Posted inReality Science Universe

Universe may not be eternal, but existence is

Believers in God who follow modern science will be heartened by a recent article in New Scientist, "Why physicists can't avoid a creation event."  While many of us may be OK with the idea of the big bang simply starting everything, physicists, including Hawking, tend to shy away from cosmic genesis. "A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God," Hawking told the meeting, at the University of Cambridge, in a pre-recorded speech. For a while it looked like it might be possible to dodge this problem, by…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Reality

Why isn’t a movie as appealing in HD?

Last night I took advantage of my wife being out of town to stream, through Amazon, an action movie that I've wanted to see for a long time: The Bourne Identity (2002). My wife isn't big on action flicks and wouldn't have appreciated the way-cool Mini chase through the streets, alleys, and walkways of Paris nearly as much as I did. But what irritated me through the entire two-hour movie experience was watching it on our television in HD (high definition). I paid an extra dollar to get the HD version. Then, almost as soon as I started watching amnesiac Matt…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

Mindfulness 101: separate your senses from your stories

Oh, the stories I tell myself. As do you. As does everybody. We wouldn't be human if we weren't story tellers.  I wake up in the morning. Almost immediately I recollect the basic narrative of my life. I live in Oregon. I'm married to the woman in bed next to me. I need to get up, raise the thermostat to 69 degrees, and let our dog out of the downstairs room where she spends the night. Then... make coffee, take the dog outside, get the newspapers. If I simply was aware of what my senses were telling me, I'd be…
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Posted inReality

Have a wonder-filled 2012!

Wonder. It's well, wonderful. What else could wonder be? Actually, quite a bit. That's a big part of the reason why wonder is wonderful, and why I'm wishing that for you, and for me, next year will be filled with it. I was inspired to strike this theme in my final blog post of 2012 by reading Paolo Costa's essay, "A Secular Wonder," in the book that I've blogged about previously: The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now. I love that Now in the sub-title. It's all that we have, even if we're engrossed in mulling over…
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Posted inMiracles Reality

Don’t believe in miracles. Reality is better.

Late last night, while changing channels on our TV, I happened across a midnight mass that was being broadcast on ABC. After watching for a few minutes my wife and I were struck by how really weird the church service was.  Understand: it wasn't any weirder than any other religious form of worship. I'll give the Catholic priest credit for talking calmly and quietly, unlike more fervent evangelical preachers.  But what he was talking about seemed exceedingly strange to our rational, reasonable, evidence-loving psyches. Which was recognized by the priest (bishop, actually, if I recall correctly), because he spoke about…
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Posted inPlotinus Reality

Why materiality? What’s the point?

One of the reasons I love my blogging gig, even though I get paid precisely nothing, and even have to pay for the privilege of doing what I do, is getting email messages like this: I'm in the process of reading Return to the One which led me to your website and blogs.  Your writings have made me question, think, and laugh.  Thanks! I have spent many a year searching for something to satisfy this deep longing within.  I've known for sometime that I wasn't going to find "it" in the material world and have read zillions of books and tried various…
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Posted inReality

Science: a minimalist “get real” walk through life

Most people like to be insulated from reality. After all, it hurts sometimes. So everybody puts on physical and mental coverings of one sort or another. Clothes, shoes, gloves, beliefs, hopes, imaginings.  I used to do this much more than I do now. My inward churchlessness has been matched by an outward "get real" approach to how I dress and get around. For example, I enjoy a healthy dose of minimalism in my footwear. Currently these are my favorite shoes, Teva's Zilch and Nilch. I Zilch in warm weather; I Nilch in cold weather (with wool blend socks). They're wonderfully…
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Posted inReality Science

“Atheist’s Guide to Reality” answers life’s biggest questions

Here's a gift idea for the atheists and agnostics on your Christmas shopping list: Alex Rosenberg's The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions. I'm enjoying it a lot, having bought it at Powell's Books in Portland (best bookstore in the world!) a few weeks ago. Rosenberg, chair of the Philosophy Department at Duke University, is a powerful writer. He is utterly fearless in proclaiming his atheistic thesis. Here it is in a nutshell, on pages 2-3 of his new book where he confidently answers life's biggest questions in a few words: Is there a God? No. What is…
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Posted inReality

Professor challenges students’ faith-based beliefs

Peter Boghossian, a Portland State University philosophy professor, is my type of teacher. He doesn't believe in letting faith-based beliefs go unchallenged in his classroom. If you spout religious ridiculousness, like "I know it's true because the BIble says so," Boghossian will do his best to cure your cognitive sickness. So saith a story in the Portland Oregonian about an upcoming public lecture: Peter Boghossian will argue that faith-based beliefs are a "cognitive sickness" that have been turned into a moral virtue and that -- like racist beliefs -- they should be given no countenance in the classroom. "I believe our…
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Posted inReality

Get wise about life and death in 56 seconds

I liked these newly-released videos from the Neural Surfer, a.k.a. David Lane. Check out the first two in what apparently will be a series of two hundred wisdom in 56 seconds offerings -- "The Limits of Science" and "Radiance Without an Edge."     For those who prefer to read their wisdom, here's an excerpt from the first video: And herein is the great human dilemma: the limits of our skull are the limits of our understanding. Plus an excerpt from the second: Hence, what we should really fear about death is not the extinction of being, but the awareness of…
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Posted inReality

With life, there’s no possible comparison

A few days ago, during a dog walk, when insights often spring into my psyche, I was contemplating the fall colors and how the number of years I'll be able to enjoy changing seasons is falling with every passing birthday. I had a brief relapse into a sort of semi-faithfulness, visualizing how nice it would be if life could be everlasting, eternal, without end. But almost instantly a compared to what? echoed in my consciousness, drowning out the anti-death wish fulfillment chatter. Yes, indeed: when we complain about life, not its particulars, but life itself, there's no basis for comparison.…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

Do you want life to be experience, or memory?

Psychologist, Nobel laureate (in economics), and happiness researcher Daniel Kahneman describes a interesting thought experiment in his fascinating TED video, "The riddle of experience vs. memory."  It seems to point to something really important about life, spirituality, meaning, well-being, and all that. I just can't quite figure out what it is -- which probably is a result of me being immersed in the riddle of experience vs. memory, as all of us are. That is, I got an intuitive flash when I heard Kahneman talk about the thought experiment, but when I reflect upon it, as I am now, I'm focusing…
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Posted inBooks Reality Science

“War of the Worldviews” ends with clear win for science

Just like I thought after reading only four of the nineteen debates between spiritually-minded new age sage Deepak Chopra and scientifically-minded physicist Leonard Mlodinow in their book, "War of the Worldviews," I finished the final chapter feeling that science emerged the decisive victor. Understand: I've got a lot of sympathy for mysticism, meditation, and unconventional ways of viewing the cosmos. I don't believe that science has all the answers, because I don't believe that anybody does.  But I've always liked my "spirituality" (a term that doesn't mean to me what it used to, yet which I continue to use out…
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Posted inReality Science

Physicists may have discovered extra dimensions

Note the word "may" in this blog post title. That's the most important thought in the potentially super-exciting story of how CERN researchers may have discovered that neutrinos travel slightly faster than the speed of light. If this is true, the implications would be astronomical. Literally. Because a leading explanation for the Einstein-defying neutrinos (his theory of relativity makes the speed of light an absolute speed limit) is that the nearly massless particles are taking a short cut through extra dimensions of reality on their way from CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, to a particle detector near L'Aquila, Italy. An article…
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Posted inReality Science

A mind-blowing fact about infinity

What can you say about infinity? Well, the word has a pretty lengthy Wikipedia page, so clearly the answer is "a lot." Which makes sense, since if there's one thing we know about infinity, it's this: infinity is freaking big. Or at least, limitless. I suppose something could be infinitely small -- getting smaller and smaller without limit. But this would mean that it's a freaking big bit of small. God supposedly is infinite. Infinitely loving, infinitely knowing, infinitely powerful. Heck, God probably has an infinite number of positive qualities, being so infinite. This is assuming that God exists. We…
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Posted inReality Religions

Conspiracy theories — another form of blind faith

One person believes that Jesus was resurrected after dying on the cross. Another person believes that the Bush administration was behind the 9/11 attacks. Each belief lacks a foundation of demonstrable evidence. Each belief almost certainly is untrue. Each belief has many adherents who vehemently hold to it, despite how bizarre their blind faith is. I'm a religious skeptic. I'm also a conspiracy theory skeptic. What seems strange to me is how people who decry fundamentalist religion often cling to fundamentalist conspiracy theories. But after reading Michael Shermer's new book, "The Believing Brain," I'm better able to see the connections…
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Posted inReality

Life is as absurd as we make it

Is life absurd? Sometimes it seems to be. I ponder how large the universe is (a hundred billion or so galaxies, each with a hundred billion or so stars) and how old it is (about 13.7 billion years), and compare this with my puny earthly existence. How insignificant I am compared to the cosmos! How absurd it is that I consider my life to mean anything in light of my miniscule'ness! And yet... If you want to know how a philosopher persuasively addresses that and yet, give Thomas Nagel's "The Absurd" a read. I did so yesterday, finding it pleasingly…
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Posted inReality Science Universe

Mystery of existence eludes both religion and science

"Why is there something rather than nothing?" This is the ultimate question. So ultimate'y, it shouldn't be viewed as a question, because questions imply answers. I prefer, "There is something rather than nothing." Leave out the "why." Embrace the stark, unarguable reality of existence. Forget God. Something must exist or God couldn't exist. So my awe is directed toward existence, not God. Existence is everlasting, eternal, omnipresent, unfathomable. Wild! If I want to feel a tingle up my psyche's spine before I fall into sleep, I ponder there is something rather than nothing as I doze off. (Some reflections of…
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Posted inReality Science

The three wisest words in the world: “I don’t know”

I've got some affirmations for you that will change your life. Repeat them over and over in your mind until they seem to be part and parcel of you. Because in truth, they already are. "I don't know." "I'm clueless.""I have no idea what's going on.""It's all a mystery to me." None of us knows how we know. That's a neuroscientific fact. I talked about this a few years ago in Knowing that you know: impossible. This blog post was based on a terrific book by Robert Burton, "On Being Certain." One of Burton's central points, which seems as certain…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

Get loopy! Feel better fast with feedback loops

Old religious habits can take a long time to die. As churchless as I am these days, sometimes I long for a "revival." The faith to which I previously subscribed was Eastern rather than Western, so my notion of a revival was to attend a weekend meeting where speakers (maybe even the guru himself) would urge devotees to apply themselves to meditation and other spiritual practices/vows more assiduously. I enjoyed feeling that I had a clear-cut spiritual goal, and that if I did this-and-that, such-and-such results could be expected. Maybe not soon; maybe not even in this lifetime; but someday…
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