Thank you. And I really appreciate everyone weighing in on both sides of this. Even if there is no answer, it is strangely comforting to see everyone’s thoughts.
Mushrooms contained a glimpse of the truth: a flash, played out visually. The very first time I tried them, in the middle of a lightning storm. It looked like a tree that spanned lightyears. Instead of leaves there were eyes of color, opening and closing as every lifetime. The eyes were all connected, but couldn’t see it. Waves of color moved along the tree branches. Then I was falling back into my own eye, and when I woke up tears were rolling down my face.
Days later I felt I was seeing the world in sharper detail than ever before: leaf edges and the texture of clouds in the sky were as if I were seeing them for the first time; for decades I had been looking but never seeing.
Now I have to reach back 13 years in memory to write about it, and the semiotics of the whole thing make me suspicious. A burning bush? A literal tree of life? How much of that is my own desire to press meaning on the ineffable?
I suppose the takeaway for me is all is not what it seems; there is a hidden, unordinary reality going on all the time whether or not we are aware of it and we are connected in ways that are apparent yet invisible.
This is cool and can apply in many different ways.
Or our minds can really do a number on reality when altered by drugs?
Days after my surgery, I kept seeing what looked like Greek alphabet every time I blinked, for a second or so. Just aftereffects of the drugs.
Hell, I pointed to the bed adjacent mine in the hospital room and asked my then wife why children were allowed in that area of the hospital. I had seen a woman on the bed with 3 children around her, clear as anything I had ever seen. Her response was, “what are you talking about, there is no one there”.
Or the day before than when I ran around the hallway of the hospital with my gown lifted, screaming, “they cut my dick off!!!” at the sight of the catheter.
And these are the things I remember; I was told of many questionable things I did and said those first few days after surgery like flirting with a nurse in front of my INLAWS!
Or calling some nurse a “stupid bitch” (and I’m not the confrontational type) or pulling out all my tubes just hours after surgery and attempting to walk out since (in my mind) they were taking too long to start the surgery (it was done) and necessitating 4 nurses/doctors to hold me down to sedate me, again.
There are a few ways of approaching this question i think, but mainly whether to accept revelation or to look at the nature of reality. Unfortunately there is little either in science, philosophy or religion that specifically can speak about the reality of higher states of existence - the best we can do is either accept revelation (of one form or another) or find in our investigations of the nature of reality some sorts of hints of larger scale patterns or truths that point, in some fashion, toward a deeper understanding of reality.
But the god of the modern scientific philosophers is in general not going to be the god of revealed religion, and a explanatory investigation, while invigorating, doesn’t necessarily lead to satisfying coherent or systematic beliefs. A vague sense that the order of the universe cannot be random, to notice how the universe seems uniquely capable of developing ever higher order levels of organization, from waves to particles, from particles to atoms, from atoms to systems and structures of atoms, from the interaction of large scale forces that are irrelevant on the small scale to even larger structures, and from these structures to increasingly complicated self-organizing systems and eventually to something like us, isn’t the same as revealed religion.
I’d say the largest difficulty in reconciling scientific metaphysics with religion is that the world as-is might well point to an organizing principle but doesn’t point to a necessarily perfect and good organizing principle. The god of the observable universe doesn’t necessarily have to be perfect, all knowing, or all good. It’s entirely plausible that such a being could create an entire universe, with a billion billion billion planets, just to ask one question “Do you believe in me?” and then cast the intelligences of conscious organisms that answer incorrectly into infinite torture for all eternity if it judges that we answer wrong.
I feel like the perfect / imperfect supreme being between religion and science is one of those bridge-too-far question that has no easy answer. That is, metaphysics without revelation might still get you to some kind of afterlife, but maybe we should’ve been more careful what we wished for.
I had plenty of waking nightmares as a kid - sitting up and seeing things, and even more excitingly had one a few years ago, quite out of the blue, so my brain can still do such things under the right circumstances. But that disabused me of the idea that i’m developing some deeper insight and more that i’m witnessing from the outside looking in my own mind “misfiring” and connecting and processing information incorrectly.
Brains on drugs are whacking out, like a switchboard operator on an old style telephone system connecting all the wires on the switchboard randomly and in unpredictable ways. It’s a lot of fun to see what unpredictable patterns emerge but i’d question if those patterns have any deeper insight other than amusement.
Yes, drugs affect the brain’s perception of reality. That’s why I’m partly skeptical. On the other hand, there are layers of meaning. There’s behavioral (what one does during the experience), perceptual (what one experiences), and symbolic (the meaning one derives). It’s in this last category that there is any value, to me, because it has the capacity to change one’s life in a sort of Maslow “peak experience”. It also goes without saying there are different categories of drugs which affect neurophysiology differently, and this type of approach isn’t right for everyone.
The danger is in getting ‘stuck’ or assigning too much meaning to the trip. I think it would be perfectly possible to have the same type of experience without any chemical aid whatsoever in the right setting. Really all it is is a kind of signpost, a Campbellian threshold guardian saying ‘hey, look at this!’. The rest is up to the one that observes.
Carlos Castaneda has a series of books that lays it out rather enjoyably, although the schema Don Juan adopts is probably more meaningful to a central American shaman than anyone else.
This. And not just instances of mind altering substances.
Most human beings that ever existed looked at ordinary objects without a clue as to their molecular or subatomic nature… And consider that, for two objects traveling at different speeds, time passes at different rates – to such an extent that the satellites used by GPS would provide useless information to us, if this difference were not accounted for.
Things are not always evident to our senses, probably monumentally large and important things.
So although I am highly skeptical about specific stories told about the afterlife and the way such a thing plays out, I would never claim to know what happens after death.
This is an incredibly common notion that is nonetheless profoundly wrong and responsible for pretty much obliterating our ability to have productive conversations about religion and/or science today.
(To be clear, I’m not trying to personally call out Scott here. Not only has this idea been voiced here a few times, but, like I say, probably a majority of believers and non-believers buy into it.)
Faith does not operate without evidence. Faith is not fundamentally irrational.
We use faith–the same “faith” that is meant in a religious context–everyday for all kinds of ordinary purposes. We couldn’t live our lives without it. Imagine operating on only on those things you know by empirical observation.
The most obvious examples are interpersonal: Do I have empirical proof that my mother loves me? That she won’t one day, out of the blue, abandon me or betray me? I would need some hypothetical view into her brain (and the knowledge to know where the “unconditional love” part of the brain is) to know for certain. But I have a ton of evidence, in the form of all the things she’s done and said since I was tiny. So I live my life as if her love is certain. What is it that fills that (admittedly pretty small) gap between all the circumstantial evidence I have and pure empirical proof of my mom’s love? Why use another word than “faith”?
It’s worth noting that even science only operates if we apply faith. I didn’t perform Francis Collins’ experiments on the human genome. I have no direct empirical knowledge that DNA even exists! I have lots of evidence, though, primarily through sources like textbooks and journals and interviews from people who have reason to know. What they describe seems to comport with what I experience in my life (there’s definitely something in common between me and my nerdy red headed kids!). So I carry on as if DNA is a fact I can rely on. What have I done? I’ve taken information from sources, evaluated if they can be trusted, compared it to my personal experience, and decided “Yep! Makes sense!” That’s faith in action.
Without my faith in the scientific community, my understanding of what I’m seeing with my eyes would be very limited. But when I say to myself, “I think this DNA thing makes sense,” suddenly I can know and appreciate the biological connection between myself and my kids in a deeper and more meaningful way. Faith lets us expand our limited personal horizons of direct knowledge.
Now, religious faith bridges longer and deeper gaps than the examples I gave above, because the questions it tries to address are bigger and more profound. They might involve things that no one can directly observe–like what happens after death, if anything. But when I accept religious faith, I don’t do it blindly or irrationally. I look at sources (my parents, religious authority figures, the Bible or other revelation), decide if they seem trustworthy, and determine if they map neatly onto–and deepen–my direct personal experience.
I can look around with my own eyes and see an amazing world (mostly a small chunk of Colorado). I can see photographs of amazing things beyond my personal reach, like galaxies and leaf insects. And I can hear my parents tell me that this world is not an accident, but was created with intention. And that fits for me; my observations fit into that conceptual matrix, so I accept it, add it to my worldview. And when my parents point me to the Bible and it goes further, saying that the universe (myself included) is an immense expression of love… That is knowledge I would never get from my little island of direct experience. But receiving that knowledge through faith, I can now act accordingly. I view other people differently–as creatures that are inherently lovable, and therefore imbued with undeniable dignity. I view a landscape as a love letter to anyone who stumbles upon it.
The universe as the creation of a loving creator is a big, deep, unwieldy idea. Something might come along in my experience that doesn’t seem to fit with it. My faith might be shaken. It could result in me throwing the idea away after all. Or I might have to grapple with it to see how what I experienced fits the notion after all. It’s not easy. Other people might not get it. But how much truth would I miss out on without faith?
I think every example you give is an example where there is actually evidence to support the belief. You believe your mother loves you because you have experienced multiple acts that convey that love. Those acts have even been witnessed by others, which means they aren’t simply in your imagination. You haven’t performed Francis Collins’ experiments, but you actually could; and if you did, you’d get the same result. Other people have, and did, and that counts as evidence. These are both examples of evidence that other people can witness and confirm.
On the other hand, I’m struggling to think of a single thing about religious faith that acts as that kind of evidence. You might have a personal religious revelation, but no one else can witness that, or share it, or reliably repeat it. It is not therefore evidence.
‘Faith’ is a word, thus malleable, but the ‘faith’ it takes to believe in the presence of evidence is not the same thing as the ‘faith’ it takes to believe in the absence of evidence.
You do realise that molecular or subatomic interactions do not happen by magic, correct? Why do you people like to use scientific concepts to support your imaginary friends/places?
You can go from a direct visual observation, such as an apple falling from a tree, to Newtons gravitation which provides an approximate measurement of the effect and then move on to relativity to make the measurement even more precise (but still not perfect) only to finally reach time dilation. The existence of time dilation may be surprising but it was proven thanks to small, incremental steps in different fields, a long chain of observations, tests and equations. How do you go from a direct visual observation to the “afterlife”? You don’t, because what you did is called a false equivalence.
While it’s true our senses are limited and there’s a lot to learn about the Universe, the idea that anything is possible is absurd. Any discovery in our future will be built upon the science that we have today.
I think it’s perfectly reasonable to see evidence of religious faith in the world around us through the lens is faith, it’s just that i don’t think the world around us gives us specific actionable information about religious faith through the lens of science.
There’s no informational value, for example, from the world about whether i should be a Christian or a Muslim, or Hindu, or gnostic, or deist, or something else, even if i am amazed or in awe of it and its fine tuned appearance.
My own opinion then is that religious are specific and particular, and the world is universal, and so this means that the truths - such as they may contain - that religious hold are therefore particular and contingent. Which to me seems to indicate that there is no - and indeed can be no - perfect religion or religious system.
I don’t think that anything I wrote justifies such hostility, ZeTh1. I have not referred to any friends or places, real or imaginary.
However, a stream of scientific discoveries does support the idea that common sense and ordinary use of the senses together do not uncover all the truths of the universe, thus it seems wise not to flatly rule out entire areas of speculation as impossible.
I suspect that The Bible’s references to afterlife were always intended to be taken as metaphorical in nature. While providing comfort to those who need it. But claims that people absolutely “know” that we do not exist in some way after apparently dying, strike me as almost as untenable as claims that we definitely do exist in some way after death.
I believe in the literal Biblical literalist position - after we die all our souls will dwell forever in the shadowy realm of Sheol, cut off from all creation, including God. Either that or annihilation.
…
For some reason people, even supposed literalists, don’t seem to like referencing the Bible’s explicit text concerning the afterlife…
At least in my case, I tend to separate those out into two different things. There’s a big difference between “evidence does not exist” and “I don’t personally have/understand the evidence, but someone else does”. The first is faith, the second is trust.
Even dismissing the idea that afterlife is a religious construct created in the past to control society (so the church and other leaders could give a reason to their standard of moral code), I believe that the idea of an after life is just a coping mechanism because all we know are the chemical processes of our brain telling us we exist and for the most part we can’t comprehend what it means not to exist.
When you go to sleep, outside of dreams you pretty much wake up and your body has no recollection of the time in between. People who come out of a coma after years don’t realize that years passed because they fundamentally didn’t experience that time. So we have no mental concept of what it means not to experience our own thought processes and senses, which makes it hard to understand that when our brain shuts down and the chemical processes end we no longer have constant thoughts or experiences and never “wake up”. The idea of an afterlife seems to me like an attempt to reconcile that and that your conciousness goes on.
Personally I don’t want to experience an after life for the same reason I don’t really want to live forever. What would happen in an afterlife? It fundamentally can’t be a perfect utopia because everyone’s idea of a utopia is different and fundamentally incompatible (even among a close group of friends).
Am I going to meet up with my Mom that passed away almost a decade ago? That would mean she’s just been sitting up there doing nothing and waiting for me to die and join her. She couldn’t have been having that much fun doing that, and that probably means I’d be sitting around waiting for my wife (and if it ever happens children) not having fun either.
Am I going to a version of hell where I’m tortured for the rest of my life (because lets be honest, I am not the perfect model of christian society, and I’d probably go to hell being Jewish and marrying interfaith), then that’s completely unappealing as well.
Is the after life just being reborn again and forgetting everything? Then what’s the point as if I don’t remember anything then functionally it’s a new existence.
Do I remember everything when I go into the after life? What happens in the non-trivial chance I get demetia in this life when I get older, am I forced to live forever with demetia in the after life? If not why as dementia changes my fundamental thought processes and therefore my conciousness (and how I experience life) so why is that fundamentally different than what I experience now.
Absolutely zero scenarios for an afterlife appeal to me or make any sense at all. It just fundamentally makes more sense to me that when you die that’s it, it’s over. Any other scenario to me seems like a much worse scenario when you think past the flowers and butterflies and look at the details of what you think an after life would look like.
Yea sorry about that, I did sound a bit hostile. :)
That being said, I don’t “know” we cease to exist when we die but I do know that the idea is not anchored in reality, it is the equivalent of the existence of Azeroth, Westeros or the Chaosrealms. What’s the point of giving credence to some of these ideas while ignoring the others? Would it not wiser to ignore all of them, at least until observations point towards them somehow?
I personally think calling anyone’s faith wrong is … wrong and pretty much obliterates one’s ability to have productive conversations about religion. Perhaps too many of us are wrapped up in discussions of faith and science being some kind of battle where someone is trying to convince someone else of something. Here, we have some people explicitly not trying to convince anyone of jack shit but just explaining their own personal paths and beliefs to someone who asked in earnest and you’re calling us wrong (by association, if not by name). Actually comes off as a little offensive, although I know you didn’t mean it that way.
Allow me to simplify this:
Imagine there is a magically impenetrable, immovable box of unknown origin
Person A believes it’s empty
Person B believes it holds something
That’s what we’re talking about; science has nothing to do with this. If the box didn’t have such constraints, lots of science could apply to figuring out not only whether something is in there, and even a good deal of its nature could be determined without even seeing it (weight, dimensions, density, malleability, etc.). Sadly, that’s not the case.
So how do we scientifically prove something is or isn’t in the magical box? We don’t because we can’t. That’s all we’re saying, and it’s perfectly fine to assume it’s full or empty. That’s not to say we won’t have perfectly good reasons for believing it’s full or empty, but science won’t be used supply an answer.
I hope that makes a little sense.
I guess I’ll mute this thread now. It’s really gotten fighty.
Throughout human history there have been thousands of these boxes. Person B is always saying there saying there is something in the box. The volcano god, the wind god, the tide god, etc.
And with the aid of science, over time Person A has been able to open these boxes and discover that they are, in fact, empty. There is no god controlling the volcano.
And here we are in 2019. There are a handful of boxes left. One is labeled “The Soul,” another is labeled “Origins of Life,” etc. Person B still stands there insisting that, don’t worry, these boxes aren’t empty. This time they have something in them.
Sure they do.