What is truth?

A few years ago, a friend--I suspect that he voted for donald t. rump--challenged me with: "You have read about the world's major religions.  You are a learned man. Tell me whether anybody other than Jesus has ever come back from being dead?"

I usually never take up such questions to debate.  Because, there is no way that one can debate such questions that are not based on evidence.  They are driven by faith.  I merely thanked him for the certification that I was a learned man, and then moved on to other topics.

As a kid, I was raised with stories of people doing extraordinary things.  I believed them.  It took a while to figure out that belief and faith do not invite inquiry.  As my grandmother often replied, "because it is so!"  I remember once my father narrating the story of a Hindu holy man who was reportedly seen in three different places at the same time.  My immediate thought was, "how did they confirm that?"  After all, this was even before the age of telephones--they could not have been on a three-way call and reporting the sighting.  But, I didn't dare to ask my father that, the same way I chose not to respond to the question related to the resurrection of Jesus.

All of us--except trump, and his minions who might be a huge subset of the 63 million who voted for him--seek the truth in anything we want to understand.

The faithful claim about Jesus or other divine people and happenings are extraordinary claims.

The principle of proportionality demands extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims. Of the approximately 100 billion people who have lived before us, all have died and none have returned, so the claim that one (or more) of them rose from the dead is about as extraordinary as one will ever find. Is the evidence commensurate with the conviction? 

The extraordinary evidence is not there.  "In science, we need external validation." There is no other way.  One might choose to believe in whatever, but that belief by itself does not make it an universal truth.

How do we know that the scientific method works?  Is science itself a "faith" as much as the resurrection of Jesus is a faith?

Nope.  The fact that you are reading this is evidence that science and the scientific method are no "beliefs" or "faiths."  Here is Richard Dawkins explaining that:

We atheists, too, are awestruck by this universe. So what?

A couple of weeks ago, a friend and I caught a wonderful break that the weather gave us and headed to the coast.  It was a sunny 60-degree-plus with nothing more than a light, caressing wind.  Looking at the vast ocean while at the foot of the old lighthouse, I--an atheist--and she--a believer, of sorts--were both equally awestruck by it all.  The trees were also awesome, and so were the hills.  I imagined that it will be one awesome paradise when the rhododendrons are in bloom.

Yes, it is with design that I used "awe" that many times in the previous sentences.  For one, it is true that I am simply awed by everything around me.  I don't even have to venture far away from home for such a feeling.  The river that is close by and I see everyday. The young lambs that have been only recently birthed, and the older sheep too. Blue sky with puffy white clouds. A toddler's laughter. A dog's wagging tail. And more.

I am awestruck all the time.

But, I don't have to see god's hand or face in any of these.

We atheists, too, are blown away by all these.  Just because we don't see any creator behind all these, and just because we theorize that these resulted from the randomness that the universe is, doesn't mean that we are not awestruck.  I would, in fact, think that we go about exploring and understanding only because we are so much awestruck.

I have blogged before about Richard Feynman's wonderfully profound observations on "the pleasure of finding things out."  As he noted, "the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts."

In the latest issue of the Scientific American, Michael Shermer has more to say on "the soft bigotry of those who cannot conceive of how someone can be in awe without believing in supernatural sources of wonder."  I like how he brings that word "bigotry" into it, because it is such a strongly prejudiced view of atheists that makes people imagine the craziest things about us.

Shermer writes that in the context of a research that showed that feeling the emotion of awe "elicits uncertainty and a subsequent desire to resolve that feeling by explaining events in terms of purpose-driven causal agents."  That awe, therefore, leads the believers to believe that there was a causal agent, or more, behind those. "[In] the moment of awe, some of the fear and trembling can be mitigated by perceiving an author's hand in the experience."

And that is where we atheists take on a different interpretation to all those "awe" moments. As Shermer writes:

Instead of fear and trembling, we feel wonder and gratitude in discovering that the author's hand is nature's laws and nothing more, but also nothing less.

Aaaaaawww! That is one heck of a well-crafted thought and sentence.

The anti-science, nearly Luddite, liberals

There are enough and more instances in this blog as evidence for why the left-leaning folks easily mistake me for a Republican, though I think I am one committed liberal.  The hassle arises from the fact that I am not ideologically predisposed in favor of the left when thinking through, and opining about, many public policy issues.

Take climate change, for instance.  I routinely post about how by forcing the developing countries to abandon nuclear energy, we end up forcing them to use more fossil fuels--after all, their energy needs have to be met somehow, right?  The liberals in democratic developing countries like India sing the same ideological tunes and make it difficult to pursue reasonable energy policies.

In my classes, whenever I discuss issues related to food and agriculture, students let loose arguments, almost as a knee-jerk response, critiquing Monsanto--the ideas they have picked up from other classes or readings they did on their own.  I then have a tough time engaging them about these important issues.

Michael Shermer has a thoughtful column on this in the Scientific American:

Whereas conservatives obsess over the purity and sanctity of sex, the left's sacred values seem fixated on the environment, leading to an almost religious fervor over the purity and sanctity of air, water and especially food.

 Exactly!  I am so glad to know that I am not all alone in this.

Surveys show that moderate liberals and conservatives embrace science roughly equally (varying across domains), which is why scientists like E. O. Wilson and organizations like the National Center for Science Education are reaching out to moderates in both parties to rein in the extremists on evolution and climate change. Pace Barry Goldwater, extremism in the defense of liberty may not be a vice, but it is in defense of science, where facts matter more than faith—whether it comes in a religious or secular form—and where moderation in the pursuit of truth is a virtue.

Good luck to us in our attempts to engage with people on all the urgent issues of the day.

The chicanery of Deepak Chopra

Let us face it; Peter Sellers as the Indian, Hrundi V. Bakshi, in The Party, offers a lot more wisdom than does Deepak Chopra through his highfalutin new age spiritual advice, where he seemingly blends modern science and reason with age old lore.

And the guy, Chopra that is, has an inflated opinion of himself enough to tweet a horribly failed joke that an earthquake in Southern California was a result of his meditation; he tweeted:
"Had a powerful meditation just now -- caused an earthquake in Southern California" ... "Was meditating on Shiva mantra & earth began to shake. Sorry about that."

Perhaps all Chopra does is to test and confirm on a daily basis P.T. Barnum's line about suckers being born everyday.

Chopra's convenient mixing of scientific language and spiritual crap gets Michael Shermer's attention (ht).  The following line in his commentary about Chopra's version of "Theology 2.0," as Shermer describes it, is a beauty:

Chopra’s use and abuse of quantum physics is what the Caltech quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann calls “quantum flapdoodle,” which consists of stringing together a series of terms and phrases from quantum physics and asserting that they explain something in our daily experience.

Awesome, dude!
Take it away, Claudine Longet :)