The meaning of gods (The comforting lie)

The meaning of gods


Very recently….like 20 minutes ago….I came to a final supporting piece of evidence that many people don’t ‘believe’ in gods as such, but in the effect believing in gods have on them, from society.


So, what is this about?

Well, whoever debated or discussed religiosity with someone who is ‘of faith’, will have come to realise that the counter arguments you get are all based on ‘personal experience’. This isn’t strange, because anything we know and learn from the world, we learn from experiencing it. However, the point for a non- or lesser-believer is, that they are self-sufficient enough to accept that if more people support the same view regarding experience, the experience holds more validity. Why would it be different from an experience from a religious person? Why would that hold less validity? For the religious person it doesn’t. It supports their reasoning in why they feel ‘happier’ in their own perspective. They feel they connect better with people than those that don’t ‘believe’. Is this true? Are people who don’t believe less connected? I would say (being a realist) no. I know I have a high impact on society around me, because of the actions I do. I do the actions because that is who I am and I know I try to help people with them. I teach good values, I act to improve the temporary or longterm quality of other’s lives. This would be (to my understanding) the same a person of faith would do. Likely for the same reason: To lighten the burden of others. But why are people discerning themselves about the underlying lie that is causing the discussion/debate? Why would I (a realist and therefore atheist) care about what kind of imaginary friend a person holds in their mind? Because of numerous reasons. 1. Because it is a lie. 2. Because it generates a fragile framework that is easily misused. 3. Because the direct and indirect effects are additional lies. 4. Because when the lie finds enough people, it changes society to a dangerous place for specific individuals or whole groups. Something that is ‘inhuman’.


Now, why would people still not accept the absence of a god, if it is the logical and honest thing to do?

Well, likely for the same reason someone would supress the truth regarding something, if it would mean the difference between a warm cozy place near a fireplace in the middle of winter, or standing barefeet in the snow of -10 C.



I read a very ‘sane’ story of a person today, that said: Well, I came from an ‘atheist’ home, but as we had family problems and it felt cold, I found a place where it promised warmth and care. Though it was based on religion, I welcomed it, because it felt someone cared for me.’ 


And I think this is what is causing people to only move away from the lie, if the lie is becoming too obvious to them that they can’t uphold it anymore.

The ‘atheist’/’realist’ view and life seems (I must emphasize this: seems) lacking the warmth of social cohesion we see in the christmas movies. The warm sweaters and cozy singing. People who are feeling lonely want this. People can feel lonely for many reasons, even with no place to go because of the amount of people.


We humans are a social species. Not all of us are at the same cognitive awareness level. Some pretend to be beyond, some don’t want to be aware. We all have our prerogative regarding what we want to be aware of. But does that mean we should accept a lie? No.


Why do we do this anyway? Why do for instance students more easily convert to a faith-based world view?

Well, taking the numbers and denominations, it is very likely an non-faith person at college time, will fall in a group where 3/4 is faith-based. Often a non-faith person doesn’t easily talk about it, causing 2 non-faith people next to each other, to be unaware of their shared state. This can cause them, due to the need to fit with the group to adapt to the general concensus of accepting a/the faith.


In earlier years, there isn’t really a question. Children take the word of their parents. They will accept the believe, because it is rationalised and even worse, children aren’t rational yet, they are learning how to reason. So, when learning to reason with a faith, it means that any further thought will incorporate rationalisation including that faith.


How about, after college? Well, high school, university all hold the same social bonds and needs for people to support each other in groups. So, the same danger exists. But what when people are mature and starting their adult life? They surely don’t fall for such group based empathies? Why not? We are, as I said, a social species. The main part of our ethical/moral encoding comes from the genetic learning to rely on safety within a group.


So, as long as the group that is faith-based, gives a signal that the group supports the individual to the amount that we learn (cultural) to accept as warm and welcoming, people will try to accept the accompanying lie.



To overcome this obstacle, it is important, as a humanist, realist (and atheist), to acknowledge the shortcomings and work towards a honest and thoughtful world, where taking out the lie doesn’t equals leaving out all the accompanying social commitments and group support.


We must create a better view on non-faith societies, where humans are still supporting and ‘warm’ towards each other, so the individual will have no reason to see benefit in a lie over honesty and reason. Though this is not something that needs to change. Societies of secular reasoning are among those to best support the whole group instead of a selective one, being aware on the impact of limited visibility against the overall ‘Coca Cola’-family effect of religion, will improve global human awareness of honesty, logic and reason.

Meaning of life (Not Brian’s)

This text was a response to a ‘blog’ I found on a well known ‘Q&A’ site. However I found it valuable enough to have its own space on my blog.

Interesting piece, however, failing at some severe points (as I just commented on one of your answers elsewhere, I thought lets see what Roger Baker writes beyond answers).

It starts here (well actually in some incorrect presuppositions made regard ability to generalize groups or even individuals with a certain worldview):

We may or may not be children of God, but we are indubitably children of the universe, and it is physical and insentient. If, as cosmology teaches, the universe is cold, impersonal and pointless, devoid of any framework of intentional, the problem of meaning forces itself upon one.

It seems as a very rational thing to say: We are either this or that, but one can not deny one of them. However, cosmology doesn’t teach anything, not even by its findings. It only shows what is observable and deductible and painfully our interpretations are always personal. Besides that, calling it ‘pointless’ would seem as if the universe has no ‘goal’. Though it doesn’t have a ‘deliberate’ goal, it is not without point. Just like crystallizing water creates intrinsic webs of ice, it is due to removal of heat. Such is also the fact that the universe becomes more and more complex due to the binding of elements, it is not pointless. It has a direction to move to. Life seems (as we now know the working of folding of proteins, build from simple amino acids) inevitable in situations common to our own Earth atmosphere.

Of course it is not intentional, why would it? A rock falls from a pile, does it have an intention? No. If it hits your toe, still no intention.

The induction (or the need to) of meaning is a post hoc fallacy. See, we are a species that has learned to change the simple ‘pattern recognition’ behavior that is in all life (flora and fauna) to survive, into the ability to plan depending on it by choice. We changed the: ‘It will happen’, to ‘it has to happen’. This is the cause of animism and from that religion at the start of humanity.

As is proven by research and logic (as we know can see, as an individual, the far reaches of space and the inner working of our own body), we individually can deduct and induct how causality causes, but not bring meaning. We are born to die, we procreate to survive. That is one of the definitions of life. So, whether you quote William James or someone else, it doesn’t change that observably we can individually and as humanity as a whole, tell that the biological bonds between kin, are causing the natural cause for procreation and the meaning (again from biological point of view) for our life. However, humans have one thing over other animals: choice. A deliberate and cognitive choice. Even the ‘smartest’ animals will behave on instinct, not rendered mental concepts.(Humanistic meaning)

Whether life has a meaning, depends on whether we give it one (Our own meaning). Or we are indoctrinated with one (religious meaning).

—————

I don’t take physicists or philosophers to quote them for ‘knowledge’. This is something an individual has to come to on his/her own accord. The scientist or wise person, or even just intelligent person can be a proxy or ‘enabler’, but it is your own mind that should try to find the answers, the ‘truth’ in your personal world. I guess we agree on that (though we might disagree on how that should go).

Lets leave out the religion part for the moment, as we seem to stand on different sides of the door and (the metaphore isn’t meant to be mean) I enjoy the sun on my face on the outside of it.

I will answer your ‘question’ regarding meaning, if you do too from your perspective (only your own words, not refering to your earlier writing or others).

You ask two separate things:

  1. How do we give meaning to life?
  2. Why give meaning to life if its meaning ends at death?

The additional points are valid questions regarding the fear people have not having chosen the right meaning for their lives.

For the first question, how do we give meaning to life, I could say that is a spiritual journey for many. Many others (if not most) get the meaning of their life directed by parents, society or general culture (In India the cohesion between country, religion, culture and societies are so strong, there is hardly a difference. This is also the reason).

I shared the second link, to show you have for instance the book of Genesis does ‘teach’ us things, but not about the actual words but the intrinsic nature of the human mind. How awareness (growth of level of cognitive abilities like recognition of causality and ability to form abstract concepts) has altered the realisation of self and the influence of our view of self on the world around us.

Why do I explain this? Because this is where the meaning of our life comes from. Do ants think of a reason for their life? Or the meaning of it all? No, they are fully functional lifeforms, immersed in emotional instinctive behavior. It gets them from a to b and from life to death. This goes for all lifeforms without cognitive abilities like humans (as far as we are aware we are the only ones on this planet currently)..

Why do some think that there must be a reason/meaning for their life outside of their own mind? Because of the lack of awareness of causality. The lack of understanding how things work if there is no mind to observe it (you call this the non-physical, but the first link I shared shows how the mind comes from the brain, ie physical). ‘If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make any sound?’ Yes, it does. Sound is the word we give to the sensory input of material pressure (vibrations in air, but also through more solid objects) change, recognized by our body (ears, sinus, head, haptic feeling). However, we as humans aren’t the only ones to recognize this event in our surroundings. Even if we are not there to recognize it, nor any other life form, the event still takes place. the tree’s branches will still break, the trunk will rupture, the objects around it and the ground itself will tremor. However, this already happened way before human ears existed. It didn’t have any meaning, yet happened anyway.

So, if everything has happened, yet had no meaning, like the birth of stars and the death of them, the debris becoming planets on distant solar systems after a cataclystic event like a super nova. These events also have no meaning, except for the life that eventually might emerge on such planets and becomes aware enough to observe and question their place.

The fact that humans exist, as does other life on Earth (and possibly elsewhere), does not automatically bring a meaning. If history had gone different, we might have not gained cognitive abilities to question our surrounding, though logic states that it is most likely that this was inevitable.

Once you are aware of your parents (by the time you are able to see.), you will feel identified with them. They are part of you. This is a biological bond, that is caused by evolution, because those children who don’t cling like a leaf to their parents will die first. Our emotional field has all emotions of earlier iterations of animals, but our cognition doesn’t have a direct connection with them, though it is directly/indirectly influenced by them. The very first emotion (most important for survival) is fear. Even the single cell organism responds with the most rudimentary equivalent of fear. If something takes away fluids, move away. If something is hot, the cell will (by internal mechanism) move away from it, like plants do. This is meaning for them to survive? Or is it ‘reason’? Or ‘cause’? Life in general has become more aware each iteration (aware in level of response mechanisms to influences in the cycle of a life form). Nowhere in this trajectory there was meaning induced already. This only came into existence when cognitive awareness caused the individual entity (in this case proto-human) to recognize that not all signals were required to respond instinctively to. The fact that (proto-)humanoids weren’t at the bottom of the food-chain anymore, caused their numbers to increase. More entities in a group create more communication, causing complexity of interaction and ‘language’. But with complex communication comes enlarged memory due to the nature of individual differences. Communication causes humans to seek common ground, this is something that is imperative for survival as well. After all the physical dangers outside the group, now humanity has to ensure there is no danger from inside the group too. By following specific protocols, individuals ensure early recognition of danger or possibilities to have mutual goals. Is this a meaning? Or a reason? No it is a means though. Humans haven’t been aware of it, but they have been subject to it anyway (as an object). This all shows that there is meaning in itself.

We create a meaning based on our awareness of the world. When one is unaware of causality, all meaning is one’s own mind. When one sees causility that is identifiable, one will place meaning outside him/her self, based om the identification. Mostly like children do: I act like this, so any event outside myself happening in an identifiable order will be based on the same kind of reason: a person. ‘Stupid chair’ etc.

When we become more aware of the world and have understanding that there are larger connections, it is this larger scope that provides us with meaning: We live together and are dependent on each other. So, this bond must have importance. Now we have (as humanity) evolved further and become aware of things as individuals. We are able as individuals to survive as such. We find that outside ourselves, everyone makes a meaning for their life (Buddhists make their reasons, Christians make their reasons, aboriginals make their reasons.) Because everyone has a choice based on their awareness, meaning has become individualized. But meaning is still not imbued by anything outside the mind. Cause and effect are not meaning, they are results. Taking ‘pointless’, as ‘meaningless’, yes, the universe is meaningless. We observe (and perhaps other species that have evolved into cognitive beings as well) the universe and are children. Our emotional dependency on pattern recognition (instinctive survival mechanism), causes our cognitive awareness to ‘feel’ there is a reason for things, even if it is just that false positive on danger.

Does not having a meaning in life, mean that life is meaningless? No, because our mind has emerged from the increasing complexity of manifolds, we are able to introspect, retrospect, deduct and induct on our observations (which are more than just the visuals). Yes, the only reason for our lives (biological) is to breed. What would happen if all of humanity lost the want to procreate? We would die out. Except that our biological sexual drive will cause the unaware to start breeding (having sex) anyway and cause the species to continue. This again is not a meaning, but cause and effect of biological measurements. But we give life meaning. How do we reflect on a Gorilla mother hugging their infant? How do we reflect on a Chimpanzee baby sleeping in the cultivation of its mother or father? Does it have less meaning? Or more?

Why would a human life have more meaning? The cognitive awareness? Is that what gives more meaning? Because the cognitive awareness is required to even fatom a meaning? Yet if all humans were finished off, the world would continue to turn and another species would emerge superior. Would that be the meaning for humans perishing? The cycle of life includes death. No matter what comes after. The existence as it was before you were born or a fictive eternity of mind? The implications of the wanted ‘after’, depends on the awareness one has for causality. If something doesn’t fit into the logic of reality, one will add supernatural or surreal solutions. To do so, will then cause more and more intrinsic webs of supernatural causes and reasons. But with it comes a reason and cause that is also requiring a meaning. Thus one creates a loop that will keep itself going. Worst thing is our primal emotion. When the loop is connected with fear, it is almost impossible to stop it. Life is prone on survival and to survive it needs to know it will not die. When it knows it will die, it either looses will to continue or seeks a meaning for death. The only meaning people ‘want’ for death is to continue living. The truth is, everything dies. The universe, the planet, humans, specks of dust. Dying is part of a cycle of existence. Energy – matter transformation. Direction to no direction. Movement to no movement.

But what would be wrong about it? Did you bother about life before you were born? No. You weren’t existing. IF you would imply everyone lives AFTER death, you automatically imply everyone lives before birth. Taking this into infinity, everyone would be in an infinite loop and you more likely will end up Buddhist, than anything else. If you live before birth, as what? Non-corporal? That would imply the mind or essence is not based on physical causes as we know it is. It implies we would be able to investigate mind / cognitive abilities at the moment of conception or even before (because the implication of added complexity would still have to adhere to reality). As we know, this is not so. We have been able to figure out where the mind/cognition is created and can switch it on and off.

So what is the meaning of life, if life ends? Well, for one, there is the meaning of A life and there is meaning of life. One is what it means to an individual, the other is what it means to a species or even broader, an ecosystem. Until an individual is aware of it, there is no meaning for it to discern. When it is aware, it will search for a meaning. Not that there is one, but it will search for it, because the pattern recognition that is the base of our mind, depends on search for causality. We as humans often fail to understand that causality is not meaning. It is cause and effect. The result, not the meaning.

So, if there is no meaning to life, what could we extract as the most objective ‘meaning’ we could give it?

Looking at life as it is, it is adaptation. Adaptation means learning. Learning means finding data, information and from that knowledge. This is what humanity has done. First with the increasing complexity of life itself, then its habits, then its communication, then its cognitive understanding. So, the meaning of life, in the most objective matter would be: Accumulate as much data, information and knowledge for the next generation to grow upon and extend.

I might add: To increase the positive effect of it on humanity, its habitat and entire ecosystem.

And again on the proof of superstition

Any religitard (someone who has deliberately kept his/her ignorance up, by following superstition rather than using the brain his/her ancestors gave him/her) will keep coming up with reversed logic:

‘Look how beautiful everthing is. That MUST be my god’s doing’ (Whether it is Hindu, Muslim or Christian denomination)

‘But that is too complex to be existing without a divine hand’ (doesn’t matter the line of religion followed)

However, they still fail to meet any burden of proof

And what will they say?

But you can’t disprove it either’.

Well….that is where they are wrong. See, all we have for saying that something exists is EITHER: proof/evidence (not the same thing) or history.

Now the thing with history is, that it is either ‘left overs’ in the natural world, or interpretations written to paper by our ancestors.

What is wrong with that? Nothing, as long as you understand the implication. It means that without the knowledge YOU have, someone who wants to give an answer about something, will have to trust on the information he/she DOES have.

An example? The people who wrote most of the still in print religious books from around 3000-2000 years ago, thought the world was flat. They even thought the Earth was the center of the universe. Why? For the same reason you talk from perspective of I and you/others. You speak from perspective. In such you take the place your mind is, in your head, behind your eyes, and the first thing you address is how to connect what you see, hear, feel and experience to the ‘mind’ that is you. Why can blind people think? Because the mind doesn’t need a visual to work. A part of the brain is dedicated to visuals, but the mind doesn’t have that. At first, humans, gaining cognition (deliberate self awareness and ability to extend that awareness into planning etc), only saw the limits of the group. Then they extended beyond the groups (some where bannished, some were seeking or left behind, some were the sole surviver of a group), they sought out the world. But that world was what they walked on. Every step was a flat step. When looking up, they saw the sky, like a blanket, when they looked forward, they saw the world, until the next mountain, then next forrest. The world WAS flat. It still is to extend, as the WORLD is what you observe. But Earth has never been flat. The planet is what it is, a globe (read some Copernicus to understand how humanity escaped that limitation of mindset), and the world is too, now. The world is basically our projection of our awareness on the ‘universe’ around us. How do we know that our evolving humanity has gone through these stages? Because our individual evolution per human still follows EXACTLY the same steps of awareness.

Sooo, how does all this relate to the question? Well, you wanted to know prove for imagination, I now explained to you where our mind and from that our imagination comes from. BUT, how about the ideas of gods? Well, imagine you are limited in understanding and awareness. Imagine you are a ‘baby’ in mind. Basically learning to ‘write’ and ‘read’, or even the more complex pattern recognition, was something that has taken humanity the greater of thousands of years. Before that, mammals were growing out of an ice age, where the ‘tide’ had turned. The change in climate, made the center of Africa (then the center of the ‘world’ of mammals, like apes) a lush green jumgle. It was easier to stay alive, but also, many different species fought for dominance and died. The dinosaurs, already extinct for some time, left more of the smaller animals for the battle and these eventually started to take its toll. Homo Erectus (or before that even Homo Habilis) was able to get out of the trees, without being preyed on. They started to walk the fields and have less and less attackers. BUT, the instincts were there. They had been there for thousands if not millions of years in its ancestors, and they had proven to be the required survival instincts. When a bush rustled, it didn’t matter if there was a predator or not, you got into the tree, high up. These were eventually, even when humanoids and other mammals lived in groups, the instincts that would still pop up. The ‘fear’ of death, the fear of not being able to reproduce, was stronger than anything. It still is. These fears, these ‘false positives’ were the ability for humans to survive. The ‘look I ran from this bush and survived’ was a stronger lesson than: ‘look there is a dead body of a mate but we don’t know how that happened.’

Now, you have had your run in the community with these false positives (you survived, even though there was no danger), how do you explain this to your children when they are in the woods. Do you say: Look, if you die, you were just unlucky. Or do you say: Stay away from rustling bushes, because you will die if you don’t? I am guessing you would go for the second. This is how our mind works. We did and do this with everything. From losing our keys at home, to picking up the phone a second before the mechanism actually makes it ring. We think that it is ‘super natural’, because it ‘preceded’ us or happened due to a factor that we are ‘unaware’ of. This is the basic reason people seek for proof of gods and other superstition. But they are all the same, just some have a longer written story that supports it.

The only argument ANY theist has for their god or supernatural power, is circular reasoning which has been done away with already (and again in the piece above):

The book says this happened and I will not seek into the mind of humanity WHY someone wrote it down like that, I just accept it for true, because I once had an experience I couldn’t explain, so it must be true. So, the book says my ignorant superstition is called , so I will name it .

Why is the theist always wrong?

As a theist you use a presupposition where no evidence is due. This is using false positive and projection. I can start explaining to you how a child learns about dependancy on its parents, interaction with it, building first an emotional structure that gains certain responses, which will be the base of the cognitive structures later on in life. But that will take a lot of time (took me some years of study for the different psychological and neurological directions in science). These structures are, when not met with correct consideration, causing individuals and from that groups, to respond to patterns in nature and more importantly society, with irrational behavior. Why? Because instead of understanding the physics and psychological evolution of humanity, people are then building their responses and insights/assumptions on these patterns based on ignorance. (this was an explanation still, so if you want to know more, check for instance http://lifeisadecision.blogspot.com (going to be moved here too). But I will elaborate answering two common questions that are giving theists the assumption that their idea about superstition is warranted.

The most important question:
1. How did it all begin?
If you have some understanding of science, you will understand how humanity has evolved its knowledge regarding its place in its own mind, society, nature and on Earth. Like children, humanity itself has learned to move away from fully emotional being (which animals are), to cognitive beings. (having reasoning skills, not merely emotional dependency skills). As children first have a dependency on their parents, so did humans still have a dependency on nature, causing it to project any ability of itself onto the patterns (signals coming from any source around us: plants, weather, light, animals, peers, events). Thus causing us (humanity or more likely even before becoming homo habilis) to create animism. Why? Out of fear. Any emotion humans have, are based on the evolutionary bred emotion fear. The single cell organism and every intermediate species have this same first emotion: fear. Fear of dying, and from that survival is based on balancing this emotion with all other evolved abilities.
We as humans have come to a moment where we are able to make objective (without emotion) reasoning (inductive/deductive) about patterns around us and see the causation between them. This has given us most if not all technological advancements you and I are using today. This technological advancement is both proof of the ability of humans to make our interpretation of reality consistent AND use the interpretation to determine and predict related causality that we are not able to directly touch (physically). As such we came to understand the microcosmos and microbes, quantum physics (though this is a slippery slope subject still), we came to understand from simple roling balls (Newton) that the Earth could not be the center of the solar system, nor universe, simply because the forces that we witness and the related consistency in reality, could not work if it was. Then we found more and more methods and evidence that the earlier theories by both theist scientists and secular scientists were correct or false, making things possible for humanity to evolve in both cultural, scientific and technological sense. This gave us things like the laws of thermodynamics, of gravity, of relativity, of evolution. These have caused humanity to reinvent itself many times. It is like a child having its puberty. The phases of transcending to another cognitive level. We first grew into our habitat. We demolished it, until we saw what the effects were (like a spoiled child in its egocentric phase, we thought everything was ours). We started to understand the causality of nature.  We started to research ecosystems, biosystems, relations between amount of species that were part of each others lifecycle. We found more and more evidence that older species had gone through the same cycle and had become extinct (even before the hand of man took hold of Earth). We found out that there were ways to determine what the age of bones were, that there was DNA, that there were obvious relations between kin, between bloodlines, between ancestors. Though, as a child we first thought our parents and family were the world, we started to understand as humanity, that there was way more. Our parents had parents and this went on for thousands and thousands of generations. We found out that, physical resemblence was more than just face value. This caused us to look beyond our habitat, beyond Earth and we saw that people like Galilei, Copernicus, Newton and many more were right about how forces were not just acting here in our ‘little’ world. The observable ‘universe’ which at first was our solar system, was holding to the same laws. It never wavered from it, never changed its mind. We found out that the Earth had gone through many catastrophies, which humanity never knew about. We came to understand that if these forces worked in the solar system, we could start explaining why stars (previously just pinholes in a blanket on the sky) weren’t always in the same place and not even had the same distance among themselves. we created (based on the confirmed formulas and models that were proven by independant researches and tests) bigger models and formulas, that sometimes upset the existing ones, but were often improvements of the older models, not refutations (though sometimes they were). Eventually we came to understand that atoms weren’t the smallest parts we could calculate with, photons, particles and quarks were found to exist as smaller bases. They gave us insights on why nuclear forces degraded over time, why the Earth stayed going around the sun. But also, how elements were expelling or absorbing energy in their cycle (like the research had previously proven the causality in life cycles of animals), how eventually entropy would set in and a match would stop burning if no fuel was left. Theories about how the sun burned in a vacuum came and went. We found more and more radiation types, particles, levels of light and magnetic frequencies. These caused us to find that the whole of the universe was holding to this type of change, where energy and matter were exchanged. How background noise proved that there was a long history to the universe. Humanity was becoming the eye on the universe. We could see further and further, like an infant that could see only 30 cm after birth, one meter at age 6 months and further and further as its eyes adjusted to the level of detail around it. Humanity now understood why on Earth there were so many archeological finds in sediments that were old, very very old. The universe itself was very very old. Using different calculations, some precise, some crude, humanity found out what could and what could not be correct ages of things, of life, of rocks, of energy of movement. We found out that the solar system, the galaxy it was in, the universe we could see, was moving. Away from it something, but some things were moving towards each other. The universe was expanding. At first this was thought rediculous, so at least half of the scientific community set on a quest to falsify this idea. And even now there are still individuals that will look for calculations that will hold all proven laws and models, but will disagree with an expanding universe. However, this expanding universe meant also that it had to have been a starting point of the expansion. This is what currently is know as the singularity. Whether it is the correct name or cause, is to be determined, but the best answer in such case is: I don’t know yet! Why is that the best answer? It gives you the option to research and find the answer, but also any other answers in between. So, where did it all begin? At a point, approximately 17.8 BILLION years ago. (and even if science is a billion years off, or 10, it is still immeasurable by human mind). What started it? Well, the models all indicate that at some point friction caused the start. But for now, it is an unknown, which is fine.

The second question:

2. Do you believe the earth is eternal?
As you might have imagined from the long and winding road above, I don’t. Why would I? Rule number one in our reactionary universe; Everything changes. The Earth itself isn’t 17.8 BILLION years old, it is only 4.5 BILLION years old. So it already didn’t exist for ever, so why would I even consider it to exist for ever from now on? The elements that make up Earth will last a long time in their current form. BUT as science has proven that matter and energy shift sides every now and then, the matter that makes up Earth will eventually turn to energy (whether that is before the universe either collapses onto itself or outstretches itself of poofs like a soap bubble) and that energy will cool down and become new matter somewhere in the far future. Current calculations say that the sun will burn for another 5 billion years, so if we as species haven’t obliterated earth before than and haven’t settled our differences or have perished, Earth will go to an energy state in matter of seconds or years if the sun ends (either in cooling, or in explosion. Our sun isn’t very big in comparison to others, so we won’t have a supernova).

I hope that answers your questions. When Logically inclined, Honesty frames the view of Reason

End of superstition

A. Why would you believe there is basis for a superstitious ignorance called ‘god’? Because there are people around you claim there is, from a book that is in no way original, nor in its original state.

B. Even if the book, which was written to ‘prove’ the superstitious ignorance to be the answer of all questions of the time, but especially the most basic of all individuals: ‘why me?’, was not altered, adapted and by translation inconsistent, it would still have lost its merit to the progress of humanity.

C. Are you part of humanity? Yes. Am I part of humanity? Yes. So what we see and hear is part of humanity’s learning.

D. We can say, without a doubt, that DNA findings are correct. You are a biological child of your parents, inherited features with adaption.

E. All research (whether by now you suddenly jumped to a conclusion of superstitious ignorance or not) done by the growing cognitive abilities and intellect of humanity, has resulted in explaining away the simple things that caused ‘primitive’ minds to see only a superstitious solution (hence superstitious ignorance).

I have already explained in http://lifeisadecision.blogspot.com (which you haven’t read) how the evolution of the awareness of an individual follows the same path (in extend) as that of the global human mind as a species. In this, the organism primate came to less and less natural enemies, causing it to change feeding habits and pattern recognition with each generation (read http://timepasthistory.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html) until the ‘modern human’ was the generation phase (meaning several generations, likely between 50 or perhaps 100 generations) where language evolved beyond the concrete objects and started to include abstracts, tools developed into reusable and teachable items for the next generation. From the beginning, the mind of humanity, like that of a child, has had only one solid base of reference: itself. As such, when pattern recognition failed, it could only ‘assume’ that the reason for the pattern was like its own mind. At some point children recognize causality, but lack understanding of natural effects and the technical implications behind these events. Simple things like stars, rainbows and the reflection of water. All very beautiful, but we can’t grasp how they exist, until we came to understanding that light was actually an ‘object’. The breaking and reflection of light as wave or particle, caused us to observe the events. The emotional effects remain the same. Some like sunsets, some don’t. Reality doesn’t exist by the grace of light, it is merely one of our options to observe. If this was not the case, blind people would have no existence. We have since come to understand that not all organisms ‘observe’ reality by the same means. Some have more simple eyes, others have even more complex eyes than humans, because evolution caused their ancestors to adapt little by little to changes in their environment. All this humanity figured out by adapting neurology. We started off with limitations, but as the environment gave us options and influenced our physics, we have evolved, even in the last 4000 years. We lost features, degraded the ability of some, improved others. How fast or slow this can go is proven by simple adaptions to handicaps (blind people can hear better, deaf people can smell and see better.) All for survival.

All this shows that the processes at work have been progressive, yet without real course of action, just improved entropy and result of events caused by yet other events. These events have been shown to adhere to the same laws of nature and physics, not even deviation once from it.

So, now as we have arrived at the point where Occom’s razor will kill the mood: All this is proof that it is the way it is, because it can be tested a million times over and EVERY single time, it will have the same result. Even the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics can change that.

Moving through life

(This is a working document, which you can read. When you check back tomorrow, or next week, it will differ)

We all start somewhere, we all change over time, we all believe one thing one day, and another the next. We don’t all come to the same conclusion, even when presented the same facts or considerations. This is what makes us human. To give some insights, I will try to write a bit of my own journey here. 

Ever since I was a kid, I have been busy finding what is most likely to be true. I was raised by a single mother, from a Catholic home. She gave me all the freedom, but of course the religious notion of a superior being called god was already taught. Not that it was real, just that everything in society around me and the talks would have such a notion in the back. I even was going to church at some point, wondering how the minister could believe the contradictory parts himself. I started to have issues with the idea of a superior being already by the age of 7. I was living in the country side and had all the time to think about it. Of course the first part was the self search. All humans are looking at themselves first. (All children start with this) then I started to look at relations around me. Between people, between all sorts of things. I had some personal moments that have influenced who I am, greatly and not in a positive way I must say). From the age of 11/12, I researched/looked at events and experiences that were seen as ‘mystical’ or ‘spiritual’. I was sure I was experiencing some of them myself at several points (due to the working of my brain as a pattern recognition system and the emotional bonds placed by my upbringing regarding a ‘reason’ for life). I have gone through hardship and happiness in life and found all of them the strongest when together with others. Being each other’s ‘salvation’ is what I saw life is about. All that I saw was about learning. Finding new information, creating new knowledge. All I have done since was try to live by that creed: any new day should bring new knowledge and it should be shared, because we can’t survive alone.

Though I have been somewhat introvert outside of home, I was rather extrovert with people I knew well. At some point I found out that to read people, I had to send signals. A bit like a bat. When you send a signal, you receive a signal (or not, which is just as much a signal) from another person. When you act sincere, it is not defined that you will receive a sincere response signal. When you give a crazy or out of place signal, you are more likely to receive a response or even more likely to receive a more sincere response. This gave me good insight on who I could trust and what signals would result in certain return responses. Living on this, I became extrovert outside the house, and learned a lot about people around me.

From the age of 9/10 I have been very avidly trying to figure out whether there was any reason to believe in supernatural things…..

Chances of it are?

<some non-specific theist> thank you for bringing pascal’s wager or some statistical change for reality to be what it is, up. I have already explained the error in thinking with when it relates to chance and mathematics by simply stating that we exist, so any CHANCE of reality to be what it is by chance is 1, also on ‘our’ regards on numbers and what we see in the world around us. Quick example: what numbers would we have used if we had more fingers or less? How would we have calculated distance and other ‘equations’? 

Anyway, that should already have set you straight, but here is the fun part: Your claim might that the chance of life to have evolved this way is of 10 to power of 54th is worse then the chance that this chance has happened and the outcome you chose to believe that there is yet another level of chance. Basically the chance of your god theory IS <10 to the power of 54th, as it would require us to exist first. Now lets step back, because you will start ranting that that is not what you mean. 

What is a theist presupposition?

Here it is: We exist, the universe exists and the chance to that is 1, because it happened. 

Now, we go to your theory of a god. Basically it is only assumed from a book to be a workable theory. 


Now, lets leave all science away and take the obvious: Can there be a god? what are the odds that this could be true? Well….actually incalculable small, because there is nothing to calculate the chance from. It is an imaginary conclusion. Additionally what would be the chance there would be a superior being, considering to create a universe that consists of NOTHING except for 1 blue planet and decided to create some ‘life form’ there AND knows exactly how to do it, but fails to recognize the fact that what he/she/it created had the chance on rebelling and destroying what he/she/it intended. Then we come to the closure: Taking the moment before the alleged Genesis moment, What are the odds that a super being (what created it? what would it consist of? how did it learn to do something? how did it come create existence without existing (in time and space)? If this was the case, its ideas would not include humans, as he/she/it would not be able to fathom them, as they are only a speck on a speck on a speck on a speck so small, that the chance this being of a totally different energy/signature/element/existence level would recognize or even realize the existence is way smaller then the made up number you though for chance of existence of life as it is now. 

The realist stance

The chance of life in this universe is 1 for 2 reasons: 1. because we exist and because it can happen again, simply because the universe is so big, that all chances can come to exist at some moment. What is likely? We are god in the future and tried to make our ancestors believe in us, so there would be enough life in the future, or to prevent too much progress to be made, so the errors in the future will be prevented. Anyway, the chance of life by chance is 100% as it happened and we can redo the events. We even can already show how it has become on our world, from the conditions: We breath as the tide of the seas, because all that happens on earth happens from this single effect. Chances are that new life is still created in the depths of the ocean, chances are highly existing life has been created by other conditions on other planets, but those types of life don’t need to be recognizable by us. However the chance is 1, we are proof.

Failing Craig

Thanks to Ricrab, I spend time putting some sense to questions that seemingly ‘smart’ theists bring forth. Below is a copy of it.   12 amazingly intelligent (and not a bit ironic, presuppositional or loaded, of course) questions from William Lane Craig;

1. If all of life is meaningless, and ultimately absurd, why bother to march straight forward, why stand in the queue as though life as a whole makes sense?
Learning. Life has evolved to a sense of selfawareness and as someone said: We are the voice that looks up at that universe that brought it forth and asks: why?  

2. If everyone completely passes out of existence when they die, what ultimate meaning has life? They aren’t related. The fact that all life (and non-life) dies or ultimately falls to entropy, doesn’t discern with the meaning we give to our lives. Because that is ultimately what we do: Only with our cognition we distinguish that it helps to feel there is meaning. Nowhere from the start of this universe to now, there is any moment that states that an event happened for a meaning, let alone a reason. But that doesn’t make life less beautiful now you are here. To think so is yet another self deception religions want you to hold.  

3. Even if a man’s life is important because of his influence on others or by his effect on the course of history, of what ultimate significance is that if there is no immortality and all other lives, events, and even history itself is ultimately meaningless? Because there isn’t. A man can feel important. Others can feel the man is/was important, but eventually there is the here and now. History is past so it is ultimately always meaningless. It is a done deed. Looking forward, an individual, as well as a whole group or species like ourselves can look say: Look, this is the road that would benefit the most to individuals and groups, lets go this direction. Meaning is what the aware gives to a pattern.  

4. In a universe without God or immortality, how is mankind ultimately different from a swarm of mosquitoes or a barnyard of pigs? An empty presupposition. Immortality would (if all life forms could attain such state) be disastrous to the universe. As we know the universe contains a limited amount of resources. So if nothing would perish to make way for new, all would eventually become really ‘meaningless’. Ultimately we aren’t different from a swarm of mosquitoes, or pigs (though a barnyard is a created environment and pigs are ‘bred’). We can choose to be different. That is where we are beyond them. But if we choose to keep to the same embedded fear to ancient ignorance, we won’t go beyond anything further.  

5. What viable basis exists for justice or law if man is nothing but a sophisticated, programmed machine? Justice exists based on the fact that man is not a sophisticated programmed machine. Nature programs, but the awareness of man has put it in the place where it can use its empathy but also methodical deduction and induction to decide what is ethically (and in religious words: morally) correct for the greater good. That greater good is the limitations of awareness of the individual, group and civilization. IE. the more each becomes aware, the broader the justice will be for the greater part of the ecosystem/biosystem.  

6. Why does research, discovery, diplomacy, art, music, sacrifice, compassion, feelings of love, or affectionate and caring relationships mean anything if it all ultimately comes to naught anyway? Because we can. Why would a microbe feed and multiply, if eventually he doesn’t live to see any outcome on the organism it attacks? Man is able to learn. We are able to improve and since we have become aware, we have been searching. Life has been adapting (learning) since the first selfreplicating RNA. Our cognition was only waiting to be come (either in us or some other species). But even our mind evolves. We have a meaning, as we can choose it to have a meaning.  

7. Without absolute morals, what ultimate difference is there between Saddam Hussein and Billy Graham? They were both human. But whether they are different can be observed from many different perspectives. So, the ‘implicated’ absolute morals have no use.  

8. If there is no immortality, why shouldn’t all things be permitted? Actually if immortality would exist for humanity, why shouldn’t all things be permitted. Is it not true that if you couldn’t die, not really, you had no end, so you could be ruler of everything for ever if you chose to? And again, immortality would mean organic material would not be able to reproduce without the risk of running out of energy.  

9. If morality is only a relative social construct, on what basis could or should anyone ever move to interfere with cultures that practice apartheid, female circumcision, cannibalism, or ethnic cleansing? Post hoc, morality is an observation OF the social construct. When the construct changes, so does morality. History has shown this in every aspect. Exactly FOR the examples you give.  

10. If there is no God, on what basis is there any meaning or hope for fairness, comfort, or better times? There is no if. Humanity, despite the believing in over 5000 gods have survived itself up to now. It is pretty clear that hope for fairness and comfort or better times come from becoming aware of the ignorance in what religion has left humanity with.  

11. Without a personal Creator-God, how are you anything other than the coincidental, purposeless miscarriage of nature, spinning round and round on a lonely planet in the blackness of space for just a little while before you and all memory of your futile, pointless, meaningless life finally blinks out forever in the endless darkness? What a strange ad hominem kind of call from ignorance. If one was a miscarriage, you would not exist. So the question fails in sentence one. We all have a creator. Our parents. They are proven to have created us, and from that both coincident (and often purposelessness) falls from the equation. They (our parents) didn’t choose the biosystem either. They are as much a victim as we are. Yes, we are on a ball of magma and rock, iron and heavy materials that kill us over time, with a huge amount of water that we can’t really live ‘on’, but can’t live without either. We live here in this thin layer of solution we call air, that is kept to the surface of this planet, by the universal force of gravity (weak force at that too). Luckily we are not the start of any ecosystem, we are the result of millions of years of evolving plantlife and microbiotic life, that found a balance creating a sustainable environment where we are now ‘rulers’. And yes, if something disastrous would happen, it would all be over in a blink and there had been no reason and nothing is left. But that doesn’t change, that you have been able to ask this question on retrospect.  

12. Suppose the universe had never existed. Apart from God, what ultimate difference would that make? Nonsensical question. If the universe had never existed. There would have been nothing. So what would there have been use for any idea of a god? It requires a mind to imagine a god, so that would ultimately have not existed either.  

And these are my short answers to these questions.

The why: Heritage of development

So, why and how did I come to the realisation of decision trees?

Well, I assume I am not the only one who has come across this venture and moment of clarity. So here goes and likely you have heard/thought it all before. I just write it down, so my own mind makes sense.

I have two children and they evolve. Before my eyes, they become bigger, they learn and they come across every awareness level, we all have at moments in our lives. Sometimes more often when we ‘rediscover’ some clarity. Seeing my children evolve and recognizing the moments from before their birth, as the phases they are changing, I began to realize that humanity and from that actually all of the universe and life on Earth in specific, wasn’t really evolving much different. Of course it doesn’t, because every current state of species grows along the same line. But not just physically, we as humans evolve in mind, along the same path. Humanity as a whole follows the same path. I guess someone already made some ‘great unification’ theory, explaining how this is true. Children first learn of input, then of acquiring the necessities to survive physically (cry, find a caretaker). After the moment it feels secure it will live, it learns of its body (aware of ability, not of self), it learns of the world close by, small steps in grasping things, seeing things, then interacting with things. It finds out, that there is a ‘Pavlovian’ effect, Cry and food comes. Cry and attention comes, attention is activating neurons, feeling good. Then it starts to feel comfortable about its abilities and recognizes its interaction and its results. Stimuli and response, but also intent and reaction.

So, that is all fine, it is how a child gets to know itself and learns to be human. YES, but not just humans have this. EVERY species has this. They learn up to their abilities. The closer their neurological network resembles ours and their physical abilities resemble ours, the closer their learning/adapting process seems to ours. This means that it is not the human conscious that causes learning and adapting, but something earlier. Children with low cognitive abilities, still are able to act on simpler impulses. They are still able to adapt, to respond. Life is all about responding.

What I have named above, is actually the fact that humanity grows like all species, and even the whole of life on earth grows in awareness. Like every individual organism that starts live, it has to come to understand what it can do, where it is, how to interact. What it is, depends on whether it becomes self aware. To understand how our psyche works, it is imperitive to understand that our drives, our inner nature, comes from…nature. From the first photosynthetic plantlike organism that consumed sunlight to mix chemicals, up to the actual animals of any size and complexity, it had specific responses to stimuli. Our brains are created after milions and millons of years and millions and millions of generations adjusting into a neural network that is able to respond to stimuli of its surrounding and, in our case, also able to act upon its environment. The responses are the basic results when a stimuli is processed by the body and nervous system. The brain is the center of action, because the signal will be sent there for a decision to be made. As Michael Shermer explained already with Patternicity, it is simply a response to a complex amount of stimuli that might cause the organism harm. If something touches the skin, the skin will send a signal to the brain, the brain will send the haptic values (heat, cold, pinch, puncture) to different parts of the brain that have been previously activated by comparative signals. The build up of the brain is generally the same with every human, when they are growing up, because the same pathways/decision trees are build, based on cultural structure. This is no different with an amoebe or a coyote, just the level of intrinsic complexity differs. Now, this is the base on which I seat my theory of decision trees and I will work this out as I continue to find objective reasoning for it.

To put it short:
The model came to be, based on my research/understanding of how humanity came about ‘religious’ ideas. Like children (or rather children like humanity, being an individual evolved from the ancestral relative), we started having very little ability to cognitively understand the world. We start with emotions. Our parents are our world. Then we start to become able to move ourselves and our parents become our protectors in the surrounding we now see as our world. Then we try to mimic cognitive abilities after we mimicked physical abilities. This will give us freedom, but we still hold to the affection of the parent/protector/ruler of our world. The emotions are still vivid, but we are then moving into a more cognitive phase. We start to understand the world, bit by bit on a cognitive level. But lacking language and the possibility to see causality, we fill in the blanks. We have a ‘magical’ world, because we don’t know everything yet. We see a chair and it is an object, it moves if we move it, but when we kick it, we are surprised it didn’t move. We expect it to behave as ourselves. ‘magical thinking’, agenticity as some scientifically knowledgeable people call it. This was the start on which I based my theory that the way humans think and evolve, is caused by the ‘development’ of inherited abilities. This means that in the same analogous way, humanity will grow as humans grow in their understanding of their life and abilities.

No original ‘sin’

For those reading this who feel that there was a Christ and he had to exist, to rid humanity of its ‘sin’, should seriously try to view the following logic from different perspectives. Not just your own. If you want to be open-minded, you should be able to. The following is written in ‘laymen’s terms’ so people not knowing about the different parts of different religions, aren’t pushed away by reference to reference etc.

Here goes.

The main reasoning of a Jesus Christ to have existed for Christianity, is for his teaching, but moreover for his supernatural link and dying for everyone’s ‘sin’.

To look at things that are represented in words, it is important to understand words. Thus knowing the definition of words that are used. This is a requirement in any situation, because words would be useless otherwise.

Not only is it important to understand the implications of the word ‘sin’, but also what dying means, what supernatural means and what teachings are. Lets start with one and then the other.

‘Sin’ Wikipedia (which I take as a critical platform to provide information, controlled by a global community) says:

sin is the act of violating God’s will.[1][2][3][4] Sin can also be viewed as any thought or action that endangers the ideal relationship between an individual and God; or as any diversion from the perceived ideal order for human living. To sin has been defined as “to miss the mark”.[5]

Etymology[edit]
The word derives from “Old English syn(n), for original *sunjō… The stem may be related to that of Latin sons, sont-is guilty. In Old English there are examples of the original general sense, ‘offence, wrong-doing, misdeed'”.[6] The English Biblical terms translated as “sin” or “syn” from the Biblical Greek and Jewish terms sometimes originate from words in the latter languages denoting the act or state of missing the mark; the original sense of New Testament Greek ἁμαρτία hamartia “sin”, is failure, being in error, missing the mark, especially in spear throwing;[7] Hebrew hata “sin” originates in archery and literally refer to missing the “gold” at the centre of a target, but hitting the target, i.e. error.[8] (Archers call not hitting the target at all a “miss”.)

To shorten the above: In Christianity, Sin is a religious notation to things that are seen as a thought or action of a religious person, that go against the will of their god.

‘Dying’ Again, Wikipedia is my source here:

Death is the termination of all biological functions that sustain an organism.

Well, to be quick to kill any confusion, this is the globally accepted biological definition of dying. Christians will say that dying can also be interpreted ‘spiritually’ or ‘religiously’. They will refer to the illogical promise of death by a god, which then isn’t happening (or the story would have been over right away), so Genesis 2:17 the chapter where the ‘first human’ gets told that if he eats from a specific fruit, he will surely die, would be a failure on both sides. But, after many years, about a couple of thousand, someone came up with this illogical part and ‘quickly’ changed the meaning to ‘spiritual’, making the ‘literal’ interpretation already ‘metaphorical’ from line one. Yet, keeping all of it as ‘literal’ as possible.

So, to use another source to make sure to cover all bases:

gotquestions mentions:

Death is separation. A physical death is the separation of the soul from the body. Spiritual death, which is of greater significance, is the separation of the soul from God.

As you might see, there are some new things added to the equation. ‘soul’, ‘God’, ‘separation’. We will have to distinguish deeper, to make sure we are on the same single page when coming to any conclusion about this.