Dr Plausible

If there is any peril in having a reality-based outlook at a time when religion seems to be on a lot of people’s minds, I think it comes from those who have yet to learn the main lesson of the 20th century: diversity and nature are more important than personal conviction.

I call myself a ‘radical agnostic’.

A radical agnostic couldn’t care less about questions of providence, creation and the existence of God. However, the radical agnostic is bold enough to admit that after all there just miiiiight be a God who’ll ultimately round up all ‘reality-based’ outlookers and send them packing down to Hell.

The existence or inexistence of God, the transcendence or non-transcendence of dogmas, the need or non-need of tradition are questions that don’t make a jot of difference, cosmically speaking: our ignorance is so mind-bogglingly vast, and the possibility of finally bridging it so utterly remote, that both believing and disbelieving seem like acts of arrogance and presumption.

Indeed, religious beliefs get special help from arrogance and presumption. The radical agnostic sometimes suspects that “I believe” actually means “I want”:

“I want in God (to live well, not to suffer, to go to heaven, to live eternally, my enemies to suffer, &c).”

… and it’s no wonder that all religions seek to deny the very thing that promotes them: while their survival and growth depends mainly on family and ethnic ties more than on any inherent truth or strength in their dogmas, they at the same time try to cynically sustain that ‘believing’ is an expression of selfishness capable of helping to congregate white and black, rich and poor in a common ideal. Hmm. And you’d better start believing now, or else…!

Yes. Ironically, the message spread by gospels of all religions is, “believe, or else your soul won’t be able to reap the fruits desired by your animality,” fruits such as happiness, pleasure, memory and relief from pain. Forget spiritual rewards: belief is the hope you’ll get your animal urges satiated.

Atheists, of course, get their fair share of arrogance & presumption. Saying things like “I know there is no god.” has the same logical & presumption status as “I know what’s happening in Alpha Centauri right now.”

I may sound like I’m against anybody who’s not a radical agnostic. But I think diversity of nature is the key concept here. In spite of all I’ve said, I think humanity may slowly come to recognise that different people believe different things simply because they are differently constituted; therefore, arguing endlessly about what’s true or logical or believable will be seen in a more benevolent light for what it is: just a harmless pastime. Nobody knows anything, and humans will have to evolve into something greater than human before anything new is actually learnt.

I stand by my epigraph, always: “You’ll never get any further than plausible.”

“Right now, we are engaged in the late 20th century version of the struggle between those who believe that the human species is so flexible, so potent, that even when we face great crises, as in the past, we will find the solutions, and so therefore we should go full speed ahead, not worry about it, concentrate on the science and technology; this is in dire opposition to the natural science viewpoint that we have genius but it is not so great as to allow us to separate ourselves that way from the environment in which the species evolved. I believe we need a thorough naturalistic worldview of the human condition, because we are now facing crises — particularly with reference to the environment — that will be better met through this view of ourselves as belonging to this planet, as a very biological species.”

Edward O. Wilson, in Darwin: The Legacy BBC video, 1998

When I see how science is sometimes championed against religion, I am a little taken aback

Because, you see, the science that is thought to be able to explain and make use of the Universe… is based on mathematics; and that cannot be right. For one thing, the idea that mathematics and physics are somehow intertwined belongs to the realm of philosophy. Of course, this could be only me splitting hairs; but there are many more reasons to discredit mathematics as our next saviour. We boggle in amazement at the marvels that the marriage of maths and physics has produced in our lifetime; but you see, that’s just the effect that colour, movement and excitement from some useful or entertaining gadgets has on our naked-ape brains, which are barely out of the caves, groping about for meaning in everything.

Mathematics is a sort of game. We add or multiply real-world objects and get apparently consistent results. We can explain quite a lot of things by using maths, such as why apples fall on our heads while we take a nap under an apple tree. With maths, we can also develop ideas into concrete objects. But as we use mathematics to move further and further towards explaining the very small and the very big, our concepts begin to behave very oddly. Can that be because very small and very big things are themselves odd to our middle-of-the-way brains? I don’t think so. I think the oddness is itself a result of the inadequacy of numbers to describe the real world with total precision (or, in other words, to calculate and produce truth).

Let me give you a simple example. You’re doing some experiment with a particle accelerator, and for some reason you need to know the exact length between opposite corners of a 1-inch square. Piece of cake, you say: it’s the square root of 2 (let me call this “V2″ here). However, V2 is what’s called an “irrational” number, meaning that after the point, we get an infinite number of digits. V2’s infinity starts at 1.4142135623730950488016887… and then this completely random series of digits extends infinitely to the uttermost reaches of the Universe and beyond, towards multiple universes and then back again infinite times and it never EVER ends. You could fill the entire Universe infinite times with the digits of V2 and you’d still be infinitely away from reaching a number that would give you 2 if multiplied by itself. All you’d get is something like 1.999999999… extending infinitely and back infin… oh, it does get boring.

If you always look on the bright side of life, this means that mathematics can describe orders of magnitude that are infinite times smaller than what can actually exist in or between the littlest particles. But to me, all it means is that mathematics can never be precise, it can only be approximate. And there’s the snag: the real world cannot be an approximation: everything must be precisely whatever it is.

Now look around you. We live in a maths-driven, maths-organised society. If you look (for want of a better word) “between” the wonders that mathematics has produced, you’ll see a lot of things that are left behind – the molecules that continuously fall off the not-completely smooth surface on a hard-disk, the diminutive speck of smoke that goes up from a chip when you turn on your iPhone –, which are sometimes treated as garbage, sometimes as dust, sometimes as minor bothers, but most often just get ignored. They are, so to speak, the difference between 2 and what you get when you multiply 1.414213… by itself – the residue of imprecision.

The trouble is we ignore them at our own peril. Forgotten things tend to collect, just as an infinite sum of V2’s would collect a residue exactly equal to 2. When enough of the real world residue generated by the use of mathematics collects somewhere, we give it a name: pollution, squalor, rap music (joking!).

On the other end from practical concerns, there’s theoretical inquiry, philosophy and mysticism: ideas, theories and beliefs that help give shape to our concept of ourselves and our place in time and space. What mathematics does to those pursuits mirrors exactly what it does to society: because no precision can obtain from mathematics, a lot of detritus is collected near the outer boundaries of the marriage between maths and physics, maths and mysticism, &c. But because we’re used to thinking of mathematics as infallible, the detritus that eventually gets collected is thought to constitute physical entities in their own right. Some of the resulting ideas may lead to interesting insights; but many of the mystic theories put forward by physicists and other scientists make use of residual garbage that goes unrecognized as such. The result is a plethora of different sorts of increasingly wacky explanations for the very small and the very big, the places where human-created digits and concepts cease to make any sense because that’s where infinity takes over. The film/book What the Bleep do we Know is a case in point.

William Golding, author of Darkness Visible, once said in a interview, “a Universe that goes on forever is the ultimate damnation”. I would say that the ultimate damnation is a maths-driven Universe. Since neither science nor religion will ever be able to answer any of our deepest questions, couldn’t we just leave it be and concentrate on what’s here?

Laws are little more than a method for making money out of people’s natural inclinations.

Here’s my contribution to the Urban Dictionary:

insoult, v.

To affront somebody’s soul by suggesting it is going to Hell because they do not believe in God, or do not believe in the same God as you do.

A: Mrs Christian was deeply insoulted when she read Mr Jew’s book.
B: Was she? I wonder how she would feel if she heard Mr Muslim’s prayers.

A: Could atheists and agnotiscs sue all religions for insoulting them?
B: They could, in theory. But what if we DON’T have souls?

In the US, breasts have gone from being a fixture to becoming a fixation. Women want to have fully portable deluxe erotic units and men want to gorge themselves over them in osculatory gratification. So for both, it’s an object of desire if there ever was one.

With that in mind, I find it extremely ironical that many Americans should object to breast-feeding in public. A woman breastfeeding her baby in, say, an airport lounge is all too often asked to take herself and her indecent bundle into the ladies’ room. The certainly unintended and unsconscious irony is twofold:

(1) the US is hailed by the Americans themselves, and very probably much more so by those same objectors, as the country where no one goes hungry and where you can get anything you desire, if you desire it strongly enough. It’s paradoxically and ironically seen as offensive that a woman should bare one breast (not both, mind you) in public so her kid does not feel hungry for the next two hours or so; and that perception can only be there because a public display of a breast might, just might, be construed (by perverts and prudes alike) as a titillating invitation to desire.

(2) a prohibition of public breast-feeding is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from Muslim countries, the very countries those same objectors probably feel most threatened by, the very countries where women not only throw veils over breasts and breast-feeding babies, but over whole women as beings unfit for public exposure.

Maybe ironies like those are inevitable in a multifarious democracy like the US – where every nonsensical, sick and crazy notion gets a fair chance to be vented in public. But I think there’s a real danger in “democracy” getting all too often confused with “common sense”. The two concepts are not even related. So why should the one [breast]feed on the other?

In chapter 2 of his On Liberty, John Stuart Mill wrote thus:

“The truth of an opinion is part of its utility.”

That was in the mid-19th century. Since then, I think enough scales have fallen from our eyes, so now we know better:

“The utility of an opinion is part of its truth.”

Oh. Is that cynical?