutely accurate tick of the ineffable clock, and the perfect stillness of the infinite meter stick. I couch my phrasing here in vaguely supernatural terms; it was a vaguely supernatural idea. Absolute time is God's time.
Analogous is the philosophical expansion of the concept of God from merely the name we give to the unknown into a dynamic figure that decides right and wrong, plans, answers prayers, and ultimately decides what will occur. (I am tempted to make a further analogy between absolute space/absolute time and absolute good/absolute evil, but I leave the metaphor of absolute morality and absolute spacetime as an exercise to the particularly enthusiastic reader.)
And yet, for all this successful philosophizing the aether aids, there were a few significant problems. Firstly, no one had ever seen the aether; it was, as far as science could determine, undetectable. Secondly, in order to transmit light, the aether had to be a solid more rigid than steel, and yet in order to fill space it needed to be completely fluid. Moreover, it necessarily had no viscosity, no mass, was incompressible, and had dozens of other sufficiently magical qualities that no one had ever seen or detected. In fact, the most miraculous quality of the aether at all was its complete invisibility. We were sure it was there. Very sure. It was just remarkably hard to find.
I really can thing of no better analogy for a deity, even the non-traditional deity of a collective consciousness, etc. Undetectable by scientific means. Any perceived paradox of the aether, such as its lack of drag on the planets, was merely prescribed as a new property of this unique substance; much as I often am told God's marked reluctance to answer prayers is due to his desire not to reveal himself. And above all, above all, the absolute certainty that it is there.
In the late 1800s, some experiments were carried out to test aether theory: the results were as one might expect. There was absolutely no drag on the Earth from the "aether-wind," nor any other detectable effect. Some rather clever scientists (one of whose name was Lorentz, I think, hence "Lorentz contraction") decided that objects moving through the aether must contract spatially in the direction of their motion in order to explain the null result.
Then Einstein came along and said right, right, that's good, except the aether part. His special theory of relativity destroyed absolute space and time, and soon after that aether was abandoned. It no longer performed a necessary function--a new worldview had supplanted it.
There is no one theory of relativity for atheism, but the point is there. Relativity was not a perfect theory (although it is probably as close as we have come)--it had, as all theories, holes and unanswered questions and kinks to work out. Aether was thrown out as a hypothesis, but it is not because aether was incorrect. Aether almost certainly is incorrect, but there is no way of knowing. How can we be sure that there isn't a massless, viscosity-less, undetectable substance out there? No surer than I am that an invisible pink unicorn does not follow me around.
No, aether was thrown out because of Occam's Razor, which is more than the simple adage that "The simplest explanation is best." Scientists' Occam's Razor is more like a paraphrase of Einstein, "A theory should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." Ideas with explanatory power are entertained. Ideas that are akin to "what if the universe were actually like this, even though it appears exactly the same as it does now and I have no way to check" are dismissed.
But more to the point, the death of luminiferous aether was an accomplishment because it killed a supernatural theory in favor of a natural one. Supernatural ideas invoke forces or powers outside of nature--not "things that we don't understand yet" (science invokes these often), but "things that we can never and will never understand." Natural theories can be as uplifting, as spiritual, as empowering, and as positive as supernatural ones: indeed, I find them more so. Supernatural theories close a door. Natural theories open one, even if only to say "I do not know what is beyond this door."
I dislike the idea of some ineffable collective consciousness or common human spirit not because I dismiss the concept. There may well be something connecting us, be it our genetic human nature, our shared ability for empathy, or some more remarkable collection of ideas and emotions over time and space. What I dismiss is the idea that the problem cannot and should not be approached scientifically, with the goal of understanding. We may never completely understand anything, let alone such a concept. But why stop trying now? Science has limits, surely, new limits every decade, some of which are temporary and will be rolled back, some of which may well be permanent. But we don't know which. Let's not cement any limits in stone, and say "beyond this point, science can know nothing." Give science a chance. You may be surprised.
After all, we worked out the aether thing okay.
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