Francis Mont's Blog, page 6

Science and religion

Since it's easter holiday, I thought I should add my 2-cents worth to the thoughts whirling around on the subject. So here is the full chapter I wrote in my "Humane Physics" book on the topic.

"Science and Religion

We have seen how science attempts to acquire knowledge. It is a long established method that has produced tangible results: our lives depend on it every day.

When we talk about religion, first we have to ask: which religion? There have been hundreds in human history and countless people believed in each of them, convinced that their religion was the only true one and all the others were deluded. Just Google “World Religions” for a sample of dozens still practiced today by millions to billions.

I used to participate in internet forums for the discussion of scientific and philosophical ideas. On one of these forums I posted the following question:

“Would you have imagined a god if you had never heard of the concept?”

"Suppose, for argument's sake, that you grew up in a world where nobody ever talked about gods or supernatural of any kind. Suppose you had a totally secular education: you learned about nature, physics, scientific facts, technology, productive skills, social organization, project management, etc. No priests, no churches, no bibles, no superstition, no Santa Clauses, no tooth fairies - nothing but observable reality. Would you have ever thought of anything outside this? What, if anything, would have made you think that there might be something outside of your experience?"

The point I was trying to make is that ALL of our ‘knowledge’ concerning religious assertions were handed down to us by our cultures. None of us discovered it from personal experience. This question made many forum members think hard, asking themselves the same question: “What do I know from first-hand experience and what have I accepted from others, without really examining how they acquired that ‘knowledge’?”

You might be tempted to say that the same is true for science: after all, we learn it from textbooks written by others. However, there is a difference. We can find out how the authors made their discoveries, based on what experiments, and how they reached their conclusions. Interested amateurs can reproduce the simpler experiments themselves, at least in the domain of Classical Physics. You need not take anything on faith.

Obviously, there are historical reasons why religions were invented in the first place, thousands of years ago. Otherwise they would not exist today. However, religions were established before we had proper science as an alternative and superior way to explain the universe.

The reason science has not replaced religion in so many minds is that people often lie, are often deluded and, the saddest fact of all, they often use psychological manipulation to achieve their aims: wealth or power over other people. Religions have been used for both over the millennia. Many bloody wars were fought using religion as an excuse.

In view of this, how much should we trust religious assertions, handed down to us over history? Wouldn’t it be safer to rely on our own observations and our own minds? Scientific thinking offers exactly that.

I was once asked whether I ‘believed in’ electrons. My answer was: I don’t need to believe in electrons, because I have personally conducted experiments that proved to me that material particles with a definite mass, charge and spin exist, even if I can’t see them. I don’t believe – I know.

The other argument I often hear is based on lack of imagination. It goes like this: “How can you imagine that a world as complex and as perfectly interacting as ours, has evolved by chance? There had to be a creator”.

And, of course, this reply begs the question. If the world was created by a creator, then the creator had to be at least as complex as its creation. Then, using the same argument, the creator had to have a creator, so who created the creator?

The usual answer is: the creator has always existed, it was not created. Then, the question is: if we can assume that something complex and powerful always existed, then why can’t we just assume that the universe has always existed, without a creator? Whichever way we look at religion, we either run into contradictions or find ourselves inventing arbitrary and totally unnecessary concepts.

Science saves you from all these problems: it is simple, logical, available to everyone who wants to find out. You don’t have to take it on faith.

Bottom line: am I an atheist? If the word ‘atheist’ means that I am absolutely certain, beyond even a shadow of a doubt that there is no such thing as a ‘god’, then I am not an atheist. No self-respecting scientist can be 100% certain of anything in the universe. Only probabilities exist in science and I admit, for lack of evidence to the contrary, that I assign an extremely low probability to the idea of a creator.

However, nothing is proven one way or another. Yes, the universe could have been created by a god or any number of gods. Life and evolution could have been started on Earth by an alien culture of superhuman power and we would not know anything about it.

However, all the established religions with which I am familiar are so obviously man-made that I find it difficult to believe that anyone could take any of them seriously. Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu said: “If triangles had a god, he would have three sides”.
"

Fight against hopelessness

I have recently reviewed a book on historical fight for women's suffrage. The book is a shot in the arm for people being relentlessly assaulted by the new tide of intolerance, mysogyny, racism sweeping over the planet. Another domino fell in Canada last night in a provincial election that replaced a progressive socialist-leaning government with a conservative leader with white supremacist associations. All this could and might discourage the decent, intelligent voters to give up and throw their hands up in the air.

In my blog entry "To vote or not to vote?" I wrote: "I went to vote for one simple reason: the bastards I hated so much, busy destroying my world, wouldn't want me to, so I had to stick it to them by my one, futile gesture of defiance. I find this reason so compelling that I'll keep voting from now on every chance I have. Each act of defiance will be one tiny personal victory for me and, as such, it is precious. "

This blog is to encourage fellow writers to write stories that inspire hope and encourage the decent hard working people not to give up and fight back against the destroyers of our hopes and our planet.

For reference see: https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/conse...

Compromise or rebel?

Your life has been a long sequence of compromises. You’d like to follow your values, but your friends, family, society do the same as well. These values can be wildly different, even contradictory and somehow it works out to become a compromise for most people, most of the time. Very few people, very rarely, get everything exactly the way they want it. You learned to live with it because you had to.

But, every now and then you become rebellious. “I am not giving an inch from this (whatever this is) because it’s just too important to me”. So you stick to your gun and suffer the consequences. You may lose a friend, a spouse, a job, maybe even your freedom or your life. On rare occasions you may have your way without losing too much. Then back to the never ending sequence of compromises.

As you are getting older, you feel that you are running out of time and you become more and more rebellious. You decide that you have a core set of values that you won’t compromise on because these values are the essence of what and who you are and your own self-respect is at stake. That’s when you realize that you became a cantankerous old curmudgeon, at risk of becoming a bona fide misanthrope.

So what’s in the balance? In one pan of the scale you have your self-esteem. In the other it may be the weight of loneliness. Nobody likes those who are unwilling to compromise. After all, who the hell are they to know for sure what’s right? The answer: you are the only one who can tell, at least for yourself.

“Your job or your life” – the new holdup cry.

A newspaper headline caught my eye this morning: “Save paper mill jobs or protect waters from toxic waste.” I find this headline (and attitude) the perfect illustration of our insanity. In a sane society people perform tasks to make their lives better, make their environment safer. Now we have to perform tasks in order to have jobs, regardless of what the jobs do to us.

We manufactures poison and dump it into our environment, make weapons of mass destruction, build gigantic skyscrapers – pyramids for the ruling elite - all of these excellent job-creators, to be protected at any cost.. The best illustration is how the GDP is calculated: building hospitals contributes to it as much as drilling for oil in the Arctic and then cleaning up oil spills from the contaminated coastline. Both involve jobs, both contribute to our GDP, in people’s mind synonymous with ‘prosperity’ – a ’desirable’ goal.

The other equally sacred mantra, besides 'creating jobs', is ‘growing the economy’. While the planet is shrinking under our feet (as far as sustainability, biodiversity, ecological balance is concerned) we want our economy, responsible for this shrinking, to keep on growing. Major panic on Wall Street if there is a momentary lull in the growth for growing’s sake.

Citizens should be screaming their heads off on the streets against this totally insane attitude of our political and business leaders, yet only a ‘fringe’ group of troublemakers protest against this lunacy: a futile cry in the fast shrinking wilderness.

The Real "National Emergency"

I have come across an article, called "Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy", written by a climate scientist at the University of Cumbria. It has been downloaded over 100,000 times and has sent a lot of readers into shock and panic.
See at: https://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptat...
What I find ironic is the contrast between US government attitude that considers helpless, dispossessed families at the Mexican border a "National Emergency", but not the fast evolving "Sixth Mass Extinction" that's barreling down on us at an exponentially accelerating rate.
What I find even more ironic is that some Trump supporters wondering if declaring "National Emergency" could establish a precedent that future democratic administrations could exploit to declare stupid little non-issues such as gun control or climate change a National Emergency.
The level of stupidity that has been reached by the leaders of the "Free World" has acquired astronomical proportion.

The anatomy of social organizations.

I have been participating in internet forums since 2001 and have sufficient amount of data to draw some conclusions. Even though most of my data comes from these forums but I am convinced that my observation can be generalized to any established human organization that has been around long enough to develop a ‘core group’ or elite or the ‘establishment’ of old-timers who form their own support group and jealously guard their perceived privileged position.

They back each other up when controversial issues arise, they slap each other on the back and congratulate each other in all their utterances, they become a “mutual admiration society” and automatically close ranks when a challenge, however mild appears on the horizon. You can see it in the Canadian televised Parliament sessions where each of the three major parties form tightly knit groups in their seating arrangements and any time one of them finishes a comment, the rest of the group claps like crazy, like trained seals.

One wonders if there is any hope for the human species when we, in thousands of years, have not managed to evolve from primitive tribalism to a functioning society where quest for truth dominates and the common good is paramount.

Here is a poem to illustrate.

Tribe within a tribe within a tribe,
a maddening nesting of Matryoshka,
who can keep track of the obligation
one has to each generation.

I must be a good husband, a good citizen,
a good employee, a perfect gentleman,
and when my tribe tells me to fight
I have to go and bleed in the night.

Why can’t we just have only one tribe
that all of us belong to -- dammit
the tiger has only one kind of stripe
there is no reason to complicate it.

We are all human, on this forsaken planet
stuck in the same boat on the ocean,
if we keep fighting tribe against tribe
we will never have a moment
of peace, when we can love each other…

…forget the stupid tribes and learn to live together.

Are we paying too high a price?

I am going out on a limb here by asking this question: is it really worth it?

The first ‘it’ is the incredible benefits high tech and the Internet give us.

The second ‘it’ is the price we are paying for it.

Don’t take me wrong, I love the Internet, I find it hard to imagine living without it. Almost infinite amount of information (and disinformation) at my fingertips, the ability to communicate with friends all over the globe, friends I would know nothing about without the Internet, and our used book business (montland.ca ) that could not exist without the Internet.

On the other hand, the world never seemed crazier than it does now. I have 74 years worth of memory, so this statement does have some weight.

When you consider young people’s total addiction to internet based communication and gaming, and their exposure to all the hate-tainted ‘shaming’ and entertainment (let alone the well documented harm of too much screen-time to their mental development), the massive amount of misinformation that is warping adult people’s minds in one direction or another, the widespread internet-based fraud and blackmail, the international intrigue prevalent on every continent to corrupt other nations’ democracy and mutual relationships, you can’t help wondering about the price we are all paying, one way or another.

When I grew up, life was a LOT simpler and a lot more natural, We actually talked to each other, face to face, we knew how to use a library and read books, we found our way to unusual places by consulting a map, printed on a paper, and did not need the disembodied voice of the GPS lady from the sky. We had actual friends we could debate with, instead of the ubiquitous internet forums where anything goes and people feel completely free to be as mean and toxic as they please, without fear of retribution.

As an illustration, I’ll post two of my poems on the subject: one a short haiku, another bit longer.

Evolution

While thumbing his phone
he walks into a lamp post.
Evolution sighs.


Phantom people

Phantom people fill the ether,
circle the globe at the speed of the light,
bounce around from antenna to cable,
light up so many screens in the night.

Electronic Oujia boards push letters around
as we talk to ghosts in cyber space…
…unsubstantial opinions abound
in this incorporeal race

to win an argument, put down a foe,
have, finally, an opinion heard,
display a brave, scintillating show
to impress our peers: the forum-herd.

I lived in this phantom world
for twelve agonizing years,
compliments and insults hurled
at my poor head, awash in tears.

Time to cut my losses, rejoin my race
in real life: friends, neighbors, lovers,
deal with each other in person: face to face,
touch and be touched like sisters and brothers.

Today is my birthday, a new year begins,
full of plans, promises, adventure,
I will have a life again, among the living,
and abandon this ghostly venture.

That was the day when I stopped participating on Internet based Philosophy Forums.

(PS. Of course, I am aware of the irony: I couldn't have posted this blog entry without my internet connection.)

Donald Trump’s Wall

For a second, let’s forget about the ecological disaster that wall would represent, disrupting migration routes of land animals, defacing pristine environments by bulldozing down hundreds of acres of land along the proposed wall, disrupting the lives and dislocating hundreds of farmers whose land would be seized.

Let’s just think about the reason why this wall is necessary according to the stated purpose. It’s supposed to keep out illegal immigrants. Would it?

Unless they propose to post thousands of troops along the wall, to prevent people smugglers from tunneling under it, or scaling over it, or just blowing up a small section of it to make an opening, it’s a very expensive exercise in futility. But, if they post all those soldiers, then what do you need the wall for?

In addition to all this futility, it’s a medieval solution to a 21st Century problem. The Chinese had built a wall and it’s visible from space, so could Trump do less?

If he wants a cheap and foolproof way to keep out immigrants, he should read Gwynne Dyer’s “Climate Wars” in which he predicted that the US would close the southern border by a chain link fence and a mine field, reinforced with automatic machine guns controlled by motion detectors on the fence. It did work for the Soviet satellites countries. After a few hundred people were blown up or gunned down, nobody would approach the fence any more: illegal immigration would come to a grinding halt. Of course, nobody is proposing such a drastic solution, yet.

Even though it would cost a fraction of the price tag of Trump’s Chinese Wall and, in the long run, far fewer people would be killed than the hundreds of migrants who will die in detention camps in horribly crowded, inhuman conditions. Two children have already died, give it time, many more will follow.

Of course, the real solution would be for the USA to take responsibility for centuries long foreign policy that undermined democratic efforts around the world in general, and in central and south America, in particular, resulting in the conditions migrants are fleeing from.

Has anyone heard about the CIA trained death squads in Central America?
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_...

The Big Picture

If you look at the world of humanity under a microscope, it may seem too complex, confusing, a real mess. I used to call it an n-dimensional rope pulling contest where the final result is determined by the rules of vector addition, well known from geometry.

However, if we discard the microscope and view it from a distance, as aliens might do in their telescopes, it suddenly becomes very simple and orderly. I call it the ‘stratification’ of the species into three well defined groups: two minorities fighting over the mental state of the majority.

One minority is the educated, intelligent, well meaning population, trying to steer the majority toward peaceful cooperation and egalitarian sharing of resources and the produced wealth.

The other minority is the group of unscrupulous, power hungry, greed-infused manipulators who try to affect the majority’s behavior by appealing to fundamental raw emotions of fear and greed, so they would be accepted at the top of the pyramid, playing their power games and accumulate more and more wealth.

The third group, by far the largest majority, is the masses with limited education, no training in critical thinking, feeling suppressed and exploited and confused about the roles the other two groups play.

The two minorities have been fighting, all through human history, to win over the masses and either liberate, or enslave them. The pendulum has been swinging back and forth resulting in very slow progress in social justice and living conditions for most of the species.

The big danger now is technology: its destructive power grows exponentially, while social progress is only linear. When the technologies’ destructive power exceeds the ability of safeguards to contain it on this side of self destruction, then the game will be over.

As Vladimir Putin warned today” the danger of nuclear war is present and threatens the survival of civilization, the species and, indeed, the entire planet.”

He would know - his finger is hovering over one of the nuclear buttons. Trump's is another. The other seven potential madmen's fingers are not too far away from their buttons either.

Earth is like a soap on a rope

I have just watched a TV program about climate change and then saw the news about "U.S., Russia, Kuwait and Saudis block key climate study at COP24"

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/un...

This double whammy inspired me to write the following poem:


Earth is like a soap on a rope
twirled around by the sun,
year after year,
in an endless run.

I wonder if the sun is aware
how sick, how beyond hope
how badly infested by us
this poor globe is at the end of the rope.

If I were the sun
I wouldn't want to know…
…I would open my hand;
let the poor bastards go.