Posted inScience Taoism/Tai Chi

Meridians in Chinese medicine have no basis in fact, just superstition

Over on my HinesSight blog yesterday, I posted "Some life lessons from a Tai Chi seminar." These were some of the insights I got from a special three-hour class my Tai Chi instructor, Warren, put on for five students who are especially interested in the martial side of Tai Chi, as contrasted with the energetic/exercise side. During the seminar Warren, who used to teach classes in East-West Medicine at a nearby college, talked about the meridians that are part of Chinese medicine. This is how a Wikipedia article about meridians starts off.  The meridian system (simplified Chinese: 经络; traditional Chinese:…
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Posted inReality Science

Search for quantum gravity shows why science is so much better than religion

I love science. I don't love religion, but I don't hate it either. Mostly I give little thought to religion, aside from when I write about its shortcomings on this blog.  Science appeals to me because I admire its dedication to truth, something that can't said about religion without being, well, untruthful. Yes, science often gets something wrong. However, rather than being upset about this, science views error as an opportunity to learn from the mistake and seek truth in another direction. Religion, on the other hand, abhors the possibility that what is considered to be true, actually isn't. Blind…
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Posted inReligions Science

Sea level and evolution show that reality is shades of gray, not black and white

One of the reasons why I've come to dislike religions so much is that they're so prone to making absolutist statements.  God is.... blah, blah, blah. The commandments to follow are... blah, blah, blah. You can tell good from evil by...blah, blah, blah. That's all bullshit, regardless of what the blah, blah, blah consists of.  I say this for a couple of reasons. One obvious reason is that religions don't deal in truth, they deal in fantasy. They make stuff up, then expect people to believe in it. If they don't, bad things are supposed to happen: hell, damnation, God's…
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Posted inScience

Quantum mechanics could be less mysterious after particles get smashed

Quantum theory, or quantum mechanics (same thing), is one of my favorite subjects. But it's difficult for me -- or anybody else, for that matter -- to wrap my mind around, because the quantum realm operates much differently than the world in which we live and breathe. Still, whenever there's an article about quantum theory in New Scientist or Scientific American, the two science magazines I subscribe to, my interest is rekindled. This is the online title of an article in the April  27 issue of New Scientist. It's fascinating, though a bit challenging to read. Here's a PDF file.Download…
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Posted inConsciousness Religions Science

“Facts and the law” applies to religiosity as well as the justice system

I don't know much about how the justice system works in other countries, but here in the United States one of the most frequently heard phrases is "facts and the law."  Those words were used a lot by commentators on the criminal trial of Donald Trump, which ended last Thursday with a 12 person jury deciding unanimously, as is required in criminal trials, that Trump was guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in order to disguise the fact that a $130,000 payment to a porn star was to keep her quiet just before the 2016 presidential election…
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Posted inScience

Religion should learn from science about overturning worldviews

After almost 20 years of regularly posting on this Church of the Churchless blog, I've learned a lot about how believers in the supernatural look at things. Which isn't a major surprise, since I used to be much more of a believer in supernatural stuff myself that I am now. But I always had a healthy dose of uncertainty about this. I thought that a supernatural realm was a reasonable hypothesis. Or if not reasonable, at least a hypothesis that appealed to me, given that I really liked the notion that one day I could learn the secrets of the…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Science

Science says we are all vibrations in the same invisible oceans

For 35 years I was a member of an India-based religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), that taught the essence of reality was shabd, all-pervading conscious energy, which could be heard as divine sound and seen as divine light. In the early 1990s I wrote a book for RSSB, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, that described my take on the links between the new physics and ancient mysticism, focusing on how the "all-pervading" and "energy" aspects of shabd were recognized by quantum mechanics, but not the "conscious" part. That's still true, of course. Naturally there have been advances in quantum…
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Posted inBooks Reality Science

Reality, whatever the truth of it may be, is weird

I've got a fondness for weirdness. I won't try to explain why this is, since any explanation would go against a central tenet of weirdness: not making logical sense. I will though, offer as evidence this photo of a tangible commitment to weirdness: a book by Eric Schwitzgebel, The Weirdness of the World, that is sitting next to my laptop at this moment. The book cost $27.09 from Amazon, a pleasingly weird price. I would have been disappointed if it was $27.00, $27.10, or $27.99.  Here's the Amazon description. How all philosophical explanations of human consciousness and the fundamental structure…
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Posted inPolitics Science

No, you religious fool, a total eclipse isn’t a sign to repent

Yesterday there was a total eclipse in part of the United States. This follows on a total eclipse in 2017 whose path went right through where I live, Salem, Oregon. It was a cool experience. But certainly not a religious one. After all, eclipses are 100% predictable by modern astronomers. Even not-so-modern astronomers had learned how to predict them. I'm no expert on how this is done, but obviously it entails calculating the positions of the sun, moon, and earth -- since a total eclipse is when the moon, which amazingly is just the right size in the sky to…
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Posted inGod Science

3 Body Problem on Netflix: aliens are called “Lord” by their devotees

I just finished watching the eight episodes of 3 Body Problem on Netflix. What I'm going to say about it in this blog post won't spoil the series (which likely will have a second season) for those who haven't seen it yet, but intend to. I enjoyed this science fiction show set on Earth. About 80% of critics and viewers liked it, according to Rotten Tomatoes. It's filled with scientific facts, along with some religiosity, my focus in this post after I describe in broad terms what 3 Body Problem is about.  An alien civilization is having to deal with…
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Posted inScience

The spiritual side of science

It seemed kind of obvious, but finally a study has shown that what I've always thought was true, seemingly is: scientific knowledge can produce the same feelings of awe at our place in the cosmos as spiritual experiences can. So it isn't necessary to embrace religion in order to have a sense of being connected to something greater than ourselves. Exposing yourself to the truths of science can do this, a not-so-minor benefit being that instead of relying on religious fantasies, you're relying on scientific facts. Below I've copied in an article in the March 2, 2024 issue of New…
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Posted inReality Science

Interesting theory of quantum weirdness (if you’re into this sort of stuff)

I felt a need to add the parentheses in the title of this post, because I realize that I'm more interested in how the quantum realm works than most people are.   So if you read on, be warned that while I find this theory tantalizing, because it deals with the "measurement problem" in quantum mechanics in a creative fashion, you might find this to be the most deadly boring blog post in the history of humankind. (Hey, if so, at least I've accomplished something rare.) In the February 3, 2024 issue of New Scientist, or as folks in Great…
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Posted inReality Science

Nature uses quantum mechanics. But we humans don’t understand how.

There's been a lot of scientific progress in the 10,000 or so years of human history, most of it in the past few centuries. But the natural world still has a lot of mysteries.  I find this highly appealing. It shows that if someone is attracted to the unknown, there's no need to embrace religiosity or the supernatural. Just look around at the world that surrounds us, and indeed is us. What you'll see are quantum phenomena. Not directly, because the quantum realm typically is well hidden, manifesting only in atomic and subatomic processes that are far beyond the ability…
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Posted inScience Universe

The big bang shows the limits of human intuition

Almost everybody has heard about the big bang. That marked the beginning of our universe some 13.8 billion years ago, which has been expanding ever since. But it is very difficult for most of us, me certainly included, to get a solid understanding of what the big bang really was. That's because our common sense intuitions of reality, which are founded in everyday experience, aren't of much help in domains of science such as quantum mechanics and big bang cosmology. Religions appeal to those intuitions by making the creation of the universe into something our minds can easily grasp. Like,…
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Posted inBooks Reality Science

We can’t grasp reality as it is, only as we know it

My new favorite book, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, had such a provocative title, as soon as I saw it recommended in The New Yorker I knew that I'd have to buy it. Wow. It's a work of literary genius, based on my reading of the first part of it. The author, William Egginton, is a humanities professor, but he clearly has an excellent grasp of modern science also. The front cover has a one-sentence summary of what the book is about. A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest…
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Posted inFundamentalism Science

“I could be wrong” is what separates openness from dogmatism

Two wonderful sayings that every person should embrace are "I don't know" and "I could be wrong." Each points toward openness, humility, and a rejection of dogmatism. My favorite, though, is I could be wrong. One reason is that there are so many things that each of us doesn't know. The number of things we know is far, far, far exceeded by the things we don't know. This makes I don't know a commonplace statement. But I could be wrong is about a belief we hold that seems true to us, yet there's at least some chance we're incorrect about…
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Posted inComments Science

Denying scientific truth isn’t welcome on this blog

I've loved science since I was a child. Way back when (late 1950s) I crammed a card table into my bedroom closet, hung a light over the clothes rod, and happily conducted science experiments via chemistry sets and science kits delivered every month, thanks to my mother, who also deeply admired science. (I wrote about this in a 2007 post, "Thanks for the chlorine gas, Mom (cough, cough).") Since, I've retained my love of science, even though I ended up getting a B.A. in Psychology and a Master's degree in Social Work. But then I completed the course requirements for…
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Posted inScience

Nature’s imagination is far greater than imagination of humans

This is my favorite quote from the early chapters of a book by theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss (The Edge of Knowledge:Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos) among the passages that I shared in a recent blog post. Because this, to me, is the most fascinating aspect of the cosmos: that it keeps surprising us. The imagination of nature is far greater than the imagination of humans. In my own work, every day I am surprised if I am not surprised. So true. I love the eminently scientific notion that nature surpasses the imagination of us humans. Of course, Krauss, being an…
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Posted inScience

Lawrence Krauss discusses the methods and mysteries of science

Lawrence Krauss is a notable theoretical physicist who I'd heard of, but I didn't really know much about him until I watched a three hour You Tube video of Krauss interviewing Robert Sapolsky about his book, Determined, which explores the illusion of free will. If you're into this sort of thing, and have some time to spare, the interview is fascinating. Sapolsky (on the left) and Krauss talked about their personal lives and approach to science before getting into Sapolsky's book. I loved how these Jewish atheists each had mothers who dearly wanted them to become medical doctors, even after…
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Posted inFree will Science

Emergent complexity helps explain how the brain works

I was planning to set aside Robert Sapolsky's book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, having finished it, including an appendix that I wrote about a few days ago. I called that post Neurons and synapses are what we are. That's absolutely true. If anyone doubts this, hire an unethical doctor to scoop out all of your neurons and synapses from your head and see if anything of you remains. (Spoiler alert: you'll surely be brain dead and almost certainly totally dead also.) But here's the obvious thing: we aren't just neurons and synapses. We're so much more.…
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