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Debate Unlimited Forum |
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All I can say is that I am sympathetic. But the universe isn't.
There is no reason why a rational person should expect the truth to feel right. Can you give me a rational explanation for a human ability to instinctively feel the truth of equations, logical arguments or other scientific explanations?
We do have an ability to feel ideas, some ideas, this has evolved in the context of social evolution. We can feel when people are lying. Many people are almost as good at this as the finest polygraphs. This ability is perfectly explainable in scientific terms. It is self-evident that an ability to assess who is trustworthy and who is not would be an enormous advantage to any intelligent social being. There is plenty of evidence that the size of social groups is a good predictor of brain size in social animals. Brains can be used to police social exchange, reciprocation, recognition of individuals and their reputation for reliability. The bats with the biggest brains in relation to their bodies are vampire bats, which have an elaborate social system that relies on individual bats being able to recognize other individuals who have co-operated, or not, with them in the past. Vampire bats have big brains because they need to trust other bats and police that trust against freeloaders, vampire bats share food with unrelated individuals, this unusual behaviour requires an unusually well developed brain. Man is a social animal too, that is why we are so smart, social skills made us smart. But only in ways that are of benefit in social situations. We did not develop brains that can naturally understand the properties of substances from their atomic structure or instinctively know whether the Earth moved around the Sun or vice versa. Elephants too have very large brains and elaborate social structures which rely on memory of individuals and the social relationships between them.
That is how our brains have developed. By social skills and later by language skills. At no time in our evolution did we gain the ability to perceive truth in the abstract. Such an ability could never evolve. What has happened is that we have co-opted brain structures and patterns of thinking that have served us well in social and linguistic development. Our brains are not evolved to do physics, philosophy, chemistry or theology. We get by. Some people do better than others and so we forget that we are totally second rate at the whole thing. Our ability to do philosophy or theology is spread through the population in a similar way to our ability to do anything else, like run or swim or make music. But just as we are, objectively, rather poor at swimming compared to animals that have evolved in an aquatic environment we are also objectively very poor at philosophy, theology and the art of knowing the truth.
If ever anybody says they have difficulty believing a scientific explanation and think that it doesn't feel right I know what they mean. I also know that their feeling and difficulty in grasping a concept is totally irrelevant to the truth or otherwise of that concept.
Truth is stranger than fiction
because fiction is supposed to make sense
Religions have been devised by men to appeal to men. Or more accurately they have emerged in the interactions of men. It is hardly surprising that they feel right, they feel more true than truth itself. Quite frankly it would be difficult to imagine religions surviving very long unless they felt considerably better and truer than the unvarnished truth. Can you imagine the future of a religion that had less appeal than the alternative explanation (Shit just happens, sometimes it is good, sometimes it isn't, there is no pattern). How many unappealing religious concepts do you know? The only one that I can think of is Calvinism, believe in Jesus, do good works, be pious, worship regularly but you might still be painfully damned for all eternity anyway. God's like that. (I paraphrase a little.)
Religions must offer some consolation to their target market or they fail to make any penetration. They need a unique selling proposition. But they will fail if they are cynical and the people who do the conversions do not themselves believe. People do have good abilities to detect the sense of conviction behind beliefs, such abilities have been refined by our evolution. Few cults survive after the death of their charismatic leader, they need a bedrock of real believers and a good product to survive. Christianity, Islam and Mormonism have all grown from cults but they are the exceptions, worth studying to see what makes a cult really successful, and the first thing we can say is that a monopoly on truth is not a serious explanation. At the very least it obviously cannot account for the success of all religions, they cannot all be the only truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Yet they all grow strong.
We as human beings need ideas to feel true but we have no way of measuring or weighing up truth. We are therefore open to the false super-stimuli. Saccharin is sweeter than sugar, silicone filled breasts are bigger and the truths in the Bible are much sweeter than those in the encyclopaedia.
The Why of Why
People have a natural tendency to seek why explanations for things. Many time there are good why answers out there. There are good why answers to questions in politics, sociology and history. These are human subjects, the human sciences. But there are not good why answers to many of the natural sciences. Biology is full of good answers to why questions when it comes to behaviour of organisms but there are no good why answers to “the big question” of why there are organisms at all. That is a problem with our brains not a problem with reality.
Please adjust your minds,
there is no fault with reality.
Organisms do not need a reason to exist, or a purpose, only an opportunity. If that does not convince you I don't care, and neither does the universe. If reality doesn't feel true enough for you that is your problem, please don't make it mine.
We love simple answers to why questions. The question why is the sky blue can never receive a satisfactory answer, after the fullest possible scientific answer we always feel that we still don't understand why it is blue, only how. That is not a fault of the answer, it is a fault of the question. Man has a tendency to assume that any string of words with why in the grammatically appropriate position is somehow a legitimate question that deserves an answer. Utter folly. Consider the following:-
Where is Tuesday?
When did London?
How is green?
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Syntax does not make good sense. Just because a question can be framed does not mean that it should be answered or is capable of an answer. Most of the big why questions are like that. Why is there a universe rather than nothing? It has no answer, it does not deserve one. Just as you can keep asking your calculator to divide one by zero for as long as you want it is not able to give you a satisfying answer. |
Most children go through The Why Stage. My wife has been a nanny to many children in addition to looking after our own two. She is familiar with the problem of the constant but why? questions. Children have to learn that there is a distinction between a good question and a bad one. It is one of the most important lessons any person learns, and I doubt we will ever come across a final definitive answer, a certain way to spot which questions are worth asking and which are dead ends.
I have tried to train my brain to spot good questions as I muse on life. Do starfish have a different sense of geometry and spatial awareness because they have radial symmetry rather than bilateral symmetry? Is there an evolutionary explanation for why men seem to suffer more when they are ill than women do? Is everybody equally conformist, but in different ways? Good questions, which offer up interesting lines of speculation and possibilities for research. In total contrast to "what are we alive for"
Most things do not need an answer or an explanation. Evolution,
for example, needs no explanation. Why do things evolve ask Christians,
it simply shows their total ignorance of the process. If a thing is replicated
with a random incidence of failure (mutation) and not all the copies can
survive there will be evolution, there MUST be; this is as self-evident
as anything in geometry or mathematics. Replication within a finite and
imperfect universe leads to evolution as surely as three equal length
sides on a flat polygon lead to 60 degree angles.
No force could make it otherwise unless that force
could defy logic, in which case all bets are off and you might as well
go mad.
One divided by zero will always yield an error message and questions about the why of physics and cosmology will also yield the same result for similar reasons. This is not a flaw in mathematics or logic or the universe, the flaw is in the human mind.