Posted inScience

Greetings from the center of the galaxy

I couldn't think of a better Christmas day greeting than this one -- a marvelous image of the Milky Way galactic center. (Click on "full size" for higher resolution image.)Yesterday I saw it as I was garnering churchless inspiration from an astronomical picture book, "Universe: Journey from Earth to the Edge of the Cosmos."Tears came to my eyes. Sitting on a cushion in my meditation area, I felt very, very small. Also, very, very fortunate to be living in a time when science could show us so vividly what lies beyond the confines of everyday experience.The caption in the book,…
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Posted inScience

Belief is in the brain, so beware

Believing in the supernatural is easy: our brains lead us down the belief road without our knowledge. So there's good reason to be skeptical of religious, mystical, or spiritual experiences.Much, most, or all of the time (depending on your level of skepticism) your brain is fooling you.Such is the fascinating message of Sharon Begley's "Why We Believe" in a recent issue of Newsweek. I read her piece the day after my wife and I believed we were at the right election night party place, but really weren't. We weren't in a supernatural frame of mind, but some of Begley's believing…
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Posted inScience

Getting down to rock bottom reality

I've never understood why science isn't worshiped by religious believers. After all, most religions believe that God or a higher power created the cosmos. So seemingly the next best thing to knowing God would be knowing how our universe works, since it stands to reason that the consciousness of the creator would be reflected in the creation -- in the same way as the psyche of an artist shines through his or her paintings. Normally my meditation nook's reading corner has several science books nestled comfortably next to spiritual and philosophical titles. I jump back and forth between them most…
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Posted inScience

Thumbs up to naturalism, evolution, and Palin fading away

Today Pharyngula, a terrific science/ progressive/ anti-religion blog, hit the mark with links to stories on three of my favorite subjects. Exposing Sarah Palin for the fool that she is. Palin is against science. She's for the teaching of creationism. She doesn't think humans have much to do with global warming. Picturing her as vice-president of the United States: too irrationally scary to contemplate. This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise…
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Posted inScience

God, the Big Bang, and a Big Bounce

It's well accepted that our universe came into being about 13.7 billion years ago with a bang. A big bang, in fact. So big, and yet so small. Because the energy which became at least 100 billion galaxies each containing about 100 billion stars, supposedly was contained within a singularity of infinite density and temperature that wasn't even a point in time and space – since a singularity is where the laws of nature (including general relativity) break down. This helps explain why the Catholic Church has looked with favor on the big bang theory, as have theologians of other…
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Join the Church of Holy Fuck!

There's nothing wrong with churches that some churchlessness won't fix. After all, that's what this blog is. This morning I was inspired to become the first member of another churchless church, that of Holy Fuck! In chartering this institution within my own psyche, my first decision was whether the exclamation point was necessary. Grammatically, it could be confusing – as in the title of this post. Does the ! go with the entire sentence, or just with Church of Holy Fuck! I've concluded that it's better to be confused than lackadaisical. Hence, I'm decreeing that an exclamation point shall always…
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Posted inScience

Repent! Believe in science!

Often a cartoon speaks more truth than thousands of words. Thanks to Pharyngula, here's a great example: The complete comic says even more. Yes indeed, "the truth will set you free." Which leaves religion out of the picture, because it puts barriers between us and reality – substituting wishful thinking for clear-eyed understanding of the universe. A recent comment conversation over on last year's "Atheists crush Christians at 'Does God Exist?' debate" post is a good example. I appreciate that "C," a Christian, was willing to enter into a dialogue with us churchless heathens (see his July 7, 2008 comment…
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Posted inScience

Knowing that you know: impossible

It's strange, but the most familiar sensation we have also is the most mysterious: knowing. I know this. And yet, I don't. Just like everything else that I know. Or you know. Or anybody knows. We don't know how we know. Which means we can't trust what we know – not with 100% certainty. So this should squash fundamentalism of every variety. Except…people can't control their knowing. Reason, facts, information, persuasion: our sense of knowing isn't influenced by any of that. Our knowing can't be trusted. Yet it's what we rely upon at every moment. Go figure. (But you can't,…
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Posted inScience

Being absolutely right, you’re wrong

You can't have "right" without "wrong." So if what you say is absolutely 100% certain, no doubt about it – that can't be true. The Taoists figured this out a long time ago. Yin requires yang. Up needs down. Truth depends on falsity. Much more recently, Karl Popper made falsifiability the cornerstone of what distinguishes a scientific theory. I echoed his ideas in "If a religion can't be wrong, it surely is." I keep coming back to this notion, because both intuitively and logically it appeals to me. Sure, something may be real, yet improvable or indescribable. Existence, for example.…
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Posted inScience

Brain damage = enlightenment?

Jill Bolte Taylor had what she calls a "stroke of insight." In her case it was an actual stroke – which produced a blood clot the size of a golf ball that pushed on her language centers in the left side of her brain. Watch the nineteen minute video of her talk about the experience. Or read the transcript. It's fascinating and moving. Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by…
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Posted inScience Vedanta/Advaita

Quantum and non-dual consciousness

Ah, intellectual and inspirational bliss. A free, downloadable, thoughtful, well-written "Course in Consciousness" that moves smoothly from down to earth quantum theory to soaring spirituality. This is my cup of reading tea. I've only been able to quickly browse through the 242 pages of Stanley Sobottka's writing, but I can tell that there's a lot to like here. Sobottka is an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Virginia, so obviously he knows his scientific stuff. His deep knowledge of, and appreciation for, Buddhist/Advaita teachings is more surprising – though he isn't the only physicist to wade into some…
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Science unites, religion divides

I've enjoyed the big bang discussion that took off in the comments on my previous post. In the course of defending science and the scientific method against a man, Rhawn Joseph, who believes the big bang, evolution, relativity, and the laws of thermodynamics are all myths, I've had an opportunity to reflect on why science appeals so much to me. Pretty simple: it produces common ground on which we all can stand – reality. Religion divides people, because there's no agreement about the nature of what, if anything, lies beyond the physical universe. So dogmatic arguments over God, soul, life…
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Posted inScience

Starbucks coffee and the big bang

I don't know why drinking a latte at Starbucks makes me feel so cosmically strange. But here's what been happening recently. I sit down at a table, look at my cup, all festooned with the Starbucks logo and a quotation from somebody or other, and it just feels unbelievably weird. So freaking unlikely. That me, Brian, is existing right here and now, in an Oregon Starbucks, about to sip a warm caffeinated drink out of a cardboard container. What are the chances of this happening, given our 13.7 billion year old universe that sprang into existence from a speck of…
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Physics ventures into the territory of mystics

I find scientific explanations of the universe much more satisfying than religious ones. Science grounds hypotheses in reality that can be observed, tested, and experimented upon. Religion constructs airy-fairy castles in the sky that are divorced from everyday experience. But there's a point, way out there, where observing, testing, and experimenting aren't possible – not even in theory. For example, much of the universe is forever beyond human knowledge because it is receding from us faster than the speed of light, so no signal will ever reach us from this domain. However, we can envision a possibility, remote as it…
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Skepticism isn’t “blind faith”

Religious believers like to say that agnosticism or atheism also is founded on faith – faith that there's no evidence for God. So skeptics are as filled with faith as the faithful. That's ridiculous. It's the sort of word play that led Donald Rumsfeld, the incompetent Secretary of Defense, to say "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence" in reference to Iraq's unfound weapons of mass destruction. Well, I see no evidence of a unicorn in our living room right now. There's just my wife and our dog, neither of whom looks like a horse with a horn coming out…
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Posted inScience

Paul Davies’ “Cosmic Jackpot” comes up empty

Where do the laws of nature come from? Great question. Here's an equally good one: Where do the laws of nature reside? I've always wondered about this. Science has found that the universe is remarkably well-ordered. Mathematics describes its fundamental laws (such as gravity and electromagnetism) so perfectly, Paul Dirac said, "If there is a God, he's a great mathematician." But how does every bit of matter know how to obey the law of gravity? Where's the software, the program, that controls the hardware of the universe? Or are these even meaningful questions? I used to think that they were.…
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Posted inScience

Arousal and quiescence in the mystical brain

Browsing through my collection of half-read books, recently I came across The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience. Starting in where I left off quite a few years ago (the book was published in 1999), I can tell that I'm going to be reading this baby straight through this time. Because the question marks I left in the margins next to statements that questioned whether any mystical experience occurs outside of the physical brain now would have my personal version of exclamation marks next to them (a round dot made with my highlighter). Back in my religiously devoted…
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Posted inScience

What reality is really made of

Oh, man, did my philosophical heart flutter when I looked at the cover of the most recent New Scientist magazine and read: WHAT THE UNIVERSE IS REALLY MADE OF: strip away human notions of reality and one thing remains I feverishly turned to page 38. Finally, I'd know What It is All About. I had a suspicion. Which was confirmed when I saw the heading, "Reality by numbers." Yes, it isn't wildly surprising that a science magazine would contain an article by a physicist, Max Tegmark, who believes that the essence of the universe is mathematical. Surprising or not, the…
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Boltzmann brains can blow your mind

Who needs far-out religious myths – walked on water! resurrected from the dead!— when science is able to come up with equally mind-blowing hypotheses that have the advantage of being plausible? Take the case of Boltzmann brains. These aren't actual brains, but most likely are free-floating conscious entities that pop out of random quantum fluctuations in the vacuum that pervades the universe. None have been observed. In fact, a New Scientist article on the subject (August 18 issue) says: A Boltzmann brain is so improbable, in fact, that there is essentially no chance that even a single one has appeared…
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Posted inScience

Science keeps painting religion into a corner

Believers in the supernatural, do you feel a bit more cramped today? Like there's less room for your beliefs to roam unquestioned? You should, if you've been following the out-of-body news. Scientists have been able to induce out-of-body experiences in healthy people. They didn't need to nearly die on an operating table and look down at their bodies from an external vantage point. All it took was some virtual reality goggles, a camera, and a stick. Now, this is just a first step toward understanding out-of-body experiences. It doesn't rule out the possibility that human consciousness is able to exist…
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