Posted inUniverse

Brains vs. the universe

So who would come out on top in this contest? Might as well put it on pay per view, for more dramatic effect. Brains vs. the Universe – ultimate smackdown! My bet is on the universe. It's a lot bigger. And, when you think about it, smarter than brains. Because brains are part of the universe, and the universe is the whole deal (that's why it's called a universe). I got to pondering this in the course of leafing through a book I'd already read, "Creation Revisited" by Peter Atkins. Atkins is a chemistry professor at Oxford University. So his…
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Posted inUniverse

No beginning, no end. The universe simply is.

Why would you need religion, mysticism, or spirituality to expand your mind? Or, blow it. Science works just fine. Much better, in fact, because science starts with is rather than what could be. If you're going to expand or blow your mind, you might as well be standing on a solid foundation before you explode into mindlessness. Take the question of the universe's beginning and end. Most of us assume that the universe began at some point. After all, the Bible tells us so in Genesis. And if we're scientifically minded, wasn't the Big Bang the beginning of time and…
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Posted inUniverse

Hubble photo of deep space is naturally divine

There's no reason, none at all, to look for divinity in a holy book, person, building, or icon. The Hubble space telescope's Ultra Deep Field photograph of the farthest reaches of space contains more authentic mystery and awe than any religious dogma. And readers of the Sunday comics were exposed to it last weekend, thanks to Opus. Berkeley Breathed, Opus' creator, points to the craziness of considering that we humans are the center of the cosmos. Science has revealed, in countless ways, that the Earth and everything on it is just a part of the whole called Universe. A very…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation Universe

My review of “The Secret” DVD points to a super-secret

Yesterday I found a free way of watching "The Secret," so immersed myself for 90 minutes in an ocean of New Age platitudes. On a pad of paper I jotted down such pearls of positive thinking wisdom as: Thoughts become thingsThe Law of Attraction will give you what you want every timeWhat you think about, you bring aboutYou are the designer of your destinyLife is meant to be abundant The universe must have wanted me to see "The Secret." (A hugely popular book and DVD, as noted in this TIME article). But not spend $4.95 to watch online. Which raises…
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Posted inReality Universe

Consider a cosmos that is only consciousness

There’s always another side. To anything. A coin can’t have “heads” without “tails.” Being on this side of the wall implies a that side. So I have no problem flipping the pancake of my “Consider a cosmos with no consciousness” post. Reading the final pages of Suzanne Segal’s Collision With the Infinite this morning got me thinking about what lies behind, beyond, within, and without my consciousness of thinking about those final pages. Early on in the book I read that Segal had a profound experience at a bus stop in Paris. In fact, it’s listed in her Acknowledgments: The…
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Posted inScience Universe

Consider a cosmos with no consciousness

I’ve always thought that the “we create our own reality” folks didn’t have much of an argument to stand on. It just seems so darn obvious that the universe stands apart from any conception of it. How we perceive the cosmos certainly depends on our sensory and cognitive capabilities. However, that there is a cosmos—however it may appear—prior and separate to any perception struck me as self-evident common sense. In other words, I considered that the universe stands on its own (anthropomorphically envisioned) feet. While we humans are able to create subjective realities within our minds, the grander cosmos outside…
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Posted inUniverse

Who should I thank on Thanksgiving?

For a churchless guy like myself, figuring out who deserves my thanks tomorrow requires some careful thought. That’s because I’m philosophical in addition to churchless. Sure, I could blurt out simple thanksgivings directed at the usual suspects—wife, dog, makers of the tasty Now & Zen unturkey that we’ll be eating—but that goes against my nature. I want to get down to the core of this giving thanks business. Follow the trail of thankfulness back to the source. Take care of every possible “thank you” recipient at one primal swoop. When I began my mulling this morning, my mother and father…
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Posted inUniverse

What if this is all there is?

It’s a joke without anyone around to hear the punch line: “Did you hear the one about the people who based their lives on the assumption that God was real and there was life after death? Then they died, and…” What? If there is nothing after death, ha ha! Jokes on them. Except, they won’t be around to be part of the laughter. Neither will I. Neither will any one of us. Which isn’t all that funny. Nor, all that serious. It’s just what it is: a likely reality. What’s disturbing is the prospect of so many true believers giving…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation Universe

What are the chances you’re right about God?

More and more, for me spirituality comes down to two basics: “What are the chances?” and “The odds are pretty good.” The first question points me toward humble skepticism, the second toward energetic inquiry. Here’s what I mean: What are the chances…? --That my chosen religion or philosophy, out of the thousands of religions in the world, just happens to be the one that is right about God, while the others are wrong. --That any religion or philosophy, mine or another, possesses the complete truth about ultimate reality. --That once I’ve settled on a spiritual direction for my life, there…
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Posted inScience Universe

Compared to the cosmos, you’re nothing

Like you, my goal every day is to make something of myself. A successful, knowing, active, loving, happy thing. The problem is, on the scale of the universe the value of each of us is vanishingly close to zero. Rounded off to any reasonable number of decimal places, we’re nothing--no thing. We are small. Very, very small. Check it out for yourself. Each of us is one of six billion people on a planet circling one of 200 billion or so stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of 100 billion or so galaxies in the observable universe,…
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Posted inScience Universe

Embracing the oddness of everything

Does life ever seem absolutely weird to you? It does to me. Often. I’ve got some distinguished company in this regard: George Will, who wrote a great piece in Newsweek called “The Oddness of Everything.” Will shares a bunch of strange facts about the universe culled from Bill Bryson’s book, “A Short History of Nearly Everything.” Now, facts aren’t really “strange,” “odd,” or “weird.” They’re simply facts. But when it comes to facts about the basics of life, time, space, and the universe, human cognition blows a fuse. Our brains can’t handle that much reality. There’s an awful lot of…
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Posted inReality Universe

Existence exists. Amazing!

There’s something. And I’m part of it, as are you. This simple fact is so amazing, it should be a daily wonderment—the Wow! that keeps on wowing through all of life’s routines and trivialities. Existence exists. Seemingly there could have been nothing, though this is a subject that philosophers love to debate: can “nothing” be? Parmenides, I seem to recall, said “no.” Calling something nothing makes it something—a nothing. Buddhists similarly speak of the emptiness of emptiness, though speaking in this fashion fills the void with words, displacing the emptiness. My head hurts when I think too much about existence.…
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Posted inReligions Spiritual practice/meditation Universe

Meditating like an extra-terrestrial

What sort of spirituality would be practiced by an extra-terrestrial being? I find this an interesting question, one which points to a more practical question: “What sort of spirituality should be practiced by us right here on earth?” Many people have pondered how the world’s religions would be affected by the discovery of extra-terrestrial life—particularly life from a civilization much more advanced than ours. Physicist Paul Davies, in his article “E.T. and God,” observes that Christianity would have the biggest problem with the discovery of alien superbeings because “of all the world’s major religions, Christianity is the most species-specific.” Jesus…
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Posted inScience Universe

Big bang stretches the mind

I’m a big bang addict. The one that created the universe, I mean. That’s the Really Big big bang. Other big bangs necessarily pale in comparison, for the original is what created everything in existence. I’ve read countless books and articles about the big bang. I never get tired of trying to envision what can’t be envisioned with the limited human mind. How is it possible that the entire universe was once much smaller than a sub-atomic particle? What force could end up creating one hundred billion galaxies (or more), each with an average of about one hundred billion stars,…
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Posted inGod Science Universe

Creationism is blasphemy

Gosh, there are still five hours until Sunday, and I feel the spirit moving me to write the Church of the Churchless equivalent of a “fire and brimstone” sermon. Reading a New York Times article, “An evolution in teaching: Fear of religious fundamentalists keeps the topic out of the classroom,” via the Portland Oregonian yesterday got me incensed about how ungodly a blind belief in creationism is.

Brothers and sisters, I call upon you to open your hearts and minds to God. Cast out the evil of creationism. Vow that you will never allow the wiles of devilish ignorance to turn you from the Almighty Truth. Worship the Creator who made heaven and earth, not the blasphemous creed of creationism.

Look around you and marvel. God is not obvious, but God’s works are. Until we are able to behold the Creator’s countenance directly, gazing upon the face of Creation is how we can best discern God’s qualities. Do not turn away from the immediate truths of this physical reality, for this will distance you from the greater truths of spiritual reality.

There are those who would substitute the insubstantial beliefs of man for the unchanging Truth of God. Do not trust these creationists. They elevate their subjective interpretation of a few words in a book over the objective evidence of the actual Creation. The delicious fruits of God’s majesty stand directly before them, yet they cast their eyes down to discredited notions from unreliable texts.

Evolution is the Creator’s will. Creationism is mankind’s imagination. Whenever you deny the evident facts of science and embrace a mere belief, you worship a false idol. God will not be mocked. The truth will win out. It is our sacred duty to fight on behalf of the Almighty. Take up your God-given arms of crisp reason and clear perception; do not let our children be deceived by the anti-God of creationism.

I read in the newspaper yesterday that teachers are avoiding the topic of evolution, “fearing protests from religious fundamentalists in their communities.” Fundamentalists they may be, but religious they are not. They are blasphemers, God-deniers, dangerous humanists. They seek to blind our children’s eyes to the glory of God’s creation. They want to confuse students with purely human conjecture instead of allowing them to know the truth of how the Creator willed creation to be.

My friends, we are becoming a Godless country. Americans are much more likely than people in other nations to accept the heresy of creationism. The United States is last, dead last, in a ranking of how knowledgeable citizens in twenty-one countries are about evolution. We should be #1 in knowing God’s reality. Instead, creationists are succeeding in keeping Americans ignorant of the power and glory that manifests as evolution.

From the One came many. All living beings are relatives of the same Common Ancestor. There is a direction to life: Upward. We can begin to discern the nature of the Creator through the laws of creation.

This is the truth. Stand firm and do not let the devilish forces of superstition and ignorance into people’s minds. Crush the malevolent seeds of creationism before they sprout. Face toward the light and shun darkness.

Above all, protect the children:

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Posted inGod Morality Universe

Evil: made by man or God?

“Evil” is a word much in fashion after 9/11. Bush loves to use it, as in “we will root out the evildoers,” but if he was asked to define the term, I doubt that he’d be able to do it. This isn’t a knock on Bush, because last Thursday three philosophers spent an hour on PBS’s “Philosophy Talk” discussing the nature of evil. Even they didn’t come close to agreeing on an answer. The two hosts of Philosophy Talk were joined by Peter van Inwagen, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame. He said that there is a…
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Posted inGod Science Universe

Scale of the universe

We are small. Very, very small. The universe is large. Very, very large. Most people have no idea how insignificant we, Earth, and even the Sun are in relation to the universe. Even smart scientific people. Once I gave a talk to a group of medical students at the Oregon Health & Science University. Instead of telling a joke to warm up the audience, I asked them, “Does anyone have an idea how many stars there are in our Milky Way galaxy?” No one knows the answer for sure, but I figured that I’d get some reasonable guesses. Yet I…
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