A LETTER TO A YOUNGER SELF

18 July 2022
Hey man.

You don’t know me, and I bet I don’t know you as well as I think. My friends and I started a little writing club, and the topic for the week was to send you a message in a bottle of sorts. The obvious route would be to offer you advice, maybe gift you some wisdom gained from fifteen or twenty extra years of life experience. After mulling it over, I have decided against taking that path and instead just vent a little to you to help myself. Because the one thing I’m relatively confident we share in common is the hatred of people’s unsolicited advice; the ramblings of boring adults telling us to turn back and take their preferred shortcuts, even though it is evident that all the good juice in life is found in fruits that grow in miles-deep canyon bottoms thick with scrub oak. So tired of those strangers pointing up at the well-maintained trails as if we didn’t fucking see them, as if we didn’t purposefully make up our minds to avoid them at all costs. To them, we are a strange creature obsessed with pursuing pointless endeavors. To us, they are… well, we don’t really care what they are, do we? I think we understand them even less than they understand us. 

The difference between us and them is we don’t interject. We don’t vocalize to these people what we really think of them or their habits. We try to be enthusiastic about them getting off their asses and doing something at all. “Wow, amazing, you did a great job. I’m really stoked for you. You must have had a blast! What’s next?”  For some reason, despite the endless discouragement from some of our peers, we still feel obligated to be the whole goddamn world’s cheerleader. Maybe our kindness is viewed as a sort of rolling over, an admission of our inferiority. Maybe we took the Golden Rule to heart too heartily. There should be a warning tagged to the end of that one. Here’s my suggested revision:

Treat others as you would like to be treated, but don’t get your hopes up that they will return the favor.

I hope it’s not disappointing for you to learn that this is just as annoying today in the future as it is for you in your present, and I do apologize for the selfish thrusting of my feelings upon you. This is not an attempt to try and nudge you onto another road, but if it does, that’s cool too, because the last thing I would ever do is to try and persuade you to do it all the same as I did. Afterall, that’s the same old shit everyone always does to us. I cannot possibly put myself in your shoes, no matter how hard I try. Those Vans of yours have so much room to expand and learn; honestly, I am jealous. We always loved the feeling of being an amateur. We also know we can never go back, and the only way to stay that special kind of dumb is to keep on learning. The joy of blissful idiocy is maintained by trudging forward through the unknown, and I refuse to rob you of that by offering you explicit directions to my honey holes. You would prefer to find those on your own, I am sure.

ANYWHO, I hope all your pet projects are running smoothly, and I hope you’ve got your nose deep in a good book. Hold onto that woman, keep learning, and as the Toasters say, “Don’t let the bastards drag ya down!”

Love,

Future Bryan

P.S. I played with the Toasters last month. Twice, actually. It was sick.

P.S.S. I play the drums now. Highly recommend picking that up sooner. But you know… do whatever you want.

WHY I AM ALSO NOT A CHRISTIAN

“Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a better place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.”

- Bertrand Russell in “Why I am Not a Christian”

Anyone who spends even a short amount of time looking into the history of philosophical thought will quickly realize how much philosophy revolves around the concept of the Good Life. What is it? How can a human find it? Is there a way to formalize a prescription for learning how to live a good life so that all humans can potentially attain it? These are some of the main questions that have propelled philosophers over millennia. While we have not found one system that will fit everyone, there are many ideas put forward by multiple philosophers and religious icons that will ring true with different groups of people based on their personal tastes.

 While I agree in some ways with a variety of philosophers on the topic, in particular the sweetheart above, in my own experience, I have found that the Good Life is a concept best described by what it is not rather than what it is. Some days I need to enjoy nature, others I need pointless play, and others hard work on art projects. Trying to use just one of these as a definition of the Good Life would exclude the others, which would be unacceptable. What I never need, however, is whatever causes me to feel anxiety, malice, hatred, a desire to control others, or greed. More than anything, I do not want to feel like I am a helpless, powerless critter that requires rescuing. I desire freedom and self-sufficiency, and to help people find these for themselves, too. This is the number one reason I am not a Christian and why I believe that Christianity is one of those things that can be placed into the box that holds all the other things that the Good Life is not. To further explain the reasons behind my distaste for Christianity, allow me to retell a short story from my past.

Seven years ago, at my sister-in-law’s wedding, I had a short interaction with some family members. While sitting with my wife’s cousins, who are devout Christians that are painfully aware of my disbelief, one of them decided, no doubt propelled by a few bottles of liquid courage, to start questioning me about my atheism. It was all the usual, predictable discourse that happens when I step into these conversations: so how do you explain creation? Where do morals come from? To which I respond… I can’t, and people make them up. I love how flat these responses land on believers; they expect a raging atheist with citations and receive nothing more than a clueless idiot. Honestly, when confronted by believers, throwing out “I dunno” is all I really do anymore. The conversation then naturally fizzles out, and we can move on to more interesting subjects, human stuff about adventures and kids and hobbies, things we can both understand and relate to.

On this occasion, though, things went a little bit differently. I got a NEW QUESTION. The question: but Bryan… do you feel saved? Egad! Do I feel saved? I had no idea, and I am sure they relished how I wore it on my dumbfounded face. My response must have been terrible, although I do not remember what it was. Inside my brain, things were going nuts, and my first reaction was to think from what? But of course, I knew exactly what I was supposed to feel saved from. Satan. Hell. Eternal punishment that can only be avoided by promising Jesus Christ that I would have faith that his words were the truth no matter how immoral or downright idiotic they were. Like a time machine, this question transported me back to when I believed in such things, and I relived the terror that tortured poor ten-year-old Bryan when grown adults told him to repent or die. It had been so long since I thought about this shit seriously, since I decided I didn’t need saving. So long that I had started the path to recovery from the child abuse incurred from a Christian upbringing and started to understand what the Good Life was. New Bryan was caught off guard, and old Bryan was awakened and felt whatever the opposite of nostalgia is, recognizing the initial new question for what it was: just another attempt to scare me into submission.

Christianity teaches us that life is just a bad movie to get through and that we have no control over whether it will be our dad or a serial killer picking us up outside the theater when it’s over. Actually, we do have a teeny tiny little slice of control: choosing to fawn over dad, assure him over and over that he is the only thing that matters to us, doing every dumb thing he tells us to do, never questioning a word from him or his creepy group of friends. Dad controls all the rest, including the killer, who just so happens to be his estranged friend that oddly still takes orders from him. Dad does not mind sending this monster to the theater to snatch us up if we falter in our endless groveling. This is the message of the Bible, the Good Word: either love dad or his buddy will kill you. Dad is our savior because if we are obedient little children, he will choose not to destroy us.

 To be honest, I do feel saved. Now that I have thought about it, I feel saved from dad. He robbed me of my agency, made me believe that I was born disgusting into an evil world, and only by his grace can I be redeemed into something worthy of escaping his eternal punishment. Free of him, I am free to live for today and seek the Good Life in this body, the only one I can be sure I will ever have. I believe Simone de Beauvoir was correct when she said the kinds of freedoms we should seek are those that increase overall freedom to its maximum for all humans, and Christianity is the antithesis of this. A good Christian is a shackled mind charged with running around convincing others cage up their own minds, too. Fuck that shit.

Like I said earlier, I cannot define the Good Life because I think it is different for everyone, even myself from day to day. What I can say, however, is that it surely is not being a Christian, and that is why, as my boy Bertrand, I am not one, either.

IN DEFENSE OF A MEANINGFUL UNIVERSE

Lately, there is a concept that I cannot seem to escape: meaning and whether it exists outside of a self-reflective observer who can identify an object or relationship as meaningful. Talking about meaning generally goes down two separate roads. The most worn trails lead to existentialism or nihilism. The former describes meaning as a created thing, a construct that doesn't exist in the world absent of a (usually human) self-reflective observer that conjures meaning from a meaningless universe. The latter, nihilism, states that the universe is meaningless, regardless of attempts to assign meaning to any interactions within it.

 On the one hand, people believe that meaning is a human construction; on the other hand, any attempt to create meaning from a meaningless universe is a fool's errand. Here, I am interested in describing meaning as something that exists within the function of physical systems, regardless of the existence of observers able to identify these functions as meaningful. In other words, the goal is to show that meaning is something that is found or discovered; it is neither created by humans nor entirely absent no matter how hard they try to create it. 

The ultimate project of this essay is to snatch meaning from the clutches of anthropocentrism and show that meaning exists and awaits discovery by self-reflective organisms. I will show that the arguments against nihilism and existentialism are pretty simple. The former rests on the logical impossibility of proving a universal negative, and the latter fails due to the circularity of its argument. Meaning exists and is not created by humans, and I will promote a definition that rests on the compatibility and interdependence of parts within a functioning system. If both the arguments for utter meaninglessness and meaning created by humans are so quickly rejected via simple undergraduate logic, then meaning must be something that exists, even if it is not experienced by a brain. Thus, well-functioning physical systems are infused with meaning, whether or not there are self-reflective biological organisms to recognize them as such.

1. NIHILISM AS A LOGICAL FALLACY/ THE FUNCTIONAL ARGUMENT FOR MEANING

Anyone who has spent any time studying basic logic knows that proving a universal negative is logically impossible. Because of the almost infinite amount of logically possible objects or phenomena in the universe, we are unable to make claims that something that is not self-contradictory doesn’t exist anywhere in any possible world. Why, then, do many people insist on the universe being meaningless? How is it even possible to make such a bold claim that meaning cannot exist anywhere we might go to look for it? Oddly, the truth of nihilism seems rather obvious to some people. These people love to go on and on about soundless trees falling in the middle of the woods, as if just because there isn't an ear to hear it makes it an irrelevant, meaningless event in the history of the world. Well, it is not obvious to me, and I think a meaningful world is an idea worth defending.

I find that the idea of a meaningless universe simply doesn’t make sense intuitively, even ignoring the one-sentence logical argument given above. Again, it is easy to write off nihilism simply by stating that it is something that cannot be known to be true. One can at best be agnostic regarding the meaninglessness of the universe if they are interested in having a logically consistent belief system. So, what can be said of the aforementioned tree falling in the woods out of earshot of human ears? The fallen tree will die, making room for another to grow in its place, which means that it opens at the bare minimum the possibility for new life. The old dead tree being replaced by a fresh, new one (maybe even of a new species that survives better in the shade!) also means that there will be new opportunities for dispersal of fresh seeds for future generations of trees from the young growth that takes its place. The dead tree will be decomposed, its organic material broken down into non-organic nutrients that can fuel the growth of whatever happens to take its place. Innumerable bacteria, fungi, and invertebrates will feed on the tree's biomass to strengthen and diversify their own populations. This whole process could lead to a change in the composition of the entire biotic community over the next hundreds and thousands of years; indeed, this fallen tree could contribute to creating an ecosystem that is entirely unique to planet Earth. This would be an almost soundless process in terms of humans being around to hear, but does that make it meaningless? This feels obviously wrong. There is so much more meaning in an event than what can be detected by mammalian sense organs. In fact, the vast majority of the countless meaningful events that occur every day will do so absent a human observer. Our existence depended on these events, and they will continue to happen long after our demise.

Once we redefine what we understand meaning to be so that it isn't laughably centered around the ill-informed thoughts and opinions of the latest apes to arrive on the landscape, the idea of meaning itself becomes more meaningful.Function, what a thing does, and how it interacts with the other things around it is what gives them meaning. In this view, meaning ceases to be tied even to biological entities only and can be ascribed to all sorts of objects that exist in space and serve a function within some sort of dynamical system. Mountains are meaningful in how they contribute to the weather systems on planet Earth, creating obstacles that cause the winds to chaotically swirl, along with pressure and altitude differentials that drive condensation cycles. The biodiversity of the Amazon would be impossible without the salt deserts of Africa and the weather systems that deliver the nutrients from the latter to the former. Simply looking at function as meaning scatters meaningfulness all around. Meaning becomes unescapable.

Today, we can only slightly understand the most mundane details of planet Earth's evolutionary and geological history. Hell, our destructive nature has put us in the sorry position of barely being able to stitch together the history of our own species that has occurred since we started keeping track of it. Humans have destroyed entire civilizations without giving a single shit about those civilizations’ discoveries or thought systems. I sometimes wonder if the real underlying motivation for the Western obsession with the meaninglessness of life is to easily ignore all of the horrors it has committed on a world trampled in the name of the relentless spread of its ideologies. It's easier to explain away one's past and deny responsibility for shaping the future if one can simply shrug and say, "well, as we know, it's all meaningless, anyway." This idea is not only ridiculous and logically incoherent but saddening to those of us who have spent some time trying to understand the world around us and found it bursting with meaning. Worse, it fuels apathy for the world our children have to grow up in. 

 But enough of the insanity of nihilism, and onto the slightly better but still incorrect view that humans create meaning out of a meaningless world.

2. MEANING IS FOUND NOT CREATED

Over and over, I read and hear that the only route around nihilism is the idea that meaning is created by people, and the individual is in control of what is meaningful to them. This view still takes for granted that the physical universe itself is meaningless. It is the only legal step proponents of this idea feel there is to take. We must say that meaning exists but is created by people and therefore is fictional. Meaning exists in the same way that Spiderman does; a construction of the human mind projected onto a world that inherently lacked it before we showed up. The problem here is that this mindset breaks another basic rule of logic and begs the question. 

 Why does meaning exist? Because I say it does, full stop. In this view, the only proof that life is meaningful is that people create the meaning that seems so meaningful. To be fair, this certainly is not the only philosophical idea put forward that begs the question; examples are everywhere in philosophy and religion:

Christians: How do I know God exists? The bible says it does. Why should I believe the bible? Because God commands it.

Descartes: Why can I trust my senses? Because a benevolent god doesn’t deceive. How do we know god doesn’t deceive? Because god is omnibenevolent.

Kant: How can we know that we have free will? The presence of moral reasoning. How do we know correct moral reasoning is accessible to all humans? Because we have free will.

Where the thinkers who demand certainty of an uncertain world go, so does the circular argument. Dogma creation is always the last dying gasp of this quest. The existential dread caused by the mere contemplation that maybe radical skepticism is correct leads to fantastic mental gymnastics that, while fun to read, only serve to hide the circularity of an argument from the creator of the argument themself. 

My aversion to the idea that people create meaning is further fueled by a deep intuition that it is grabbing the stick from the wrong end. Those like me who suffer from depression that has resulted from a life of professional failure might be able to commiserate with me on this point. I think back to long nights of whiskey drinking and pot-smoking, wondering why the hell I cannot seem to find a career like so many of my friends and family have found. Sitting alone in a room and just trying to decide that life has meaning even though all signs point to the opposite just plain does not work for people in the throes of depression. But the things that do work, like making songs, taking pictures of birds, long hikes, and writing long-winded essays about my feelings, are things that I recognized a long time ago are not really creations in the way most people think of them. Saying I “create” a bird picture or a good tune is just as fallacious as saying that I “create” meaning, in the same way that a scientist cannot (honestly) “create” a discovery. These things are stumbled upon by those of us who go looking. They usually result from accidents, of sifting through garbage for hours or days until suddenly a keeper shines through. Although meaning seems to be everywhere, it is special because it requires work to uncover it. If it could simply be conjured from thin air, there would be no drive to look for it. If meaning didn’t already exist in the world, it is highly doubtful that anyone could ever find any.

3. CONCLUSION

We use words to describe things we experience in the real world. Of course, my opinion is highly skewed by my insistence on naturalism as the correct worldview to adopt if a human is interested in the truth. Obviously, many people will disagree with the opening statement to this conclusion. But I have become incapable of viewing my conspecifics as anything but beautiful outputs of the blind process of natural selection. I feel the best way to describe what we do as humans lie in our discovery, description, and reorganization of things that had existed long before we showed up. Meaningfulness is one of those things, and the word itself attempts to name something in the world that might otherwise be ineffable. The language barrier between reality and our capability to describe it is strong, likely unbreakable, but we can make abstract shortcuts that trick our monkey minds into believing that maybe one day it could be shattered. Because of this, we mustn't mistakenly take these abstractions as total phantoms or, on the other end, things that never existed before humans showed up and planted them in the universe.

Meaning is hidden under the hoods of our cars, in the interactions of organisms within ecosystems, in harmony created between the strings of guitars and voices singing together. It can be challenging to find, but nothing worth doing is easy. Go out and find some.

PRACTICE WITH WORDS

In the interest of not having my writing practice for the day be another fucking cover letter, I will sit here at the computer for a little while and write about some things that have been on my mind. Sometimes tiny ideas pop into my head, and I write them down in the Notes app on my phone. I often don't remember what I even meant when I wrote it, and it takes me a little time to recall what I thought was so important about this idea. It doesn't help that usually, the note is in the form of a one-liner; it makes the whole thing feel like an out-of-context joke that really makes no sense unless the circumstances it arose from are available to me. 

Below are a couple recent ones, along with an attempt to expand a bit on them:

“A good background might be even more special than a good bird.”

When I read this the other day, I was surprised it was in my phone, to begin with. Not only did I not remember what I meant by it, but I had not even remembered writing it. When I noticed it, it was like walking into my living room at 2AM to get a drink of water and finding Bertrand Russell sitting at my kitchen table playing solitaire and smoking a pipe. It was a strong feeling that this does not belong, almost enough to throw me into a youtube rabbit hole researching the Mandella Effect and the possibilities of a human jumping between alternate universes. 

But then it all came back to me, as quickly as the fleeting thought came and left me while I was out photographing birds. Once I remembered where I was when I made this note, its meaning became glaringly obvious: birds are everywhere, good backgrounds are hard to come by. There are plenty of cool birds around to take pictures of most days, but those birds are rarely in a position relative to me that gives the photographs I'm taking of them an excellent background. Telephone wires, tree branches, roads, a dumb, dull blue sky… these things all tend to ruin my pictures. A common bird, however, has never ruined a picture on its own. The most memorable days for me as a bird photographer are when everything looks perfect in the viewfinder there in the field. And that is almost entirely dependent on a glorious background, which I have found in the last couple of years is hands down the most challenging thing to come by out there. Birds will always be beautiful, but backgrounds, unfortunately, will not.

“Funding is based on strong use; the goal was always to move toward a weaker definition where all are included."

This one took me a minute. Funding of what? Ah yes, wildlife and habitat conservation/restoration. That thing I always talk about and the one subject that returns more blank stares than any other.

Strong use and weak use refer to the use of wildlife resources and include trampling caused by hiking, taking fish and game from the woods via angling and hunting, off-roading, plinking, camping, etc. Strong users would be those who use a lot, especially in a way that they can be charged more and more for their use. Weak users don't do much out in the woods and rarely participate in anything that would result in income generation for natural resource managers. Income is generated for wildlife and habitat protection primarily through fishing licenses, hunting licenses, State Park and National Park passes, and campgrounds. Additionally, there are taxes on hunting equipment that go directly to the cause. Outside of this, there is not a hell of a lot of passive income to fund the protection of our lands and animals. At the end of the day, strong users can be thought of as hunters and anglers, while weak users are those once-a-year hikers that hit the free trail closest as the crow flies to their couch.

Wildlife management has focused almost entirely on increasing strong users. More people hunting and fishing and visiting state parks translates into more money to fund hunting and fishing and state parks. While I am all for more people going outside in theory, I worry that Aldo Leopold was right in that this system builds a relationship between people and the woods that mirrors that of Lenny and that poor rabbit. Aldo says that this kind of funding system that depends on people taking from nature will end in humans fondling the woods to death; selling tickets to the show to try and save it is self-defeating and ignores a couple of essential facts. 

Fact 1: We are all users even if we do not go outside and recreate in the mountains. Being alive inherently means that your existence is causing resources to be pulled out of the earth to sustain that existence. For this reason, we have to widen the definition of a strong user in a way that basically includes everyone so that everyone gets charged to keep the ecosystems we depend on functioning and providing the services we need to survive. I’m pretty sure we already do this with all kinds of shit and that this is just called a “general tax."

Fact 2: All living organisms have an intrinsic right to go on existing. When we only use money from strong users to protect ecosystems, biases creep in. We get organizations who lobby for MORE DEER, MORE ELK instead of just the healthier, diverse ecosystems we really need for the long-term survival of these species and thousands of others. We get hunters protesting the reintroduction of carnivores because it would, in theory, decrease the number of huntable animals on the landscape. We farm fish and dump them into rivers and lakes instead of working out why our bodies of water cannot produce fish in abundance anymore. If we had a more general-purpose way of funding ecosystem management (maybe the previously mentioned “tax” idea), then all living organisms from Steller’s Jays to morel mushrooms would have an equal right to protection. 

When only one group is funding public resources, we run the risk of a short-sighted management policy resulting from catering to a blinkered interest group. I would love to see a wider net be cast to collect money for habitat restoration and wildlife protection. But that would require that people appreciate nature even if they don’t drive out there to experience it themselves. This is a hard pill to swallow. The possibility of getting it done depends entirely on the moral, aesthetic, and scientific education of a group of primates who would preferably not learn. 

 Like Aldo, I am pessimistic.

 “Planets as golf balls”

 What the fuck. No clue. Ok, the last one:

 “I'm just glad I stopped and took the time to understand the length and depth of our almost infinite ignorance."

This was the most obvious one and was one of those "fuck, I shoulda said X” things. I made this note while walking away from another conversation where someone was probing me on what I planned to use my degree for. My response is always that the learning was the point, and I honestly have not given enough thought to how I will monetize my degree. The conversation kind of flopped from there, probably because I was embarrassed and somehow felt irresponsible for not thinking too deeply about the job prospects for a philosophy major in 2022. This question always makes me feel childish about my desire to learn for its own sake. It depresses me that the single goal of gaining new knowledge and grasping what humans have learned since they started writing stuff down and saving it for the future is not the reason most people get a degree.

The history of humans itself is infinitely fascinating. There is no word for how interesting the history of the whole fucking universe is. Our knowledge is flimsy and consistently incorrect. Our world changes as we find new ways to think and talk about it. Being exposed to dozens of theories every semester, comparing and contrasting them, siding with one, and then the next week siding with its critics is what is beneficial about philosophy. No, there are not a lot of jobs that pay for someone to be able to deconstruct and explain Hemple or Quine. But there is so much value in taking on and then rejecting so many viewpoints over a few short years that I don’t really care. I can go fix appliances if I have to. I can be happy doing anything from here on out, and I have philosophic exposure to the infinite amount of ways there are to be human to thank for that. 

This leads to a decent conclusion about why I am wasting time fleshing out these baby ideas when I know no one will read them. It is helpful to me, the only person that really matters around here. These thoughts come and go so quickly, and I barely understand them at the moment they strike me, let alone a couple weeks later when I am scanning my phone for essay ideas. The fact that I could crank out 1500 words in a couple of short, enjoyable hours is proof to the only person I really give a shit about that this is something I enjoy doing for its own sake. And those, I have found, are the kinds of things that are always worth doing.

Sometimes I wonder if I am lying to myself when I tell people that the degree was an end in itself and doesn't need to be a means to career advancement. It's days like today when it becomes wonderfully apparent that I am telling the truth.

NATURALISM AND THE NON-NATURAL

“You religious believers set up your postulates as truths, and we take you at your word. By definition, you render your beliefs unassailable and unavailable.” -Strahler [1]

It seems a little bit like divine providence to me that the final philosophy paper I read before graduating was related to a subject that lands so close to my heart. I could have been assigned some more Mill vs. Kant bullshit, some stuff about computers and intelligence, the intricacies of language, or the nature of knowledge. Instead, I was inspired and am sitting here writing about the difference between the only things we can know exist (natural) and this other category some people constantly refer to without ever giving a coherent explanation of what it is (the non-natural). This subject has been a source of confusion, frustration, and heated discussions throughout my college career, and I somehow usually ended up in my own corner defending naturalism while others talked about the non-natural and non-physical as if they are real things. Divine intervention would be a perfectly logical explanation for what is happening in my life right here, right now.

Some people might even be convinced that divine intervention or fate really is the explanation for why I am writing on this subject, and probably use similar logic every day to say all kinds of stuff that they cannot prove empirically. I can’t show they are wrong, because a naturalist like me is always at a disadvantage due to the logical impossibility of proving a universal negative. While people around us speak authoritatively on gods and multiverses, Platonic forms and consciousnesses beamed into human brains from who-knows-where, we must sit and wait for proof before we can speak up with an opinion. The thesis of this paper is that the divergence here lies mainly in the ratio of weights a person puts on evidence and logical possibility. For a naturalist, evidence is heavier than logic. To others, logical possibility weighs the same as, if not more than, empirical fact. This idea is explained best by Barbara Forrest in her Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism [1], and the following will be composed of commentary on this paper and how it helps explain how I have come to view naturalism and what kinds of things a philosophical naturalist can and cannot say about all things natural, both scientific and unscientific.

1.     NATURAL AND NON-NATURAL THINGS

Question: what is a non-natural thing? This category is so broad it sometimes oversteps its bounds and even includes things that are obviously natural when we think about it for more than five seconds. Indeed, it is sometimes synonymous with "man-made," as if living a human life is inherently against the laws of nature. Vaccines, space travel, and information have all, from time to time, been labeled as non-natural by those who have ethical objections to them or a metaphysical ax to grind. The type of humans who try to distinguish between the natural and non-natural is at least three-fold. First, there are those who don't want to do or use non-natural things (I refuse to take vaccines, natural immunity is fine!), and second, those who deny natural explanations for human origins (Darwin was wrong, I didn’t evolve from a monkey!). The third are those logicians and mathematicians that wish for world to flow from order, instead of the other way around, and for humans to be the only things capable of receiving such sacred knowledge. Because of all this, the whole conflict between the natural and non-natural seems based firmly on human exceptionalism, asserting that humans are not only fundamentally separate from nature, but superior to it.

My personal definition for “non-natural” is simply that it is the word “natural” with the other word “non" in front of it and a hyphen between the two. It doesn’t have much meaning itself, because if there are non-natural things, we wouldn’t be able to access them. Natural things include, but are not limited to: Information, math, logic, trees, angler fish, the dwarf planet Pluto, humans, Black-capped Chickadees, alligator lizards, scissors, pillows, terrorists, and the religious delusions that cause them to blow up buildings (which are also natural). Natural processes output natural products, of which we are one and thus everything we ever made or thought. This is supported by literally all of the physical evidence collected over the history of humanity and its engagement in the scientific enterprise. This history of success of the methods of science is the grounding for not only my reasoning to call myself a naturalist but also for philosophical and methodological naturalism as described by Forrest. It is the key feature missing from all supernatural explanations that have been put forth over time and the reason why we can ignore them so long as they continue to call themselves supernatural. 

2.     METHODOLOGICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL NATURALISM

Forrest’s paper talks about philosophical naturalism and methodological naturalism. Methodological naturalism is defined by:

“(1) the reliance on scientific method, grounded in empiricism, as the only reliable method of acquiring knowledge about the natural world, and (2) the inadmissibility of the supernatural or transcendent into its metaphysical scheme.” – pg 2 [1]

By using the scientific method as our sole method of finding causal explanations, we automatically preclude supernatural causes, which have no explanatory power, because they cannot be poked and prodded by the scientific method, by the definition usually given by those who believe in the supernatural. Naturalists did not sit down and decide that god was a dumb idea and shouldn't be taken seriously. The possibility remains logical, but the point is that bare logical possibilities (non-contradictory ideas) are a dime a dozen. Unicorn farts on Mars are logically possible. As far as our only acceptable method of inquiry (the scientific method) is concerned, supernatural explanations for a natural world make the job of the scientist harder, because they remove the requirement that all natural phenomenon have natural causes. Says Forrest:

“Introducing supernatural explanations into science would destroy its explanatory force since it would be required to incorporate as an operational principle the premise that literally anything which is logically possible can become an actuality, despite any and all scientific laws; the stability of science would consequently be destroyed.” – pg 4 [1]

Allowing the supernatural to hold an explanatory role in science, in effect, ruins science altogether.

Methodological naturalism is a sort of epistemology, which is empiricist in nature, and concerned with how we collect information in a way where we can learn something. It is a procedure that is performed and dependably produces results in the form of new knowledge. But this doesn’t mean it is the only logically possible way a human could come to know something: they could hear voices or hallucinate (hear or see god), which could cause them to believe that what they experienced has a supernatural origin. But there is no procedure to dig deeper within a naturalist methodology if they insist on a supernatural explanation. They disqualify themselves from the game, as Strahler states in the epigraph of this essay, by the very assertions they make about the supernatural, that it is inaccessible to science.

  “The fact that there is no successful procedure for knowing the supernatural does not logically preclude its being known at all, i.e., through intuition or revelation. The problem is that there is no procedure for determining the legitimacy of intuition and revelation as ways of knowing, and no procedure for either confirming or disconfirming the supernatural content of intuitions or revelations.” – pg 10 [1]

Because of this, it is not the sciences that leave the supernatural out of the science game but the supernaturalists who choose to play a different one that keeps their assumptions forever intact.

Philosophical naturalism is the way one organizes their worldview under methodological naturalism. A philosophical naturalist's collage representing their worldview pulls from facts gained through methodological naturalism and would likely exclude anything supernatural. If it included them, they would have to be labelled as things we cannot know (truly supernatural) or have not yet found a way to measure. They would be things that are merely logically possible. The funny thing about logically possible explanations is that, as we probe the aspects about them that can be measured (physical effects inside brains, fossil records showing the evolution of life), we find that in many cases even the spookier subjects have good scientific explanations for them, all the way up to religion itself. EO Wilson (RIP) says in Forrest’s paper:

“Most importantly, we have come to the crucial stage in the history of biology when religion itself is subject to the explanations of the natural sciences . . . sociobiology can account for the very origin of mythology by the principle of natural selection acting on the genetically evolving material structure of the human brain. 

If this interpretation is correct, the final, decisive edge enjoyed by scientific naturalism will come from its capacity to explain traditional religion, its chief competitor, as a wholly material phenomenon. . . .” - pg 11 [1]

Supernatural phenomena just become natural phenomena, and their mystical nature vanishes along with our ignorance of the subject. 

The philosophical naturalist does not jump to conclusions about things that are not accessible to examination by their methodology. They don’t have to, because they can have a certain amount of confidence, gained purely through the success of the scientific method, that the method will continue to work. Whether or not any of us will be around to see how far it can go it is another question altogether, but the possibilities of a supernatural cause for anything we find important dwindles by the day. One can cry faith in science here if they want, but it is a faith that is backed up with a significant evidential down payment that has yet to be made in the name of supernaturalism. 

The question asked in the philosophy course that inspired me to write this was “Does the scientific method, together with the success of the scientific project, warrant disbelief in anything non-natural?” and the answer to this is no, here in Forrest and also in my dumb brain. But it is a mistake to think that the boundaries of what a naturalist is comfortable believing in or not were drawn arbitrarily, in a naïve attempt to claim confidence that what science discovers constitutes all possible knowledge. If a supernaturalist is interested in justifying their views satisfactorily, we are all ears and await their proof and methodology. Unfortunately for them, they cannot use the scientific method because they define their subject as non-natural. If they did use the scientific method, they would get unrecognizable outputs, natural explanations in the form of neural spike chains, mental disorders, cultural evolution, and so forth. Strangely this would result in new knowledge for the naturalist, while at the same time, the supernaturalist would be scratching their head and going back to the drawing board to find a way to get a supernatural answer. They would, sadly, feel like they had learned nothing about their supernatural subject when in reality, they had learned all they ever needed to know.

Philosophical naturalists are not automatically required to take supernatural beliefs as a bad thing for people to have; it merely asserts that these things aren’t accessible to science. I aim only to defend science as the best way to obtain shareable knowledge about natural things, but I by no means think that it is the only way we obtain knowledge. Practicing hobbies, reading fiction, and instincts are all ways we can gain knowledge about the natural world, it is just that we cannot publish a paper or assign statistical significance to these things. My feelings are not fit for scientific investigation, so as the sole feeler of my feelings I must accept that the most important thing to me, my SELF, is not scientifically interesting. And as a philosophical naturalist, my “self” must hang in the previously mentioned category of natural things we don’t understand yet. Which is perfectly fine — that category dwarfs the categories that contain knowledge of the world by many orders of magnitude. Here, just as in countless other circumstances, I am not special.

3.     CONCLUSION

While reading Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism, I kept wondering to myself if something this obvious really had to be written on paper. This paper was one of the best explanations of naturalism and the difference between logical possibilities and empirical fact derived from scientific exploration I have read. Unfortunately, her argument is not likely to convince anyone who isn't already convinced of the usefulness of methodological and philosophical naturalism. The weight of the argument hangs on the shoulders of the reader, stuffed in a backpack full of books, and the reader most likely must be someone interested in science and understanding of its limits. Additionally, they must already have a view of themselves as a poorly understood natural thing, a product of natural causes like a diamond, rain storm, or tree frog. They must appreciate how easy it is to be wrong and how precious the scientific method is for giving us a way to be right, even if only for a few fleeting moments.

I must stress that all this argument means is something similar to what Feynman said in Six Easy Pieces [2], or maybe even Sellars in The Scientific Image of Man [3]: that investigation into the supernatural cannot be scientific. However, no one said that the unscientific could not be fun to learn about or worthwhile to dabble in. The scientific image of man as a pile of jiggling atoms has little to no effect on my daily life, besides the preaching of the benefits science education to my friends and kids. In the manifest image, I'm a dad, drummer, photographer, hunter, and husband. I am Santa Claus at the right time of year, and all of these things are insanely rewarding and fundamentally unscientific. But it is all still natural, and the scientific method only lets you learn about facts about some of the natural, not about what it is like to be in the natural. This will always have to be felt and will probably always remain, thankfully, unscientific.

Works Cited

[1] 

B. Forrest, "METHODOLOGICAL NATURALISMAND PHILOSOPHICAL NATURALISM: CLARIFYING THE CONNECTION," vol. 3, no. 2, 2000. 

[2] 

R. Feynman, Six easy pieces: Essentials of physics explained by its most brilliant teacher, Addison-Wesley Puplishing, 1994. 

[3] 

W. Sellars, "HILOSOPHY AND THE SCIENTIFIC IMAGE OF MAN," in Frontiers of Science and Philosophy, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963, pp. 35-78.

 

HOW I LOST MY NIHILISM

There is a common misconception about those people like me who love to read and discuss philosophy. Many people seem to have an image of the philosopher-type as Socrates at his worst, running around challenging people on their closely held beliefs. An army of nay-sayers showing people why they are wrong by using reasoning they don’t care about or understand, without offering up a new framework to adopt so that they can be right moving forward. The only thing philosophers believe is that beliefs are childish, and like all childish things can be easily pulled apart and shown to be something other than what the believer initially thought it was — instead of safety and security, belief offers false hopes and dreams that at their worst can become dangerous to the believer and those around them. Normal, sane, non-philosophically inclined humans who believe the world has meaning see the philosophical project at large as an intruder kicking in doors at bath time and throwing out everyone’s bath water with their babies along with it. Philosophers hold nothing sacred, hold no real beliefs of their own, and think the world would be better off if we all understood that nothing matters.

 The above misunderstanding of philosophy is a fair one, and I am not so entrenched in the dogma of critical thinking and rationality that I cannot fathom a good explanation for where it comes from. Out of context quotes from many wonderful philosophers give people the impression that philosophers are sad, damaged individuals who wake up every morning and ask themselves “should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?” This line from Camus does a great job demarcating where the conflict between philosophers and non-philosophers arises: all one needs to do is read one sentence further, listen for a few more seconds, and the point of the setup is revealed, that “one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.” All of us who go on living instead of putting a bullet in our brains are courageous just for making this choice. The misunderstanding is between how much a philosopher believes people want to read, and how much patience most people have to give to the philosopher’s words. 

So, who is to blame here? Either the problem is that the philosopher cannot seem to get to the point, or the reader cannot sit still long enough to watch the whole argument unfold. It should be rather unsurprising that I lean toward the latter explanation, but there is more work to be done here before anything definitive can be said. For it is here that we are presented with a brand-new mental Necker cube that is ripe to be plucked and endlessly dissected by philosophers: what came first, the soundbite or the type of impatience that has propelled it into being normal humanity’s favorite way to consume information? Or are both of these insufficient to explain the other?

The title of this essay is misleading, and I feel like I must apologize for that. I don’t think I ever lost my nihilism, because for the most part I never became a nihilist. This essay was a product of a conversation during philosophy club which prompted me to write this down as a good title for an essay. So here I am writing it, when I should be working on any one of a hundred other things at the end of my final semester at philosophy school. Worse, I’m doing the one thing I feel like I have been trained to never do at all: giving my unsupported opinion about life its meaning. 

If we take the time to read the words of the people who we take to be nihilists (not those who actually SAY THEY ARE, who are essentially unsalvageable), as in the whole damn book the small bite came from, it becomes almost impossible to believe that they thought the universe is meaningless. Even in a world where meaning must be created by the observer for itself, there ends up being all kinds of meanings everywhere, at least as many as there are human observers. I spent a little bit of time occupying this particular stance, and that was the closest I got to being a true-blue nihilist. But even that is an extremely anthropocentric, self-serving view that just seems laughable after a cursory glance at the history of the universe. All these amazing incidents over the past 13.7 bn years were meaningless until I showed up and bestowed it with meaning. A world where nothing means shit until a human assigns it with purpose looks rather grand indeed; an insignificant creature who is ignorant of everything that brought it into existence required a little change of attitude before the universe could have meaning. How lucky the universe is to have stumbled up us, H. sapiens, givers of significance to all of existence! My current stance today is much different, and I believe meaning existed long before humans. The universe would have meaning even in the absence of humans to say it did. So, just to be clear, I never once believed that the universe is meaningless, and after reading real nihilists realize I was never even close to being one of them.

My lucky, middle class, aging, white ass never had a chance to become a real nihilist because of two things. First, the opportunities I was afforded just from the circumstances of my birth mentioned in the previous sentence. A largely happy person surrounded, largely, with happy people, who knows rent money is just an awkward phone call away if he ever needed it, is not likely to fall into despair over how miserable and uncaring the world is. Second, I always had the time to sit and read my way through an existential crisis. This is also a result of my privilege as stated, which bought me the time to be able to read, in context, the original texts that many philosophical snippets are pulled from. I simply am lucky enough to have the spare time to investigate the truth of things, where many people simply are not.

Another fortunate thing can happen when a privileged human becomes interested in reading philosophy: they find new friends who are also interested in reading philosophy. Philosophy fills people up with questions and ideas that spill out endlessly when they find a similar soul who is also topped to the brim with philosophical thoughts. My philosophy friends and I have conversations whose length is limited only by how long we can stay awake and how pissed our SO’s will be if we stay out any later. There is never enough time to touch on everything, but we try to anyway. The way we debate might lead people to believe we were trying to win, but as people who are used to criticism, a defeat in argument is just a new way to remove bad ideology from our box of thinking tools. I personally value any opportunity to change my mind, and I am fortunate to know people who give me ample opportunity to do so. These opportunities would be much fewer and far between if it weren’t for the people I have met who are also hopelessly doomed to love philosophy like I do.

In fact, the whole course of this essay has changed just from texting portions of it to philosophical friends. They keep me in check, show me there are other ways to view the world besides through my own eyes, and what really needs advocating for is more free time for all people. Freedom, no matter how much some snooty philosophers would like to think, is not inherent within us, but is something we help build for each other. A single person alone in the woods — ignoring the fact that this idea of how humanity started is a total fabrication — is not free at all; they are committed to focusing on the problems of the moment, which include building shelter, finding food and water, and making sure there are enough supplies tucked away to make it through the cold, low-resource winter months. Groups of people can share these duties so that individuals can specialize in a way that makes each individual highly efficient in their assigned task, which gives the group the superpower of abundance creation. Suddenly, there is more than is needed for today, maybe for the next year, and everyone can sit and share ideas, fictional or otherwise, to help pass the time in a way no organism has ever been able to do before. We make songs and sculptures, play games. We do philosophy. Together.

Seeds are best planted into soil that has already been turned, and its best that the one doing the planting understands the soil it is working with. How much greater would people’s understanding of the benefits of philosophy be if instead of encountering lone quotes on the internet, they were spoken to them by a trusted friend? How much more inspired would people be to read more closely the source of the soundbite if they knew they had the whole weekend, maybe even more, to explore the literature without falling behind on their daily humdrum duties? How much more variety and diversity of philosophical texts would be available if it were valued by the general public as something fun and worthwhile to do with each other? It is an unavoidable fact of history that most Western modern philosophy got written because of Western wealthy donors, either private or through the university, supporting the thinking and writing habits of those lucky Western few who could secure this for their Western selves. Modern philosophy has been a rich white man’s business, and because of how remote the existence of these philosophers of old seems to the average working human, the only option for having new philosophical seeds planted in one’s mental soil is through a stranger, many times a foreign one to both one’s century and culture. Of course these strangers seem nihilistic; usually they are with respect to everything the new reader cares about. 

Philosophy, as my good friend Leah says, is best done as a group activity, and thus it is a tragedy that one is usually introduced to it alone through lonely, naked, marooned snippets. Thus, the problem sketched in the beginning of this essay, where philosophers write more than people have the attention span to absorb properly, has an obvious source in the inequality of time the two groups have to devote to philosophy. Philosophers have all the time in the world to write and read, and normal people only have a few minutes out of their day to even try to tackle some of it if they wanted to. There are really only two options within this system to solve the problem, but neither sounds satisfactory: either we dumb down philosophy (keep it to 250 short words please!) or ask people to shirk their daily commitments in order to take it seriously. 

The only thing left my feeble mind can think of is a completely new society-wide incentive structure, where we count GDP in time available for people to waste, and the more of it, the better. What a fucking amazing world it would be if we all had as much time as we needed to find answers to our questions, to slow down and smoke a joint and stare at the world long enough to come up with questions of our own. We all might want to learn some big new words and abstract concepts, so we can be lazier when we talk about them with one another. Now THAT would be a world bursting with meaning, and I only wish I could read the philosophy that would be birthed by such a culture.

AGAINST THE RELIGION MACHINE

“Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.” 

-Karl Popper 

Religion has been abusing us right in front of the whole neighborhood since the day it was created. Abuse of people's bodies, goodwill, and donated time is among the most well-known of the crimes it has committed against its followers and critics alike. These alone are horrific and should be enough to argue for abolishing fundamentalist religious institutions outright. At the very least, they deserve a steep downgrade in their position in the moral and social hierarchies. If we cannot bring ourselves to view fundamentalists as devious and deleterious to society, at least we should give them no more respect than flat Earthers. For Christ's sake, the Bible is where these globe-Earth deniers get half of their proof for their garbage beliefs. More shit output from familiar shit inputs, the predictable trademark of a successful religious text.

It is the nature of truth and the way religion deranges it that I wish to talk about here, for the parading of the Bible as the source of eternal, undeniable truth is what fucked me up the most in my religious upbringing. Actually, it was the belief that there could be eternal truth at all that really did a number on me. After becoming educated about the slipperiness of the truth through studying science and philosophy, the reality of what it is when you tell a curious kid that one book holds all the information they will ever need has become clear: it is child abuse. It withholds from humans their right to participate in the noblest wild goose chase of truth-seeking.

1.    THE RELIGION MACHINE

Scared, intellectually lazy parents churn out kids that grow up to be and do the same. The population grows, and the rigid social structures created by this generational enslavement of minds become "tradition" and ever harder for any individual trapped within it to refute. History and poor record-keeping compress and destroys evidence of cultural evolution, and its beginnings become impossible to trace. Abused children become child abusers, sure that the reason for their perseverance as a cult(ure) is dependent on the gods they worship and the abuse they demand, instead of the good luck of being in the right place on Earth during a geologically tame time. The credit due to the toiling cooperation of millions of forgotten humans, the correct source of any society's success, is appropriated by jealous gods and the priests who shove them down our throats. This cycle of misery that builds religions and keeps them in power will be referred to hereafter as RM, the Religion Machine.

RM depends on the ignorance of the humans that function as its parts for its continued operation. It is a leaky, wheezing, wasteful, inefficient machine that requires everyone’s constant attention to keep it hobbling along. The only way for this to happen is for the parts not to realize that RM itself is dependent on the world outside for its existence. Everyone owes RM, but RM owes nothing or no one. Thus, religions never have an explanation for where god came from. Hilariously, this simple question of “if god made everything, who made god?” is one of the most devastating attacks on theism in general and monotheism in particular. While there are sophisticated arguments that use statistics and entropy to argue this more intellectually, any child, including my own seven-year-old daughter, possesses at least enough rationality to understand it as a real problem. The answer to this question, of course, is that we are the ones who build gods, so RM invests vast amounts of energy making sure that its origins are hidden from its parts.

Sadly, when children are taught by the adults that they are supposed to trust that questioning RM is not only dumb but that it could get them in big trouble, their rational equipment becomes mangled in ways that can be difficult to undo. While this form of abuse does not involve any physical touching, I can assure you that it is potent and argue that turning a child against their own mind should be considered highly nefarious. If a human is lucky enough to escape RM, they are plagued by a desire to have one big truth to replace the one they lost, haunted by the illusion that there could be some scientific or philosophical theory that has an explanation for everything. Coming from a world where there was an origin story for the whole universe in its entirety, the shifting, hazy world where truths reside seems disorienting, drab, and full of intellectual drudgery.

2.    THE FLOOR IS UNIVERSAL ACID

"Although this may seem like a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man."

-Bertrand Russell

 Examples of how the truth, or our concepts of what truth is, changes over time are myriad. Primarily, this results from one of two things: our imperfect sense organs and the constant introduction of new technologies we use to enhance them, or the fact that the thing we are studying with these organs and instruments is itself changing all the time. Even the laws of physics themselves turn out to be statistical and random at their base and subject to change in the future. RM depends on the belief of its parts that RM is unchanging, always existed, and will go on this way forever. The history of evolution tells us that this is impossible. When the truth of the world is laid over the lies RM tries to teach us, it is easy to see how a lifetime stuck within RM can produce a creature ill-equipped to understand the nature of reality without some serious extra legwork. Instead of having one book to read, suddenly there are too many to consume in a single human lifetime. Wondering where one should start morphs quickly into a realization that one can never stop.

The single beacon of light in the murky world of truth-seeking is first learned as more of a slap in the face: change and uncertainty is the rule. Gödel’s theorem has shown us that we cannot even prove that mathematics contains no contradictions. Nothing we see today will be here in a few short years. Within a generation or two of our deaths, most of us are likely to be forgotten entirely, and one day there will be no one around to remember a damn thing. The whole universe is forged in what the philosopher Daniel Dennett calls the universal acid of evolution, which destroys everything it touches. But as it eats through the world, it sometimes leaves behind a new structure that has never existed before. Sometimes the structures are useful (motor proteins and chlorophyll), and sometimes they aren't (lawyers). None of them will last forever, but sometimes they survive long enough to be noticed, used, or inspected, understood. The universal acid simultaneously creates and destroys everything we have ever loved. 

The best thing about universal acid is it doesn't care whether or not anything it creates believes in it. It won’t guilt trip you into sticking around after service to help clean up and pass out donuts. As one of those structures left standing in the wake of the evolution’s destructive path, you are free to find other structures (people, ideas, tools, etc.) and use them how you see fit. Universal acid doesn’t sweat over any of its mistakes and starts writing a new page before it's even finished the last one. You can't catch it, and it will never chase you around begging you for your money or the reigns to your children's minds. We are not required to kill for universal acid, make up weird stories to explain its actions, write songs about how much we love universal acid and how we wish everyone else did, too. We don’t have to worry if our kids, friends, or potential mates believe in it. It's just fucking there.

We can also say, "you know what? Fuck this universal acid." Not in the way the RM would have us do it by denying it is there and believing that the RM will never die, but by trying to invent new ways to dodge it, if only for a few short years. Ignoring it will make its threat worse; we can only give universal acid the finger by understanding it. We can measure how it moves, take pictures and make drawings of its products, and try to predict approximately where it will seep next. RM doesn't want us to understand evolution; it would rather us keep all our attention on itself, even if it means the whole world is dying faster than it must. 

Richard Dawkins thinks religions are memes that are only interested in perpetuating themselves. These mind viruses use us to increase their reproductive fitness, with no preference whether it decreases or enhances ours. When our parents teach us to be religious, they are installing a pernicious program into our brains, one that is more interested in replicating itself than increasing our own physical and psychological wellbeing. The universal acid might not care about you, but at least it doesn't pretend to, either. The RM tells us that it is all we need to care about. It demands all our energy, our music, our worship, our progeny. It tells you it loves you and then steals all your shit.

3.    ESCAPING THE RM

“Everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected.”

-Richard Feynman

I used to be into apologetics when I was a Christian. I’m not going to name any authors in this wretched field only because I don't want to waste my energy on it. Long story short, when I would read apologetic material, trying to find some type of measurable proof to cite for my beliefs, I found them unique because sometimes they would mention scientists and philosophers who disagreed with them. This is when I started watching debates and realizing that the arguments against theism were much more potent than those for it. I lost grip on reality, and I started doubting everything I had ever believed. This was a painful process that I would not wish upon anyone. Emotional distress caused by realizing your religion is false, or even worse, a lie, would be deterrent enough to ever start believing in the first place if one could only be induced to imagine how it feels. 

My way out of the machine was to find new bearings by reading and learning as much as possible about the world. Reading Hitchens to hear the truth of my abuse told straight, and Aldo Leopold to know that what really deserves our awe, if not worship, is the magic of ecosystems. John Stewart Mill taught me how ethics work without god (hint, it makes more sense this way), and Lee Smolin, Richard Feynmann, and Erwin Schrodinger taught me about the physics that really rules the universe. Bertrand Russell taught me how to not worship the acid, just like I shouldn't worship Jesus. Too many authors to name each gave a little help in my recovery. All of them have one thing in common: a healthy respect for the frailty of truth but a commitment to try and find some, anyway.

There are probably more intermediate, spiritual places I could have landed, but I think I’m glad that I didn’t. Full-on antitheism is the place for me. I still suffer some days when I think about my young brain. All the things it could have understood sooner when the connections upstairs were more loosey-goosey, how I could have found philosophy and biology earlier in life if I wasn’t so focused on my religion. But that’s what abuse does, I suppose. Inserts bad data where there could have been good and leaves the victim wondering “what if.” Whatever social systems we build in the next thousands of years, if we make it much longer, I hope they are not based on the harmful model of the RM. I hope they assign value to our ability to help one another remove some of this endless uncertainty we are faced with here as humans on Earth without lying or making up stories. We can unite against the ripping claws of universal acid, maybe find some oasis that we know will be acid-free for the foreseeable future and just hang out there for a while, creating together, observing and measuring, approximating, learning, being wrong, and relearning.