The Wizard of Awes: Part #2

My last post’s title was “Ah, Yosemite Falling Again.”

Ah—as in pleasant surprise, relief, regret, amazement…

But, of course, the main side-traveler is the pun, ah and awe, and an allusion to The Wizard of Oz, the famous children’s book and award-winning movie.

And the matter which so many thinkers have brought up--astrophysicist Adam Frank most recently this week on a NPR blog--where does the human emotion of awe come from?

Is awe only a movement of brain chemistry?

Is awe only a religious illusion?

Frank’s answer on awe is “about attention not attribution.” Don’t worry about attributing the experience, but focus on the validity of the moment.

But I’m an onion peeler. How can we find value in “awe” if it’s only an illusion of brain chemistry?

Is awe no more than an evolutionary adaption, a “misfiring” of natural selection, no more than neurons, etc?

Keep in mind what I am worry-warting here is neuroscientist Sam Harris’s infamous statement that even our sense of “I” is an illusion.

According to some scientists such as Sam Harris, we conscious primates and everything in existence from the Big Bang to me typing this sentence—all of it is determined. If so, if the “I” who is clicking my keyboard doesn't exist, but is only an illusion, then, of course, a transcendent emotional experience of mine when standing below Yosemite Falls is even of less significance, of no significance.

In that case, like in the children’s book and movie, there is no wizard of awes.

The transcendent feeling we humans sometimes experience when encountering the gigantic depths of the Grand Canyon, the intense and vast expanse of the Milky Way Galaxy while on a camping trip far from light-dense cities, or standing entranced on the walking bridge drenched in the spray from Yosemite Falls which plunges down into the gorge of Yosemite Valley thousands of feet below...

It’s all just atoms functioning.

No god wizard of religion, but no ultimate reality of philosophers and some scientists either.

I’m somewhat sympathetic to the skeptical view of religion. At present, after battling against some of the horrific delusions of various religions for 52 years, I've become skeptical of the usual supernatural wizards who are trotted out as the source of our awe when we encounter scenes that take our breath away.

But I find most atheists, not only sharp at showing the false pretentions of religion, but too often dissing the wonder of awe as well, too often claiming to know far more about the cosmos and absolute reality than even the most erudite cosmologist, and so often insistent it's all meaningless and purposeless.

No doubt this is why Einstein emphasized that he wasn't an atheist; he said wonder was the real basis for all science: "The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed..."

"A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity...I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."
From The World As I See It by Albert Einstein

My own view is that the sense of awe we experience when encountering incredible natural vistas is inherent in us the same way that reason, creativity, free will, human rights, and ethical standards such as honesty and compassion are.

In this dramatic vista that has overwhelmed us, we finite primates encounter a touch of the beautiful, the wondrous, the infinite.

In the LIGHT,

Daniel Wilcox

Part #5: Or Maybe Not...maybe there is no moral arc

Maybe nontheistic scientists and cosmologists are correct: There is no real moral arc, (like Martin Luther King Jr. and other
visionaries think),
but only a cosmic block of amber--lock, stock and barrel--one meaningless, purposeless cosmic time/space/matter/energy existence because of the Big Bang, and an eventual explosive blast of cosmic death...the Big Rip after us (or possibly the Big Return).

That's the end, not Life.

There's an important aphoristic saying" "Begin with the end in mind," when you make important decisions.

What is this end speculated by many brilliant thinkers?

"Most of us are aware of our own mortality, but few among us know what science, with insights yielded from groundbreaking new research, has to say about endings on a larger scale. Enter astronomer Chris Impey, who chronicles the death of the whole shebang: individual, species, bio- sphere, Earth, Sun, Milky Way, and, finally, the entire universe."

"With a healthy dose of humor, How It Ends illuminates everything from the technologies of human life extension and the evolutionary arms race between microbes and men to the inescapable dimming of the Sun and the ultimate “big rip,” giving us a rare glimpse into a universe without us."
How It Ends by Chris Impey, Amazon Website



Allegedly over 80% of modern philosophers think God--ultimate reality, the transcendent--is imaginary delusion,
and nearly ½ of all scientists are Atheists!

According to all of these brilliant thinkers, our goose is cooked—and it’s us. There are no golden eggs, never were.

The cosmos including us conscious, ethical humans won’t last forever.

No good news exists. Jesus and other moral leaders proclaimed no eternal truths; indeed according to some scholars, Jesus never existed.
The New Testament is a fake fictional adaption of Greek myths.

In fact, there are no moral truths, no human rights, no equality, no justice...All of those ideals are illusions, are only "subjective preferences," "relative," and came about via natural selection, probably "spandrels" (the term used by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould). Or they are "misfirings" of evolution (Richard Dawkins).

We won’t survive our own finite deaths, won’t become One with God, won’t experience everlasting bliss, won’t be transformed by the Divine into creative communion. Christian thinkers are deluded including the French Christian philosopher and paleontologist, Tellihard de Chardin who said that there was a glorious future
for the universe and humanity, a blessed hope, the Omega Point.

No, say the secular experts, theistic scientists such as Simon Conway Morris, George Mendel, and Theodosius Dobzhansky are dead wrong. Tellihard’s views were distorted by his Christian delusions.

Instead, everything is headed for a great Negation. Allegedly, first, the Milky Way Galaxy will crash out in 4 billion years. Our cosmic backyard will cease to exist because it will collide with the Andromeda Galaxy. In the sardonic phrase of the Terminator II: Judgment Day:
“Hasta la vista, baby!”

These 2 galaxies, right now as I write, are flashing toward each other at 250,000 miles per hour. But according to the cosmologists, this vast collision probably won’t cause the destruction of Terra, our planet Earth.

Terrific;-), no terror, for Terra.

Or maybe not...

The same scientists are fairly sure that by then Terra “will become too hot to be inhabited by humans” anyway.
(from CNN Light Years/Sari Zeidler)

Eventually our sun will become a red giant and our dead planet will be caught and pulled into the inferno.

"The drag caused by this low-density gas is enough to cause the Earth to drift inwards, and finally to be captured and vaporized by the sun."
(Scientist Robert Smith, University of Sussex)

This won’t happen for about 7.6 billion years, so don’t worry yet. Of course, our own death will come 6.6 billion years sooner than that because the expanding sun will already have fried the Earth to a cinder.

This depressing end-scenario brings out the corny in me. I just thought of another famous phrase which captures this dismal end: "Return to ‘sender’
address unknown..."

And there’s more about the abysmal end, about how the universe will keep expanding until everything becomes distantly dead and lightless, but we won’t be there to observe and wail.

So Sheol, (Hebrew: the pit, grave), is the ultimate end,
NOT
Heaven, not the Realm of God, not Cosmic Communion, not the Omega Point.

Welcome to the funeral wake, our eternal death.

OR MAYBE NOT...

Maybe the words of theistic scientists such Kevin Miller, Simon Conway Morris and Theodosius Dobzhansky and ethical visionaries get the last word. At least they do for those who choose to listen to statements
like this from Martin Luther King Jr.:
"I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the 'isness' of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal 'oughtness' that forever confronts him."

"But I am here to say to you this morning that some things are right and some things are wrong. Eternally so, absolutely so. It's wrong to hate, Its always been wrong and it always will be wrong."
"Rediscovering Lost Values," Martin Luther King Jr., February 1954


So choose and choose wisely.

Even if we’re wrong, even if the God we trust doesn’t exist, never has, never will...

Even if there is No Meaning and No Purpose, none at all.

Even if the Atheist biologists Richard Dawkins and Francis Crick and the determinists Jerry Coyne and Sam Harris are factually correct...

I plan to live differently.

What do I have to lose living ethically in absurd meaningless matter and energy?

Nothing:-) as Albert Camus so well explained.

If the universe is absurd, I still plan to live my life with creative ethical purpose.
(If 'I' am an "illusion" as they claim, I won't ever know that.)

Through trust in reason and creativity and ethics, I choose to live as this brief life should be lived, to live as the universe OUGHT to be. What is real for humans is NOW! This present moment.

To live a life of compassion, honesty, fidelity, and goodness.

Yes, choose “ought” and trust, not despair or ultimate pessimism.

REJECT the hopelessness of Bertrand Russell" "Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms;

that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins
--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute,
are yet so nearly certain,
that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand."

"Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair,
can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built."
The Free Man's Worship, Bertrand Russell, 1903

CHOOSE INSTEAD:
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness...And if we do act, in however small a way, we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
Howard Zinn

Amen to that…

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox