Tiger, Tiger

Tiger, tiger burning bright,
Who was it who set you alight?
From where I sit, it seems that that's
Cruelty to pussy cats!

Fetch some water quickly, dear
Fetch it fast and bring it here
A meaning new without a doubt
To putting that poor pussy out.

Evolution

Evolution marches on
What's here today may soon be gone
And as the aeons on doth roll
Evolution takes its toll
On creatures past their use-by date
So you better watch out, mate,
If stupidity's extinction's sign
Then you could be the first in line!

A Dangerous Word

There is a dangerous word. Actually there are lots of dangerous words. Language has the capacity to sneak up on you, limit your thinking, steer you subtly in directions you don't notice. We can only think about what we can name. How we name things is fraught with assumptions. The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao.

Nevertheless, there is a dangerous word, that dismissive, nasty word: MERELY.

You have heard it said: This is MERELY that. Life is MERELY the random play of molecules. The Mind is MERELY a subjective experience of the brain. Morality is MERELY evolutionary imperative. And on, and on.

Here, MERELY is taken to mean 'only this and no more', 'no need to look any further, folks, it's all explained'. MERELY is a tyrant of a word. It says that my view is the only view, all other thoughts are without merit. MERELY is a devaluing word. It says 'this is worth little, don't look here'.

Like all tyrants, MERELY wants to rewrite history and the present. Like all tyrants, MERELY needs to be overthrown.

An apple tree is MERELY a seed. An apple is MERELY a combination of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen just so.

MERELY is a dangerous word

I just get SO frustrated!

I get frustrated having the same debates over and over again for no good reason. The only thing that happens is that people entrenched in their view remain so. People (including me) come wrapped up their invincible capes of self justification and cannot really hear what is being said.

I get frustrated at people who want to justify their worldview with things I KNOW are patently false. Of course this doesn't preclude their worldview being true, but it sure reduces their credibility in my eyes. How could it not? I happen to have a reasonable education in science, physics in particular. This is not boasting, it's just the way it is. People without an education in this area need to be very careful making pronouncements in it seeking to justify their personal religious view. I think it's a simple rule: If you don't know about it, don't talk about it. I have a certain amount of theological education too, enough to tell a pony from horseshit. I accept that SOME believers can rationally and eloquently make a case for their belief. I may disagree with some of their interpretations but I recognize the complexity of the issues and respect their intelligence. Why on earth are there so few of you?

I get frustrated when people blithely think that their enculturated view is the 'natural' one and that anyone who thinks differently to them is evil. In this day and age of free information and travel such ignorance is inexcusable. (Americans, I'm looking at you.) Which brings me to willful ignorance.

I get frustrated at people who view knowledge as a threat, who think education is unnecessary, for whom curiosity is evil, intellect synonymous with false pride, learning is the same as elitism. You are dangerous to free thinking and civilization itself. You have made a virtue out of sloth and ignorance a badge of honour. When you celebrate lazy thinking you enslave yourself to any philosophy that is shiny enough to catch your attention.

I need to be able to divorce my intellect from this visceral reaction. If I was a better buddhist I could look with compassion on all those who have offered up their critical thinking skills on an alter of convenience.

But I get SO frustrated!

Organic or Inorganic

There is a central myth that has beset the Western world for thousands of years. Perhaps it was the Hebrews, perhaps it was the greeks. The notion that runs through our thinking about the world is that it is a thing.

Up to the enlightenment, the universe was a created object, made like a potter makes a pot. Man, himself, was made of clay. With science and the enlightenment, we've done away with God but the myth has remained where the universe is a dead thing, life a happy accident. Newton's clockwork universe still ticks in our heads as we view the world. At its heart, we reason, everything is the insensate collisions of countless billiard ball-like particles. Nothing more.

But this is not the only myth we can use. The Chinese view the universe as organic. Imagine seeing an apple tree in winter, for all intents and purposes a dead thing, inert. In spring, it brings forth leaves and apples. That is what apple trees do. The apple is contained in potentiality in the bare tree, and before that the seed. If our imaginations can stretch enough we can see the apple contained in potentiality in the air and water.

Our labels of organic and inorganic, living and non-living, are simply that; labels. They are intellectual constructions, and they are deeply informed by our culture's guiding myths.

We can choose to view the world from the 'bottom up' as 'really' inert stuff moving about or we can see it from the 'top down' as a whole organic process, unfolding in complexity and beauty, each new form an expression of its essential nature.

Apple trees 'apple' One of the things the universe apparently does is 'people'.

It's been over a century since Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God. Apparently the news of His demise has not reached the general population. In the ensuing century we've had people believe in the myth of racial superiority, scientology, spaceships in comets, death cults, lizard people, neo-paganism, crystals, the Unification Church, the Urantia Book, divination, astrology, voodoo, spiritism, the new world order, aliens, and countless other nutty things. Uniformly the adherents of these weird beliefs are totally convinced that they are right, they will (and often do) die for their beliefs.

Will we believe just about anything? Apparently yes. And we seem remarkably capable of seeing the other guy's belief as silly while not examining our own. What is it that safeguards us from such stupidity? Critical thinking and a fierce commitment to the impartial examination of claims. As soon as we set up a realm of human experience (faith) and make it exempt from rationality we set ourselves up to waste a lot of time, and possibly our lives, in the pursuit of silliness.

From a number of different sources recently I've had people use the old first cause argument to 'prove' God. Of course this is an old argument. It usually goes something like this:

1. There is a universal law of cause and effect.
2. To prevent an infinite regress of causes there must exist a First Cause.
3. The First Cause is God.

Sounds pretty good. But does it really stand up to scrutiny? To begin with is there really a 'law' of cause and effect and if there is, in what realm does it apply?

Cause and effect is actually a philosophical labeling rather than a scientific one. It comes with a particular mechanistic view of the universe as 'stuff' being pushed around by other stuff. It is a particular characteristic of Western thought. Buddhists, for example, speak of 'dependent arising'. Imagine a cat passing a fence with a hole in it and an observer on the other side watching. He sees the head and then the tail. He makes this observation a number of times and concludes (as a westerner) that the cat head 'causes' the cat tail since the head always precedes the tail in time in a predictable fashion. We know however, that such an analysis is faulty since the cat is a single system with inter-dependent parts. Some eastern philosophies see the whole world like this.

Now, in what realms does cause and effect (if it indeed exists) hold? In modern physics there is at least reasonable debate on whether some events are uncaused, and given quantum uncertainty can some effects actually precede their causes? It's very likely a strange world out of the realms of our experience that may act in a completely counter-intuitive fashion. So, the jury is out, cause and effect may NOT be universal.

People who quote first cause often turn out to be christians who believe in 'free will'. Decisions we experience subjectively are objectively electrical and chemical changes in the brain, stuff pushing stuff around. As such they too would be bound by this 'law' of cause and effect. Every mental event is 'caused'. Thus free will is ruled out on the basis of strict adherence to cause and effect.

Also, people use the universality of this 'law' of cause and effect to prove God but then immediately exempt Him from the law. God is eternal and uncaused. It seems a strange form of special pleading to me.

Thus, in summary, the law of cause and effect is a philosophical assumption, it may not hold in all reality, if it does hold it poses propblems for free will and the very 'law' you wish to use to demonstrate God is a law that does not apply to Him.

Note, now, I'm not saying this categorically disproves the notion of First Cause. Rather I'm saying that it is not particularly persuasive.