All Things Irreligious

Saturday, April 21, 2012

God Has Left the Building! Part One

The alleged most important being in the cosmos has the absolute least amount of evidence to verify that very existence. Either that being is incredibly shy, doesn’t exist, or exists under false pretences or via a human misconception. And that’s just the tip of the Godly anomalies.

Let’s start with several premises. 1) There exists, or existed, a being that we collective call God. 2) God isn’t an actual God, but ‘God’ a flesh-and-blood extraterrestrial who arrived on Earth in his Starship Heaven. 3) ‘God’ has ‘left the building’. To suggest that “God has left the building” is actually a tad kinder than that well worn 60’s phrase “God is dead”, though that may well be the case since ‘God’ is just another mortal flesh-and-blood being, albeit extraterrestrial, but if ‘God’ is just an extraterrestrial then he drops significantly in the cosmic scheme of things and is hardly the most important being in the cosmos.

Premise One: God exists or at least existed. Well, there are certainly a lot of references in literature, in culture, in art, in music to something that goes under the collective name of God, a conceived supernatural all-powerful, all-knowing, deity who has had some influence over the cosmos, Planet Earth, its life forms, especially humans. Billions of people over many centuries have believed that this deity exists and has some sort of personal connection with them. A whole major industry has flourished solely because of these collective beliefs. When it comes down to God’s reality, as one saying goes, “billions of people can’t be wrong”, yet I’ll counter with “a foolish idea is still a foolish idea no matter how many fools believe it”. I mean, most of the world’s population believed once upon a time that ‘here be dragons’; ‘the Earth is the centre of the cosmos’; ‘the world is flat’; ‘the Sun moves around the Earth’, ‘the heart was the centre of the intellect and of emotions’, ‘before God there existed thousands of gods’, etc. Now I suggest here that what’s foolish isn’t that there’s no God, rather that ‘God’ is a supernatural deity. There is no such thing as supernatural; there are no such things as supernatural deities. There might be ‘God’, there might be ‘gods’, but they often find themselves having to ‘phone home’.

Premise Two: So, if ‘God’ exists, or at least existed, but isn’t all-knowing (just knowledgeable), all-powerful (just powerful), isn’t supernatural, and isn’t a deity, and wasn’t totally a figment of human imaginations, where does that leave us? If God isn’t imaginary; supernatural; and terrestrial, then ‘God’ must be an ordinary extraterrestrial! Since God’s abode is considered to be a physical place called Heaven, and since if ‘God’ is an extraterrestrial, it’s logical to postulate that God arrived via his spaceship, and that spaceship is called ‘Heaven’ as in ‘Starship Heaven’. Instead of the fictional NCC 1701 Enterprise under the command of Captain Kirk, we have Starship Heaven under the command of ‘Captain God’. Well, as Sherlock Holmes is so found of pointing out, “When you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. I’m actually giving God the benefit of the doubt here seeing as how there bugger all actual evidence that God (in any shape, manner or form) exists at all. How do you verify your existence? Well there’s your birth certificate, your school records, photographs, other people who will vouch for your bona-fides, tax records, etc. You have a paper trail of sorts. Even thousands of years from now some archives will verify that you once graced the world with your presence. What’s God’s paper trail? No real time ‘photographs’ (no witness ‘identikit’ drawings, carvings, paintings, frescoes, statues, etc.); witnesses so few and far between (and now dead, so really, really dead if they existed at all) as to have relatively little credibility – more people have seen the Loch Ness Monster than God. More people have slain dragons than have had a close encounter of any kind with God the Supernatural. God has no real physical documentation at all, certainly way less than that exists for Zeus say. At least Zeus has a statue or two or three to his credit.

Discussion: What’s so ‘impossible’ about a supernatural God? Answer, there’s bugger all evidence that the supernatural exists and that it is necessary to resort to the supernatural to explain any part of life, the universe and everything. But rather than throw the concept of a real supernatural God out with the supernatural bathwater, let’s play with the idea of ‘God’ the extraterrestrial (ET). Might I suggest that between 6000 BC and the current date, ‘God’ (the ET) has ‘left the building’ we call Planet Earth. I’ll return to that theme shortly, but first…

Surely the Bible proves God’s supernatural existence? Well, book stores and libraries are full of works of dubious historical accuracy, not to mention works that are no doubt in the minds of all and sundry to be purely imaginary works of literary fiction. I mean anyone can put down words on paper and publish their version of reality and of history. That doesn’t mean that their version is of necessary an accurate version. The evidence for God is no more in the Bible than the evidence for the existence of Sherlock Holmes is because he appears in the collected works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Does Winston Smith exist because George Orwell wrote “1984”?

Now nobody doubts the actual existence of Plato, or Aristotle, or Socrates, or Homer, or Pythagoras, or a host of other historical figures from before the Christian era. Surely they must rank below God in terms of cosmic significance. Yet the most important pre-Christian era being of all, God, has the least evidence that points to an actual existence. And thus, we’ve been pretty much reduced to inventing philosophical arguments why God should exist – the Universe had a beginning, therefore there must have been a Creator (not necessarily – anyway who created the Creator); the Universe appears to be designed and finely tuned to allow life, therefore there must have been a Designer (again, not necessarily so – anyway who designed the Designer). Speaking of philosophy, if it takes the existence of a supernatural deity (God or otherwise) to give your life meaning, then you’re in pretty bad shape. The onus is on you to give your own life meaning. Don’t pass the buck! You don’t need a crutch!

Philosophy aside, surely it’s not illogical to require some hard evidence for the actual existence of a supernatural God before you invest a lot of time and energy in your devotional and worshiping activities, especially with so many other religious flavours on the market all in competition for your time (and money).

You’d be willing to bet considerable amounts that Plato, etc. above actually existed. Would you be willing to bet the family farm on God’s reality based on the actual evidence presented to you in the Bible? And what about other Biblical characters like Adam and Eve, Noah, Moses, Jonah, Methuselah, and all the other Old Testament characters? Would you put your neck in a noose as a test of your good faith that they really existed, of that if they existed did they accomplish and do the things the Bible said they did? Well I wouldn’t.

Now the Bible was written over many, many hundreds of years, by many, many people, many, many decades after the events so described, and of course there was a lot of text left out (missing books of the Bible), and what was included was often hotly debated as to whether it should be included (i.e. – ‘Revelation’). Talk about a dog’s breakfast! The Bible is really a hodgepodge of rather tall tales. It’s an anthology of short stories, with way less than ideal consistency between them; stories that often are in conflict – that is, down right contradictory. The Biblical texts are hardly something that if deemed to be the absolute true word of God, that the real God (assuming a real God) would be pleased with and proud of. God did a very poor job in proof-reading His Word!

To be continued…

Friday, April 20, 2012

God: Your Invisible Friend: Part Two

Sooner or later, all children come to the realization that the story of Santa just can’t be true and that Santa isn’t real, but part of our Christmas mythology. It’s that human trait, the ability to reason and figure things out rationally and logically.

There is so much philosophical baggage surrounding the concept of a supernatural creator God-of-the-Old-Testament that it is far easier to believe He never had any reality in the first place. Here's some of that philosophical baggage IMHO, along with some suggestions for additional readings on the general theme.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

3) God is a Cruel God: God is anything but an all loving, friendly father figure and benign figurehead.

Let’s start with immortality: I find it interesting that an apparently immortal being, which has therefore no fear of death, creates mortal living things, including some species having the intellect to contemplate the concept of their mortality and death. If we were immortal would we have ever invented or have had a need for a God, or gods, or a religion at all?

Any God who orders up animal sacrifices is no God I wish to have an association with. Societies charged with the responsibility of speaking out and preventing cruelty too animals should speak out on this issue, since animal sacrifices is apparently condoned, and sometimes still practiced by some of the world’s major religions even today!

I gather from the Bible that God has a bone to pick with humans, and only humans. However, if God created everything, like animals, then he also created the various afflictions with affect animals, and which, viewed from a humane perspective, suggest that God is guilty of animal cruelty in the extreme. I mean God could have arranged things such that animals would die naturally, but always quick and cleanly. Alas, that’s not the way God wanted it. He clearly wanted some animals to suffer hideous and long drawn out deaths. While there’s probably an example for every animal species, lets examine beak & feather disease which affects cockatoos (and other members of the parrot family apparently). In brief, this viral disease causes the bird’s beak to grow uncontrollably resulting in something akin to an elephant’s tusks, and the bird’s feathers/plumage falls off. The animal takes one an un-groomed, downright filthy appearance. Death results from a combination of exposure to the elements and starvation. Once you’ve seen a bird in this condition, it’s unforgettable, and heart-rending in the extreme. If God created this condition, the God shouldn’t be top-of-the-pops in the eyes of any feeling human being, rather downgraded to a nasty brute that should be totally and utterly despised.

The upshot is that if God did not create this disease, then logically He didn’t create cockatoos or humans or the world or the Universe. You can’t arbitrarily pick-and-choose between what bits He did and did not create; what bits He is, and is not, responsible for that suit your particular philosophy. It’s all or nothing.

God is a sticky-beak! If God exists as described in the literature, then God ensures that you have no privacy, ever. Everything you do is known to God. God can read your most private thoughts, see even into your dreams (so where’s the scientific ways and means that credits telepathy?). Doesn’t that remind you somehow of Big Brother? So by what right does God have to violate your privacy? You wouldn’t tolerate that from even your closest of relations – child, parent, or partner. But not to worry, even if you sin in your dreams God won’t know. Why? God doesn’t exist IMHO, so that’s a relief. The Privacy Act hasn’t been violated.

4) God’s Ten Commandments: Something’s rotten in the state of Biblical lands when it comes to these gems. A few are decidedly unworthy of the tablets they were carved in.

Thou shall not kill is one of the Ten Commandments I believe. So you’d think that God would practice what He preaches. But isn’t, according to the Old Testament, God the greatest mass murder in the history of the world that puts tyrants the likes of Hitler to a status of a rank amateur? I mean there is the Biblical flood story, and what about Sodom and Gomorrah? You can’t trust a god who basically says ‘do as I say, not as I do’.

There’s something somewhere in the Ten Commandments about honouring Mum and Dad. I bet a lot of kids who were abused, even sexually abused, or sold into slavery, or had other atrocities fostered upon them by dear old Mum and Dad would have some trouble in accepting this edict, and would probably have a few choice words to say about it.

Then I recall something about not coveting thy neighbour’s wife. Now that’s downright sexist. What about not coveting thy neighbour’s husband? I don’t believe that got a mention anywhere!

Then there’s something (actually several commandment something’s) about not having any other gods before Me (The Almighty God). There’s something disturbing about a God so insecure or jealous that He would have to issue these resolutions. Can one trust such an emotional temper-tantrum-throwing God? Does the very issuing of these (you’d better make Me Number One now and always) Commandments suggest that there is in fact, other gods (extraterrestrials perhaps) that exist?

5) God: The Intelligent Designer: I’ll put it this way, if God created/designed humans, if ‘man’ is created in God’s image, well, next time your back goes out of whack (or any other part of your anatomy for that matter), have a few choice utterances about how great a designer God really is! Or, take childbirth and how often, especially before modern medicine, the baby killed the mother. I believe it was something along the line of 20%. The upshot is that childbirth was, and often still is, dangerous. So, we certainly have a bad design here – the baby that has trouble fitting through the birth canal, so, bad God. If God were an engineer, peer review of His design of the Universe would have Him expelled from any and every professional engineering society in existence. In fact, it’s rather unlikely He ever passed Engineering 101.

6) God Works in

Mysterious Ways

: The buzz phrase that ‘God works in mysterious ways’ has got to be one of the greatest cop-out phrases of all time. It explains absolutely nothing because it attempts to explain everything. No matter what dilemma you’re forced to deal with, this is an ultimate answer. It’s what you fall back on when you don’t have an answer to a penetrating question. Talk about your ultimate security blanket! It’s akin to a parent telling his questing endless series of ‘why’ questions that children are so prone to ask, ‘because I say so’ – it’s highly unsatisfactory from the child’s point of view.

7) In Conclusion: A supernatural God (and associated Biblical baggage) is unnecessary and illogical and in all likelihood doesn’t exist. If God does exist, He is in all likelihood an extraterrestrial – or a cat. There’s a saying that dogs have masters; cats have staff. The dog says ‘my owner feeds me, keeps me safe and warm, looks after me and plays with me – he must be a god. The cat says ‘my owner feeds me, keeps me safe and warm, looks after me and plays with me – I must be a god’! And to be perfectly honest, I’d far sooner worship my cats than the Biblical God! No matter which way you slice it, a cat has a far better disposition or personality than the Biblical God – and they catch mice too!

Thursday, April 19, 2012

God: Your Invisible Friend: Part One

In the 1960’s, it was proclaimed that ‘God is dead’, a sentiment I wholeheartedly agree with. The only problem is that in order for God to be dead, God had to have existed in the first place, and IMHO, God never existed and doesn’t exist now. 99.9% of all the gods who ever were or conceived of (i.e. – Zeus) have been consigned to the rubbish bin as garbage. It’s time to dump one more God into that bin.

1) Let me start with the Concept or Nature of God: There’s something odd about God’s origin and behaviour.

If God created the Universe, what, or who, created God? Who is God’s mother in other words? And if something or someone created God, what created that something or someone (and so on and so on)? It’s an infinite regression. It’s far easier to believe the cosmos has always existed though that doesn’t mean our Universe didn’t have a point-in-time origin or beginning since a previous universe can give rise to another universe (like ours) in sequence.

Actually, I strongly suspect the answer to ‘who created God?’ is fairly easy, probably downright obvious in an intuitive sort of way. Humans created God in man’s image (and probably all other deities as well, including Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy), rather than the reverse – God didn’t create humans in God’s image. [Actually, perhaps man was created in God’s image. Based on the writings in the Old Testament, God has to be described as a dictator (‘thou shall not…’) and a tyrant, a hypocrite (do as I say, not as I do), someone who’s vain and petty, someone who sanctions any number of atrocities in His name (which if committed today would results in charges of war crimes), someone who’s cruel, jealous, nasty, raciest, and sexist, someone who’s totally up Himself, highly demanding and basically an all around SOB. Remind you of anyone you know, or know of?]

If birds have a deity, I’m sure their god would have a beak and feathers and go squawk (or more likely ‘gobble-gobble’). I suspect that humans have a quasi hard-wired need to believe in a something(s) that one can always fall back on to explain and answer those unanswerable questions, as well as provide comfort for that ultimate question – the nature of death and what follows on from that.

Anyway, if God has always existed, then God’s infinitely old. In that case, an infinite amount of time had to pass before His creation of our Universe – which is an absurdity. How is it that you exist for an infinite amount of time and the get then all of a sudden get this bright idea or urge to create a Universe? What was God doing the ‘day’ before s/he created our Universe? Perhaps one answer is that God has always created universes, one after another after another – creating universes, that’s God’s thing! And if God is infinitely old, then there must have been, or are, an infinite number of universes created and in existence.

Speaking of creation, and assuming just one Universe, that’s an awful lot of Universe created just for little old us! Seriously, and for example, if God created everything, then God created the planetoid Pluto (and associated moon). My question is what was the point of expending the resources to do that? We can’t see Pluto with the naked eye. If Pluto didn’t exist would anything on Earth be different? Pluto adds nothing to our quality of life (or lack of it) and presumably ditto applies to any extraterrestrials in our solar system (assuming that Pluto and moon are uninhabited that is, and that’s a fairly safe bet). Of course you may argue that perhaps Pluto was impacted by a killer asteroid that otherwise would have hit us and therefore has affected our quality of life. Then wouldn’t it have been easier on God not to have created Pluto and not created that asteroid as well? This creation of things with no relevance to the apparent pinnacle of creation (the be-all-and-end-all of God’s efforts), that is to say, us, makes no sense. It’s sort of like buying pots and pans, or a chess set, for your pet goldfish. What would be the point? Further a field, we couldn’t see 99.999% of the observable universe, and 99.999% of the observable universe has no bearing on our day-to-day existence. What’s the point then of creating all that extra 99.999%?

If God exists, why doesn’t He (I’ll keep with tradition and assume the masculine) show His face today? I mean, He wasn’t all that shy about getting in the human race’s face way back in Old Testament days, so what is God so afraid of today? Maybe He’s afraid of our nukes! That aside, it wouldn’t be all the difficult for a Supreme Being to make a show today akin to some of the stunts He pulled way back when!

If God so wants humans to believe in Him, then it would have been so ultra easy to have just one sentence somewhere in the Bible that would be understandable to later generations, even if that Biblical sentence were baffling to contemporaries. The sentence would have been a sentence attributed to God that something only God (or an extraterrestrial) could have known at the time. For example, if kangaroos had been mentioned, or Antarctica, or that bright light in the sky that moves slowly through the heavens had rings around it, or that salt was a mixture of two things, or what about another commandment akin to ‘Thou shall not go faster than the speed of light’. Just one simple little sentence – that’s all it would have taken – something, anything one-off that illustrated a knowledge of biology, geography, astronomy, chemistry or physics that the natives of the time wouldn’t have known about. Alas, it was not to be. Methinks God missed a golden opportunity to reveal His actual existence beyond reasonable question. Or, updating to the present, God could fuse the Ten Commandments onto the Lunar surface, easily visible through modest telescopes, or do a repeat of one of those Biblical happenings like making the Sun stand still for a spell!

If God exists, yet we can explain life, the Universe, and simply everything without requiring a God hypothesis, the God has gone to extraordinary lengths to make Himself totally irrelevant!

2) Is God All Knowing and All Powerful? Hardly!

Not even God can get around the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics, which states that it is impossible to know simultaneously any particle’s precise position and trajectory.

Presumably, God, like gravity, and anything comprised of mass and/or energy can’t operate at faster than light speed. If God wants to smite you down, and God is a light-year away, then you’re safe for a year before His bolt hits you.

If God exists in a physical location within the Universe, then God can’t know about X until the light (or other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum; or gravity) from X reaches God. Since light has a finite speed, God is in the dark as it were until the light and information it contains reaches God. For example, if God is residing on Planet Earth, and for some reason the Sun goes nova, God (as well as the rest of humanity) won’t know about it for other eight-plus minutes – the time it takes light to reach Earth from the Sun.

Not even God can change the past. I mean, there are any number of instances where to correct some mistake; it would have been easier to backtrack in time and undo something.

If God is all powerful, why did God need to rest on the 7^th day?

If God is all knowing, what’s the point in the whole creation business? There’s no fun or satisfaction to a creation if you know to the minutest detail, exactly what will happen at each and every moment to everything, everyone, and everywhere. Would your life be worth living if at say age 18, you had absolute knowledge of the future and knew exactly what each and every future second would be like for you in advance? So God created Adam and Eve, but since God is alleged to be all knowing God, then He knew even then what would happen in the Garden of Eden, so why bother? What would be the point?

If God can not prevent evil, then God is not all powerful. If God can prevent evil, but chooses not to, then God is hardly benevolent (see immediately below). If God allows evil to exist in humans, and God created humans, then God must share some responsibility for said evil. It’s akin to parents having to shoulder responsibility if their child runs amuck.

Not even God can accomplish something that is self-contradictory, like creating a spherical cube or a cubical sphere! Not even God can draw more than one straight line between two points on a flat piece of paper.

To be continued…

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Free Will: Your Reality or Your Illusion? Part Two

Introduction: “You have to believe in free will. You have no choice”. Seriously, if our Universe is a clockwork Universe, where causality rules absolutely (as both Newton and Einstein believed), then you do not have free will, only the illusion of having free will.

I will argue that if causality means anything, then everything is predetermined and therefore there is no free will. Causality rules – a cause causes an effect which in turn becomes the cause for a later effect which is hence the cause for an even later effect, and so on down the line. It’s an unbroken causality chain starting from an initial set of fixed conditions. The past determines the present which determines the future. If you knew the past to an absolute infinite amount of detail, then you know the future to that same degree of infinite detail, and free will doesn’t enter into things.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

Now let’s take the case of human conception, through to blastula, embryo and foetus. I think one can agree that a human doesn’t need to make any decisions for the first nine months, while still in the womb. Ditto the nine months following birth, and probably another nine months after that. But sooner or later, that baby or infant will make its first decision that’s not based on fundamental body needs like ‘deciding’ to go to sleep or wet it’s diapers.

The question is what is fundamentally different about the nature of the infant before it can make its first free will choice or decision and just after? The brain, the brain chemistry, the neural nets and pathways, would be seemingly identical. The only thing I can think of is that the infant and infant’s brain/mind is receiving an ever steady input of sensory data, ultimately enough to allow the infant to make decisions – the baby wants scrambled eggs, not soft-boiled eggs.

The ever increasing absorption of external stimuli may provide the ultimate need or desire to make choices, but it doesn’t provide the mechanism. Ultimately I don’t think there is a free will mechanism as everything is predetermined, like the computer simulation of “Life”. But does it really matter whether or not you have actual free will or the illusion of free will? It doesn’t alter how you live your life and the expectations of those unknown choices you’ll make between now and when Mother Nature makes that final choice on your behalf!

So far I’ve been muttering on as if you came to a metaphorical fork in the road and had some sort of free will to pick one path, or the other path; maybe neither path - or maybe not, if causality rules the universal roost.

There’s no free will solace in the Many Worlds Interpretation of reality; in coming to that fork in the road, because all paths, all possible choices, are enacted as the universe splits to cater for each and every one. You may think you picked one path – the high road, the low road, or the path least travelled, it makes no difference – and thus could pat yourself on the back for having free will and acted upon it, but in actual fact it was, ditto, an illusion. All paths were taken, in one world you took the high road, in another the low road, in a third world the road in-between, so no cigar, you do not pass ‘go’, you do not collect $200 free will dollars as there was no free will exhibited.

I do have some unanswered questions. Say you have to decide between wearing that green dress or that red dress to – whatever. You set those thought chemical/physical wheels in motion. I’m not quite sure how the chemical/physical processes stay focused on the issue at hand. I mean, what if you hence decide to make scrambled eggs – nothing to do with the original green dress/red dress decision! Perhaps that’s a part of the ‘disease’ we collectively call mental illness.

Then there’s the old hairy chestnut of if there is no free will, can people, should people, be held accountable for their behaviour? The fact that people are, obviously suggests that society as a whole has voted for the concept of free will. Whether that has ultimately a religious base (God gave us free will) I know not, but I’d bet - probably.

Quite apart from that deterministic clockwork Universe scenario – what was set in motion at the Big Bang event 13.7 billion years ago, those initial fixed conditions, the set of particles and the laws and relationships that governed their interactions and evolution past to present to future – there are other slightly less plausible scenarios that also limit your free will if they reflect true reality.

For example, if you appear in your dreams as a character, or as a character in someone else’s dreams, your (or someone else’s) dream world representation of you, if questioned (not that that’s possible of course) about your free will, well you would reply that within the dream you were a part of (not that you would know you were a participant in a dream) that you were exhibiting free will. But of course it’s actually the dreamer’s mind that’s pulling the strings, and thus the characters (such as you) in a dream just dance to whatever tune is played out for them. No free will.

Dreams (wetware) aren’t the only form of virtual reality. There’s software, and computer generated simulations, like, say video games. The characters within, as per the dreams scenario, would tell you if they could that their actions exhibit their own free will. But of course that’s not true; the programmer and ultimately the player dictate the action and tell the character what to do. Again, there’s no free will actually exhibited by the characters.

Now, ask yourself what if our reality is actually the product of a higher reality wetware or software? That is, we’re dreamed or simulated but ultimately generated beings akin to the beings we dream about or we create via our software. We’re actually characters in someone else’s dream (let’s hope they don’t have an alarm clock set) or the product of someone (something) else’s software (let’s hope they don’t hit the delete key). If that’s so, then, we got no free will. We waltz to their wetware or software tune.

Lastly, although according to legend God gave us free will, let’s say for argument’s sake that there’s an afterlife and that we go to Heaven. Do you have free will in Heaven? That is, could you, of your own free will, commit a sin in Heaven?

Conclusion – Regardless of what society believes, I believe free will is an illusion. Everything is preordained, much like that next scene in the movie you’ve already seen a half-dozen times before. You know what’s coming next and the characters you’re observing have no choice in the matter – no free will. Well, maybe that’s what life, the Universe, and everything is – something already recorded and set in stone. Or, like that example I gave above, “Life”, perhaps we’re a computer program or simulation with relationships and rules all set in motion, perhaps for the edification or amusement of that extraterrestrial computer programmer in the sky!

*Because of etiquette or protocol, Tycho Brahe, while in the company of royals so the story goes, apparently couldn’t, or wouldn’t excuse himself to go to the bathroom. As a result he suffered a ruptured bladder and snuffed it, getting a Darwin Award in the process. That was a hell of a way to die for king and country!

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Free Will: Your Reality or Your Illusion? Part One

Our Universe could be a reflection, albeit on a far grander scale, of those computer-generated simulations, like “Life”. Start with a simple set of initial conditions and relationships, add several rules to the mix, press ‘enter’ or ‘go’ and see what happens. Such simulations can evolve into immense complexity, but the outcome – as far up the track as you wish to extrapolate – is 100% predetermined.

You can download and run “Life” on your home computer – in fact I understand some come automatically equipped with the software. In a similar way, cosmologists run simulations where they vary the various parameters thought to have existed close on the heels of the Big Bang event or era, along with the laws and constants of physics and see if the simulation evolves into something approaching the large scale structure of our actual, observed, Universe. Their fundamental assumption is of course that causality is absolute. If you start with ABC, you end up with XYZ – the first time, the last time, and all the in-between times.

If causality however is a sometime thing (like a woman is – sorry, I didn’t write the song, Gershwin did, so complain to him when you get to the afterlife part of your existence), then there must be (or probably is) such a thing as free will.

Now quantum physics as we currently understand it, is in-deterministic – it’s all based around probabilities, not certainties. Einstein never accepted that, believing to his dying day that there was some undiscovered deterministic or certainty principle or hidden factors that would restore or reaffirm causality in the realm of the quantum. If Einstein were alive today, he’s still be waiting. However, the indeterminacy and lack of causality in the realm of the quantum has nothing to do with free will.

Free will, if it exists, is a function of the mind; it’s all in the mind – the ways and means of consciousness to achieve a conscious choice. Free will, if it exists, is ultimately then a function of brain biochemistry or neurochemistry. Chemistry is deterministic and causality driven. Chemistry is an atomic process, but chemistry is still macro compared with the micro of the quantum realm. If you combine sodium and chlorine in equal parts and only probably get table salt and thus every now and again you get quartz or stainless steel instead, well that’s just not the way the Universe works. That’s not the way chemistry, any chemistry including brain biochemistry or neurochemistry works.

Let’s explore the issue further.

Firstly, free will means making decisions that have no predetermined outcome. Free will is coming to that metaphorical fork in the road and having the ways and means or ability to choose one path or the other. Even choosing neither, doing nothing, is in itself a decision.

Decisions require conscious thought – well, maybe not. There’s something more fundamental at work here – physics and chemistry.

Let’s start with simple life forms, say microbes and plants.

Plants and microbes make decisions but clearly they do not have free will. They respond to external influences. Plant roots ‘decide’ to grow downwards with gravity; the plant ‘decides’ to grow upwards, against gravity. Phytoplankton ‘decide’ to move up and down in the ocean with respect to light intensity, and plants can ‘follow’ the Sun as it moves across the sky. Unicellular organisms ‘decide’ to reproduce when the environmental conditions are right.

Even more complex organisms that we don’t normal associate with free will make decisions. A snail will decide to tuck into its shell with threatened. We may call it instinct, but its still decision making, albeit somewhat involuntary.

At what point does instinct or blind response to environmental stimuli morph into the appearance (real or illusionary) of free will?

And so we have, slightly higher up the evolutionary chain, a threatened organism will decide to fight or flee or hide or go into its shell. The response is not 100% instinctive; not apparently 100% predetermined. The organism chooses, and if it is not instinctive, then the decision required thought.

Decision making, instinctive or otherwise, has an awful lot to do with chemistry, and ultimately physics, because organisms are chemical structures, and chemistry is ultimately based on physics.

So, thought processes are ultimately chemical processes, ultimately routed in physics – we’re back to that micro world again!

Faced with a non-instinctive decision – fight or flee; red dress or green dress; scrambled eggs or boiled eggs – you have to think about it. That thought process sets into motion a chain of chemical and physical processes. It’s like you’ve pulled the handle on a slot machine - when everything stops and the numbers (or symbols) come up, that’s it bingo – decision made. But you had no actual control between setting the wheels in motion and the result. Your decision making was only an illusion of free will.

I repeat - once those chemical and physical processes are set into motion, you have no control over them – no say-so. You have no say-so in the reactions that happen, in the energies required to see those processes through to completion, what pathways electrons travel over your neural circuits.

Should that be surprising? Setting your brain aside for a moment, the rest of your body does not answer to what you want. In the exact same way you have no control over the natural chemical reactions that take place in your stomach when you dump a load of food into it, or for that matter any of the biochemistry that makes you tick. You don’t dictate to your body what pathways electrical impulses take when they blink your eyelids or control your heartbeat or make you twitch or even when you put one foot in front of the other.

Every molecule, atom and fundamental particle in your body does not answer to what you want, free will or no free will. You do not decide what they do! If you really had free will – willpower or mind-over-matter – you should be able to decide to control your aging process, or control your hair growth or colour. You can’t. You don’t really have free will.

You can only hold your breath for so long, or deprive yourself of sleep. While a relatively few can have the willpower to starve themselves to death when food is readily available, few could willingly die of thirst, and astronomer Tycho Brahe* notwithstanding, you can only put off going to the bathroom just so long and no longer. On a less gruesome note, how long can you prevent your eyelids from blinking?

If you have no control over the operations of your own body – its systems, organs, tissues, cells and biochemistry, why is the brain – including the mind, or that inner ‘You’ within you any different?

To be continued…

Monday, April 16, 2012

Cosmology’s Biblical Resolution: Part Two

There are but two possible or realistic fates for our expanding Universe. Either it will expand forever and ever, or else the expansion will eventually halt and reverse into a contraction. If you had to choose between the two, based not on the science of cosmology, but on the Bible, you’d have to opt for the former. Fortunately for the Bible, cosmologists place their bets on that option as well.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

ETERNAL LIFE

*Heaven as the happy ultimate in retirement villages and facilities has drawbacks when it comes to life eternal or everlasting life. The big drawback as I see it is that you are going to end up bored, not to death obviously (you’re already dead), but out of your feeble little mind. You might occupy yourself with the novelty of it all for the first million years or so, but what of the following billion years after that and the trillions of years that follows on from that – and you’re not even a stone’s throw within being ‘everlasting’ or ‘eternal’ yet.

ETERNAL YOUTH

*There’s another and usually overlooked issue with respect to having eternal life – eternal youth. A common situation in mythology arises when someone asks for and is granted immortality but forgot to request that the ageing process be suspended – oops!

RESURRECTION

*Now to get from this life to the afterlife that you hope to spend eternally in a physical place requires two events, your death and your resurrection. Death is the natural order of things. That’s the easy part.

*Resurrection as I understand it means the return to your former self after your demise (your death). Resurrection however defies the second law of thermodynamics – it’s like unscrambling and un-cooking a cooked scrambled egg – unless there some intelligence with super-science behind the resurrection; something beyond our reckoning.

*As per the above linking of immortality with eternal youth, I’ll assume that once resurrected, the ageing process isn’t also resurrected.

*Jesus (J.C.), if there ever was a Jesus, was a 3-D physical being. J.C. is the prime example of someone allegedly resurrected back into a 3-D being (unless he was ‘resurrected’ as a hologram of course, though a hologram is still a something that involves physical principles and energy. Still, a hologram is an interesting way of providing a ‘resurrection’).

*Now issues arise as to what your biological age will be when you are resurrected. The unwritten assumption would be to be resurrected back to the age you were at the time of death as was the case with J.C. That’s nifty if you’re 50, but what if you snuff it at 100? Do you want to spend eternity as a 100 year old? The opposite problem – what if you die as an infant, say a day or two after your birth. Would you want to spend your infinite afterlife as a new born baby? It would be even worse if you die before even being born!

*Maybe the optimum solution would be if everyone were resurrected to what they were, or what they would be at say, age 30. And of course all deformities would be corrected in the resurrection process. That would be super-science indeed, but how does one know what, say a two-day old infant will look like at 30-years of age, and how does one resurrect experiences and learning and memories that a 30-year old should have but a two-day old infant doesn’t.

*Then again maybe one size fits all. That is, there is only one body model and you, and everyone else, gets resurrected into that single form or body type, though that still isn’t much help for issues arising with our two-day old baby.

*Well maybe we should just forget resurrection of the entire body. It’s a can of worms. Even more so a Mission: Impossible to resurrect a body that was cremated and had its ashes scattered to the four winds and already recycled unto other life forms.

SOUL

*Well, instead of resurrection of the body, there’s usually just talk of your soul winging its way to Heaven, or alternatively your soul suffering eternal torment as in “damn your soul to Hell”. Now the soul; your essence; what makes you, you; what makes (or made) you tick, leave the body upon your death. Now either your soul has mass, and one study – never independently verified said it was 21 grams, or your soul is without mass. If it does have mass, we’re back in the realm of chemistry and physics again and now one can imagine a physical Heaven inhabited by floating souls instead of bodies. I assume here that a physical soul (21 grams worth or otherwise) has sensory apparatus; otherwise you’ll be eternally floating deaf, dumb and blind. It would be like spending forever in a sensory isolation tank – you’d go bonkers really quick-smart.

*Now if the soul has no substance, no mass, it weighs zilch, then it’s hard to understand how it could represent the essence of anything. A weightless, no mass soul couldn’t interact with anything. There could be no physical forces holding it together and so it would dissipate, if the concept of nothing dissipating has any meaning.

GHOSTS

*Somewhere between a resurrected body and the soul must be something akin to wraiths or spirits or phantoms or ghosts – call them what you will. This is at least clear-cut – if you can see a ghost, hear a ghost, if the ghost interacts with other matter and energy, then the ghost is a physical object. Though the concept of a spirit or a ghost (holy or otherwise) is noted in the Bible (phantoms and wraiths miss out), somehow the image of Heaven as a celestial version of a haunted house just doesn’t resonate.

*Equally unexplained is how one goes from a dead body to an animated ghost – what part of you stays dead and what part of you returns to an animated condition? In much the same way that applies to reported out-of-the-body (OOB) experiences. OOB happenings have to really be all in the mind since you cannot have by any physics we know a physical body split into two physical entities, each with functional sensory apparatus that interacts with energy (mass in another form), like light and sound. How do you divide one live physical body into two live physical bodies, even temporarily? Even if the OOB part of the original physical body were light as a feather, gravity would pull the OOB back down to earth. It couldn’t just float around like a hot air balloon.

ENTROPY & OTHER COSMIC DANGERS

*As the Universe expands it gets colder and colder – the Universe’s finite amount of energy gets spread around in an ever increasing volume. Further, heat spreads from areas of warmth to areas of coolness thus ultimately making everything a uniform temperature – a concept known as entropy whereas a high state of order (hot areas and cold areas) turns into a lower state of order (temperature uniformity).

*How does Heaven shelter itself from entropy – the second law of thermodynamics? When all the stars in the Universe have all exhausted their fuel supplies and the temperature of the cosmos just hovers above, just a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero, how does Heaven cope from the Big Freeze and shield itself from this and for how long can Heaven keep itself isolated?

*Heaven must have some sort of ‘force field’ to protect it as the Universe sinks ever lower in temperature. (Hell need not worry quite as much as it obviously has a lot of energy storage, supply and reserves in stock!)

*Heaven, being a part of the cosmos (it’s around somewhere), needs to shield itself not only from entropy but other cosmic catastrophes. Heaven may have a force field to shield it from gamma-ray bursts and other deadly radiations (wouldn’t you just love to hear God say “Increase power to the shields, Scotty”) but no amount of shielding will stop it going down a Black Hole gurgler, so you’d better hope Heaven has a good helmsman and sensors!

ALTERNATIVE ONE

*One solution is that Heaven and the afterlife aren’t physical at all, but somehow ghostly in the extreme or nebulous or without actual form or substance. The problem there, just like with that soul with no mass, is that no physical presence means no matter, therefore no chemistry and physics is possible. In short, if there’s no matter, there’s no energy. It’s hard to conceive of existence of any kind that doesn’t involve the transfer of energy. For one thing, all your five senses would be inoperative. What kind of afterlife would it be if you couldn’t see, if there were no sound, if you couldn’t touch and feel anything. All this requires physics and chemistry and the transfer of energy.

ALTERNATIVE TWO

*There is no Heaven (or Hell for that matter); no afterlife, no resurrected bodies, no ghosts and no soul. Cosmologists will have to continue to rely on traditional methods to figure out the ultimate fate of the Universe.

CONCLUSION

*Any Biblical promises of eternal life are simply pie-in-the-sky and cannot be a believable scenario by any critical or rational person. Thus, the fate-of-the-Universe question is still up for grabs, or in limbo land, though, irrespective of Biblical claims, just based on current scientific (not Biblical) evidence, any sane person would in fact put their money on infinity and not on the Big Crunch.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Cosmology’s Biblical Resolution: Part One

Revelation 1:8 - I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.

Beginnings and endings are not just the exclusive providence of the Almighty. Cosmologists too are interested in all things Alpha and Omega. Can the latter glean any guidance from the former? Well yes, but one has to enter some pretty strange territory, and ultimately one will have to conclude that any similarity between religion and cosmology comes down to a matter of just unconnected coincidence.

ALPHA

*The Biblical “In the beginning” matches the cosmologist’s Big Bang event, the origin and kick-starting of our Universe, even if there is a gap of some 13.7 billion years between the two versions.

OMEGA

*In all things Biblical there really is no Omega or ‘The End”. Yes, there is a forecast ‘end of days’ or ‘second coming’ or Armageddon or apocalypse, all as depicted in the Book of Revelation, as well as talked about in many other earlier books of the Bible. But, when all of that transpires, life, the Universe and everything goes on. Even after the ‘end of days’, etc., the Universe still goes on – there’s no point in wasting a totally good cosmos just because of some local terrestrial apocalypse. It’s not an “On the Beach” end-of-the-Universe plot. Stars aren’t really going to fall from the sky – that itself would take nearly forever since the stars are far away and a star can’t ‘fall’ at a velocity that exceeds the speed of light.

*In all things cosmological, there are two versions of Omega. Firstly, we know that our Universe is an expanding Universe. Its volume increases like an ever blown up balloon. Now that suggests two possible fates. Firstly, the expansion slows down (because of gravity), stops, and reverses course and starts to contract (gravity again), faster and faster, ever faster until everything comes together at the same point in space and time and you hit the Big Crunch. The Universe only has a finite amount of time before it enacts that “On the Beach” end-of-the-world or in this case end-of-the-Universe, plot.

*If there is a Big Crunch then its curtains for Heaven and Hell and all associated eternal lives, all snuffed out in its prime, crushed down into a singularity from which not even God can escape.

*Option two is that there isn’t enough gravity to stop the expansion and the Universe will keep on, keeping on – expanding that is. The Universe will have lots of time on its hands – an infinite amount of time. The latter scenario matches the Biblical scenario as defined by the phrase “everlasting life”. No end in sight – ever.

*And that’s the context or connection here. An everlasting Universe has to exist in order for there to be everlasting life.

AFTERLIFE

*Two questions now arise. Does Heaven physically exist and is there an eternal afterlife in that Heavenly abode? Well the Bible does say repeatedly one will have “everlasting life” (11 mentions), or “life everlasting” (4) or “eternal life” (26) or “life eternal” (4) or “live for ever” (14) in Heaven, so let’s tick the “yes” box for the afterlife.

*The immediate follow-up question though is what does the word ‘immortal’ or ‘immortality’ (also noted and logged in the Bible) or ‘eternal’ or ‘everlasting’ or ‘for ever’ signify to you? The Bible doesn’t use the word ‘infinite’ or ‘infinity’ in the context of the afterlife though ‘infinite’ does appear, so the concept was known back then, and no doubt that’s the meaning you’d give to ‘eternal’, etc. If your ‘life eternal’ only amounted to 1000 years, you’d feel cheated. No, you expect ‘life eternal’ to equate to infinity. That in turn will create all manner of issues as we shall see. Meantime, you have eternal life, which immediately settles the fate of the Universe question since the Universe has to attain an infinite age as well. Now you need a Heavenly place in which to spend it.

HEAVEN - LET’S GET PHYSICAL

*Is there a physical Heaven to house that presumably physical afterlife?

*It seems clear that since various physical beings such as angels, as described in the Bible, descend from and ascend to Heaven, including mortals like Enoch and Elijah, that Heaven must be a physical 3-D place with geographical, or rather celestial, coordinates.

*Heaven is often referred to as the “Kingdom of Heaven”, and a kingdom implies physical geography.

*Now the Bible refers to a throne in Heaven which God sits upon. Firstly, a throne is a physical object. Sitting is a physical action. If you are not a physical being you can’t get tired and so there is no need to sit. God sits on His throne, which is in keeping with the stated fact that God needed to rest on the seventh day of creation – God isn’t all powerful, He gets pooped like the rest of us! Jesus (J.C.) is also known to sit while in Heaven.

*If you sit, you have to sit on something (like a throne). If you sit on something and you don’t fall through that something (that throne for argument’s sake), then clearly the electromagnetic laws of physics are in operation – the same laws that prevent you from sliding through your chair at home when you sit down. The laws of physics can only operate in a physical realm.

*The Koran makes it crystal clear that Heaven is a physical abode, a land of milk and honey and lovely maidens all in a row for the menfolk to ogle.

*If the afterlife is a physical afterlife, then there must be a physical place in which to spend that afterlife. If the options are Heaven or Hell, then both are geographical locations existing in existing space and time.

PROBLEMS & ISSUES ARISING:

LIFE & THE AFTERLIFE

*From the moment of your conception, to the moment of your death (a more drawn out process since not every cell you’re composed of will perish at the exact same moment), you owe your entire life to the laws, relationships and principles of physics and chemistry.

*That equally applies to that brain-thingy of yours and all the processes that go on inside it – thinking, memory, personality, emotions, likes & dislikes, decisions, morals, spirituality, etc. None of these facets which makes you, you can be so without those root fundamentals of physics and chemistry.

*You may, or may not, have free will, but regardless, making a choice involves thought processes and drawing on memories and knowledge and those are within the providence of physics and chemistry, since without physics and chemistry there’s no life, no body, no brain, no thoughts and therefore no decisions.

*To give your afterlife any meaning and continuity with your life the same will have to apply. Your afterlife is equally dependent on physics and chemistry operating as we know it.

*Now perhaps your afterlife in Heaven is based around some totally other kind of physics and chemistry – who’s to say ours is the only kind possible. But, if that’s the case you are born afresh and can have no possible connection with this life you’re currently leading grounded in our physics and chemistry. In one sense that sounds an awful lot like reincarnation, where you are born again but have no connection to what you were previously.

*Okay, you’ve had a life; you now have an afterlife, what about a permanent, everlasting afterlife where physics and chemistry still rule, OK?

To be continued…