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As for your advice to go to a maternity ward you are too late. I was present at the birth of both my children. I saw no miracles. I saw one stage of the reproductive process. It was a wonderful experience but there was nothing spiritual or supernatural about it. It was an emotional experience. At the end I thanked the hospital staff and squeezed my wife's hand. There was nobody else to thank. I did not experience either a bad messenger or no messenger. I listened carefully to the message, perhaps too carefully. I never managed to convince myself that lying to myself for my own good was a good idea. It seems like many people do not have a problem with that. Your message comes down to personal incredulity. The fact that any person has a difficulty in believing a concept has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not it is true. You find it hard to believe that things happen without a purpose. Fine. What do you expect me or the rest of the world to do about that? The universe doesn't just create itself. Life doesn't just evolve for no good reason. People do not just become intelligent without a reason. Without being disrespectful to you, can I ask if you believe that basketball teams can manage to win games even when you don't pray for them or wear your lucky socks? This is a similar kind of phenomenon. The problem you have is believing that things can just happen without some form of direct and conscious motivational force making them happen. In your version of the universe and reality everything happens because of an act of will, however indirectly. This view is very common among humanity as a whole. It is a bias that is built into our brains, it has survival value. It is also wrong. If things have causes, are caused by actors who you can identify, you can have some influence on them. If you simply believe that things just happen you have a philosophy that discourages you from finding out why things happen, and if you do not find out why things happen you are unlikely to discover a way to improve matters. Just imagine that you were a bison on the great plains with a things happen attitude, as bison seem to have. Wolves come, wolves chase bison, bison stampede, some bison die. Imagine if instead you had a things don't just happen attitude, there would be great potential value to be had from finding out more about wolves and learning how to avoid being stampeded, learning how to kick them to good effect, learning tactics to defeat them. "Mr Wolf, I can see those teeth could do me some serious damage, but only if you manage to sink them into me, which you will find rather difficult to do after my 68 friends here have finished dancing on your head." Watch out for the Kung Fu kick boxing bison posse. We have evolved from people who sought answers to life's problems, people who saw causes and actors, people who didn't take things happen as an explanation. We have evolved from savannah apes that used to get eaten by lions and hyenas, but that was long ago, we evolved a smarter way of dealing with the challenges of life, and lions and hyenas have evolved to respect us. But the attitude that there must be an explanation for every action and event becomes less valuable when it is wrong, not only does it become less valuable, it becomes deeply damaging. Volcanoes don't just happen. Earthquakes don't just happen. Rivers don't just flow for no reason. The sun doesn't just shine all by itself. That is a natural extension of the valuable human insight that many things have causes that can be understood, are caused by people or other similar forces. This idea can rapidly grow into seeing animistic and anthropomorphic forces at work everywhere. I have lost count of the number of time I have heard the scientific explanation for why the sky is blue, it is so boring compared to the "obvious" answer that it is blue because somebody decided blue was a good colour for the sky, because he decided we would prefer a blue sky. That is a much more rewarding answer, it feels much better, it feels truer. Unfortunately I can't be satisfied with it because I know it is wrong. When a working assumption no longer works you should drop it. Looking into the fundamental processes of the universe almost all of our hunches and previous ideas we refer to as common sense stop being assets and become huge liabilities. Read about the physics of sub-atomic particles and your confidence in the value of common sense will fly out of the window. Our brains are as well adapted to do particle physics and philosophy as our legs are to take us to the moon. We have not had the most powerful force ever discovered (evolution) working for us. We have to make do with what we do have. It makes no difference how strange and peculiar the idea that things just happen feels to you it has no bearing on whether or not it is true. We as a species have no organ to detect the truth. Our hearts are well engineered by evolution to pump blood. They do not feel anything. We have no ability to detect truth other than by logical deduction. Any other process is little more than guesswork. Hunches, faith, gut instinct; they all amount to the same thing, inadmissible evidence. We have no good reason to trust them as being perfect. They are the instincts that have been passed down to us by survivors, that is the top and bottom of their value. They might have increased the survival chances of our ancestors in previous generations, or they might not, they might also have been untested. We do have instincts for survival that are useful in water, we instinctively refuse to breathe in water. But we have no instincts to help us survive in the vacuum of space, or come to that in the concrete jungle. Our children have instinctive ability to develop a fear of snakes and spiders and big cats, but not of Fords and BMWs, which are far more likely to kill them. We are saddled by evolution with a brain that works in a certain way, a way that has been adaptive in the past. Now those common sense ideas that everything happens because of some actor or force are no longer valuable, they actually get in the way of our understanding. The world we are now discovering in physics and philosophy is acutely counter-intuitive. We have to recognize that simply because something does or does not "feel right" has absolutely no relevance to whether or not it is true. Many things feel right that are totally bogus; millions of people have weird superstitions about how things they do affect the world. Millions of people know that their team cannot win the match tonight unless they wear their lucky socks or pray to their God, or chew gum or clutch their teddy bear. Such beliefs are absurd but widespread. They make sense to the people concerned. The capacity of the human brain to make sense out of nonsense is a constant source of wonder to me. Life is not a precious gift. Nothing has given you life. Life has dragged itself out of the slime and carried on doing what doesn't kill it. If that idea sounds hollow and empty to you I, and the rest of the universe, really don't care. You are assuming that life is supposed to make sense and feel good. Apart from the retold experiences and practices of the vast majority of the people you encounter you have no reason to think that. The reason that you consider that religious explanations make sense is that so many people around you tell you that they make sense to them. To you it is as normal as preferring ketchup on your burger rather than fish sauce, or thinking that blondes are stupid and easy to sleep with, or that driving a 150 horsepower car is a normal activity; in other words it is a socially reinforced belief. If instead of living in Arizona in 2001 you were living in Arizona in 1001 you would have a very different set of beliefs that would be just as normal and self-evidently true to you as your current beliefs are. Please be aware that I am not saying that truth is relative. The perception of truth is relative. You perceive the idea that a god has made the world as being a good idea, that perception has no bearing on whether it is true. Finding truth is a difficult process, fraught with difficulties of measuring, understanding, remembering and communicating. I do not know if it will ever be possible to discover all the relevant facts about the universe upon which to build a good model of how it works, it might be, but it is less likely that that model will ever be assembled in one human brain. Even so it is worth attempting. After all, what else have we got to do with all this intelligence and lifespan? All the other answers to that question I have ever come across make less sense and, to me, feel silly. So I will carry on living to learn. |
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