Mystery and Awe

If you give me the right man in any field, I can talk to him, I know what the condition is. That he did whatever he did as far as he can go. That he studied every aspect of it as far as he could stretch himself. He is not a dilettante in any way. And so he talked deep, as far as he can go, and therefore he is up against mysteries all the way around the edge, and awe. And we can talk about mystery and awe. That is what we have in common.

That's Richard Feynman, in a Yorkshire Television interview in 1973. It has struck me recently that this is the kind of thing that religion is supposed to have over science, and I just don't believe that for a second. From that same interview:

It is very much more exciting to discover that we are on a ball, half of us sticking upside down and spinning around in space. It is a mysterious force which holds us on. It's going around a great big glob of gas that is fed by a fire that is completely different from any fire that we can make (but now we can make that fire – nuclear fire.)

That is a much more exciting story to many people than the tales that other people used to make up about the universe – that we were living on the back of a turtle or something like that. They were wonderful stories, but the truth is so much more remarkable. So what's the pleasure in physics for me is that it is revealed that the truth is so remarkable, so amazing, and I have this disease – like many other people who have studied far enough to begin to understand a little of how things work. They are fascinated by it, and this fascination drives them on to such an extent that they have been able to convince governments and so on to keep supporting them in this investigation.

Of course, another of my heroes is Carl Sagan.  The idea of approaching mystery and awe, the balance between the two key elements of skepticism and wonder, were a constant theme in his work.  I of course recommend Cosmos and The Demon-Haunted World, but he reached perhaps his greatest crescendo on this topic in Pale Blue Dot.  

Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors. We gaze across billions of light-years of space to view the Universe shortly after the Big Bang, and plumb the fine structure of matter. We peer down into the core of our planet, and the blazing interior of our star. We read the genetic language in which is written the diverse skills and propensities of every being on Earth. We uncover hidden chapters in the record of our origins, and with some anguish better understand our nature and prospects. We invent and refine agriculture, without which almost all of us would starve to death. We create medicines and vaccines that save the lives of billions. We communicate at the speed of light, and whip around the Earth in an hour and a half. We have sent dozens of ships to more than seventy worlds, and four spacecraft to the stars. We are right to rejoice in our accomplishments, to be proud that our species has been able to see so far, and to judge our merit in part by the very science that has so deflated our pretensions.

It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it. 

Indeed, this seems to be a common theme among scientists.  Here's Lawrence Krauss:

The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way they could get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today. 

I could go on for days, finding expression after expression of just how amazing and wonderful the universe is, how much finding things out brings us right up against the mystery and awe that mark the best in "spirituality".  The Symphony of Science series presents this wonderfully, and the latest video speaks to just the most astounding thing about our origins that I think it's possible to say: We Are Stardust.

I think we can all agree on the importance of mystery and awe. No matter what your religious beliefs, odds are that such things are an inextricable part of them. But why, if it's eminently possible to achieve such things through contemplation of the universe through the methods of science, should we cling to religion so fiercely? I simply don't understand it. The discoveries made in the search for our actual circumstances are readily available to the general public, and I also don't buy the idea that some people "just can't live without religion", that they're somehow not able to "get" science; I have more respect for their intellect than that. Isn't it time we just let go?

Finding Meaning in the Universe

I haven't found a lot of time lately to write, which is unfortunate.  Thankfully, I've done some writing in the past, and I find myself referencing this particular piece a lot.  I've been hanging out at r/atheism lately, and this question popped up recently:

"My entire teen years were spent on philosophical pondering and being REALLY stressed over what world view I could accept. I would form one, think critically on it until it collapsed, modify it, and repeat the process until I arrived at Atheist. I also did a fair amount of reading, most notably of Sophie’s World, which if you don’t know is a really easy primer for most major philosophers. This wide range of thinking has left me with a bit of a problem.

I am now a condescending bitch.

Now when I read things that have been hailed as “brilliant” or “profound” or “mindblowing” I am left with the reaction of “dude, I knew about this when I was 14.” For example,

-I finally read Watchman this year and was REALLY disappointed. I was hoping for something controversial, thought-inducing, worth all the hype it got. Instead I just responded with “this seems kinda trivial, and Ozymandias’ great fix wouldn’t work anyway because we have world disasters all the time and its never brought about world peace.” 

-When my ex-bf had an existential crisis over the idea of what happens after death I wanted to punch him for being so immature because to me, duh, it’s the same as before you were born. 

-I once heard someone I know to be a fairly devout Protestant say “man, Eastern religions will blow your mind, its stuff that I have never even thought about” and was appalled because when I first learned about Hinduism I was amazed at how much it lined up with conclusions I had drawn myself.

-When I hear theists agonizing over some ambiguous religious doctrine, or how a good diety could let bad things happen I am amazed that they didn’t resolve that question in their mind years ago because it seems so core to any belief in God.

Long story short, philosophy now seems really boring, and almost juvenile, to me largely because I learned so much about it when I was younger. Does anyone else have these side-effects from learning to think critically?"

I realized exactly how this person felt, and I wrote up a response.  I thought I'd share it here.

It sounds like you took an evolutionary approach to your philosophy, which is awesome. You're finding yourself at a point many of us reach, and in which I was sitting myself until not long ago. Nothing looks remarkable any more, everything is dull and boring, because all you have is the real world. And what fun is there in just reality?

In college, I took classes in ethics and religion under Dr. David Belcastro, and I expressed to him the thought that the ultimate point of philosophy was to ask "why". He told me that religion, in all of its various forms, has an answer: "Yes." I've been trying to understand that for about 6 years now, and I think I finally do. Oddly, I found the answer outside of religion entirely.

Read some Carl Sagan, particularly Pale Blue Dot and The Demon-Haunted World, or watch Cosmos. Watch the Symphony of Science videos, or any interviews/lectures with Carl Sagan or Richard Feynman. The universe is a wonderful place, it is remarkable in its vastness and complexity, and is enough in itself to inspire awe and wonder. You're seeking spiritual fulfillment, but religion isn't going to help. That same fulfillment can be found in science, by coming to understand the way the world actually is.

We here on Earth think we're amazing beings. And we are, there's no question about that. But we're also tiny, virtually insignificant on a cosmic scale. Take a look at the Pale Blue Dot picture; really look at it. That tiny speck, a small part of one pixel, is us. All of us. A mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. Everyone you know, everyone you love, everyone who has ever lived, lived on that tiny point of blue light. That should give you the feeling of humility you need.

Then, look at yourself. Think about the things that are going on inside you, every moment. There are trillions of cells, each one made up of tiny molecular machines, inside every human being. Every cell was built through billions of years of evolution, and look at the amazing result: you. And then realize that as you're thinking this, you're using your brain; a three pound mass of jelly that you could hold in your hands, but that unappealing object is capable of contemplating the vastness of space, capable of contemplating infinity, and capable of contemplating itself contemplating infinity.

Finally, those molecules that make up your body are made of atoms of various types. Every single one that is heavier than hydrogen or helium was synthesized during the death of a star, billions of years ago and light-years away. You, and me, and everyone else, and everything you see, are made of stars. We are connected to the universe in the very deepest manner possible. Dr. Belcastro, in his Introduction to Religion class, focused on religion as reconnecting; that's the root of the word, in fact. Its the same root as "ligament." Religion seeks to connect us to the universe, to show us our place in the cosmos. But religions make up connections, they tell stories that have no evidence but that sound comforting until you see through them. Science has the evidence, and it tells us we really are connected. To each other and to every other living thing through biology, to the Earth through chemistry, and to the rest of the universe on an atomic level. For me, I don't need anything else to look at the world and finally, for the first time in years, really say "wow."

The Origins of Love

In relation to my recent more open atheism, a Christian friend of mine suggested I think about where love comes from.  I've experienced it, both loving and being loved, so I have my own observational evidence that it exists.  But where it comes from is a much deeper question; is its source external to us, from a soul or a god, or is it something formed entirely out of the human mind, with its biological basis?  On my friend's advice, before seeking out what others had said, I gave it some thought myself, in the context of my atheism and skeptical method of inquiry.  Is there a reasonable explanation why humans would experience love, or is it something inexplicable by purely naturalistic means?

Love is an emotion, and it isn't uniquely human; other animals experience and express feelings, notably primates, and especially notably chimpanzees.  This suggested to me that it is likely an evolved trait, something that is advantageous to us in some way.  But in my experience of love, it isn't solely reproductive in nature; it isn't just lust.  Its much broader; it encompasses affection for friends, family, even my country and humanity as a whole.  Now, I'm not a biologist, or a sociologist, so this is very speculative, but it seems to me that love has to do with groups, with being interested in and caring about more than one's self.  With that in mind, I took to the Internet, and started at my usual jumping-off point for research.

Here, I found some confirmation of my original thoughts.  "Helen Fisher, a leading expert in the topic of love, divides the experience of love into three partly overlapping stages: lust, attraction, and attachment. Lust exposes people to others; romantic attraction encourages people to focus their energy on mating; and attachment involves tolerating the spouse (or indeed the child) long enough to rear a child into infancy."  From that perspective, love provides a reproductive advantage; it promotes the creation of new generations, and it promotes protecting that new generation.  We love our children, and because of that we're likely to keep them safe from harm.


Understanding biology far better than sociology, I still found the psychological arguments compelling.  They spoke to the more expansive experience of love that I've had.  Its about bonding with others, forming attachments.  However, the recent concepts describing love as either both feeling and action or just as a series of actions rather than a feeling at all didn't really make sense to me.  It was then that I recalled a couple of comments from Carl Sagan (Surprise!  Get used to this from me.) that provided some additional illumination on the subject.  Both are from his book Cosmos:

As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky. In our tenure on this planet we've accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage — propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders, hostility to outsiders — all of which puts our survival in some doubt. But we've also acquired compassion for others, love for our children and desire to learn from history and experience, and a great soaring passionate intelligence — the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity. Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet Earth. But up there in the immensity of the Cosmos, an inescapable perspective awaits us.

Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together — surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing. 

Humans are social creatures; we live in groups, and those groups are continually expanding.  Perhaps love began as compassion for individual mates, and for our children.  That makes sense, as I noted above.  But what made humans so successful, at least in part, was our ability to extend that love to others.  Social animals care about the larger group, but that group usually has a limited definition; chimpanzees only care about their own communities, which is very helpful, but they don't extend it to other, unknown members of their species.  They certainly don't contemplate loving all of chimp-kind.  We humans seem to have been able to take that beneficial caring, the drive to care about and thus protect the group, helping it to survive as a whole rather than as individuals or families, and extend it further than other animals.  Love, in humans, can even be applied outside our species, or even to more abstract concepts.  We can love our country, and work to protect it, and that provides us with an advantage.  We can love humanity, and try to make life better for everyone, and that helps the species survive.  And importantly, we can know that we are loved.  That may not be uniquely human, but I know I've felt it, from family and friends, and from groups of people I don't even know.  And there's something to be said for the strength we gain, the will to survive that rises up, when we know that someone else cares.

I'll probably keep looking into it, and I look forward to hearing what others may have to say.  But I've pretty much come to the conclusion that love comes from within us, not without.  It arises in us, at its most basic, from human consciousness and human essential drives, and the chemical and quantum effects that drive them.  That may not sound as nifty as receiving love from God, at least on the surface; shouldn't there be something more to a concept as huge as love than chemicals and evolution?  But I think its really pretty cool, and I think science can provide us with just as much exhilaration and wonder as anything else, if not more.  One last quote from Sagan, because he got this one right, too:

It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.

Initiate the Awesome

So, I've decided to begin blogging again.  I never got into it earlier, but now I think I'd like to give it another try.  My old blog never really had direction, which I think was part of the problem.  I'll leave it up, since I think I had some good thoughts, and I might even post to it again should I have anything that won't fit here.  But I plan to make this a little different, because now I have a theme for my blog.

I've recently come out about my atheism, and I guess now I'm out to the world.  I've been spending a lot of time on r/atheism, and have started to put forward some of my thoughts.  But its a volatile forum, so my posts disappear quickly.  I want to have a place to put down my thoughts and questions about science, religion, atheism, and the wondrous universe in which we live.  And I want to be able to get feedback, read and respond to comments, and maybe get some answers to my many questions.  So this will be, well, that; my atheist, science-loving blog.

I've got some ideas for posts, and my first one will (coming soon) will be about love.  I think love is very important, and a friend recently asked me to think about where love came from.  I've done that thinking, and I want to share my thoughts.  For now, I want to do something I'll probably be doing a lot here: quote Carl Sagan.  So here's a passage from Pale Blue Dot, one that speaks a bit to the theme of my new blog, In Awe of Everything.

Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors. We gaze across billions of light-years of space to view the Universe shortly after the Big Bang, and plumb the fine structure of matter. We peer down into the core of our planet, and the blazing interior of our star. We read the genetic language in which is written the diverse skills and propensities of every being on Earth. We uncover hidden chapters in the record of our origins, and with some anguish better understand our nature and prospects. We invent and refine agriculture, without which almost all of us would starve to death. We create medicines and vaccines that save the lives of billions. We communicate at the speed of light, and whip around the Earth in an hour and a half. We have sent dozens of ships to more than seventy worlds, and four spacecraft to the stars. We are right to rejoice in our accomplishments, to be proud that our species has been able to see so far, and to judge our merit in part by the very science that has so deflated our pretensions.