My Top Religious Anomalies: A List

All of religion is anomalous, but some bits are more anomalous than others. Here are some of those bits.

GOD: This isn’t really an anomaly due to any conflict between theory and observation. There is very little of either. The anomaly here is why anyone in their right mind would believe in such a supernatural deity. The gap between observational evidence and theoretical faith is so vast that it staggers the mind – at least it boggles my mind, all the more so since the only real description of God’s bona-fides, the human penned Old Testament, exhibits Him not as a just, loving, forgiving, merciful and compassionate deity but an all-round SOB that makes Hitler look downright cuddly.

CREATION, THE CONCEPT OF: One of the biggest mysteries to me is why anyone in their stark raving right mind would assume anything and everything had been created from scratch, as in Genesis for example. You cannot make that assumption from first principles based on personal observations and human history. Knowledge that there were in fact creations therefore must be based on information passed down from those with way more insight or knowledge than you could possess. Who passed that information on down the line?

HEAVEN & HELL: If they exist, heaven and hell have to be physical places with some sort of celestial and terrestrial coordinates respectively. Despite all these millennia that have flowed under the bridge since Methuselah was in diapers, nobody has sighted heaven up there or pinpointed where hell is located down here.

BIBLICAL OLD AGE: Though Methuselah is the best known, there are a whole pot-full of Old Testament males-only who reach ripe old age way, way, way in excess of three score and ten. The anomaly here is that even with the best of diets, exercise regimes, health and medical care, and outstanding personal habits (sound sleep, no drugs, no alcohol, no smoking, etc.) no human alive today can come within a bulls roar of the longevity achieved by Methuselah, Adam, Noah, and a host of others. The anomaly is easily resolved in this case – the Bible is full of it; “it” being rather messy and smelly.

NOAH’S FLOOD: A whole textbook could be written about the impossibilities, not just the anomalies, of the Biblical tale of the flood and Noah’s Ark. The amount of water required can’t be produced. The boat isn’t near large enough to house and feed every species that would need to be given shelter. The crew isn’t sufficient to look after their charges. That doesn’t seem to discourage those from spending vast sums of money not to mention time and energy boldly gong where others have gone before and like those who went before, returning empty-handed!

EXODUS, BOOK OF: There are multi-dozens of anomalies, things that just can’t be, reported in the Bible. Of all of these, the most anomalous is the Book of Exodus, because some of the events recorded there can be checked against another independent historical source. If the history in the Book of Exodus is found wanting, and it is, then if one holy book goes down the gurgler, then all the rest of the books are suspect too.

The anomaly here is that the Book of Exodus features the land and peoples of ancient Egypt fairly prominently. A couple of key Biblical characters play leading roles there – Moses and Joseph – not to mention thousands of alleged Hebrew slaves. Nasty things happen to that land and those peoples like the ten plagues and the drowning of pharaoh’s army. The anomaly here is that you’d expect ancient Egyptian records to verify and collaborate and substantiate the Book of Exodus, but you don’t find anything of the sort. It’s as if the Biblical version took place in a parallel universe – or in the imagination of the all too human author.

BIBLICAL MIRACLES: Then there’s this Biblical bit about Joshua commanding the sun to stand still (at least that’s the way I recall it). That’s a tall tale or myth but whatever, it can’t be a physical reality. But wait, there’s more! There’s Jonah and the whale; Eve’s creation from a rib; walking on the waters; the walls of Jericho tumbling down at the sound of no doubt out of tune trumpets or rams horns. In the Bible we have this tale of the multiplying of loaves and fishes out of virtually nothing.

Miracles are part and parcel of any and all supernaturally based religions. Miracles of the supernatural kind (and that’s the only kind of miracle that counts here) violate one or more laws, principles or relationships established by science. There can be no such thing as a supernatural miracle in theory. However, there have been numerous reports of supernatural miracles.

Reported events cannot violate the natural state of things. If they do violate that natural state of things, then they must be supernatural. There’s no known theory that can accommodate supernatural events. That’s part of the conflict between science and religion. The conflict is an anomaly.  

THE AFTERLIFE: A concept that closest to the hearts and minds of nearly all humans and human cultures past and present is what happens to us after we kick the bucket. The answer is we transcend into another life – an afterlife. Every culture, past and present, has an afterlife concept, a life after death concept, or some sort of an eternity or immortality worldview. However, the concept of eternal life is actually hellish as you would rather quickly be bored out of your afterlife skull, and you still have infinity yet to come.

Not all of the versions of the theoretical afterlife can be correct however. Idealistic theoretical expectations that when you die you won’t stay dead, versus practical reality that observations show that dead things stay dead, are indeed conflicting, therefore anomalous. However, nobody has ever come back from the dead to prove the reality of an afterlife to the satisfaction of any unbiased referee.

Immortality: Who Wants To Live Forever? Part Two

“Nothing is certain but death and taxes”, so the saying goes, and while much has been written about taxes, death, or the lack of death, the latter is my topic under consideration. The question I pose is, can technology deliver on what religion promises, but probably can’t deliver on - that is to say, the promise of life eternal.

Assuming that there is no actual afterlife, or reincarnation, then perhaps one can try for (near to actual) immortality, or at least as much immortality as the ultimate fate of the Universe allows for, and cheat death. I believe Woody Allen is quoted as saying something along the lines of, ‘I don’t want to achieve immortality through my films; I want to achieve immortality by not dying’! How can immortality by not dying be accomplished, if indeed it can be accomplished?

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

Apart from the immortality question, let’s say you have an intense personal desire to have a career exploring the planet Jupiter – not via telescope, but in person. Today, for various reasons, your prospects are bugger-all. There’s no way to get you there at the moment, and you couldn’t survive the hostile environment even if you did. There’s no part of your organic body that would survive the Jovian (Jupiter’s) environment.  And if you wanted to explore, in person, extra-solar ‘Jupiters’,  in addition to inherent hostile environments, you wouldn’t survive the time frames necessary to get you to them which would require interstellar travel, travel to be measured in tens to hundreds of thousands of years at present, even extrapolated advances in spacecraft velocities in the near to midterm future.

So, even a combination of your organic biology coupled with some machine technology (you becoming a cybernetic bio-mechanical hybrid) wouldn’t ultimately help your goal. What would work would be an entirely technological or mechanical ‘organism’ – a robot with artificial intelligence – one that could survive the lengthy journey times and the hostile environments. But that doesn’t do you (or more to the point your mind that’s within you) any good – unless you became that robot! However, one needs then to get the relevant organic parts of you – your mind or your brain - into an inorganic form.

Just as it’s currently possible for one to transfer or download the contents of one computer into another computer, and just as your brain (which contains your mind) is an advanced type of computer – it’s your mind’s software that controls the rest of you - so too might it be eventually possible for your organic mind-within-your-brain to be downloaded into a nuts-and-bolts computer which could then be merged with an appropriate mechanical body or some other technology specifically designed to achieve a particular goal that’s unachievable by actual  flesh and blood. Examples are exploring Jupiter, space travel to distant stars and solar systems, or undersea exploration. You cannot, unaided, dive to the depths where RMS Titanic rests of the bottom of the Atlantic. If your mind however was somehow contained within a silicon and steel robot, well exploring the oceanographic depths would be easy. Robotic probes have explored the Titanic and the deepest of the deep parts of the ocean.

The upshot is that if your mind, the inner “you”, were part and parcel of residing inside an inorganic body, given that inorganic materials last a hell of a lot longer than organic bodies, then you’ve achieved quasi-immortality!  That’s ditto the case in that when your mind becomes the software in an inorganic computer. That software can later be transferred to another computer and then another and then another – right on down the line. That can also lead to lots of copies of your mind being around. Not only quasi-immortality, but cloning as well!

Using nanotechnology, building from the ground up, atom by atom, tiny but useful machines/things is a current rapidly emerging technology in our 21^st Century. Fast forward to the far future – if one has, down to the last detail, a blueprint for a living thing, then even that living thing could be created, from the ground up, atom by atom, using nanotechnology techniques, again and again and again – all identical. That living thing could be the physical you combined with the inner you – your mind - a being identical to whatever the pre-existing you was. Immortality! [As an aside, this is the way, atom by atom, that organic bodies are naturally constructed. Our food, air, water, etc. are broken down and recombined into organic compounds, bio-chemicals and so on up the chain through to cells and tissues and organs, etc.]

Of course such complicated nanotechnology may well be many centuries (if ever) away before this version of immortality is even a remote possibility. But, who knows what advancements might be possible that far ahead?

That said, it’s therefore possible that very advanced extraterrestrial intelligences have already achieved, if not immortality, then at least something approaching it. Such a civilization would have no difficulty, if so inclined, in exploring, even colonizing the galaxy in fairly short order – several millions of years at most, even at sub-light speeds. That’s a small fraction of the age of our galaxy. Extraterrestrials can colonize the galaxy akin to how humans have colonized Planet Earth – it doesn’t take that long relative to the age of the object – galaxy or Planet Earth – being colonized.

Quite apart from achieving immortality through silicon and steel, or nanotechnology, you know there is no law of nature that states you must die after so many days; after three score and ten years; after so many heartbeats; after so many cell divisions; after so much calorie intake; after so much whatever. Therefore, perhaps you might be justified in firmly believing that no matter what, you will always wake up the next morning. You are so convinced of that that you have never even remotely contemplated making out a will, or buying a graveyard plot, or making any sorts of arrangements post your death –cause it ain’t gonna happen! That’s the power of positive thinking as it were! Of course that leads to the converse, perhaps if you do acknowledge that there’s no uncertainty when it comes to your death, you’ve sealed your own fate! Once you accept that you will die, you will indeed. Of course it may not matter one bit what you firmly believe or refuse to believe in or acknowledge – like your own croaking. I assume it doesn’t matter since I suspect over time there have been lots of individuals who have denied death’s inevitability, but nevertheless, are now stone cold dead.

Of course in one sense we all achieve a form of immortality. Some of our atoms and molecules that made us up will eventually recycle and become incorporated into new life forms - maybe as bacteria, or plants or bugs or maybe a part of another person. The heart may not go on, but the atomic bits and pieces will. Perhaps after billions of years, after our sun and solar system are no more, some of the fundamental particles that make you, you, might find its way across the cosmos to eventually become incorporated into some extraterrestrial life form! The reverse might also be true – molecular bits of you might once, eons ago, have been part of an alien organism.

Immortality: Who Wants To Live Forever? Part One

“Nothing is certain but death and taxes”, so the saying goes, and while much has been written about taxes, death, or the lack of death, the latter is my topic under consideration. The question I pose is, can technology deliver on what religion promises, but probably can’t deliver on - that is to say, the promise of life eternal.

Assuming that there is no actual afterlife, or reincarnation, then perhaps one can try for (near to actual) immortality, or at least as much immortality as the ultimate fate of the Universe allows for, and cheat death. I believe Woody Allen is quoted as saying something along the lines of, ‘I don’t want to achieve immortality through my films; I want to achieve immortality by not dying’! How can immortality by not dying be accomplished, if indeed it can be accomplished?

Some cautionary notes first of all, and that is physical immortality could be as downbeat as any afterlife. While nearly everyone wishes for immortality, whether they realize it or not, this is a case of be wary of what you wish for, least you get it. Immortality (which doesn’t preclude death by accident or design – just natural [aging] death), if achieved, would be a very boring existence as you’d end up spending trillions of years in a dark, intensely cold, lifeless (heat death) Universe. Looking at current observational evidence, our Universe will keep on expanding, and expanding at an ever accelerating rate at that, continues to ever cool as stars and galaxies ultimately die as their energy supply becomes exhausted and what energy there is becomes diluted throughout an ever increasing expanding volume. Such is the predicted fate of our cosmos.

Even if the fate of the Universe is a Big Crunch, that is, our Universe slows down the  expansion rate, halts, and starts contracting again under the collective gravity the Universe’s mass has, that alone would terminate your immortality quick-smart!

I should note that it’s the fate of the Universe that’s important here vis-à-vis becoming, and more importantly, staying immortal. The demise of Planet Earth is of no consequence.  If you achieve immortality, then by the time Earth goes kaput, you will have had ample time to have packed your bags and left. You’ve fled and escaped elsewhere in the Universe to a location that hasn’t yet gone kaput. But when the entire cosmos goes kaput (in either direction – Heat Death or Big Crunch), then it’s ultimately curtains for you too! It’s hard living the comfortable life when the temperature of the Universe is just a tiny fraction above absolute zero; in the Big Crunch, down a Black Hole you go!

Oh, the other cautionary note is that if you achieve, in your organic body, immortality, you had better have achieved eternal youth as well. There’s no point in living to a ripe old age of several million years if your aging process doesn’t stop! Unlike some of the mythological gods, Norse I believe in particular, there is no endless supply of golden apples to keep you eternally youthful. Apart from that, the mythological gods are given as immortal, or as close to immortal as makes no odds, so if you should come across Zeus or equivalent, you can always ask them what the secret is!

Anyway, for starters, there’s no way (currently known) that, assuming you possess an organic multi-cellular body, that you can stop, far less reverse, the aging (and ultimately the death) process. There is, alas, no combination of vitamins; no health club membership; no fountain of youth; no “Picture of Dorian Gray”; no magic witch’s brew that can, or will accomplish that objective. And while you can eat fruit, nuts and vegetables till you’re blue in the face, they alone won’t see you into the 23^rd Century, far less the 123^rd Century!

A unicellular organism (like an amoeba) can (in theory) achieve a sort of immortality via reproduction – dividing in two (mitosis). Where there was one, now there is two, and since there’s been no recombination of genetic material, both are clones. Continued reproductive mitotic division over the days, weeks, years, centuries, millennia, would see an organism in 2000 AD identical to its ancestor from 2000 BC. Well, you, as a complex multi-cellular critter, can’t divide in two like an amoeba, so that fast track to immortality is out.

Cloning is also out because while that might produce an identical physical body, it wouldn’t replicate the inner you (your brain, your grey matter or your mind) that inhabits that body. A cloned you can’t ever duplicate that inner you. A cloned brain would be a virgin brain – a blank slate. It wouldn’t have your memories, personality, and other facets which are largely environmentally imprinted. 

Anyway, casting those above methods aside, how could you (actually that inner you – your mind) achieve if not infinite immortality, at least near quasi-immortality? The first catch is that what actually needs to be preserved is that inner you. That’s the inner you  that’s part of your physical body you – your emotions, memories, personality, awareness, likes, dislikes, habits (good and bad), etc. Survival for all eternity of your big toe or your wisdom teeth is fairly irrelevant in this context. For that matter, so is your blood, muscles, skin and bone, liver, etc. What needs to survive forever and ever (amen) is the seat of the real you – the inner you. That of course is your brain or your mind. Of course your brain, being organic, and subject to the aging process, can’t survive forever and ever (amen). Even if it could, after millions upon millions of years of living, its carrying capacity for memories, knowledge, etc. would have become exhausted – our brains have trouble in the here and now coping with sensory and information overload. Brain volume doesn’t expand to meet needs above and beyond that of our roughly three score and ten lifespan expectancy. It certainly can’t cope with three million score and ten! However, there’s no point in being immortal without having ongoing sensory inputs, at least sight and sound (you could probably do if necessary without the rest), although all input could be direct and electronic, like how a computer receives data.

And therein we come to the technological fix.

To be continued…

Biblical Old Age: An Explanation or Two: Part Two

One of the many anomalies part and parcel of Biblical texts are those “Book of Genesis” genealogies that inform us that various characters in the Bible apparently spend way more time in retirement and collecting pensions and other old age social security benefits than they ever did gainfully employed. Methuselah is often the person cited as king of the pensioners. The question is, are those Biblical old ages fact or fiction? If factual, what are the possible explanations?

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

The Bible itself apparently offers no explanation for these extraordinary life-spans. Therefore, we have open slather when it comes to speculations upon the explanations.

The most probable explanation is that it’s pure Biblical fiction, just more myths and fairy tales for grown-ups, but then if that’s true this essay terminates now. So, indulge my fantasy as I play the ‘what if’ game, as in ‘what if’ a lifespan of 969 was achieved. How and why and what sorts of implications are now gist for the fun-and-games mill that can be speculated on till the cows come home. 

One thing I rule out is more time to be fruitful and multiply. Any normal male over any normal lifespan could potentially father hundreds upon hundreds of offspring. You don’t need a 900+ year lifespan. Re-enforcing this are the observations by the Gershwin brothers in their “Porgy and Bess” song that no gal is going to give in and spread her legs for no man who’s 900 years old!

Now I have speculated elsewhere at long length that God isn’t really a deity, but an extraterrestrial, a Captain of the Starship Heaven. Further, God, and his extraterrestrial colleagues from other starships, the polytheistic ‘gods’, came to Earth with technological powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men (and women), and experimented with mammalian primate stock, ultimately producing, via artificial selection, the human being (which really was a very bad mistake, but that’s another topic).

Now perhaps these Biblical long-lifers were really aliens themselves, aliens with naturally long life-spans, part of Captain God’s Starship Heaven crew who did a lot of the be-fruitful-and-multiply begetting bit (some of those ‘sons of God’ chatting up some of those ‘daughters of men’ scenarios that the Bible relates) designed to improve the stock of the terrestrial species known as Homo sapiens..

Or perhaps this gift of extensive longevity is yet another case of God and/or the polytheistic gods doing a bit of bio-tampering via bioengineering, medical technology, and/or genetic engineering on actual humans – some of God’s chosen ones.  So perhaps if our old-timers were human through-and-through, then you have really got to conclude that clearly, some advanced bio or genetic or medical technology/engineering was employed, and by elimination, the only beings capable of employing such technologies would be aliens, aliens who to humans living way back around the time of the mythological flood were considered deities.

So assuming Methuselah and the rest of the super-pensioners listed above were genetically or medically augmented with all those additional years, what’s the point?

One reason for a long lifespan is if you need to take a long journey. Now that rules out Planet Earth since a normal human lifespan is long enough for you to get from Point A to Point B, even before the invention of the automobile and the airplane, especially given the rather limited geography that was known in Biblical times.

The only journeys that make sense in Methuselah terms would be a journey to the stars, where say Captain God (the E.T.) and crew of the Starship Heaven originally came from – call it a sightseeing tour for God’s chosen few. 

Today, modern humanity with its advanced high-tech civilization can’t manage to get to even the nearest of stellar neighbours. Our spacecraft are too slow; our life-spans too short. But how far could you get if you lived to be over 900 years and had an advanced extraterrestrial’s technology to transport you?

Now when it comes to interstellar distances, things are measured in light-years. One light year is the distance light travels in one year. The speed of light is roughly 186,000 miles per second; a light-year is some 6 trillion miles.

If you could travel at 1% light speed, you’d travel one light-year per every 100 years. So, if you lived somewhat beyond 900 years, you could make it out to roughly 9 light-years one-way, or 4.5 light-years roundtrip. That would bring you to our nearest stellar neighbour, the Alpha Centauri system, and back home again within your 900+ year allotment.

If you celebrated over 900 birthdays, and if you could travel at 10% light speed, you’d travel one light-year every 10 years. So, you could make it out to roughly 90 light-years one-way or 45 light-years if you wanted to touch ground on home turf again before you snuffed it. A radius of 45 light years brings you to distances that incorporate a fair few stars and star systems, some of which are quite Sun-like and prime candidates for hosting some form of alien life.

But if you could travel at close to light speed and taking into account special relativity, you’d boldly go outward bound at a little less than one light-year per year. The catch here is ‘special relativity’. It operates in your favour if you want to explore strange new worlds, etc. very far from home.

So, another possible explanation is that Methuselah (and the others) actually lived normal human life-spans but their interstellar journeys were at such velocities, close to light-speed, that Einstein’s special relativity came into play. The upshot is, the faster you travel, the slower you age. And thus, the case of the ‘twin paradox’ where the stay-at-home twin ages normally (one second per second; one year per orbit around the Sun) according to our norms, but the boldly going traveller, rocketing along near light speed twin, ages way more slowly. Thus, when the boldly going twin returns home and reunites with stay-at-home twin, there will now be vast differences in their ages. Stay-at-home twin has grown a lot older relative to boldly going twin. In fact, stay-at-home twin might have already snuffed it, dying of natural causes – old age – before a reunion happens.

So if Methuselah was boldly going, he might return home to a home now hundreds of years post his terrestrial date-of-birth, but to stay-at-home types, knowing nothing of special relativity, Methuselah would a super-pensioner, having obviously spanned those hundreds of years. Those stay-at-home bodies would record Methuselah lived to a super ultra ripe old age when in reality he aged normally and had a normal life span – no bio, genetic or medical technology/engineering, just special relativity physics.

 

And so in conclusion, Methuselah’s age and those of his super ultra pensioner kind, can be accounted for by 1) assuming the story is total rubbish (and if you were a betting person, that’s the way to bet); 2) they were aliens with naturally lengthy life-spans; 3) they were humans who were artificially augmented by various technological means to keep those grey hairs and wrinkles at bay for hundreds of years; or 4) they had normal terrestrial life-spans, the sort that you or I expect, but they were subjected to the weird physics associated with the Special Theory of Relativity.