The Sun Said to the Desk Lamp

The sun said

to the desk lamp:

even from 93 million

miles away

I can still

kick your ass

Faith

“The most pervasive falsehoods are the hardest to see.”

If faith is belief in what cannot be proven, then all human endeavor rests on faith. This is as true for science, mathematics, and every aspect of our personal lives as it is for philosophies and religions. Schools of thought, bodies of knowledge and everything we do from the moment we get up and brush our teeth in the morning, all rise up from and depend upon an assembly of beliefs accepted on faith. Whether you are Christian, Muslim, Hindu or atheist, faith is the bedrock of your reality.

It’s easy to see that religions are based on a set of beliefs subject to question by those who do not believe. Indeed, one of the admirable aspects of religions is their honesty about the role of faith as a foundation for everything they claim. We also accept that people have philosophical beliefs upon which they may base their actions or entire lives. We don’t see as clearly, however, that mathematics, science and our daily existence are all likewise based on unprovable beliefs. This has been widely affirmed over the centuries by wisdom traditions of all stripes. It’s a central principle of Buddhism, in Christ’s message, in Socrates’s probing approach to philosophy and in what quantum physicists have discovered about the nature of reality on a fundamental level. We would be better served were we daily more mindful of the ground of belief upon which we walk, and through which we experience what we call reality.

Take mathematics, a field we think of—when we are forced to think of it all—as logically airtight and having no truck with faith whatsoever. For mathematics is based on proofs. A mathematician only accepts into the canon of his field a “truth” that can be proven, at which point this truth becomes a “theorem.” But what are used to prove theorems? Other theorems! Clearly, though, this can’t go on forever. Eventually the most fundamental theorems have to come from somewhere else. Eventually something has to provide a foundation for the theorems. And so it is. Mathematicians call these “somethings” axioms. But we can call them beliefs.

Why? Because axioms aren’t proven. An axiom (also known as a “postulate”) is a statement taken at face value. It’s a statement mathematicians—who are human beings, I hasten to add (despite common misconception)—have agreed to accept as obvious.  An example of an axiom in geometry is “the unique line assumption,” which says that through any two points there can be drawn exactly one line. Part of the wikipedia definition of an axiom is that its “truth is taken for granted, and serves as a starting point for deducing and inferring other truths.”So it seems that, just as is the case for religion, the foundation for mathematics are also truths that are “taken for granted.”

Now you are doubtless thinking, “Hold on, brother. If the ‘unique line assumption’ is anything to go by, these mathematical beliefs are a lot more obvious than religious beliefs. Surely mathematical axioms are no-brainers—only a crazy person would doubt their truth.” Indeed, this seems true, but as I’ll later explore in more detail, many things once thought self-evident have turned out to be false. For now, let’s move on to see how science is also based on unprovable beliefs.

How does science rest on faith in the same way that religion and mathematics do? You could say that the business of science is to explain phenomena. To explain something, we depend on the concept of cause and effect: “A causes B and B causes C” and so on. However, as the Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out around 1740, the very concept of cause and effect is actually a belief. There may be no such thing.

Think about it. When a pool stick hits a billiard ball and it rolls, there is no way to prove that the stick caused the ball to roll. All you can say is that in every case up till now, when someone has hit a billiard ball with a pool stick, the billiard ball has rolled. The past being all we have to go on, you can only say that in the past we have always observed the two activities occurring together in sequence. The concept that the stick caused the ball to roll is a belief we impose on the events. Perhaps in the future one might push a billiard ball and the ball might not move, or might roll up the stick, or jump around and whistle dixie. One cannot prove otherwise. As Hume put it in his Treatise on Human Nature: “[cause and effect]… are… qualities of perceptions, not of objects… felt by the soul and not perceived externally in bodies.” We believe in cause and effect. It’s not a fact.

Now let’s address the objection that the truths taken for granted in math and science are a lot more obvious and universally accepted than those taken for granted by religions—that one would have to be practically insane not to believe them, whereas religious beliefs are clearly open to question. The belief that two points determine exactly one line is a far cry from the belief that Jesus Christ was the only son of God. True enough. But they are beliefs nonetheless. And even beliefs considered obvious are not necessarily true.  The earth certainly seemed flat until we discovered the truth. Indeed, the greatest breakthroughs in human progress have occurred when some genius—or is that “insane person?”—questioned widely-accepted beliefs.

Take our concept of time. Before Einstein, it seemed apparent that time marches at a steady rate for everyone everywhere. In 1905, though, Einstein contended that time moves at different speeds depending on how fast we’re traveling and on the force of gravity. Even more than a hundred years later this idea seems at the very least bizarre if not downright crazy. And yet it has been borne out by experiments. Given this capsizing of accepted wisdom with regard to the nature of time, it is not completely bonkers to imagine a similar assault on the concept of cause and effect. Actually, this assault has already begun, as observations in the tiny world of quantum physics appear to challenge our notions of cause and effect (one example being that Newton’s third law of physics—”for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”—doesn’t always seem to apply down there).

Just as our notion of cause and effect is suspect, so too may be the “common sense” belief in the separation between matter and “spirit,” which we could also call energy. Since the Enlightenment, science has operated on the assumption that matter is “dead,” in other words there is no animating spirit or consciousness in matter. We tend to think this way in our everyday lives: there are forces on the one hand and stuff that gets pushed around by these forces on the other. But this belief has been challenged by quantum physics ever since 1905 when Einstein sprung his famous equation E = mc² on the world. E stands for energy, m for matter. The equation states mathematically that energy equals matter (after the amount of matter is multiplied by the speed of light squared). They’re actually the same thing! As such, they can theoretically be converted back and forth. We don’t know how to turn any matter into energy but physicists have since shown that energy can “pop out of nowhere” as a particle, and a particle can “disappear” into pure energy. Matter is only inert in our minds.

You might agree that scientific ideas are always open to challenge and revision, but surely our mathematical axioms are completely obvious and safe from attack? Well, maybe. But it turns out that at least in the world of geometry there are theoretically infinite different sets of axioms upon which different systems of geometry could be based. Each set of axioms leads to a different geometrical system that is internally consistent and therefore “logical” on its own terms. The type of geometry we learned in high school was Euclidean. It’s quite handy for flat situations like paper. You could say “it believes in flatness,” for it rests on a foundation of assumed flatness. But another thing Einstein showed is that space itself is not Euclidean but curved. Therefore a different geometry, based on “curvedness” and using different axioms is needed for calculations involving curved space.

The beliefs most fundamental to a way of thinking become second nature. Through long habit, they are ingrained, taken for granted and unquestioned. But a fresh, active mind explores beliefs. It probes and tests them and is willing to discard dry, cob-webbed beliefs in favor of those more vital, supple or nuanced. This is called being re-born. This is called life in the most vigorous and broad meaning of that word. This is what Socrates meant by “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and why he, and Christ, walked around questioning the accepted wisdom of their day.

Our most fundamental beliefs about ourselves and the world are like a pair of colored glasses we wear all the time. If they are yellow glasses, all we ever see are yellow things. Most never realize they can take the glasses off and try another pair. Most never realize the profundity of the bumper sticker that reads “Don’t trust everything you think.” Most never realize that they can be the Einsteins of their own lives.

Science: Weirder Than Any Religion

“People see me
I’m a challenge to your balance
I’m over your heads
How I confound you and astound you
To know I must be one of the wonders
Of god’s own creation
And as far as you see you can offer
No explanation.”
–Natallie Merchant

In “Jesus Weren’t  No Christian” I wrote that “Christians” do not stand for much that’s in the spirit of Christ as he’s depicted in the New Testament. In other words, there’s a huge gulf between Christianity and what it claims to originate from. Christians tend to be straight-laced conservatives who emphasize clean, traditional living, whereas Christ was a radical who lived a rootless lifestyle, consorted with outcasts, broke rules, and upset conventional expectations.

Similarly, there is a gulf between those who profess a scientific outlook on reality and the foundation this scientific outlook rests on.

I realize there are all stripes of scientists with different ideas about reality and God. And I’m not arguing that logic has no place in our outlook or that science hasn’t been a powerful and beneficial force through human history. I’m arguing that you can’t explain the universe with logic. And if you try to, using science as your authority, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot.

Scientific atheists like Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, argue against the supernatural, spiritual or scientifically unprovable. They explain our attraction to religion or spirituality in terms of psychology and brain chemistry and, stopping here, think they have arrived at the ultimate cause for our urge to “believe.” But they haven’t gone back far enough. They’ve chosen to stop at brain chemistry because that fits their logical, “scientific” outlook. This is exactly like a Christian who believes in original sin and then looks back to Tertullian (an early Christian writer who invented original sin) as a justification for that belief, without looking back further to Christ who seemed if anything to believe the opposite.

In both cases, the belief was chosen first and then an inaccurate label was attached to it to confer authority to that belief. The belief is the starting point, a justification is found, and then the justification is touted as proof. The Christian chose the belief in original sin and then attached the inaccurate word “Christian” to it. The scientific atheist chose the belief in logic and then attached the word “scientific” to it. Neither went back far enough–to their sources.

In Christianity, the source is Christ. What is the source when it comes to science? Let’s start with physicists’ current theory of how the universe began. In the beginning, there was nothing. No space, no time, no matter, nothing. Gee, that’s easy to picture. Then a “singularity” appeared–an infinitesimally small speck of infinite density–and this expanded out at blinding speed into the universe we know and love. Picture the earth squeezed down to the size of the period at the end of this sentence. That’s already impossible to imagine. But the singularity was smaller than that and contained billions and billions of times more matter, namely all the matter in the universe (that’s billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars). None of this is logical in the everyday sense of that word. In fact, it’s mind-boggling. It’s beyond anything any mythology or religion has ever dished up. Yet, this is what cold, hard-headed, logical science believes.

Extrapolating logically back in time, then, physicists have arrived at a mind-blowing scenario. Similarly, when they have examined matter at tinier and tinier levels, they again discovered utter weirdness. First of all, it turns out, matter is made up of particles called atoms. Atoms are made up of a nucleus–protons and neutrons–with electrons orbiting it. When you change the number of protons, you change how something looks and acts. For example, atoms of lead have 80 protons but atoms of gold have 79 protons. All protons are identical, but take away one from a lead atom and you get gold. That’s weird. But nowhere near as weird as it gets.

It also turns out that these atoms are mostly empty space. That’s because there is so much distance between the electrons and the nucleus (protons plus neutrons). To picture the relative sizes, imagine if you enlarged a nucleus to the size of a pea and put the pea in the middle of a football stadium. The electrons would be as far away as the outer walls of the stadium. The rest is space. So every solid thing you see around you is mostly empty space. (The reason you can’t put your hand through a table is not because your matter is actually making contact with the table’s matter; rather the negative charge of your electrons are pushed away by the negative charges of the table’s electrons. This means we never really touch anything—we just experience something’s electric field!) But it gets even weirder.

It turns out electrons, like light, sometimes act as though they’re particles and sometimes as though they are waves (all matter is energy in “solidified” form). Also, in accordance with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the more precisely you know where an electron is, the less precisely you can predict where it will be, and vice versa. In fact, the principle of causality breaks down completely as one enters the tiniest “quantum” world. In this world, the observer affects the behavior of the observed. For example, a particle of light, known as a photon, has a certain probability of showing up in different places. Once someone observes it, the photon “decides” to appear at a particular location. In other words, the photon of light wasn’t at any particular spot until someone observed it. In addition to all these shenanigans, many quantum physicists believe there are almost infinite parallel universes, constantly branching off from existing universes, playing out all possible outcomes and choices at each instant in time. Their logical science has led them to this and many other bizarre proposals too numerous to mention.

So it looks like when scientists have pursued cause and effect back in time or down to the tiniest levels they can, they’ve been led into the realm of what may be fairly described as the miraculous. And for this fundamental miracle, they can offer no explanation.

The Most Pervasive Falsehoods are the Hardest to See: Proverbs IV

When the imagination makes this world a hell, it must make a heaven elsewhere.

Avoid the abstract, prize the invisible.

There is nothing in this world or the next that does not long for something.

The most pervasive falsehoods are the hardest to see.

Jesus Weren’t No Christian

Back in college a fellow writer, named David Cohen, and I wrote an article about Elvis impersonator impersonators for the Harvard Lampoon‘s USA Today parody. The joke was that there were guys who idolized and impersonated not Elvis, but Elvis impersonators. Then we imagined Elvis impersonator impersonator impersonators, and then… well, you get the idea. In the article, each generation of impersonators, like a whispered message passed from person to person, strayed ever further from the original Elvis. The changes accumulated until the performers looked nothing like Elvis but instead like clowns who beat the ground with rubber sticks.

Christianity is like that.

Just look at how far the public face of “Christianity” in America has strayed from the person of Christ as he is portrayed in the Gospels (the only sources we have to go by). If we grant that people talk about what matters most to them, then what matters most to today’s high profile “Christians” has no connection to what mattered to Christ, for they each talk about completely different things.

Broadly speaking, Christians in our country are associated with the “conservative” values of tradition and family. But Christ flouted many traditional conventions, such as keeping the Sabbath, and took issue with the established religious officials of his day, the Pharisees and Sadducees. He also defied conventional expectations about how a person should behave, including dining with low-lifes and praising the woman who adoringly sat at his feet while her more responsible sister served the food. Aside from all this, Christ’s whole way of life was in no way traditional, wandering about as he did, performing alarming miracles and eating whatever he found from day to day.

And what of family? Well, he asked two of his apostles to follow him and leave their father in the middle of helping the old man work. When told that his mother and family had come to see him, he responded that those people gathered around him were his true family. In addition, we are told, he did few miracles in his hometown because the people there, those closest to him, saw him as merely the carpenter’s son they had grown up with—i.e. nothing special.

What did Christ talk about? Well, too many things to chronicle here, and anyone can read the Gospels and see for themselves (remembering that they were written a minimum of 60 or so years after Christ by those with their own agendas and biases). In an attempt at an overview, though, we can say he talked a lot about the kingdom of god. He said things like “whoever does not accept the kingdom of god like a little child shall not enter it,” and “the kingdom of god is within you.” He also told parables about paying equal wages to those who worked for an hour and those who worked all day, and about a father who forgives his profligate son for no good reason. He advised his disciples not to worry about tomorrow. In other words, Christ was startling, unconventional, and spontaneous and he preached irresponsibility in the commonly accepted sense of that word. I don’t hear any of this in the Christian message today.

But then, official Christianity has always been this way. It started with Paul, running around the Mediterranean telling early church members how to run their churches. Where Christ said nothing, Paul did his best to fill in the gaps. From that time on, as those with power attempted to organize, expand and explain Christ’s message, that message became increasingly beside the point, crowded out by the ideas and biases of those delivering the message. Tertullian is a powerful example of this. An influential writer whom some have called the founder of Western theology, he decided sometime around 200 AD that a person’s soul is stamped by human sin from birth. Never mind that there is no evidence Christ was at all concerned with this question, Tertullian decided it was Christian and added it to the church’s doctrines.  Original sin, then, is not Christian but Tertullianist. Since then, of course, councils of church officials met periodically to decide what and whom they would deem Christian. Add to this official doctrine the informal mass of ideas and prejudices Christians have dreamed up, and you get a religious stew that tastes nothing like Christ’s original recipe.

Over the centuries, the practice continued: those who claimed to be followers of Christ have been largely preoccupied by issues that didn’t matter to Christ; they have nonetheless labeled the issues “Christian” and gone about their merry–and sometimes deadly–way. What we now call Christianity, then, is an unwieldy series of these accretions: layers and layers of attitudes and doctrine that have nothing to do with Christ.

This is not to say that a few figures imposed their views on the masses from on high. Influential ideas need to be accepted by the masses or they are not influential. Whether due to masochism or laziness, for example, people have to varying degrees believed in original sin. The idea took hold and got associated with Christianity and therefore with Christ.

This is also not to say that all these post-Christian ideas are bad. Many of them are, but that’s a different essay. My argument here is that it misleads the public and does Christ a disservice to associate these ideas with Christ. What we call things matters. It clarifies our thinking. I have no problem with people starting a church based on original sin. But call it Tertullianist, not Christian.

Slay the Predictor: Proverbs III

How often does paranoia pass for wisdom!

We suffer more abuse from ideas than from people.

Slay the predictor.

Be wary of conversation with those who do not live within walking distance: Proverbs II

1. Be wary of conversation with those who do not live within walking distance.
2. By sleeping, we say each day, “This world is not enough.”
3. Tyranny through niceness—the worst kind.
4. Prize the seeker above the knower.
5. Wisdom is in the feet.
6. In my limitation is my genius.
7. God does not look down with pity on the homeless man. God is the homeless man.