Choice

I have realised that I talked a lot about choice. I have more or less implied that we can choose whether we believe in God or not as there is no way of ever knowing the answer.

But have we really a choice about our creed? Can anybody become an atheist? Can we convince everybody, given enough time and resources, that they should abandon their prejudices, their habits, their philosophy and their faith?

My personal answer has been yes, I had a choice. Not only had I grown in a ‘communist’ country with its definite separation of the Church from the state, but both my parents were divided in their philosophies, my mother being a traditional (superficial) Catholic and my father a declared atheist. However, he had given up to her demands and we (my brother and I) were being brought up as Catholics.

Freedom to query, awareness of various positions and options became part of my personality. I loved asking ‘difficult questions’. I cheered every opportunity for a fervent discussion. I sought any chance to share my ideas as a way to create and develop.

Probably I needed others to really feel that I knew something… I am referring to a period in my life that I recall with significant grief even if not regret.
(I was taught not to regret my experiences but rather to draw a lesson from them.)

Soon after I tentatively accepted Yeshua as my master and a prophet, and was still in the process of sorting out which of the ‘revelations’ from the Bible I could accept as truthful (I was very sceptical about the sources of the message and further ‘editions’ introduced by pious ancient idiots (so called church doctors and saints), I had a misfortune of meeting with people from a catholic version of Christian Youth or whatever. They were university students like me but they would spend their spare time meeting with other catholic students to attend the Mass and then discuss the Bible. It wasn’t a formal organisation, (it would be illegal during communist times). They called it the Movement of Light and Life, which was founded by Father Professor Franciszek Blachnicki. I am recording the name here because he is a candidate for a saint and he already has a couple of streets in Poland named after him. He survived Auschwitz and made surviving of Catholicism in the communist Poland the mission of his life.

He was definitely a decent man and more, he had a good sense of humour. One problem with him was that his sermons were usually very theological, very scholarly, very long and very boring. It was quite normal for at least a couple of people to fall asleep during his sermon or a lecture. He didn’t really mind – I remember his admonishing one of the altar boys that the minimum decency would be try not to snore! Well, he should know himself. His students from Lublin Catholic University recognised him as the professor who would fall asleep during his own lecture!
I have to admit I have a lot of respect for him. He embraced the teaching of Vatican II and struggled to reform the Church. He despaired of ever getting across to his fellow priests, so he addressed young laymen. He was very open-minded and ready to learn from ancient ‘enemies’ – Protestants and evangelical preachers. You can conclude that he approved ecumenism and recognised mistakes (errors and crimes) that the Roman Catholic Church made in the past.
So we, who belonged to this movement of Light and Life, were well coached in the Bible and the Church past and present disputes. While remaining Catholics, we wouldn’t mind praying and socialising with other Christians.

I made this extended digression to sketch the environment in which following exchange had place.

One of my friends from this Movement, Tomek, told me that he envied my ability to make a choice about faith.

He had none according to him. He was born in a very traditional Catholic family in a rural area. From his early years he always belonged to the church. He was 4 when he first became a junior altar boy with his little bell. He prayed to Virgin Mary every night. (She never appeared on my horizon!) He just could not question the teaching. It was the only reality, the only way to explain the world. And he wasn’t a simpleton! I lost contact with most of my old friends from that Movement (nobody likes company of an apostate) and my memory is fading, but not only was he a technical university student (automatics) but also a great humanist, philosopher and a poet.

Well, I guess you need either poetry or philosophy to harmonise incompatible realities!

He was the first to open my eyes to this issue. I didn’t know that I was privileged. I used to scorn and despise people who wouldn’t stop and question their position.

Now, many years after that exchange, I know that many have no choice at all. Not only they lack knowledge but they have no need to acquire it. They feel safer in the philosophical (religious) systems they took from their parents and grandparents. Loyalty to this system defines sometimes a baseline beyond which they could not face themselves. They can only think about themselves as decent if they stick to those old values.

I am afraid it takes more than just one book, even written by such a brilliant scientist like Richard Dawkins to shake them badly enough. Sometimes a real crisis, a real tragedy is necessary for them to start questioning their own beliefs.

Is it really a choice then?

Theory of Mind

Richard Dawkins insists on applying a probability test on the hypothesis of God. For him it is the right thing to do. He believes that if the probability is infinitesimally small, we can, as we use to do in physics and mathematics, assume that it is equal to zero.

Well, I have a problem with this approach. If we are talking about an entity that is intelligent, wilful, planning and executing, we are talking about a mind.

The problem with the mind is that we all experience directly only our own minds. They are the only reality. Minds of other people we learn to accept as existing and we assume that they are similar to ours but we never know for sure.
The ability to imagine another mind, to create a model of another intelligent entity that is different from us and yet able to proceed and understand the information about shared reality is one of the skills that most of us learn from during the preoperational developmental stage at the age of about 4.
J Piaget, the psychologist I mentioned earlier, called it the Theory of Mind.

They designed a test, which younger children usually fail. In this test children observe a play between two puppets. One of them hides something in a box and then goes away. Then the other one comes and moves the hidden object into another location. When the first puppet returns, children are asked where she will look for her property. Children who mastered the theory of mind usually rightfully answer that she will look for in the box she put it in. They know that their knowledge is not automatically shared by others.

This is a very important competence. It lays a foundation for our ability to empathise and sympathise with others. It is finely tuned in psychologists and psychiatrists but also in detectives and salesmen.

Funny thing is, we cannot prove that the other person has a mind of their own. There is no probability test and if one needs such a test to decide if their fellow human has a mind, they will probably decide against it.

As I mentioned it is a skill not mastered by everybody. Psychopaths and narcissists as well as these with the Asperger’s disorder just cannot imagine that other people feel and react like them. That is, they observe other people’s behaviour, their face expression; they hear their words and screams, but they cannot internalise their feelings. We know that the part of the brain that contains ‘mirroring’ neurons is damaged in people who suffer with these disorders.

They are really terrifying because they don’t care. They don’t feel responsible for the harm they cause to others, because, for them, they are the only conscious beings. They see the world as full of machines, whose functions they need to learn to be able to use them adequately. They no more feel remorse for hurting another man that we would when breaking a car. Yes, we can be unhappy about the loss, but we wouldn’t apologise to it.

What I am trying to say is that even if this Super-Brain, which possible existence I outlined previously, existed, we wouldn’t be able to design an experiment to test its Mind. There is no way of knowing if he is/would be conscious.

But we can choose whether we believe he is – or not.

Physicist's God

I mentioned that I haven’t started as an agnostic.

I was brought up Catholic in a ‘communist’ country. This was important because my father was a member of the Party (Polish United Labour Party – PZPR) and a declared atheist. Since my early years I had to struggle with questions like: ‘Where was God in Auschwitz?’ I knew that as a boy in pre-war times (before 1939) he used to tease the priest who taught religion in his school with remarks like ‘If Adam and Eve didn’t descend from the tree, we would still be sitting there’. Funny, sarcastic and intelligent. Also, very bitter. I guess I recognise the same emotions behind Richard Dawkins arguments.

And yet I was a believer. More, I was a follower. The difference was, it was never obvious to me. I knew that I had to choose and when I was 16 I decided to believe in Jesus.

At the beginning it was very limited faith. I separated Jesus, Yeshua from Nazareth, from the Demiurge of philosophical debate. I had, as Dawkins, no reason to believe in God Creator. But I was fascinated with this Jewish prophet and his humanism. He seemed to be the epitome of goodness in Man and I wanted to believe him. Okay, so he was talking about God who is Father to all mankind. He talked about kindness and compassion, and unity. When you are 16 you are ready to love. You want to find a master and become his apprentice. You want directions to find your own path.

He seemed to be the right choice.

But there was a problem. God, about whom Yeshua was preaching, didn’t exist in my scientifically inclined mind.

I needed to find a solution. And I found it. You can bet on creativity of a teenager in love.

Richard Dawkins believes that a complicated structure of our brains can be only a product of evolution. Karl Marks believed that awareness, thought and intelligence are products of highly organised matter.

There is no reason to limit this highly organised matter to neurons and neuronal connections. We expect to create artificial intelligence based on semiconductors and microchips.

We can conceive a much highly organised matter. A net built not of chips or neurons but of universes.

The idea started as a pretty simple assumption that our Universe, the one we observe is a closed one, that is, it starts with a Big-Bang and after a time it begins shrinking again to return to its singularity. In multidimensional space it has a shape of a ball or a bead. Now, we know about black holes. They may be connections to similar circumscribed time-space entities. Expanding this picture, we can imagine that the Cosmos is much bigger than this Universe we know. It may be populated by myriads of Universes similar to ours (or quite different). There may be a connection between some of them (like those black holes). Energy may be passed between them. It’s actually enough to make a highly complicated system.

Many years after I first thought about this, I have found that some cosmologist are proposing a model of multi-fractal, self-replicating Universe. I read an article in a Polish edition of Scientific American. Unfortunately, I lost the copy when I moved to the UK.
But I do remember a picture on the cover – multicoloured, connected beads almost like quipu.

It sounds like an invitation to pantheism, doesn’t it? Because I was tempted to make a jump and suppose, just suppose, that this highly complicated structure gained consciousness. It could be a Mind. And then it would have quite a number of attributes we usually ascribe to God.

In old Greek philosophers terms it would be an equivalent to pantheism. God is Cosmos. Cosmos is God. Yes?

No. Most of us reject the idea that we are our bodies.

So God could be the Mind of this (highly complicated) Cosmos. Our definition, our understanding of time and space could not apply to him and from our vantage point he would be eternal and beyond time and space.

Could this Mind influence what is going on in one of the pearls of Universe? The very process of thinking is changing chemical structures of our neurons, so I guess the exchange of energy between the Universes may and would change the probability of events within them.

But it is only a thinking experiment. I cannot test it. I cannot disprove it. I cannot confirm it.

I can only choose whether I believe or not.

The God Delusion

I am reading Richard Dawkins' the 'God Delusion' again. First time I read it, I had a good laugh, at least at the beginning. In fact, there were moments I laughed aloud. You see, he has such a talent in pin-pointing the absurdities of the established religions, beliefs and structures. His acute sarcasm resonated well with my own disappointments and - maybe - sense of betrayal from the time I personally struggled with remnants of my faith. Yet he didn't tell me anything new and the more I read the more disappointed I was. I finished the book with a feeling that he missed a point. I didn't quite know what it was, but I knew that he didn't find a way to 'convert' believers to atheism.

Now, I should probably state my position. I am one of those scorned by both sides - clergy and Richard Dawkins. I am an agnostic.

Well, I haven't started this way. Nobody does. According to J Piaget, we all develop through certain stages and some of us achieve ability to propose and discuss abstract ideas only at the age of 11 (formal operational stage). Some of us, because others remain throughout their life on the previous level of development, that is concrete operational stage.

Richard Dawkins, whose other books on evolution I loved, seems to forget that majority of believers are different from his college and university students. If they were able to consider abstract ideas, weigh pros and cons and make informed decisions about invisible entities, there would be much bigger competition for every available place at the university... And I remember some cries in the media here, in Britain, that they have to close many faculties and colleges of mathematics and physics, because nobody wants (is able) to study it!

On the other hand, Dawkins wants to discuss God as if he was a physical entity. He wants to talk in terms of probability. He rejects NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria). He, a biologist, scorns the idea that theological issues should be left to theologians.

I guess, he never studied theology.

Now, I don't believe he should regret it. I did and it was the most mind-blowing experience in my life. (I used to be a Catholic). You have to forget logic, you have to give up any right to question why and how, to squeeze your mind into this particular way of thinking required by (at least Catholic) dogmatism.

Unlike Dawkins, I studied nuclear physics and not biology before I thrown myself into this miserable affair with theology. I used to think about functions and multi-dimensional space and knew I couldn't expect to see the subject of my experiments. After all, biology even on the lowest level deals with molecular particles that can be visualised under an electron microscope. You cannot visualise a quark or mion. (Therefore we needed this Large Hadron Collider - but we are not expecting to see any hadrons there. We will see their interactions with the matter and test some theories!)

Anyway, studying theology requires completely different set of skills than those expected from a physicist. First you have to forget everything you learnt when studying physics (and biology as well). The closest analogy would be though mathematics.

Take for example field algebra or Hilbert space. You don't expect to find a direct connection to your home and daily experiences. It is a reality in itself. Yes, physicists use some algebraic forms to formulate hypotheses. But they evade common senses. It is a separate magisterium and I don't believe Richard Dawkins would propose weighing probability to establish if a given Hilbert's space really exists. It does exist in the mind of the mathematician and his colleagues if he shares his ideas with them.

And then they are things that we all share (to a point) and yet they cannot be a subject of logical analysis.

We all experience love. We dream of peace. We demand justice. We crave some sense of life. A scientific approach to these internal experiences is vain. We find personal answers and hope that we share them with others.

I am afraid that God belongs to this category. He is your reality if you believe. It doesn't exist if you don't.