But, I put the word GOD in all capitals because I'm using that word in an uncommon sense, and need to keep reminding my readers that I am doing that. In today's language, I am talking about God-2.0, a new version of God, like a new, improved version of a video game or App. And there, I said it, so now I have also offended and outraged most Religious communities.
I'm losing friends and "Likes" and followers pretty fast here. But I press onward, undaunted.
I want to address this post to the people who made it this far in reading it -- those who are willing to believe that our context, our universe on Earth, is alive, awake, aware of us, and at least partially responsive to our behaviors, actions, and words. Maybe it's not Jupiter, or Thor, or some old white guy with a long beard on a throne in the sky, but there is definitely something going on here that rises above simply nature or even a larger term "Nature".
And this is important because whatever is going on here, I believe, interacts with us heavily in everything we do and to ignore it is to completely misunderstand why some things we do fail and why others succeed, and to miss out on opportunities to succeed with way less effort and much greater impact in our daily lives. We are immersed in and swimming in a sea of "tough love" -- it is not our servant to tap into and order about like some Genie in a bottle or some mystical loving parent, though it can "come through for us" and give us things that we would never achieve unaided. It also is "tough" because there are some facts, rules, guidelines, restrictions on what sort of things we can get assistance on.
We have to live by its rules, not expect it to live by ours. This is no different from learning to live with the Law of Gravity -- it just is a fact we can like, hate, believe in, deny it, but regardless it will "rule" our lives all the same. We all understand Gravity. There is no "magic" involved, just higher mathematics which, fortunately, we can be content to let other people understand. This is just the way things are. It is no big deal. We can adjust to it and live with it.
So we all accept that there are things-like-Gravity, part of the structural design of the world we live in, that we just have to live with. A good question, and one that we never really articulate and ask out loud in school is
"How many more things like Gravity are there that we need to know about?"
Very much like the "Artificial Life" that I described in my last post here, the definition of the term keeps changing as we learn more and more, as it should. After all we started with a very weak notion of what Artificial Life could be, and it truly needed updating over time.
Sadly, just suggesting that we raise the question of whether we have this concept, the meaning of the word "God" as correct and nuanced as possible, and as helpfully defined as possible, raises a firestorm of heated outrage from all sides - Science, Religion, and Atheism! It is discouraging and I must digress for a moment to reflect upon why that is.
In fact, this digression takes up the rest of this post and I have to defer what I was actually trying to point to to my next post in order to keep this reasonably short and coherent.
Over the last 5000 years, as society has evolved, we learned more about the world around us. We added new concepts to our thinking, and refined old ones. That is a normal and natural process, which continues at a dizzying pace today, and we need more of it.
It seems there are three distinct kinds of "facts" that behave quite differently when we try to update them in our minds and in society.
There are neutral facts that no one cares if we change; there are socially-connected facts that rock the boat somewhat if changed, but in a tolerable way; and there are deeply-rooted-beliefs that set the boat on fire and overturn it if changed, and which trigger violent response, even death, if even challenged, let alone changed.
No one ever seems to mention this or teach it, but it's a very useful distinction to learn.
So long as Scientists retreated from society and focused on neutral facts, like "momentum" they could play happily and no one really noticed or cared, unless maybe a cool documentary on the Discovery Channel came along to share. Most of the so-called STEM subjects are in this category, and it is also termed "hard science" , a misnomer if there ever was one.
Socially-connected-facts are things like Psychology or Sociology or Economics or, surprise, Geology and Astronomy. Groups of people have set up camp around certain exact meanings of these facts, and become agitated if someone rocks the boat. The camps take on shape and names and become things like the "Chicago School of Economics". Groups argue often heatedly about who has the better understanding and meaning of the same words. But in general no one actually dies.
Deeply-rooted-beliefs, as I mentioned above, set the boat on fire and capsize it if challenged or changed. Not just small camps, but entire nations or cultures argue heatedly over who is right and often are quite willing to go to war, killing or being killed in great numbers, to protect their own understanding of certain words and concepts. Protestants go to war with Catholics in Ireland. Sunni Muslims go to war with Shiites in most of the Middle East. Christian Crusaders invade and attack all of Islamic civilization in the Middle Ages. Scientists like Galileo, suggesting the Earth is not in fact the center of the solar system, risked death if they did not recant.
But these deeply-rooted-beliefs are not just about religion, or culture, or the role of women in society, or differences between races and racial identity. So called Scientists also become emotionally attached to and even ardent defenders of certain understandings. Revolutions and changes in "paradigms" such as Quantum Mechanics, Plate Tectonics, or the nature of "disease" ( invisible tiny organisms living inside us? Really?!!!) were fiercely denounced and resisted and proponents of new ideas excluded from funding or mocked and shunned.
Heck, even the guy Ignaz Semmelweis who realized that women were dying in childbirth in the hospital because surgeons were not washing their hands, and tried to tell them that, was driven out of practice and put in a mental institution where he quickly died.
There are things that some people do not want to hear.
Anyway, where all this was going is that the subject of the nature of GOD is one of those live-wire, hot-button topics that typically causes much heat and no light to emerge from a discussion or attempt to study and grasp the kernel of truth out of the shell of attached meanings of old.
I've spent most of my life believing that there is, indeed, something, some kernel of Truth that matters to me, buried in and tangled up inside this bundle of meanings attached to the word GOD. Yes, most of the simplistic meanings are just laughable and can be dismissed out of hand. There is no dude in a white robe sitting on a throne running or ruining our lives.
But on the other hand, there are some aspects of reality that are as important as the Law of Gravity, but equally invisible, that still change the outcome of what we try to do as surely as they change the trajectory of a ball we throw upwards.
It is just plain wrong not to try to investigate, in a clear-headed, skeptical but curious manner, what those structural laws and design features of the world around us might be. In my book, that is precisely what Science is all about and we should not be deterred by skulls on stakes and big signs that say "Forbidden territory -- all hope abandon ye who enter here!"
Heck with that. Let's go see what is over there on the other side of the police tape.
To be continued in my next post!
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