Posted inReality Science

Quantum theory is still largely unexplained, but that’s how science works

Quantum theory (or quantum mechanics) is the foundation of our modern world. Without it, we wouldn't have computers, the Internet, GPS, and so many other inventions that we've come to take for granted.  I'm fascinated by quantum theory. Though it is generally associated with goings-on at the atomic and subatomic level, not at the level of everyday life, since everything is made up of particles and energy, obviously the existence of we humans and all that surrounds us is dependent on quantum processes. This is where much of the mystery of quantum theory resides: how is it that the uncertain,…
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Posted inBuddhism Science

Evolution doesn’t care if feelings are true, just that they are good for us

In a recent post, "No, major religions don't provide a truer picture of reality," I noted that evolution doesn't care about truth, just about whether genes are passed on to the next generation. Of course, this is just a manner of speaking, since evolution isn't about caring or not-caring. This goes against one of the primal facts about evolution: that species prosper not because they possess a greater grasp of reality, but because they are adept at passing on genes, organisms being well suited to the environment in which they find themselves. After writing that, I came across a mention…
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Posted inReality Religions Science

No, major religions don’t provide a truer picture of reality

It isn't surprising that, as an atheist, I find a lot not to like in Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. However, what does surprise me is how weak Douthat's arguments are.  For while I admire his clear writing style, as befits a New York Times opinion columnist, often he simply tosses off glib statements about the marvelousness of religious belief without backing them up with either solid facts or persuasive reasoning. Here's an example from the book's "Big Faiths and Big Questions" chapter, which argues that the world's major religions are a better bet than minor…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Science

If humans are the top of creation, what about Neanderthals?

The February 2025 issue of National Geographic features a fascinating story by Brook Larmer, "The Hunt for the  Other Humans." This got me to thinking about the common religious teaching that humans are the top of creation. For example, the Bible says in Genesis: 26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” 27 So God created mankind in his own image,    in…
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Posted inNeuroscience Science

AI, artificial intelligence, points to the mystery of how the mind works

Religiously-minded people like to invoke mystery as a reason for believing in God and the supernatural. They adore how holy books teach that the workings of divinity are beyond human comprehension, you know, the whole man proposes and God disposes thing.  But it isn't necessary to go anywhere outside of the closest entity any of us has to ourselves to come face-to-face with a gigantic mystery, because that entity is the mind that experiences both mystery and everything else from our birth until our death. In my previous post, "No, neuroscience doesn't support religiosity,"  I included a passage from Ross…
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Posted inReligions Science Universe

No, the big bang doesn’t point to a divine creator

In my first post a few days ago about Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I said that I bought the book because "I was curious about how Douthat would make his arguments, figuring that it would be easy for atheists like me to undermine them." Here I'll finish my critique of his first substantive chapter, "The Fashioned Universe," which I started making in that initial post about the book.  It's easy for me to do this, because I'm already seeing a theme emerge in how Douthat tries to make his case for religious belief. Though he's…
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Posted inBuddhism Reality Religions

Science is the best guide to spirituality

Some people believe that science is opposed to spirituality, that these pursuits operate in different realms of reality and an embrace of one implies a distancing from the other. I've never believed this. Even when I was in my most religious frame of mind, the 35 years I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru considered to be God in Human Form, I remained intensely interested in what science has learned about our universe even as I explored the possibility of realms beyond the physical. This is why…
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Posted inMiracles Science

Miracles aren’t so miraculous in the light of mathematics

We humans have some innate amazing capabilities. However, intuitively grasping mathematical principles, including statistics and probability theory, isn't one of them. Or at least, this is very rare. That's why almost everybody mistakenly overestimates the rarity of unusual events. I wrote about this in a 2014 post, "Miracles" happen all the time. Mathematics demands them. In that post I included this question from a book I was reading: How many people must be in a room to make it more likely than not that two of them share the same birthday? The answer is 23. I would have thought the…
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Posted inBuddhism Science Spiritual practice/meditation

Why general relativity leads me to prefer Zen’ish meditation

Ever eager to cram together two seemingly highly separate subjects into a profound (or pseudo-profound) blog post, here's my take on relativity theory and Zen. I got to pondering the connection after two events in my life today tilted me in that direction.  Event #1 occurred when I read an article in the August 6, 2022 issue of New Scientist that I'd dug out of the bottom of a forgotten pile of unread magazines. In it Chandra Prescod-Weinstein, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire, described why general relativity is known as a background…
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Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

Breathing exercises can calm a frazzled mind

Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to breathing when it comes to meditation and relaxation. The don't interfere approach, which I generally use, advises that we simply notice inhalations and exhalations with close attention without trying to change our breath. This makes the breath an object of awareness, thereby focusing the mind. The breath exercise approach, which I also enjoy, advises that we follow certain patterns of breathing to achieve desired ends, like relaxation, increased energy, and such. This makes the breath akin to a muscle that benefits from exercise. Today the Washington Post had a story that caught my…
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Posted inReality Science

A clear mind sees a foggy world. A foggy mind sees a clear world.

In my previous post I talked about how science is viewed in Tim Urban's creative and engaging book, What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies. I've continued reading the book, finding Urban's writing style highly appealing. Here's a terrific passage that offered up a compelling way of looking upon the difference between a Scientist and a Zealot. While the Scientist's clear mind sees a foggy world, full of complexity and nuance and messiness, the Zealot's foggy mind shows them a clear, simple world, full of crisp lines and black-and-white distinctions. When you're thinking like a Zealot, you end up in…
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Posted inScience

Your Higher Mind thinks like a scientist

I've followed Tim Urban and his Wait But Why blog off and on for quite a few years. Not long ago Urban published a book online, What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies. I took a look at it, but I much prefer reading print books. Fortunately, Urban eventually came out with a "real" book. When I got an offer from Urban to buy his book directly from the printer (it's self-published), I did just that. It arrived a few days ago. I'm enjoying it, in part because I like the quirky illustrations crafted by Urban. The book also…
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Posted inNeuroscience Science Spiritual practice/meditation

Mind Magic is a science-based book about manifesting what you want

If I hadn't read a review in New Scientist of James Doty's new book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, the title and subtitle would have turned me off, since "manifestation" sounds New Age'y, and "how it changes everything" sounds over-the-top. But the review stressed the neuroscience part, which I liked. And after the book arrived via Amazon a few days ago, I really liked the first sentence of the introduction, along with the entire first few paragraphs. THE UNIVERSE DOESN'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU. It may not sound like it, but this is…
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Posted inReligions Science

Science says religion isn’t so much wrong, as it is unnecessary

Thanks to fading highlighting, I've been re-reading theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's book, Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions.  I bought the book a few years ago and wrote several blog posts about it. (See here, here, here, here, and here.) Then I put the book aside and turned my attention to other books in my morning pre-meditation reading. When I picked it up again recently, I noticed that I hadn't read a couple of the final chapters. I also saw that my yellow highlighting had faded considerably. To most people, that wouldn't be a big deal. But…
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Posted inScience Universe

The factual creation story of physics is more inspiring than religious fantasy

The world's major religions claim that God created our universe. Naturally details are lacking, because religions are all about faith, not facts.  Modern science also has its creation story, the Big Bang. It takes more effort to understand than the simplistic religious stories. But I find science's story to be much more appealing, largely because I prefer reality over fantasy when it comes to the big questions of life. (When it comes to thriller novels and television shows, I adore fantasy.) This isn't to say that the scientific explanation of creation is complete and coherent. It has a lot of…
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Posted inReality Religions Science

If God and the supernatural are real, where’s the evidence of them?

Religiously minded people like to have it both ways. I know whereof I speak, because I used to be one of those people before I saw the error of my ways.  The basic error is this: religious believers assert that (1) God and the supernatural can't be known through reason and the physical senses, yet (2) God and the supernatural are real, and deserve the respect shown to these divine realities. So those of us who reject blind faith are supposed to accept that one or many someones, somewhere, some time, had an experience of God and the supernatural that…
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Posted inReality Science

Science says the energy of matter is the energy of being

In my religious true-believing days, I would have made more of the scientific understanding shared in this blog post than what the understanding supports. Meaning, it isn't at all mystical, though it contains echoes of certain mystical teachings. Or more accurately, those teachings contain echoes of scientific truth. Today I got to the chapter in theoretical physicist Matt Strassler's book, Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean, where he reveals the secret that he's been building up to in the part of the book that precedes the Quantum section.  I'm tempted to summarize what…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Science

Why the mystical notion of a “sound current” is at odds with science

I used to belong to an India-based religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), whose teachings centered on the notion of shabd, or sound current -- considered to be the audible voice of God, being an all-pervading conscious energy that created and sustains the cosmos, including our physical universe. Believing in this, my first book was called God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder: Echoes of Ultimate Reality in the New Physics. (In the shorter and simpler version that I published after the original book went out of print, I changed the subtitle to Echoes of Spiritual Reality in the New Physics, which…
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Posted inReality Science

Common sense is a poor guide to objective reality

As I said about a week ago, I'm enjoying theoretical physicist Matt Strassler's book, Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean. I've made my way through chapters about Motion, Mass, and Waves. Then I'll get to read about Fields, Quantum, Higgs, and Cosmos. Strassler is an engaging writer. He makes science readable, though it still takes some work to grasp his core points. One of the things I most enjoy about the book are the facts about the world based on physics that I either never knew, or once knew and needed reminding about.…
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Posted inReality Science Universe

We are made from waves of the universe

For thirty-five years I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious organization that taught the ultimate reality of the cosmos is all-pervading conscious energy termed shabd, in English sound current.  I wrote a book on behalf of RSSB called God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, in which I argued that findings of the new physics reflected the message of ancient mysticism that waves of conscious energy not only permeate our universe but actually are the deep-down nature of the universe. I no longer believe in the supernatural aspect of this viewpoint, but I've maintained my interest…
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