3 Things You Need to Know About Science

I love science and have tremendous respect for scientific inquiry. I have studied science. I know a few scientists, and I generally like them. However, I know a few things about science, and scientists, that more people need to know, especially now. So today, I offer you a few really important things you need to know about science and scientists.

1. Scientists know almost everything about physics, and almost nothing about life. That’s why physicists can build a reliable nuclear weapon but doctors can’t cure the common cold. Objective science works well for calculating the trajectories and velocities of objects in space and time. Organisms, however, are not objects, and so objective science is completely inadequate for studying them.

Most scientists don’t know this, but it is true. Sadly, many scientists, especially in the US continue to study human beings as though we were objects, or piles of objects called atoms. This has led to a medical system that dehumanizes and objectifies us more effectively than it treats disease or promotes health. It also means that there’s a hell of a lot that doctors don’t know. One thing doctors do know, however, is how to talk down to you in such a way that you won’t question their bullshit.

Physicists know how to blow shit up, and they don’t argue about it. Physicians, on the other hand, barely know what they are looking at, and there’s a lot of disagreement among them about practically everything. Doctors don’t like to let on that they really don’t know what they are doing, so they formed the American Medical Association in order to put up a consistent front that makes it look like they have everything figured out and know what to do in every situation. They do this so that people will trust them, and unfortunately, it works entirely too well. The AMA works very hard to quell dissent within its ranks, and banishes doctors who refuse to tow the party line, but renegade doctors persist, and many of them have better success treating patients than doctors who follow AMA guidelines.

2. Almost everything we know about science, we learned from the pursuit of war. We learned physics in the development of ever more lethal weapons, and we learned medicine from patching up the survivors. Today our weapons kill people far more effectively than our doctors cure disease, and much of the advance in modern medicine has been in improving survival rates of people who suffer the kinds of traumatic injury that only technology can inflict.

3. Plebes worship “Science,” while scientists worship money. You can’t do science without money, and finding money to do science isn’t easy. Unless somebody thinks they can make a lot of money on it, or the military thinks they can kill people with it, you are probably going to have a hard time finding money to study it. On the other hand, if you don’t really care what you work on, as long as it pays well, your opportunities as a scientist multiply. Scientists spend a lot on their education, and they expect to be rewarded for that, so many scientists look for the higher paying jobs.

That’s why, when you need a scientist to do something really terrible, like design a nuclear weapon that kills all of the people in a city, but leaves the buildings standing, or turn a minor statistical anomaly into a smoke-screen argument against global warming, or bio-engineer a bat corona-virus so that it infects humans, you can always find a meek and obedient scientist who is happy to do it for you so long as you have the money.

Plebes, on the other hand, have disavowed the creation myth of their Judaeo-Christian heritage in favor of an even bigger pile of bullshit called the Big Bang Theory, and they now embrace “Science” the great spirit from whom all new technology flows, as a religion. They traded the clerical collar for the white lab-coat of scientific authority. Now they believe anything the doctor tells them, just like they used to believe the priest, and of course they take their vaccines as a sacrament to their faith in “Science.” I hope they’ve at least learned not to leave their kids alone with a scientist either.

People have always believed a lot of stupid stuff. As I’ve so eloquently said before, “Stupid and wrong is the natural human condition, and it has never stopped us before.” That said, the human body is smarter than science can comprehend, and its natural tendency to heal, especially when supported by good nutrition, proper exercise and a non-toxic environment, tends to make doctors look good, if they can somehow take credit for it, but the miracle is you, not the medicine, and your body knows more than your doctor.

That’s why you should be very careful about messing with that miracle, or trusting “Science.” Science is not some noble pursuit of the truth. Science is about warfare, money, power and greed, and any scraps of truth that emerge from it are purely coincidental. Science is a tool of exploitation and control. In fact, psychologists are studying you right now, and the people paying those psychologists intend to use the knowledge they gain to control and exploit you. That’s what you need to know about science.

Beware of Skeptics

(Introduction: I wrote this piece more than two years ago, before anyone ever heard of Covid-19. I didn’t publish it then because I didn’t want to broach the vaccine issue. I just didn’t have a dog in that race. Funny how some things change. Skeptics haven’t changed though. This loose association of intellectual bullies still spews the same pin-headed reductionist thinking laced with the same prejudices and privileged perspective that they’ve been spewing for years, so the piece remains relevant, regardless of how you feel about vaccines in general or the experimental new Covid-19 “vaccine.”)

Be careful of people who identify themselves as “Skeptics.” In the same way that the long history of religious violence spawned atheism, a movement which killed God in reaction to the undeniable corruption of the Church. The explosion of online disinformation has given rise to a reactionary movement known as “Skepticism” which views objective science as the ultimate authority on everything, including all of the stuff scientists know nothing about. The Skeptics movement presumes that objective science can, and will, lead to our complete understanding of the Universe, not to mention a technological utopia for all humanity. For all that scientists, especially biologists and ecologists refute this, “Skeptics” have bought into the “logic” of objective science and the predictability of physics and extrapolated them into a universal belief system.

Our culture reveres science and technology because of the everyday miracles they perform in our lives. From microwave ovens to smart phones, we give science and technology credit for all of the toys and tools that we use everyday, but have no idea how they work. Ever since Einstein foretold the invention of the nuclear bomb, we treat scientists, especially physicists (aka “rocket scientists”), as the ultimate authority on everything from the origin of the Universe to the mysteries of perception and the human mind. Many scientists eagerly embrace this view as well, which is why we see so many physicists, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Michio Kaku getting into showbiz to propagate this notion among people who would never take, let alone pass, the science courses they teach. As a result, we have elevated objective science from a method of inquiry, to a kind of religion.

Skeptics have become the Spanish Inquisition of this new Church of Sciencism, a religion that worships technology. In general, Skeptics believe in science more than they understand science, so they assume that scientists know more than they do, and they assume that what scientists believe, is true, even though most of what scientists believe, is their own assumptions. Skeptics believe they know more than they do, and of course, they always think they know more than you.

Skeptics used to tell us that environmentalists were just being emotional and alarmist when they warned of the consequences of climate disruption, not because they doubted the science of global warming, but because of their blind faith in, and love of, technology. As it turns out, climate disruption is even worse, and happening faster, than even those environmentalists predicted, driven by the technological innovations that Skeptics are so enamored with.

Now Skeptics tell us that if it weren’t for those emotional and alarmist environmentalists, we could build safe, new, nuclear power plants that would solve our carbon emission problem. Isn’t it funny how the same people who call you an idiot for visiting an acupuncturist, taking a homeopathic remedy, or reading a horoscope, somehow believe in the magic of a foolproof nuclear power plant, with immunity to natural disaster and impenetrable defenses against military attack, and have complete faith in our ability to safely store tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste for at least a quarter-of-a-million years, despite all of the evidence to the contrary.

Skeptics love science, except when it reminds them that in our militaristic culture, we use science and technology to kill people, enslave them and make the planet uninhabitable. To Skeptics, this is a small price to pay in their ever-elusive quest for the complete understanding of the universe. They think it’s great to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for bigger and better atom-smashers, but scoff at mega-churches and their super-rich preachers. They revere people in lab-coats rather than clerical robes and say their prayers to Elon Musk’s rocket in lieu of a deity, but think you quaint for your archaic religious beliefs.

As an innocent word in the English language, “skepticism” denotes a good thing. Everyone says “Never look a gift horse in the mouth,” but if anyone ever gives you a horse, say “thank you,” lead it away to someplace private, and take a damn good look inside that horses mouth before you take it back to the farm. That’s a healthy kind of skepticism. The Skeptics Movement on the other hand, promotes a very misguided brand of fundamentalism quite at odds with the evidence and the best science. As a movement, Skeptics differ little from flat-earthers in their zeal to oversimplify the universe.

In the same way that the Catholic Church empowered small vile men to indulge their sadistic tendencies on poor peasant women who practiced herbal medicine, showed a reverence for nature, or rejected church doctrine, the Skeptics movement empowers eggheads with a superiority complex to bully women who reject western medicine and ridicule them for refusing to vaccinate their children. Skeptics don’t lead the charge to stop the excessive use of antibiotics on livestock, which scientists tell us, breeds drug-resistant super-bugs that threaten us all, nor do Skeptics make noise about corporate ag practices that lead to widespread food contamination. In reality, kids today face a greater threat from their school lunches than they do from their unvaccinated classmates, but Skeptics, like the Inquisition, choose their victims for their vulnerability.

Whether it’s high-level nuclear waste, persistent bio-accumulative pesticides, microplastics or fracking fluids, Skeptics have never met a toxic pollutant they didn’t like, as long as it is “safely contained” or “below a certain threshold.” They are perfectly willing to accept human casualties, lots of them, in the pursuit of technological innovation, or as an “unexpected consequence” of it, but something must be done about these heretical women who refuse to submit to the authority of Science.

Beware of Skeptics. Skeptics believe themselves wise and capable of navigating our technological society through the current climate crisis, or any other cataclysm their unbridled technocracy may unleash, were they not hindered in their efforts by the large number of superstitious savages who surround them. In reality, that unfounded, and unwarranted belief in their own wisdom created the climate crisis, and the extinction crisis, not to mention the gross inequality we see in our technological society.

For Skeptics, human casualties are just statistics, and your life, merely anecdotal evidence. Skeptics enjoy this kind of separation from the hazards of a technological society, primarily by virtue of their privileged position within it. Skeptics are mostly white, middle-class, college-educated people, and as such, can use their economic clout to limit their exposure to environmental toxins and avoid the worst industrial hazards, while they marvel at the achievements of unbridled human ingenuity and enjoy all of the new toys technology has made available.

Capital “S” Skepticism reeks of chauvinism and white supremacy. Skeptics dismiss the collective wisdom of indigenous humanity as “superstition and folklore,” but they share the blind arrogance of privilege ,and the prejudices of a culture that denigrates nature, and they mistake that belligerent blindness, for intelligence. They ignore the grim consequences of our high-tech civilization, while they embrace a completely imaginary, sci-fi vision of a future technological utopia. Capital “S” Skepticism simply cloaks the overt racism of white supremacy behind a thin veil of “nature and nurture” intellectualism.

There’s no horror they can’t justify and no atrocity they can’t rationalize in their misguided quest to misunderstand the universe, because understanding nature was never the intention of science. The intention of science has always been to rule nature, including human nature, with technology. Skeptics expect to have power over others, and they expect to have a very abstract relationship to the consequences of their decisions. That’s why Skeptics feel so comfortable making decisions for other people based on their own, emotionally detached, logic. Skeptics expect to rule the world by virtue of their intellectual superiority, which, in their minds, is always beyond question. We need to be very careful of people who think like that.

A New Brand of Stupid, and a New Way to be Wrong

They say “You can’t fix stupid.” and “You can’t help being wrong once in a while.” Truer words have probably never been spoken. On the other hand, one of the dumbest things that human beings have ever said is: “Human intelligence, backed by sound objective science, allows us to understand the universe.” I know that sounds like a smarter thing to say, and educated people say crap like that all the time, but that doesn’t make it any less wrong.

We live at a time where we worship objective science as our new religion. We believe that we understand the universe and have the intelligence to reshape it in such a way that it will serve us better. That idea has become the foundation of our culture. We’ve ditched the whole mythology of original sin, miracles and virgin birth, and ordained theoretical physicists like Niel DeGrasse-Tyson and Stephen Hawking and their equally ridiculous story of the Big Bang, quantum mechanics and string theory. In truth, we’re no closer to understanding how the universe works than we were three million years ago. We just have a new story that everyone believes, but no one understands.

E=MC² is a very useful equation. It helped us build nuclear bombs and land men on the moon, among other things. We know how to use it, but we don’t really comprehend it. Everyone thinks they understand it. Everyone thinks they understand relativity, but then they talk about squishy space and tell us how gravity bends light as it travels through space. In fact, relativity tells us that light doesn’t travel through space, and that space is never squishy.

Even physicists don’t understand relativity. The best physicists understand that squishy space and the Big Bang form part of a model of the objective universe that allows us to make predictions about how things in it will behave. The best physicists understand that the model is not the universe, because relativity reminds them that the universe is put together in a fundamentally different way than it appears to us.

Relativity tells us that space and time originate with the perceiver, and that there is no scientific reason to believe that space and time exist anywhere else in the universe except within the perceptions of the perceivers who perceive that way. This is where it gets incomprehensible. If anything exists outside of our perceptions, it must therefore exist outside of space and time. What would that look like? How would you describe it? How can you even imagine something without dimension or duration, let alone study it?

It’s impossible to even imagine, because it is beyond comprehension. Relativity drops us at the edge of the incomprehensible, and the best physicists stop there, peer over the edge a moment, then turn around, and get back to work on that model of an objective universe, even though they realize that the universe is not put together that way at all.

Human beings were not meant to understand how the universe works. Our intelligence was not shaped by a driving thirst to understand metaphysics, or by an innate drive to penetrate the cosmos. Human intelligence was shaped by our constant interactions with other humans. Our intelligence was shaped by constantly trying to outsmart and take advantage of each other. We became the cleverest animal on the globe because we challenge each other, intellectually, in a way that no other animal does, and we do that by being sneaky and dishonest with each other.

Human beings constantly deceive each other. It takes a keen intelligence to find flaws in an argument or tell when someone is lying, but it takes an even keener intelligence to concoct a convincing deception and pull it off effectively. We got to be this smart, not because of our driving curiosity to understand the cosmos, but because of our propensity to lie, cheat and steal from each other, and our need to unravel these deceptions to survive and thrive socially. That’s a lot more complicated than rocket science, and rocket science doesn’t explain the universe.

We might as well face the fact that stupid and wrong is the natural human condition. We have always been stupid and wrong about how the universe works, and we will never get any closer to understanding it than we are right now. Being stupid and wrong about how the universe works didn’t stop us from becoming the most successful predator on Planet Earth, and being stupid and wrong about how the universe works isn’t what’s causing us to overheat the planet or driving the extinction crisis, and being stupid and wrong about how the universe works doesn’t stop us from changing the way that we live and responding to the planetary crisis we face.

Quite the opposite: Our whole culture is built on the belief that in just a matter of days, we will unravel the universe’s few remaining secrets, and create an artificial intelligence that is incapable of error. Armed with this knowledge and technology we will remake every atom of the universe to serve us and our limitless understanding, and it will all work flawlessly. This global idea that we must be on the right track in our quest to remake the whole world in our image is so stupid and wrong, and so widely held by so many people despite so much evidence to the contrary, that this toxic stupidity and stubbornly held wrongness now imminently threatens our very survival as a species.

We don’t need more science; we need a new way to be stupid and wrong. Maybe we need 10,000 new ways to be stupid and wrong, because nothing has ever been so convincingly proven, with science, as the wrongness of our current brand of stupid. Forget about objective science, and forget about knowledge and understanding. We’re not built to understand the universe. We just need a new, more functional, brand of stupid and wrong.

We’re looking for a new way to be stupid and wrong that doesn’t obliterate all of the other intelligence on the planet. We need a new brand of stupid and wrong if we want to survive on planet Earth, and we need it yesterday. We don’t need the Large Hadron Collider, and we don’t need to understand gravitational waves. We need a new kind of stupid that hasn’t already been proven so fatally and disastrously wrong that it threatens our very survival as a species, and I’m just the idiot to bring it to you.

Better People

Someone who left a comment in LoCO’s “Thunderdome” last week thought I showed poor judgment in who I associate with because I have friends who are “homeless.” I realize that “homeless” is a bigoted term, as is the term “dope yuppies” which I also used to describe other friends of mine. I don’t usually talk about my friends in such pejorative terms, but in the context of the piece, those terms brought their legal, economic, and political status into focus. I used the term “homeless” to emphasize the level of disenfranchisement and prejudice my friends endure.

I didn’t use the term because I think they are bad people, quite the opposite. Most of the good, decent and interesting people in Southern Humboldt lack adequate housing, or are subject to the fickle whims of SoHum’s notorious slumlords. On the other hand, the real monsters in this community all seem to have nice, comfortable, stable homes. Gary Lee Bullock is a good example of the kind of people who live in nice homes, and come from respected SoHum families.

Gary Lee Bullock was high on meth, as usual, and started terrorizing his neighbors, who called the cops. He fought with the cops, who arrested him and took him to jail in Eureka. In Eureka, they charged him, booked him, and released him on his own recognizance. After that, while aimlessly wandering the streets of Eureka in the middle of the night, Bullock broke into the rectory of St. Bernard’s Catholic Church, and then tortured and killed Father Eric Freed, the Priest who lived there, before stealing Father Freed’s car and driving it back to his cozy SoHum home.

Zachary Brown makes a fine example as well, last Fall, Zachary, and a teenage accomplice beat an old man they did not know, almost to death, in the Garberville Town Square, with baseball bats. Zachary then walked back to his comfortable Garberville abode, leaving a trail of his victim’s blood all the way to the front door.

Then there’s Estelle Fennell, who works tirelessly to undermine the rights of poor people with new laws that criminalize poverty, ignores violent crime, as long as it is directed against poor people, and who appointed an unqualified Public Defender to make it even easier to railroad poor people into false convictions. These are the kind of people who have homes in Southern Humboldt. How could the people without homes be any worse?

 

I know that we have a few decent people living indoors here in Southern Humboldt, and a lot more who think they are decent people, and probably would be decent people, if they lived somewhere that encouraged them in that way, but if you are looking for genuinely decent, interesting people, you have a better chance of finding them among the people who pay rent, or can’t find a place to rent, than you do among the landed gentry.

That’s why I advocate for affordable housing and better treatment of the poor. I don’t do it out of charity. I do it because we need better people in SoHum. We need better people in SoHum, not richer people, or greedier people. We need better people, and better people have better things to do than squeeze bloody profits out of political corruption. Better people aren’t afraid of honest work, but they don’t want to work themselves to death either. Better people have better things to do. Nonetheless, better people deserve to be treated like human beings, and they deserve an affordable place to live.

The more we do to make life easier for people at the bottom end of the economic spectrum, the easier we make life for everyone, and the more attractive we make it for better people, and that’s how we build a better community. The problem is: the people at the top of the economic scale don’t see it that way.

Greed is a character flaw. It’s a kind of blindness connected to an inferiority complex. Greed creates a yawning chasm of need that enslaves greedy people who always want more. It comes across as pitifully coarse and shallow. Greed is insatiable, and it makes greedy people insufferable, and that’s a large part of the problem around here.

Greed takes a further toll when greedy bosses inevitably try to squeeze more work out of their employees. Overworked, poorly treated workers become bitter and resentful. Instead of resenting their greedy bosses, who they continue to suck-up to, they resent anyone who doesn’t work as hard as they do. Overwork tends to make people dull, and bitterness and resentment are not exactly attractive.

Finally, greed creates poverty. The needfulness of the greedy drives them to exploit the underclass, mercilessly, and the bitter resentment of overworked workers gets expressed in punitive attitudes and overt hostility towards the poor. Greedy people are too stingy to share, and resentful people like to see other people suffer, Together they they maximize the destructive power of poverty and inequality to destroy the lives of good people. Then they complain about all of the traumatized, and addicted people lying around who have no respect for this community.

You see how greed can really undermine the quality of the people, and the quality of life, in any community, but the black market in marijuana adds a whole new dimension to the sick, death-spiral of greed here in Southern Humboldt. As long as we remain focused on squeezing every last dollar out of each other, things are just going to get worse around here. On the other hand, everything we do to make this community more livable for people who don’t enslave themselves to greed, or work themselves to death, makes this community a better place to live, and tends to attract better people.

I Didn’t March for Science

A couple of weeks ago they held the first national March for Science. I love science, and I have a deep appreciation for science and scientific inquiry. I don’t trust scientists, however, and I’m very suspicious of their political agenda, so I did not feel inclined to join them in this demonstration. For as much as I love science, I don’t worship it. In fact, I think it’s kind of a bad cultural habit, but it’s one I picked up early, so I try to make the most of it.

I understand the science behind the Climate Crisis, and I know why ecologists say we have entered the sixth great extinction event in the history of life on Earth. I appreciate that many scientists recognize the grave threat we face from these crises, and I know that they hope to raise awareness about why we should pay attention to this kind of science, but I also know that scientists led us down this road to ruin in the first place, and their siren song continues to seduce us at our peril.

A lot of people tell me that they think science has made us smarter, and that the technology it spawned has made life better, but they could hardly be more wrong. Quite the opposite, in fact. Science may have changed our cultural mythology, but it has failed to reform our culture in any significant way. Meanwhile, technology has unleashed the deadliest holocaust on planet Earth since an asteroid strike wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That’s what science tells us about science and technology.

The objective evidence gathered in the field of ecology should disabuse us of any delusions of grandeur we derive from the mental masturbation we call quantum mechanics and theoretical physics. According to the World Wildlife Federation’s Living Planet Report of 2016, global wildlife populations, declined by 58% between 1970 and 2012, due primarily to human activity. That means there are less than half as many wild animals on Earth today, as there were on the first Earth Day. Science and technology had a large part in making these numbers a reality. Does that sound smart? Does that sound like an improvement?

Far from an intellectual advance, science has merely replaced one ludicrous myth with another. We replaced the myth of an omnipotent deity who created the world and molded humanity in his own image with the myth of a giant bomb that exploded out of nothing. They’re both stupid, and they’re both wrong and neither of these myths have made us any smarter. We’ve merely replaced the guys in monasteries who wore robes and studied ancient texts with guys in universities who wear lab-coats and peer into microscopes. Beneath them both lies the same pathological, ecocidal culture we call “civilization.” Instead of bestowing wisdom, science usurped the power of the church, creating a new religion based on the same old stupidity.

Here’s an example that illustrates how scientists dress up the same old medieval religious stupidity in the new clothes of secular science: Darwin theorized, not that we humans descended from apes, but that we are apes, and that we are but one specialized species of animal in a great pantheon of specialists. This, generally accepted, scientific theory of the origin of species, should have laid to rest the religious idea that God made man in his own image, and blown that “dominion” shit right out of the water, but these Medieval ideas remain as strong as ever, especially among scientists, because universities continue to teach scientists to view human beings as the only intelligent species on planet Earth, and the only ones capable of determining our own destiny. Most scientists still presume the superiority of the human intellect, and believe that the millions of other, “inferior,” species upon this planet exist purely for our benefit, to study, displace, or even kill for sport, just because those creatures don’t share our particular specialty. How is that different from any other form of chauvinism?

 

Businessmen and politicians use science in exactly the same way they used religion in medieval times: to control the masses and to give them an advantage in war. Instead of buying indulgences, they now invest in clean technology, or hire a panel of experts. Instead of asking the Pope to bless their military campaigns and inspire their troops, the military now pays universities to research and design new weapons, including psychological ones.

Both scientists and the clergy gained power over the masses by performing magic tricks, and promising salvation. Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, while scientists point to “Trinity,” the first detonation of a nuclear bomb. Christianity promises life after death. Science promises a brighter future through technology.

The fact that we still fall for this BS, even though industrial technology invariably creates much bigger problems than it solves, demonstrates our willful ignorance and cultural intransigence. In reality, we’re no closer to understanding how the universe works, today, than we were 500 years ago, or even five thousand years ago, and modern Americans are probably the stupidest creatures to ever walk the face of the Earth, thanks largely to science and technology.

When you consider science from the perspective of how it has affected our culture, I hardly see science as an improvement over religion. Trading religion for science is kind of like trading The New Yorker for Penthouse. Religion incorporates literature, poetry, art, music, dance, architecture, and more, into a framework that advises people on how to live and addresses most aspects of human life, whereas science just says, “Show me what I want to see.”

Where religion teaches kindness, charity, decency and humility, science presents endless possibilities, stripped of morals, ethics or aesthetics, like doors that open dark rooms full of unforeseen consequences. Science loves unforeseen consequences. “Unforeseen consequences” is where science gets all of its new material. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fan of medieval Christianity, but I’d no sooner march for science, in the way it is practiced today, than I would march in support of the Inquisition.

God, Einstein, Kant, Darwin, and Me

I’ve been really busy on a couple of new radio projects. One of these radio shows relates to this blog, and will air this Sunday. I really enjoyed doing it, and I’m excited to share it, so let me tell you a little about it:

Sunday, August 31, at 9:30 AM Pacific Time on KMUD Community Radio,

I will appear (if one can be said to “appear” on radio) as a guest on:
The Living Earth Connection:
A Show That Examines the Root Causes of the Ecological Crisis and Seeks to Change Our Vision of Our Place in the World

On this show I talk about classical music, Einstein, Kant, Darwin, the phenomenology of the organism and the metaphysics of ecology, in that order. You know, just a regular “off the cuff” interview. We prerecorded the interview last week, and finished editing it last night.

I know this material pretty well, but it’s quite heady. I had the rare privilege, as an interviewee, to edit the interview as well. I did my best to eliminate the long pauses and unnecessary digressions to make it as pleasant to listen to, and easy to understand as possible. Some great bits didn’t make the cut. We only have an hour of airtime, after all. This show was entirely Amy Gustin’s idea, but now that we’ve completed it, we’re both happy with how it came out. We may even post some of the outtakes as additional material on the Living Earth Connection blog.

I got invited on the show because of an essay I wrote that first appeared on this blog. Well, that, and the fact that I sleep with the producer, got me invited on the the show to talk about the essay titled: You Don’t Have To Call It God, But Don’t Pretend It Doesn’t Exist. Amy really liked the essay, because it points out that the best available science supports an animist, or indigenous worldview, while it indicts objective science, technology and the dominant culture.

The essay has nothing to do with God. It’s about science, perception and phenomenology. Religion gives God such a bad name, that I hated to use the G word in the title, but “A Short Essay on Phenomenological Metaphysics” has no hook. God is still a celebrity with SEO gravitas, so I went with the stupid title.

This essay elicited the most inspiring comment I have yet received in three-and-a-half years of blogging:

Frank Josef Orange
May 28th, 2014 at 1:22 am | Edit

This in regards to your essay You Don’t Have to Call It God: I’ve been a searcher all my life, read Relatively for the millions at around 11 but I was never able to do the math but I came to understand the principles.
Looked for god in LSD ,weed ..got closer
The strange thing is that recently I’ve been having some health problems, the kind you know will be the end ..ya just know, the odd part is that answers have been just showing up, I happened to watch a documentary DMT the spirit molecule And your essay, and all of it is coming into clarity.
That all of us and everything ever,was and forever well be One.
And it is simplicity and perfection and oneness and ..Self ?

Although there is still the problem how this thing came into existence. Something can’t spontaneously exist from nothing.
Could be we are just one of many beautiful shinning entities.
Oddly I’ve come to not care.

To conclude though, there were many things that lead me to the conclusions I’ve come to, but I have to say your essay just about puts the dot at the end…….

What can you say about a comment like that? Words matter! I write!

Frank read the essay about a week earlier than most of you, because I accidentally hit “Publish” when I meant to hit “Schedule.” The post appeared on the blog early, for about 10 seconds, but because he subscribes, the post went right to his email. When he came back to post a comment, it ended up under the previous week’s post. I’m telling you this, because, hey, sometimes there are bonuses for subscribers.

There are bonuses for listeners too. I always find it easier to understand something when someone explains it to me, than when I read it. On the radio show, I go into much more detail about the science behind the essay, and the implications of this world view. I’ll be the first to admit that a lot of what you read on this blog is just pointless drivel. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do, but this radio show is different. This radio show can change the way you see the world. At the very least it will give you something to think about. I hope you’ll tune in. 

click this link to stream or download Part 1 of the show

click this link to stream or download Part 2 of the show

 

You Don’t Have to Call It God, but Don’t Pretend It Doesn’t Exist

As you may have guessed, I’m not a religious man. I think about religion the way I think about classical music, only more so. That is: I’ve heard it. I’ve played it. I know what it’s all about, but it’s been done to death. I know some people still love it, but to me it seems antiquated and irrelevant.

I don’t worship a God of any sort, but nor would I call myself an Atheist. Atheism is a reaction to religion. Atheists renounce religion, and with good reason, I think, but I’m not about to deny the existence of a force greater than myself in the Universe when science makes it so plainly evident.

Anyone who accepts Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, buys the basic premise of Darwin’s Origin of Species, and can agree on a definition of “organism” would have a hard time arguing against the existence of, if not God, then at least something like God, or something that might have been called God for a very long time, for lack of a better word. I don’t have a better word either, but if you have a moment, and don’t mind stretching your mind a bit, I’ll introduce you, and you can decide for yourself what to call it.

We’ll start with the hardest thing to get your mind around: Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Everyone recognizes the formula E=MCsquared, and knows that atoms are packed with energy, and that’s why we can build nuclear bombs.

That’s not the really interesting thing about relativity. The really interesting thing about General Relativity is that it demonstrated that space and time only exist in relation to an observer.

Einstein wasn’t the first person to figure this out, by the way, the first physicist, perhaps, but not the first person. Immanuel Kant deduced the same thing, about 200yrs ago, logically, based on the a-priori nature of math and geometry. Einstein did the math and geometry and arrived at the same conclusion.

If you want to check Einstein’s math on this, you are welcome to do so. I know I’m not up to it, but I have read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and it seems like an airtight case to me.

This is a very different way to think about space and time than we are used to. To us, space and time appear unified, inexorable and absolute. We think of ourselves as inhabiting space, and passing through time.

For example:

I live in Ettersburg, East of Shelter Cove, South of Eureka and West of Garberville, I’ve lived here since the turn of the 21st Century. That is how I would ordinarily orient myself in space and time. Abe Lincoln, on the other hand, lived in Washington, DC during the 1860’s. So, it appears as though Abe Lincoln and I are separated by space, some 3,000 miles, give or take, and by time, 150 years or so.

General Relativity tells us that we don’t inhabit space and time so much as space and time inhabit us. In other words, I live in a very special place called “here” at a time called “now”, and in my experience, Abe Lincoln is a character from the distant past. During his life, Abe Lincoln also lived in a place called “here” at a time called “now”, but in his experience, I did not exist at all.

Abe Lincoln and I both perceive space and time, as the central character in our own experience of here and now, but the idea of a larger space and time in which we both exist at different times, and in different places, is just that, an idea. Ideas, like space and time themselves, do not exist outside of our perception of them. That’s what Kant and Einstein told us.

Space and time only exist within observers. That’s not how the world looks to us, and we cannot even imagine what existence outside of space and time is like, but that’s how it is, and that’s where we live. Still don’t believe me, take it up with Einstein or Kant. I recommend Kant’s The Prolegamena to Any Future Metaphysics for a good first step. If you’re still with me, try to stretch your mind around that for a moment.

You can’t really comprehend anything outside of space and time, but that is where you live, weird as it seems. You secrete space and time in order to make sense of your experience, and you build a concept of the world based on what you experience. So, space and time, as well as a concept of the world, in which you, and every other creature on Earth, inhabit space and time, only exist in relation to the observer who experiences them, namely, you.

OK, that’s the hard part. Let’s take the definition of “organism” next:

An organism is a complex system of interdependent parts, such that the structure and function of each part is determined by it’s function within the whole, and the whole of an organism is always greater than the sum of its parts.

That seems pretty straight forward to me. A cell is made of many parts, but they all function together as one organism. Many cells can function together to form a larger organism, like a plant or an animal. Many organisms can function together to form a still larger organism, such as an ecosystem. Organisms are not objects, nor are they machines. Organisms are alive. Organisms live.

And finally, What’s the gist of Darwin’s Origin of Species?

In the tiniest nutshell, I would say that the crux of Darwin’s biscuit is that all of the organisms that have ever existed on Planet Earth, are related to each other. Does that sound right? There’s a lot more to biological evolution than that, but for our purposes, that’s enough.

Now, imagine all of the organisms that exist on Earth now, and have ever existed in all of history. Imagine the 7 Billion+ humans living now, plus every human who has ever lived, all of their pets, all of their livestock, all of their ancestors, all of the wild animals that have ever lived, all of the dinosaurs, every fish, bird, insect, plant, and mushroom, and don’t forget all of the tiny microscopic organisms like yeast, protozoa, and bacterium. Don’t leave anyone out.

All of those organisms, Darwin would expect us to believe, are related, by birth, to every other organism, including those of you now reading this essay. Now go ahead and throw in all of the organisms that will exist in the future, even though we have no idea what they will look like or how many of them to expect. We’re talking about a lot of organisms now.

What separates this collection of individual organisms from each other? The answer is space and time, of course. Some of these organisms come from the past, others from the present, still others from the future. Some come from Africa, others from Asia and still others from Australia, and so on. No two organisms can occupy the same space and time. This you remember from geometry, and it corresponds to your experience of space and time in the real world. So, all of these organisms, though related, remain separated by their positions in space and time.

What were we just saying about space and time? We went over how Einstein demonstrated that Kant was right when he deduced that space and time do not exist outside of the observer who perceives them. What does that mean for all of those organisms? It means that outside of our perceptions, all of those organisms are not separated. Outside of space and time, where perceiving organisms actually exist, all life on Earth remains undivided. In other words, every organism on Earth, past, present and future, are, in some incomprehensible, but very real way, parts of a single organism, that exists outside of space and time.

What did we just say about organisms? “An organism is a complex system of interdependent parts, such that the structure and function of each part is determined by it’s function within the whole, and the whole of an organism is always greater than the sum of its parts.”

So I ask you, “What would you call an organism made up of every single organism on Earth, such that the structure and function of every single organism on Earth was determined by it’s function within the whole, and the whole of that organism was even greater than the sum of its parts?”

Thanks to Kant, Darwin and Einstein, we know this organism exists. Without it, we wouldn’t exist. We know that we are a part of it, but what should we call it? Gaia?, The Big Organism?, God?, Bruce? Does it matter what we call it? You are never going to mistake it for anything else, and you’re never going to be able to talk about it any more coherently than this, so maybe it’s best not to call it anything. Still, I don’t think it makes sense to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

In fact, I don’t understand why we don’t teach this in schools. The Critique of Pure Reason has been around for over 200 years. General Relativity has been around for most of a century. We teach evolution, and we teach relativity, at least to the degree that most teachers understand it, but but they never quite put it together. Instead, they teach that civilization, the economy and the “rule of law” is what unites us …against the rest of nature.