Seeking God in Science part 5: Testimony

At the end of the last installment in this series I made a prediction: you believe that matter is made of atoms.  I am confident in making this prediction despite the fact that I have almost no information about who you are because, as far as I can tell, no one in the modern world denies it.  There are people who profess to believe in all kinds of crazy shit, but I have never heard of anyone alive today who denies that atoms are real.

Given this rather overwhelming consensus, it may surprise you to learn that there was legitimate scientific disagreement about the existence of atoms right up to the start of the 20th century.   At that point there was a lot of circumstantial evidence that atoms were real, mainly in the fact that when elements combined to form compounds they always did so in quantities that were ratios of small integers.  That fact could be explained by the existence of atoms, but it wasn't proof that they were actually real.  Back then there were alternative explanations that seemed to account for all the data just as well.

Today we have pictures of atoms, which would seem to make it a slam-dunk.  But we also have pictures of humans walking on the moon, and yet there is a whole industry of lunar landing denialists.  In fact, there are Artemis-mission denialists now!  So why aren't there atomic denialists?  It is actually not that hard to cook up an argument that atoms aren't real: the alleged "photographs" of atoms aren't actually photographs at all, they are just digital renderings of data from so-called "scanning electron microscopes", which aren't really microscopes at all.  A microscope is an device with lenses that magnify light.  Scanning electron microscopes don't have lenses.  They don't even have the magnetic fields that (allegedly) "focus" beams of (alleged) electrons in so-called "transmission electron microscopes".  So all of these "photographs" of atoms are necessarily heavily processed.  In other words, these pictures are literally photoshopped into existence.  (BTW, this is also true of most "normal" photographs taken using digital cameras.  The vast majority of digital cameras do some kind of processing on the data, even if it is just to compress it to make it smaller.  Apple iPhones in particular do a lot of actual image processing (i.e. "photoshopping") to try to make their pictures look better.

However, you have some first-hand evidence that the photos on your iPhone are not that different from reality because you can compare the photos you take with what you saw with your own eyes at the time.  But with photos of atoms that's not possible.  It is physically impossible to see an individual atom with your eyes, or even with an optical microscope.  The only way to get a "picture" of an atom is through some indirect and very complicated process, so complicated that people actually can earn a living by mastering them.

So how do you justify your belief in atoms?  Seriously, take a moment to stop and think about that before reading further.  I'll wait.

It might help to consider what happened that finally persuaded the scientific community that atoms were real.  That consensus was reached long before (so-called) pictures of atoms became available.  What is it that managed to turn a centuries-long running controversy into a universal consensus over the span of just a few years?

The answer to that question is a fellow named Albert Einstein.  Maybe you have heard of him?  He came up with relativity and E=mc².  He won a Nobel prize too, not for relativity, but rather for his explanation of something called the photoelectric effect, which helped pave the way to quantum mechanics.  And he also, on the side, advanced the definitive proof that atoms exist through a mathematical analysis of something called Brownian motion.  This is a phenomenon named after a Scottish botanist, Robert Brown, who, in 1827, published the first description of it.  Brownian motion is the apparently random motion of small particles suspended in a liquid (typically water) when viewed under a microscope.  It turns out that the minute details of how these particles move are exactly what you would expect if they were being pushed around by moving atoms.

That is what finally convinced the scientific community that atoms exist, but that is almost certainly not what convinced you.   Maybe you were aware of Brownian motion, but almost certainly you have never read Einstein's paper, and even if you have you almost certainly didn't understand it.  I certainly don't, and I have a more training in math and science than most people.

The reason you believe in atoms is almost certainly the same as the reason I believe in atoms, or at least why I started believing in atoms: someone in a position of authority, most likely a middle-school science teacher, told you that matter is made of atoms and you believed it.  But even if you were to become skeptical (or simply curious) and start to dig into the details, everything you find will be indirect: papers, articles, photos taken by other people.  In other words, all of the evidence you have for the existence of atoms takes the form of testimony, something you are told by another human rather than something you directly experience for yourself.

And this is not only true for atoms, but for the vast majority of what you and most people believe.  Do you believe that Bhutan exists?  Unless you have actually been there yourself, the only way you can know about it is through testimony.  Do you believe that the far side of the moon exists?   Black holes?  Texas blind salamanders?  Unless you are a member of some very privileged groups, you have no alternative but to rely at least to some extent on testimony to support these beliefs.

In fact the vast majority of what most people think they know comes from testimony and not direct first-hand experience.  This is not an indictment of testimony.  It's essential.  There is just too much information out there, especially in the modern world, to be able to acquire all of it first hand.  But not all testimony is created equal.  People lie, and people make mistakes.  So how can you tell when someone is telling you the truth, especially in a situation where you can't verify a claim first hand?  When I, or your science teacher, or Richard Feynman, tell you that matter is made of atoms, why should you believe us?

The answer is that the actual existence of atoms is the best explanation of your first-hand subjective experience of having all of these people telling you that they exist, just as the actual existence of chairs is the best explanation for the fact that everyone agrees about chairs.  Consider what would have to be true if atoms did not exist.  How would you explain the fact that there is both a scientific and popular consensus that they do?  How would you explain the periodic table of the elements?  The atomic theory is much, much more than the simple assertion that atoms exist.  It is very specific about exactly how many kinds of atoms there are (92 in nature, a few more that we can create in nuclear reactors) and how they behave.  Moreover, there is no disagreement about any of this.  There is no scientific faction arguing for the existence of different kinds of atoms or an alternative periodic table.  There are not different denominations of physics or chemistry.  There is an absolute consensus about all of these details.  If people are lying or mistaken, they would all have to be lying or mistaken in exactly the same way.  It would have to be either an enormous coincidence or an enormous conspiracy, neither of which is very likely.  So the best explanation of this consensus is that the consensus is actually true.

But it's not just all that.  There is also your first-hand experience of reading these very words.  How do you explain that?  This is a blog post, so you are almost certainly reading it on a computer or a smart phone.  How does that work?  Well, there are these things called semiconductors which are made mainly of silicon atoms.  You can find vast quantities of excruciatingly detailed information about exactly how they work, and all of it will agree.  Again, there are only three possibilities: either all this information has been deliberately produced to deceive you, or it has been produced with good intentions but it is nonetheless wrong (but somehow all of these devices work anyway), or it is right.  By far the most likely explanation is that the information is right, and so atoms exist.

Moreover, this implies that the people who told you that atoms exist are trustworthy sources of information.  It doesn't mean that they are perfect, that they are never wrong, or that they never lie.  But at least in some cases, their testimony actually does align with objective reality and allows you to make correct predictions about the future.  If someone like this tells you something, there is at least the possibility that a good explanation for their testimony is that they actually know something, and are actually making a good faith attempt to impart that knowledge to you.

The existence of atoms is among a handful of explanations that are so well established that they can safely be labeled as scientific facts.  Included among these are relativity theory, thermodynamics, and of course the atomic theory.  The $64,000 question is now: can these "scientific facts" account for all of our observations?  Can they answer all of our questions?  In particular, can they answer the Big Questions:  What is consciousness?  What is love?  Do we have free will?  What is the standard for moral behavior?  What happens after we die?  And perhaps most importantly, why are we here?  What is the point?  Humans are just so damned complicated that it seems a priori impossible that all of our subjective experience could be accounted for in this way, that our entire existence can be reduced merely to "atoms doing their thing."

In the rest of this series I am going to argue that yes, it can, and I am going to explain exactly how.  But that is going to be a long row to hoe.  For now I want to present the argument for the opposing point of view to the best of my ability.  If I am going to claim that my explanation is the best one available, I have to be willing to put it up against the strongest alternatives.  So if you are an advocate for one of these alternative and I get something wrong here, let me know in the comments.

The claim that all of our subjective experiences can be accounted for by the behavior of atoms is not only wrong (this argument goes) it is manifestly absurd, a category error.  Subjective experience is a fundamentally different kind of phenomenon than anything an atom (or large groups of atoms) could possibly produce.  Atoms simply move around according to deterministic laws.  Nowhere in those laws is there anything even vaguely resembling everyday human subjective experiences like consciousness, love, shame, pride, joy, anger, sadness.  Atoms have no moral agency, and cannot acquire moral agency simply by being aggregated into sufficiently large collections.  There is something qualitatively different between human experience and the deterministic behavior of atoms.

Moreover, our very existence cannot be accounted for simply by Atoms Doing Their Thing.  Life is so mind-bogglingly complex that it cannot have been brought about by mere chance and deterministic laws.  Biological evolution can explain some of the characteristics of life, but it cannot explain how life arose in the first place, or how the universe itself arose in the first place.  To explain those it is necessary to hypothesize a Creator (or at least a creator).  Given that, it seems plausible that the reason we are here is that the Creator wanted us to be here, that we exist to fulfill some kind of purpose.  Moreoever, it seems plausible that the Creator has revealed that purpose to some of us, and that the people to whom that revelation has been made wrote it down so they could share it with the rest of us, and that is the reason holy texts exist.  These are not the results of humans making shit up out of whole cloth, they are the instruction manuals for life given to us by the Creator, because we are not expected to just figure it all out on our own.

That's about as far as I can get with steel-manning the religious position in general.  To go any further than that I have to grapple with the fact that there is a huge variety of holy texts on offer, and they don't all agree with each other (to put it mildly).  In fact, even by positing a Creator with a capital C I have already biased myself against certain Eastern traditions like Buddhism, which does not admit (or at least does not emphasize) a Creator, or even a creator.  So I simply don't know how to go further without advancing one religious tradition over another.  I am not a religious scholar.  I know a fair bit about Christianity, a little less about Islam and Judaism, and next to nothing about eastern traditions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Shintoism... I don't even know how long a list like that would end up being.

Going forward I am going to focus on western monotheism because of my own cultural biases and because it's what I know.  So I am going to talk about The Creator rather than a creator, which I intend to encompass as much as possible of Western monotheism, and specifically the traditions that grow out of the book of Genesis.  I'm going to focus mainly on Christianity, not because I want to exclude Judaism and Islam, but simply because I've studied the former more than the latter.

I'm going to leave it at that for now.  Next time I will start diving in to the details of how science can at least begin to answer some of the Big Questions.  Here's a teaser: the fact that we cannot definitively rule out the possibility that we are living in the Matrix will turn out to be very significant.

Reflections on dying

My father died last week.  I am now the sole surviving member of my immediate family.  My sister died in 2020 and my mother in 2024.  The experience of dealing with three deaths in the family has been... interesting.  There are things I know now that I wish I'd known then, and things I can reveal now that I could not before.  I'm writing this in the hope that someone reading this may end up better prepared than I was, and may even be able to save someone.  Because my sister died in 2020, everyone assumes it was due to covid, and in a way it was, but covid is not what killed her.  She died from anorexia.  And, as it turns out, it goes all the way back to when she was in junior high school.  I know this from a letter that she wrote back then, which I discovered among my parent's effects after my father died.

The entire time we were living together in my parents' house, and even well after we both left to go to college, I had no clue there was anything wrong.  My sister looked healthy, seemed healthy.  She was enormously popular among her peers.  She was literally the homecoming queen in high school.  Among my parent's effects I found a plaque naming her "friendliest person" in her class.  But even then she was already, ever so slowly, killing herself.

She hid her disease exceptionally well.  Throughout her twenties and thirties she looked extraordinarily healthy.  At one point she got into body-building.  She looked like this:

 

Twenty years later she looked like this:

 

That is a photo of her with my father on a trip to Disney World in 2019.  She was 53 years old.   We didn't know it at the time, but that would be our last time together as a family.  Nine months after that photo was taken the covid lockdown began, and five months after that she would be found dead in her condo.  If the pandemic had not happened it's possible she would have been in the office that day, but instead she was working from home where she lived by herself with her two cats.

I debated with myself for a long time over whether to publish that photograph.  I don't want her to be remembered that way.  I want her to be remembered the way she was in her prime.  But even in her prime she was already sick, and so I decided to show what she looked like at the end in the hopes that others might be able to avoid her fate.  One of the insidious things about anorexia is how slowly it kills.  Irit appeared to be fine for decades.   But she obviously wasn't fine.  By the time it became evident that she wasn't fine, it was probably too late to do anything.  When we saw her in 2019 everyone in the family was shocked.  She had been getting thinner for a very long time, but now she looked like she'd walked out of a Nazi concentration camp.  Moved by her shocking extreme gauntness, everyone in the family tried to talk to her, to tell her that she needed to eat more, but it was far, far too late.  We didn't know it, but she was already walking dead, and had been for a very long time.

My sister's disease was born when she was still a teenager.  And one of its roots is something that I could never publicly reveal while my father was still alive.  I don't think he ever realized this, and if he had, I think it would have destroyed him.  You see, when we were children, my father had a pet name for my sister.  He called her, in Hebrew, "shmeine-bumba" which, roughly translated, means "little chubby one."

Of course, she wasn't.  My sister was never chubby.  But that was the self-image that my father's pet name seared onto her soul.

[Interlude] 

I've been staring at the above paragraph for three days now wondering how to finish this post.  I want this story to somehow be constructive, to be a call to action, but the problem is I'm not sure what kind of action to call for.  My wife correctly predicted that my sister was going to die years before she actually did, and wanted to intervene somehow, but even today I don't know what a successful intervention would or even could have looked like.  The problem is that by the time it was evident from looking at her that she had a problem it was probably already too late.  Many people tried to tell her that she was too thin, but she refused to talk about it.  Short of strapping her to a gurney and force-feeding her, I don't know what could have been done.

Normally my advice in a situation like this would be to consult an expert.  But the irony is that my sister was an expert.   She was a psychology professor.  She had a Ph.D.  She actually worked as a consultant counseling obese people before getting gastric bypass surgery.

So I guess my hope here is just to raise awareness.  Be aware, and be kind.  Don't tease your daughters about being fat.  If you are a young person, don't tease your peers about being fat (especially if they aren't) either on-line or IRL.   You could, quite literally, be killing them.

Slowly.

Very,

very,

slowly.

[UPDATE] My wife pointed me to this article, which is based on this research paper.

This quote from the article really struck me:

Up to one in five people with chronic anorexia may die as a result of their illness, either due to the direct effects of starvation and malnutrition or due to suicide, making it the deadliest of all psychiatric disorders.

 Yep.

Seeking God in Science part 4: Chairness

I concluded the last installment in this series with a deceptively simple claim: Things exist.  This two-word quip is a scientific hypothesis, an explanation for some of my subjective experiences, specifically, my ability to see and touch and hear and small and taste, well, things.  The explanation is that these things that I perceive really do exist in point of actual physical (and possibly metaphysical) fact, i.e. that there is an objective reality that actually exists "out there", independent of my mind.  This is so obviously true, so obviously the correct explanation that there seems at first glance to be no point in discussing it at all.  But as we will see, this hypothesis actually turns out to have some pretty serious problems, and in fact, when we drill down far enough, it will actually turn out to be wrong.

But let's take this one step at a time.

First, let's give this hypothesis a name.  I'm going to call it the Objective Reality hypothesis, or ORH for short.  This hypothesis says that some (though not necessarily all) of my subjective perceptions can be accounted for in a totally straightforward way by the existence of actual physical things.  I can see and touch and hear other people because there actually are other people, and we can all agree that there are chairs and tables and computers because there actually are chairs and tables and computers.

At this point you may be thinking, well duh, of course the reason everyone agrees there are chairs is because there really are chairs.  But it's not so simple.  Consider, for example, rainbows.  People will agree that they see a rainbow just like they agree that they see a chair, but a rainbow is unlike a chair in some fundamental ways.  You can see a rainbow, but you can't touch it.  If you try to get close enough to a rainbow to touch it, the rainbow will disappear.  Rainbows are part of objective reality but they are not physical things.  Rainbows are just water droplets lit up in a very particular way.

Rainbows are not the only things that look like they might be physical objects but actually aren't.  You are probably reading this on a computer screen, which can mimic the visual appearance of just about anything.  Before computer screens there were movies, and before movies there were paintings, and after computer screens there will probably be virtual reality glasses or implants.  As technology improves, it gets harder and harder to distinguish actual physical reality from a simulation.

Aside: a while ago I got a demo of the Apple Vision Pro, which is a virtual reality headset.  While you are wearing it what you are actually looking at is a pair of tiny screens.  But there is also a camera which projects an image of whatever the headset is pointed at onto the screens.  The illusion is so compelling that during the demo I actually forgot that I was looking at a screen and became convinced that the screens were transparent, that I was actually looking through them and directly seeing the room I was in.

Which brings up an interesting question: how can you be sure that the things you perceive as actual physical objects are in fact actual physical objects and not a simulation?  How can you tell the difference between "real" objective reality and a high-quality virtual reality, one that includes all of your sensory modalities?  How can you be sure that reality is actually real and you are not just living in The Matrix?

I'll leave that as an exercise for now and proceed on the assumption that objective reality is actually real, and that part of this objective reality consists of real physical objects like chairs.  I'm going to refer to such objects as Things with a capital T.  Objective reality includes abstract things like words and ideas and sounds, and ephemeral things like rainbows and the images on computer screens.  These are lower-case-t things, but they are not upper-case-T Things.  When I refer to upper-case-T Things I mean actual physical objects made of matter.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Things is that they exhibit certain regularities in their behavior.  The most important of these is something I call the Law of Location: Things exist in particular places at particular times, and they move between different locations along continuous trajectories.  This is the thing (lower-case t) that allows us to ascribe identity to Things.  We can distinguish (say) this chair over here from that chair over there by virtue of the fact that this chair over here is, well, over here, and that chair over there is over there and not over here.  We can move the chairs so that the chair that used to be over here is now over there, but because the chair had to move in a continuous trajectory we can still meaningfully say that the chair that is now over there (after we moved it) is the same chair as it was before we moved it.

The Law of Location is so deeply ingrained into our psyches that even giving it a name seems like I'm belaboring the obvious, but there is a good reason for it: there are Things — or at least things that appear to be Things — that do not obey the Law of Location.  But again, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Instead, let's talk more about chairs.  For some reason, chairs are a favorite example among philosophers and religious apologists.  There is a thing in philosophy called the "problem of universals" which asks the question (and I'm just quoting Wikipedia here): "Should the properties an object has in common with other objects, such as color and shape, be considered to exist beyond those objects? And if a property exists separately from objects, what is the nature of that existence?"  In other words, is there such a thing as "chairness", some kind of ineffable chair-like essence which all chairs have in common?  (It sounds a little less silly if you put it in terms of other kinds of properties: is there such a thing as "redness" which all red things have in common?  Is there such a thing as "loudness" which all loud things have in common?)

But this is not about philosophy, this is about science.  Science starts not with abstract philosophical questions but rather with observations, and one of the observations we can make is that chairs are a thing, that is, people talk about chairs and they seem to be able to say coherent things about them.  But what actually is a chair?  When people talk about chairs, what are they actually talking about?

At first glance this seems like a silly question.  Everyone just knows what a chair is.  It's something like this:

But trying to get a handle on exactly what is meant by "something like this" turns out to be not so easy.  What exactly qualifies as "something like this"?  For example, is this a chair?

It is very unlike any of the chairs in the previous picture.  It doesn't have a back.  You can sit on it, but it's a weird kind of sitting where some of your weight is supported by your knees and there is no support for your back.  And what about this?

That is a photograph of a sculpture in Geneva, Switzerland called "Broken Chair".  It looks like a chair.  In fact it looks more like the chairs in the first photo than the one in the second photo does.  It has four legs (notwithstanding that one of them is broken) and a back support.  But you can't really sit on it because it is the size of a multi-story building.  So is it a chair?

And what about this:

This is a (picture of a) Thing that was once a chair, but is it still a chair?  You might actually be able to sit on it, but it only has two legs.  Does a pile of bricks holding up the other side count?  If this is a chair, are the bricks part of the chair?  They are kind of essential to the chair's function, but I think most people would say that they are not part of the chair, that they are merely holding up the chair — if indeed a chair broken to this extent still counts as a chair.

And what about this:

That has four legs and a back and it's the right size, but if you tried to sit on it you would be in for a nasty surprise.

Here is one final example.  This is pretty clearly a chair:

Specifically, it is a folding chair.  It is designed to be folded up so that it occupies less space for storage, like so: 

When a folding chair is in its folded-for-storage configuration, you can't sit on it any more.  So is it still a chair?  Most people would say yes, of course, because all you have to do to be able to sit on it is unfold it.  But the same can be said of broken chairs: all you have to do to a broken chair to be able to sit on it is repair it.  Is there a substantive difference between unfolding a chair and repairing a chair beyond the mere quantity of effort involved?  At what point does the effort required to repair a chair render a chair so broken that it is no longer a chair?

It gets worse.  Suppose we take a broken chair and repair it.  Is it still the same chair as it was before, or is it a different chair?  This question is called the "Ship of Theseus" problem because it was originally posed as a thought experiment about ships rather than chairs, but the puzzle is the same: take any Thing — a ship or a chair or whatever — and start replacing parts of it until at the end there is nothing left of the original.  Is the result the same Thing or a different Thing?

We can make this conundrum even more explicit: Take any Thing that can be disassembled into parts, and a bin of replacement parts.  We can take parts out of the bin and make a new Thing, a copy of the original, but this new Thing is clearly a different Thing because the original still exists.  Now disassemble the new Thing and use the parts to replace parts of the original one by one.  The end of that process is the exact same set of parts that comprised the new Thing that we made before, so this must also be a new Thing.  Indeed, it is the same new Thing as before.  But there is obviously no clear dividing line between when the old Thing became the new Thing.

This lack of sharp dividing lines is fundamental to the nature of Things.  It will become very relevant later when we start talking about the nature of humans and brains and minds and whether or not abortion is murder, but we are getting WAY ahead of ourselves.  For now let's get back to the fundamentals: chairs, and how they relate to the scientific method.  I want to be very explicit about what is going on at this stage in the discussion in those terms.  I am trying to explain some of my subjective experiences.  Specifically, I am trying to explain my gut feeling that the word "chairs" has a meaningful referent in objective reality, i.e. that there really are chairs "out there" in the real world.  The hypothesis under consideration is that chairs are Things, and what distinguishes chairs from non-chairs is some property — chairness — that chairs possess and non-chairs do not.  The hypothesis is that this property is, like the chair itself, part of objective reality, that it's a real thing (though obviously not a real Thing) "out there" in the world.  This position is called essentialism.

Essentialism is problematic for two reasons.  First, it turns out to be really hard to get a handle on exactly what Things are chairs (and thus possess this hypothetical "chairness" property), and second, we can change whether or not a Thing is a chair simply by moving parts of it around.  In fact, we don't even need to move parts of it around.  Imagine carving a chair out of a single (huge) block of wood.  The end result is a chair, and so would have "chairness".  But notice that the only things that moved during the carving process were the parts of the block of wood that were not part of the final chair.  The wood that makes up the chair doesn't move at all.  So where did its final "chairness" come from?  Was it there in the block of wood all along, or was it somehow imbued into the remaining wood during the carving process?

To help answer these questions let us consider a different property: redness, a hypothetical property shared by red things.  We can see that redness is different from chairness merely from the structure of the word.  The word "redness" is built out of an adjective — red — whereas "chairness" is built out of a noun, which is what makes it sound kind of funny.  There is no noun associated with redness, we have to resort to the phrase "red things", which immediately suggests another interesting puzzle: are there any red things that are not red Things?  Does a thing have to be a Thing in order to be red?  Is Santa Claus's coat a Thing?  When a pixel on your computer screen turns red, is it now a red thing?  Is it a red Thing?  The red band in a rainbow pretty clearly has redness, but is it is not a red Thing (because a rainbow is not a Thing).  But is it a red thing?

There is another difference between redness and chairness: chairness (if it actually exists) can be detected using multiple sensory modalities.  Chairs can be seen and touched, so even a blind person can (at least potentially) tell whether something is a chair.  But redness can only be seen -- it cannot be touched or heard or smelled or tasted.  So can a blind person tell if something has redness?  (Yes, they can!  Figuring out how is also left as an exercise, but here is a hint: even normally sighted people cannot see ultraviolet light.  So can normally sighted people tell if something has ultra-violetness?)

But all of this is a distraction.  My subjective perception is that chairs exist and red things exist and other humans exist and (and this is the important part) the vast majority of other humans agree on whether a thing is a chair or whether a thing is red in a huge number of cases.  How do we explain that overwhelming agreement if chairs and red-things — and hence chair-ness and redness — are not real?

Up until about 100 years ago that was still a question open to legitimate philosophical debate, but no more.  The answer is as prosaic (to a modern ear) as it is profound: In the words of Richard Feynman, matter is made of atoms, little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.  All Things are made of atoms.  But unlike chairs, there are bright lines separating different kinds of atoms.  There are exactly 92 different kinds of atoms that occur in nature, plus a few dozen more than we can produce artificially. Then there are a few variations on those basic types called "isotopes" and "ions", but that's it.  Every Thing that you see is made up of some repertoire of those 92 different kinds of atoms.  What we call "chairs" and "tables" and "red things" are nothing more than different arrangements of these 92 different kinds of atoms.

I don't expect you to take my word for this.  I don't even expect you to take Richard Feynman's word for it.  At this point I am advancing this idea in the same spirit as it was advanced in the 19th century when the idea was still controversial: as a hypothesis.  My burden is to convince you that this hypothesis is better than the essentialist hypothesis, that it is a better explanation for what you observe.  And I have to do this without simply saying, "That's what science says" because that would just be begging the question.

That is what I intend to do in the next installment.  But in the meantime I am going to make a prediction: I don't actually have to convince you that matter is made of atoms.  I'm pretty sure you already believe it.  In fact, I'm pretty sure that your belief is so strong that the mere suggestion that this is a hypothesis that is open to question strikes you as absurd.  Of course matter is made of atoms!  Everyone knows that!

If you don't already believe this, if you are an anti-atomist living in the 21st century, please let me know in the comments.  I would really like to learn how you came to question this.

Field report from Maui

Ulua beach, Wailea-Makena, Maui, before the storm: 

and after:

 

We interrupt this post series to bring you an important weather update

Those of you who watched my debate will know that I was in Hawaii at the time.  Well, I'm still here.  I have no idea if this is making news on the mainland, but Hawaii has just gone through two days of one of the most intense Kona storms in many years.  I have never in my life seen rain this hard go on for so long.  The condo that we are in was not designed for this.  There is a large sliding glass door which is wonderful in sunny weather, but the wind-driven rain was hitting it like a fire hose and driving water underneath the door and into the condo.  And it did this for hours and hours and hours, not continuously, but in wave after wave after wave of pouring rain.  At one point I went outside to try to lay down some towels on the outside of the door to be a barrier against the wind-driven rain and I got completely soaking wet in a matter of seconds.  We did our best to hold back the ride (literally!) with all the towels that we had but it wasn't enough and we ended up with about an inch of water inside.  Fortunately, the cavalry eventually arrived in the form of the condo staff with big plastic bags full of clean towels and they got everything cleaned up.  I eventually figured out how to use one of the plastic floor runners as a makeshift dike outside the sliding door to keep the water from coming in, and since then we haven't had water on the floor, though there is water coming in on some of the walls and making the paint blister.  The main road through the nearby town of Kihei has been washed out, as has much of the nearby beach.  100,000 people are without power across the state (happily our power has stayed on).  It's a horrible mess, though the locals seem to be dealing with it courageously.

If you've been wondering why I haven't been blogging these past few days, that's why.  Trying to stop water from infiltrating your shelter gets a wee bit stressful after doing it more or less non stop for two days.  Things seem to be finally quieting down now, and the forecast is for the storm to finally pass overnight so maybe tomorrow I'll get something done.

Debate Post-Mortem

Last Saturday I did my first on-line debate in four years with a YouTuber who goes by the handle MadeByJimBob (who I will refer to simply as JB since JimBob is not actually his real name and MadeByJimBob is just too long).  The topic was "Is Evolution a Reasonable Position?"  The topic was originally going to be "Evolution on Trial" but I pushed back on that for two reasons.  First, that title had the tacit implication that evolution has been accused of a crime, and second, that the actual substance of the debate would be whether or not evolution is true.  I believe it is true, but I'm not a biologist, so I'm not qualified to defend its truth.  The best I can do is defer to the experts.  What I was willing to do was argue for why I think it is reasonable to defer to the experts in this case.

I can save you the trouble of watching the debate by telling you that JB was constantly interrupting me and, hypocritically, petulantly whining whenever I interrupted him in return.  I didn't want the debate to turn into a shouting match, so I just tried to explain that the questions he was asking could not be answered in a six-word sound bite, and if he actually wanted to hear the answers he would have to stop interrupting me while I was trying to give them to him, but it didn't help much.  So there wasn't much substance.  It was mainly JB asking me questions, interrupting me when I tried to answer, and then shaking his head and condescendingly repeating my name over and over and over.  In his world I guess talking over your opponent counts as a win.

There are two things I could have done better.  One was to put more emphasis on the distinction between defending evolution as a reasonable belief and defending it as the truth.  These are not the same.  There are times when it is reasonable to believe things that aren't true.  The best example of this is the belief that gravity is a force that pulls objects towards the surface of the earth.  That is false, but nonetheless reasonable.

The second thing I should have been better prepared for was to explain why my deference to biologists was not an example of the appeal-to-authority fallacy.  Appeal-to-authority can be fallacious, but it is not necessarily so.  Distinguishing fallacious from non-fallacious appeals to authority is a little tricky, but the best way to do it is to go back to the core tenet of the scientific method: find the best explanation that accounts for all of your observations.  In this case, my observations include the uncontested fact that there are over 100,000 biologists in the U.S. alone, and an overwhelming majority (like 99%) of them agree that evolution is true, which is to say, that all of the diversity of life on earth can be accounted for by naturalistic processes, specifically, random variation and natural selection from a single universal common ancestor.  We can also observe that this community produces a lot of useful products, like antibiotics and vaccines, which is best explained by the hypothesis that they have some contact with reality.

Against this we have a community of creationists who insist that life descended from more than one "kind" but who cannot agree on how many different "kinds" there are.  And it's even worse than that.  It's not that there is an actual dispute over what the number is, it's that none of them will even offer a guess as to what the number is.  [UPDATE: turns out that is not true.]  On top of that, this community has never produced anything of value.  Given all that, it's reasonable for an amateur like me to defer to the judgement of biologists.  They may be wrong, but there is quite a bit of evidence that they are closer to the truth than creationists are.

I was taken aback, however, by a critique from another redditor who goes by DarwinZDF42.  [NOTE: I previously said that this person was Dave Farina a.k.a. Professor Dave.  I got this wrong. DarwinZDF42 is actually someone else.  I apologize to Professor Dave.]

Now, I am about to publicly shame DarwinZDF42.  This is something I hardly ever do.  I don't generally think it's constructive to publicly shame individuals.  And I tried to explain to him in the relative privacy of the creation subreddit why he was wrong, but his response was so dismissive and, frankly, obnoxious that I feel this is warranted.  DarwinZDF42 holds himself out as an expert in public, and so I think it is justified to call out his manifest ignorance in public.

The issue at hand is a question I was asked during the Q&A of the debate: what would falsify evolution?  It's a fair question.  One of the classic criteria for a hypothesis to even be considered as a valid scientific explanation is for it to be falsifiable.  The glib answer of "rabbits in the precambrian" refers to an alleged but unconfirmed quote from legendary biologist J.B.S. Haldane as an answer to that question.  Because there is no original source for the quote, there is no way to put it in context, and so we have to make an educated guess as to what it actually means.  And my educated guess is that it means: if we were to find a rabbit in the precambrian era, that would falsify evolution.

That is wrong.  To see that it is wrong, imagine that I went to DarwinZDF42 and told him that I had found a rabbit in the precambrian era.  What do you think his response would be?  Would he immediately concede that evolution has been falsified, or would he be more likely to tell me that I am full of shit, that there is absolutely no way that there could possibly be rabbits in the precambrian, and so I must be wrong?

Now, on this point I would actually agree with DarwinZDF42.  That would be my reaction to someone making this claim.  It is overwhelmingly likely that the person making the claim is lying or has been deceived, and whatever evidence they think they have that there were rabbits in the precambrian almost certainly has a much more prosaic explanation.  But that is irrelevant to the question of whether this would actually falsify evolution.  To answer that question we have to suspend disbelief and consider a counterfactual world where there is actually persuasive evidence of rabbits in the precambrian.  Would that falsify evolution?

No, it would not (though there is a very small caveat which I will get to in a moment).

To understand why, and to understand the "small caveat", I have to start by pointing out that the word "evolution" actually refers to two different (though related) theories.  The first consists of the following general observations:

1.  There are things in nature that make copies of themselves, i.e. replicators exist.

2.  The copies that replicators make are not always perfect.  There is variation.

3.  Some variants of replicators are better at making copies than others.

4.  Which variants are better at making copies depends to some extent on the environment the replicator finds itself in and the variants it has to compete with.

5.  There is a large variety of different environments on earth, and so you naturally get a large variety of replicators.

Those observations lead to a conjecture: that 1-5 are a sufficient explanation to account for all of the variety of life on earth, and that it all descended from a single common ancestor.  No designer is necessary.

Notice that all of this seems plausible even before we look at any actual data.  As framed above, it is a theory that does not require any fossils or trips to the Galapagos.  Democritus could have come up with it.  (In fact, had Democritus actually considered this problem, he may well have even predicted the existence of cells the same way that he predicted the existence of atoms!)

The second thing referred to by "evolution" is a very detailed historical reconstruction of how the current repertoire of life on earth actually arose.  That, of course, is impossible without actual data, and it is bound to be complex, messy, and incomplete, constantly being refined and revised as new data comes in.  Until we have unearthed the last fossil on the planet, this will be a work in progress.

A cornerstone of this historical reconstruction is the so-called Cambrian explosion, a period of very rapid creation of new species.  The Cambrian explosion began about 540 million years ago (MYA) and was followed by the Devonian period (420 MYA) when the first land animals appeared, the Mesozoic (256 MYA) a.k.a. the dinosaur era, and the Paleogene (66 MYA) when the dinosaurs got wiped out and opened the door for mammals to become the dominant land animals.  The earliest known rabbits appeared about 55 MYA.  (And of course all of this is an extreme oversimplification.  There is a reason people make their living studying this stuff.)

So finding a rabbit in the precambrian would certainly be remarkable.  It would be out of place by a few hundred million years, which would surely cause a major upheaval and revision of the currently accepted timeline.  It would probably be the biggest such revision ever.  But would it falsify evolution?  Would it cause the scientific consensus to suddenly accept young-earth creationism?

Almost certainly not.  I can think of many more plausible explanations.  A hoax.  A local event that somehow transported a rabbit fossil into a precambrian geological layer.  A previously unknown geological phenomenon that somehow produced something that looks like a rabbit fossil but actually isn't.  Or even an entirely new and previously unknown period in earth's evolutionary history, the evidence of which is mostly lost to subduction.

Note that that last possibility could plausibly be considered "falsifying evolution" but only in a very narrow sense.  It would falsify part of the current reconstruction of earth's past.  A big part to be sure, but still, only part.  But it would not falsify the central tenet of evolution, that all of life can be accounted for by naturalistic processes proceeding from a single universal common ancestor.  Which is to say, it would (almost certainly) not falsify evolution in the sense intended by the person who asked the question.

So to the question of what would falsify evolution, the glib response "rabbits in the precambrian" is at best just barely defensible, and at worst flat-out wrong (which is one reason to doubt that Haldane ever actually said it, or if he did say it, that he actually meant it, because he was probably smarter than that).  Under no circumstances is it justifiable to berate someone for failing to offer it in response.  That is wrong on so many levels.  Even if rabbits-in-the-precambrian were defensible, there is no excuse for someone who holds themselves out as a science educator to use the condescending and dismissive tone that DarwinZDF42 used with me.  That is never the way to win hearts and minds.  With people like DarwinZDF42 on our side, it's little wonder that the war on misinformation is being lost.

Seeking God in Science part 3: Things Exist

The mere undertaking of this project of reconciling the mechanistic and teleological worldviews is already chock-a-block with tacit assumptions.  I am assuming that you, my readers, actually exist.  I am rejecting solipsism.  By choosing writing as my medium I am assuming that you know how to read and that you understand English.  But publishing on-line I am assuming that you have access to computers and the internet.  These seem like pretty innocuous assumptions, but those last two assumptions would (again, obviously) not have been true 100 years ago.  At that time, the word "computer" existed, but it was a job title, not a kind of machine.  In fact, 100 years ago, in 1926, the whole idea that a machine could do what a computer does would have been widely considered a ridiculous notion.  It would not be for another ten years that Alan Turing would first lay down the theoretical foundations that showed how a machine could do what a computer did.

There are a lot of things that modern humans take for granted that would have been considered utterly absurd just a few generations ago.  There are things at the cutting edge of science that seem absurd to us today, but which will probably be considered obvious by future generations.

How can we explain this fluidity in what is considered "obviously true" from one generation to the next?  One possibility is that reality is actually changing.  Maybe Newton's discovery of the laws of gravity is actually what created gravity.  How could we possibly prove otherwise?  There actually is an answer to that question, but I want to set that aside (consider it an exercise) and instead just accept it on faith for now that there is some kind of unchanging underlying reality "out there" and that the changes in what is considered "obviously true" between generations reflects changes in our understanding of that objective reality rather than actual changes in that objective reality itself.  But put a pin in this assumption because later we will have to circle back and discharge it.

The question I want to ask here is, if reality is unchanging, how is it possible for our understanding of it to change so radically?  Why are so many things that are obviously true for us so obviously false for our ancestors?  Again, one possible answer is that our ancestors were just stupid, but that also cries out for an explanation that is not forthcoming: what happened to make our generation so much smarter than previous ones?  Providing a proper answer to this question is a deep, deep rabbit hole that I don't want to go down right now, so again I'm just going to ask you to take it on faith for now that our ancestors were not stupid, and that the answer to the question of how they got things wrong is that they simply didn't have access to the data that we have access to today because of technological limitations of their era.  Today we have the James Web space telescope.  500 years ago they had their naked eyes.

Also, 500 years ago, the mechanistic and teleological worldviews had not yet diverged.  It was obvious that there was a supernatural realm.  It was obvious that the heavens were governed by very different laws than applied here on earth.  It was obvious that there were deities of various stripes that meddled in the affairs of men and had to be appeased by worship and sacrifice.  The idea that, say, the heavens were governed by the same laws that applied here on earth would have gotten you laughed out the room at best, labeled as mentally defective at worst.  All you had to do to see that this was a ridiculous notion was to observe that the moon and stars were somehow suspended above the earth with no visible means of support and shone with eternal fire without any apparent source of fuel.  Of course there was something radically different going on up there than down here.

All that changed in 1687 when Isaac Newton published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy).  In it he showed that the heavens actually are governed by the same laws that apply here on earth.  The moon actually does fall towards the earth (but it also moves sideways just fast enough that it keeps missing the earth).

Today most people take this for granted.  There are still some gravity-deniers a.k.a. flat-earthers, and they will actually come back to play a significant role in this story, but that is also something I want to set aside for now.  (BTW, if any of you reading this are flat-earthers please let me know!)

Principia is widely considered to be the advent of modern science, what ultimately turned out to be the leading edge of the wedge between mechanism and teleology.  Newton didn't know this.  In fact, he would have been appalled to learn that this was his legacy.  Newton, like virtually everyone in Europe at the time, was a devout Christian, and he thought he was working to glorify God by discovering the secrets of His handwork.  Newton surely would have been horrified to see that what he ultimately accomplished was the ushering in of the (so-called) Enlightenment 

But my point here is not to speculate about Newton's cognitive dissonance.  My point is that things modern people, both religious and not, take for granted today were considered self-evidently absurd less than 400 years ago.  And it's not just the idea that the moon and sun and stars are made of the same stuff that we are.

Richard Feynman in 1964 opened his famous Lectures on Physics with this quote:

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.

One of the reasons Feynman chose the atomic theory is because at the time, in 1964, that theory had only recently been accepted after a scientific debate that lasted over two thousand years.  The earliest speculation that atoms might exist dates back to an ancient Greek philosopher named Democritus.  Democritus has no actual evidence for the existence of atoms.  It was just a guess on this part.  It turned out to be correct, but it took over 2000 years for the matter to be definitively settled, and it took no less a luminary that Albert Einstein to provide the argument that finally convinced the scientific community.

Today we are at the midst of two similar radical conceptual revolutions regarding quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence.  It is just obvious that there is something special about human brains, and yet the list of things that we can do that machines can't gets shorter by the day.  It is just obvious that a cat in a box is either alive or dead, and yet quantum effects are being demonstrated on larger and larger objects.  Still nowhere near an actual cat, of course, but an experimental demonstration of where quantum effects actually stop happening remains elusive.

Just because something is obvious does not mean that it is actually true.  And it gets even crazier than that.  It can be the case that a statement like "X is true" to be legitimately considered true even though X is actually false!  An example of this is, "Gravity is a force that pulls objects towards the center of the earth."  Strictly speaking, that is false.  Gravity is not a force.  What actually causes object to fall towards the center of the earth is curved spacetime.  But pointing this out seems absurdly pedantic in any context other than a physics class.

The problem runs much, much deeper than that.  Consider "the earth is flat."  This is often taken as the canonical example of a false statement, but even that assessment is laden with tacit assumptions.  What does "flat" actually mean?  It can't possibly mean perfectly flat like the surface of a mirror because obviously there are mountains and valleys which deviate from flat by thousands of meters.  "Not flat" doesn't mean "not lumpy", it means "curved".  More to the point, it means (roughly) spherical.  But the difference between spherical and flat is just the difference between a finite radius and an infinite one.  The actual radius of the earth is about 4000 miles, which is pretty big on a human scale.  To actually notice the difference between 4000 miles and an infinite radius that is bigger than the inherent lumpiness of mountains and valleys requires that you make measurements that span hundreds or even thousands of miles.  If all you care about is you immediate vicinity, being flat is a pretty good approximation to the truth.

So is there anything we can say that all non-mentally-ill humans, including the pedantic ones, will agree on?  It depends on how much pedantry you are willing to tolerate, but here is my best shot:

Things exist.

To hopefully head the pedants off at the pass I want to stipulate that when I say "things" I mean physical objects like chairs and tables and cows and human beings.  I am not taking a stand on what it actually means for a thing to be a "physical object" or for it to "exist", only that the words "things exist" denotes an idea that is a plausible explanation for my subjective experience that things seem to exist.  I can see and touch chairs and tables and cows and other human beings (OK, I confess, I have never actually touched a cow, but I have seen and heard and smelled them.)  I've heard other people profess to be able to see and touch chairs and tables and other people.  The milk in my grocery store comes from somewhere.  I'm told it comes from cows, and I have no reason to doubt this.

Again, I want to be clear that I am not arguing that it is a slam-dunk that milk comes from cows, only that it is plausible, because it is plausible that cows actually exist and that they and the milk on my grocery store shelves are not just a collective delusion.  There are things whose existence is highly debatable, like bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster.  It might turn out that these don't exist (I think that's quite likely).  It might turn out that cows and chairs and tables don't exist (less likely).  But it is plausible that they do exist, and anyone who argues that none of these things exist (for some reasonable interpretation of the word "exist") can be dismissed out of hand.

That's it.  That is going to be my starting assumption.  Not to leave you in suspense, here is a ridiculously oversimplified version of where this is going to lead.  It will turn out that things that exist are made of parts called "atoms" which come in 92 naturally occurring varieties.  Atoms are in turn made up of smaller parts called electrons, neutrons, and protons (and a few other things which can be safely ignore for our purposes).  Electrons and protons have a property called "electric charge" which causes them to push and pull on each other from a distance.  In addition, there is this thing called "gravity" which causes things to pull (only pull, not push) on each other from a distance.  And all of this pushing and pulling can explain a lot of the things we observe.

The $64,000 question will, of course, be: can this pushing and pulling explain everything we observe?  In particular, can it explain things like life, the origin of the universe, emotions, morality, and consciousness?  The answer will turn out to be "yes.... but".  The "but" will turn out to be a fundamentally different understanding of what it means for things to exist, so our foundational assumption will ultimately circle back to bite itself in the ass, so to speak, when we get to quantum mechanics.  (This is what makes quantum mechanics weird.)

The other Big Question will turn out to be: can we accept the truth of mere pushing and pulling being able to explain everything without sinking into a nihilistic pit of despair?  If all we are, at root, is electrons and protons pushing and pulling on each other, what is the point?  Is there a reason to get up in the morning?  Here again, the answer will turn out to be "yes", this time without a "but".

This is one of the most challenging blog posts I have ever written.  Grappling with the problem of the ambiguity of words using words as my only tool turns out to be quite the little challenge.  I've been wrestling with it for over a week now, and discarded at least half a dozen drafts.  I decided today to just bully on through and publish whatever I ended up with when I ran out of steam.  This is the product of that resolution.  If this post felt like a garbled mess, that's why.

Another reason for publishing this now is that I have signed up to participate in a debate on evolution this Saturday, Feb 28, at 9PM Eastern time on Modern Day Debate, and I need to take some time to prepare for that.  So I won't be publishing anything else here until after that.

Seeking God in Science Part 2: Pits and Pratfalls in the Meanings of Words

About ten years ago I decided to take a deep dive into young-earth creationism (YEC).  I was curious to find out how people maintain a belief in something that, to me, was so obviously wrong.  Notice that this project was itself an application of the the scientific method to everyday life.  I was faced with a Problem, an observation for which I could not (at the time) provide an adequate explanation: a fairly large group of people who professed to believe something that seemed like transparent and easily debunked nonsense to me.  If the YEC hypothesis were so easily debunked, why had no one simply provided the definitive debunking that would persuade everyone that it was nonsense?

So I decided to do an experiment and produce the Definitive Debunking of young-earth creationism myself.  How hard could it be?  The YEC hypothesis is so radically at odds with the data that there are mountains of evidence against it.  All I had to do was pick a few choice data points, assemble them into a slick YouTube video, and all the YECs would behold and be amazed at my erudition, and immediately see the light.

Needless to say, that did not happen.

The first problem I ran into was one I mentioned in the previous installment: direct access to scientific data is very hard to obtain, even for scientists.  Nearly all scientific data is published, if not actually in the form of testimony (a.k.a. a scientific paper), then at least with some kind of testimonial baggage attached regarding its provenance: how the data was collected, whether or not it has been processed or edited in any way, whether the proper procedures were followed to calibrate the instruments and insure that the reagents all had the right concentrations, or whatever.  And one common thread among YECs is that they did not (and do not) trust scientists.  YECs believe that there is a wide-ranging scientific conspiracy to promote Darwinism and conceal the truth, which is that God created the world in seven days, that Noah's ark really existed, and so on.

How do you persuade someone like that?  Distrust in the scientific establishment eliminated at a stroke 99% of the arguments I might have offered.  I had to come up with a way to demonstrate that the earth was old using only data to which people could have direct access, and that turned out to be quite the challenge.  If you are not a YEC you might want to tackle this yourself.  It's even more challenging than showing that the earth is not flat without any appeal to testimony or authority.

You can judge the results of my efforts yourself, but the details don't really matter all that much. The unsurprising result that my argument failed to persuade anyone doesn't really matter all that much either.  What matters is why my argument failed to persuade.  There turned out to be two reasons, one superficial ostensible reason, and a much deeper real reason.

The superficial ostensible reason was that my argument relied on the assumption that geological processes in the past operated more or less the way they do now.  That seemed (and still seems) like a reasonable assumption to me, but it was an assumption, and I didn't justify it.  It didn't even cross my mind at the time.  It just seemed obvious to me that it was true, and equally obvious that it would seem obvious to everyone.  Which was, obviously, wrong.

But the deeper reason that my argument failed to persuade was that it was based on a much deeper false assumption: that a YEC's subjective experience of scientific data is the same as mine and that, therefore, any argument that would persuade me would persuade them if properly presented.  It turns out (and it took me a few years to figure this out) that the divergence between my mindset and a YEC happens long before either one of us actually looks at any scientific data, even before we become aware of the existence of such things as science or data.  It probably happened before we learned to read, or even speak.

As humans, there are two fundamentally different ways we can approach the project of making sense of our subjective experience.  The first is to ask: how does this work?  As babies we flail around randomly for along time until one day we manage to figure out that there seem to be causal connections between things happening inside of us and things happening outside.  If we make certain noises, or flail around in particular ways, good things happen, and if we make different noises or flail around in other ways, bad things happen.  Eventually we get to the point where we are in a position to wonder explicitly about what the fuck is going on, at which point we can ask one of two fundamental questions.  The first is: how does all this stuff work?  What are the rules or the mechanisms that control the behavior of the things around me?  The second is: why is all this stuff happening?  What is the point?

The first question leads to science; the second, to religion.

Note that each of these questions makes a different, tacit assumption.  The first question assumes that there are rules that govern the behavior of the things around us, and the second question assumes that there is a point.  Making the first assumption turns out to be fruitful because it turns out that there are in fact rules, and, fortuitously, that these rules are discoverable and tractable even to our puny little brains, and putting effort into figuring out what the rules are pays handsome dividends.  But it leads to a problem: the more we understand the rules, the more it seems like there is no point, no satisfying answer to the question of why.  And many people find that a bitter pill to swallow.

But here's the thing that many secular people don't appreciate.  I know I didn't.  Asking the second question is also fruitful, but in a very different way.  If you start with the assumption that there is a point, then you can find a lot of corroborating evidence for that.  Now, no religious person would put it like that.  They would use different words, words like, "You have to open your heart to God" or something like that.  But it turns out that what those words mean is more or less the same.  In order to find the point, you have to first accept the possibility that there could be one.  If you have spent a lifetime in pursuit, not of the point, but of the rules, and the rules indicate that there is no point, then it's going to be very, very hard for you to ever see the point.

This thing that I am calling "the point" is actually called "purpose" or "teleology".  I intend for these words to all be synonyms.  I'm going to keep calling it "the point" just because I think it's a little pithier.  But whenever I say "the point" what I mean is "purpose" or "the meaning of life" or "teleology" or whatever your favorite label is for this somewhat ineffable concept.  (I will sometimes refer to these as the "teleological worldview" and the contrasting "mechanistic worldview".)

Now, a secular person may say that it's perfectly OK not to ever see the point if in fact there is no point.  But it is not perfectly OK.  If the reason that you fail to see the point is that you were asking the wrong questions, then this might blind you to an actual truth, and this might cause you to fail to achieve some pretty big goals.  If the reason you fail to see the point is that the assumption that there is no point was tacitly assumed by your foundational question, then your conclusion that there is no point is not a sound logical conclusion.  It is begging the question.

There is another problem with simply accepting the apparently-true conclusion that there is no point.  It fails to account for some of the data, which is that part of many people's subjective experience is a deeply-rooted conviction that there must be a point.  For many people, this subjective experience is every bit as real as the subjective experience of stubbing your toe on a rock.  Even if you yourself do not accept it, surely you can understand how someone can look around them at all the beauty and the ugliness and the striving and the struggling and the suffering and come away with the conviction that there just has to be something more going on behind the scenes, that all this cannot just ultimately come down to a roll of some cosmic dice.  It cannot just be that life-sucks-and-then-you-die-the-end.  Giving this widely-held conviction some respect as a possible indicator of an actual phenomenon (rather than writing it off as a collective delusion) is analogous to someone in the ancient world looking at the retrograde motion of Mars and thinking that, just maybe, there is something more to that than just the gods pushing it around capriciously.

Can we reconcile these two world views?  Yes, I believe we can, but it's not easy because the divergence happens long before any argument can even begin.  Humans start to wonder, "How does it work?" or "What is the point?" long before they learn how to render those wonderings into words.  By the time a person gets to the point where they have enough command of language to even begin to engage in a discussion about such things, they have almost certainly already travelled a long way down one or the other of these philosophical roads.  As a result, when discussing such things people often talk past each other, believing falsely that they share a set of tacit foundational assumptions, including the meanings of words like "point" and "purpose" and "meaning" and "good" and "exist" and, the elephant in the room, "God."  A lot of disagreements I see between secular and religious people boil down to misunderstandings over the meanings of words.

So in order for this project to have any hope of success we have to start by finding some common ground between the mechanistic and the teleological worldview to serve as a starting point.  As I just pointed out, this is quite challenging because these worldview start to diverge even before humans acquire a facility for language.  How can we reach agreement about whether or not God exists if we can't even be sure we agree on what the words "God" and "exist" mean?

Despite these deep-seated differences, there are some things that (according to my subjective experience) humans almost universally agree on, starting with the fact that we are humans.  We have bodies made of flesh and bone and blood.  We are born, we live, we die.  We have arms and legs and eyes and ears and brains.  We live on a planet we call Earth that is inhabited by things that are not humans, like animals and plants and rocks.  All of these things exist in three-dimensional space, and behave according to a set of rules.  I may not know exactly what these rules are, but it's pretty clear that there are rules.  For example, objects move along continuous trajectories.  They do not suddenly disappear from one place and reappear someplace else.  Sometimes these rules appear to be broken, but on closer examination it always turns out that this apparent breaking of the rules is some kind of illusion, sometimes accidental, but sometimes created deliberately for the purpose of entertainment.

There are some other aspects of my subjective experience that seem to be shared by other humans.  For example, I sleep, and sometimes when I sleep, I dream, and usually when I am dreaming I am not aware that I'm dreaming.  While they are happening, dreams feel every bit as real to me as being awake.  It is only after I wake up that I look back and realize that what I experienced was not real, or at least, a very different kind of reality than the one I experience when I'm awake.  In my dreams, objects do spontaneously appear and disappear.  Monsters appear out of nowhere.  All kinds of weird shit happens regularly in my dreams that never happens when I'm awake.

Dreams are different than my waking experience.  When I'm awake, I have a lot of evidence that the things I perceive are actually real.  I can see things.  I can touch them.  I can take photographs of them.  Other people behave as if they can see and touch the same things that I can see and touch.  The most parsimonious explanation of all of these observations is that these things are actually real, that there is an objective reality "out there" and distinct from me.

But not all of my subjective experience is like that.  For example, my dreams are purely private.  No one experiences them but me.  No one else has ever reported experiencing the same dream as me.  There are some common themes (like monsters appearing out of nowhere) but the details are always different.

There are other subjective experiences that I have that appear to be private in this way even when I'm awake.  For example, I feel emotions like happiness, sadness, fear, love.  Other people report feeling these too, but I can't verify this in the same way that I can verify the existence of material objects.  I can't demonstrate to you that I am happy or sad or afraid.  You might be able to guess based on how I behave, but it's hard.  If I say, "There is a chair over there" you can verify that I am telling you the truth by looking over there to see if there is a chair or not.  But if I say, "I love you" or "I think you're beautiful" it's much harder to tell if I'm being truthful or not.  Sometimes it's hard for me to tell!  Is this feeling that I'm feeling really love, or just lust?  What even is love?

These kinds of private experiences are actually a huge part of my subjective sensations, and the span a very wide range of feelings: joy, despair, fear, love, loathing, passion, and a host of others.  The difference, the thing that makes the private experiences private, is that I can build a machine that can see and feel a chair.  I can't build a machine that experiences joy.

So how can I know that what I mean when I say the word "joy" is the same thing that you mean when you use the same word?

There is no simple answer to that question.  There is a complicated one, but that is beside the point at the moment.  The point is that English speakers invariably behave as if they accept that the word "joy" means the same to their interlocutors as it does to them.  They just assume that the question has an answer despite not having a clue what that answer actually is.  And they do the same thing with words like "God" and "exist" and "forever" and so on.  And that gets them into trouble.

Now, recall the Zeno's paradox puzzle from the end of the previous installment.  It began:

Imagine you have a series of ordered tasks that you have to complete.  Before you can start the second task you have to complete the first one.  Before you can start the third, you have to complete the second, and so on.  It is self-evident that in order to complete all of the tasks, you have to complete the last task.

Notice that at this point I have said nothing about how many tasks there are.  In particular, I have not mentioned the possibility that the list of tasks could be infinite.  Humans are not used to dealing with infinite things.  By default, when we envision a "list of tasks" we naturally think of a finite list, a list of things we could potentially write down on a sheet of paper.  And for a finite list of ordered tasks it is indeed true that to complete all of the tasks you have to complete the last one.

But then I pull a fast one in the next paragraph:

Now consider the task of moving from point A to point B some distance apart.  This task can be decomposed into sub-tasks.  In order to move from A to B you first have to move half-way from A to B.  Then you have to move from the half-way point to a point that is three-quarters of the way from A to B, and so on.

Did you see the trick?  It's in the words "and so on."  With those three simple words I have made the list of tasks infinite, and an infinite list of tasks has no last task.

Is it still true that to complete an infinite list of tasks it is necessary to complete the last task?  Well, maybe.  There are certainly some infinite lists of tasks for which this is true.  For example, if I were to ask you to move to A to B, and then back to A, and then back to B again, and so on, that would also be an infinite sequence of tasks, and there it is indeed impossible to complete all of the tasks (at least for a mortal being like you).  But moving from A to B once is obviously possible.  So what is the difference?

The trick is to notice that completing the last task is not the only way to describe how to complete a list of tasks.  The other way to complete all of the tasks is to complete every task.  And for the sub-tasks of moving (once) from A to B, you can complete every task despite the fact that you can't complete the last one (because there is no last one).

In modern mathematical parlance we would say that it is possible to produce a one-to-one correspondence between the infinite sequence of sub-tasks of moving from A to B, and a finite interval of time.  Yes, there is an infinite sequence of tasks, but for any one of them I can tell you exactly when it will be complete, and for every task, the completion time will be less than some finite time.  This is possible because, although the list of tasks is getting longer and longer, the tasks themselves are getting shorter and shorter, and the rate at which the tasks are getting shorter undoes the effect of the list getting longer and longer.

The point here is not to force you to relive your high school algebra nightmares about the mathematical properties of infinite sequences.  The point is that Zeno's paradox is not a deep philosophical insight, it is a linguistic trick.  It sets up the problem using words that lull you into thinking about finite sequences, then pulls the rug out from under you by making you think about infinite sequences in the same terms as you were thinking about finite ones.

A lot of religious rhetoric uses similar linguistic tricks.  Consider Genesis 1:3 "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."  What does the word "said" mean here?  Does it literally mean that God spoke, i.e. expelled air through his lungs to vibrate his vocal cords to produce sounds?  It seems a little absurd, right?  Does God even have lungs?  I mean, humans were created in God's image, so it's not completely out of the question, but it seems more than a little odd and pedestrian for God to make light by literally casting a Lumos spell, no?

If we can get ourselves into this much trouble with the words "last task" and "said" imagine the damage we can do with things like "essential nature" and "the word became flesh".  In order to avoid fooling ourselves the way Zeno's paradox did, we shall have to proceed with the most extreme caution.