What do you get when you combine the complexity of the life-sustaining digestive process of mammals with the Internet's ever-churning entropic exploration into the far corners of informational state space? You get the "Four C's of Poop."
I encountered Bart Ehrman many years ago, when I encountered his excellent book, Misquoting Jesus. Today I learned that Ehrman writes at his own website, The Bart Ehrman Blog. Yesterday he published an article that makes sense out of a confused topic: the difference between agnostics and atheists? Erhman holds that the difference is not a matter of degree, a common misunderstanding. The title of Ehrman article is "On Being an Agnostic. Or Atheist?" Here's an excerpt:
. . . I think it is possible to be both an agnostic and an atheist. And that’s how I understand myself. So, in this newer view of mine, agnosticism is a statement about epistemology – that is, about what a person *knows*. Do I know whether there is a God in the multiverse? Nope. I really don’t. How could I know? I’m just a peon on a very big planet, circling around a very big star, which is one of some 100 billion stars in this galaxy, which is only one of anywhere from 100 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in this universe, which may be only one of trillions (infinite number?) of universes. So, well, I don’t have a broad perspective on the question. So I don’t know. I’m agnostic.I like this approach. No one knows whether there is a god hiding behind a distant star. It's possible that there is such a lurking god, even though I'll never be able to prove or disprove such a claim. This inability to prove or disprove god is an epistemic challenge, according to Ehrman. I am forced to live a life of ignorance about many things, including shy gods hiding in outer space (or in my toaster, or wherever). Ehrman would attach the word "agnostic" to that epistemic predicament. Fair enough.Atheism, on the other hand, (in my way of thinking) is not about knowledge but about belief. Do I *believe* that there is a God? No I don’t. I especially do not believe in the biblical God, or in the traditional God of Jews and Christians (and Muslims and so on). I simply do not believe that there is a God who created this world (it is the result of forces beyond my comprehension, but it goes back to the Big Bang, and we are here because of evolution, and I exist only because of some pretty amazingly remote chances/circumstances…); I don’t think there is a divine being who is sovereign over this world who interacts with it and the people in it, who answers prayer, who brings good out of evil. I don’t believe it. So I’m an atheist.
So I’m an agnostic atheist. Or an atheistic agnostic. Take your pick!
And in the meantime, I need to either act as though god does exists or that god doesn't exist. As I see it, this is a question of where I'm setting my default for belief. Some people set the bar low and they believe in all kinds of mystical claims and conspiracy theories. I am extremely skeptical about claims about gods (and many other things). This might also be seen as how I set up my "burden of proof," as we might say in a courtroom. Those of us who are highly skeptical need extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims.
I consider the question of whether god exists to be an extraordinary claim, but others might set the bar much lower. Some of them believe with with nothing more than a hope and a duty old book of apocryphal tall tales. What do I believe when I (a person who sets the bar for proof high) don't see any evidence of a god and yet I can't disprove the existence of god? Shall I act "as if" or not "as if" there is a god? A lack of belief in a god is what Ehrman calls "Atheism." This nomenclature makes sense to me.
I will give this some more thought, but I'm inclined to join Ehrman as new member of the church of Atheist Agnostics.
For decades, we (rightfully) fought hard so that a person who is biologically female could conceive of herself as fully a woman no matter what her interests, career aspirations, dress style, personality or hobbies were. Then our sense-making institutions (and sexual-medical-industrial-complex, in the name of "liberty" and "freedom" started promoting the the idea that vaginas and breasts were no long compatible with a person who liked to climb trees, take charge of organizations or do mechanical work on cars. And with it comes a 4000% increase in the number of teenagers who claim they were born in the wrong body. And the consequent felt need to alter their body medically and surgically.
It repeatedly occurs to me that I have no idea what is going on inside my own body. Each of us consists of many trillions of cells all of them, more or less, doing what they need to do to keep us alive and cognizant. It's been a good run for me, for which I'm grateful to my trillions of cells. At any given moment, though, there could be numerous microscopic battles underway that are potentially matters of life and death. At any given moment, my immune system could be successfully (or not) beating back a viral incursion. Who knows how many times per day my body's cells divide successfully without allowing cancer to take root. How many close calls are there? How many times per day do my cells identify a pathogen and wipe it out? Every week there might be countless life and death battles going on inside of me, yet I'm utterly oblivious. I don't deserve such high-level service and loyalty from my minions.
Again, these are the kinds of thoughts that sometimes occur to me, and this is also my introduction to a short excerpt from Episode 247 of the "Waking Up" podcast, where Sam Harris interviews neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett (who is among the top 1% most-cited scientists for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience). Here's the excerpt:
Lisa Feldman Barrett: First of all, you need to understand that decision-making is always about action first. It's not like you decide something and then you act. The decision that your brain is making is the decision to DO this or that based on probabilities, So I think that's the first thing. The second thing is that, we're not just unaware of what's been going on in our own brains, right? We're also unaware of what's going on inside our own bodies, for the most part, thank God, because there's a whole drama going on inside you right now.
Sam Harris: Yeah, exactly. It's a horror show.
Lisa Feldman Barrett: All I can say is, if anybody is really is currently aware of all of the drama going on, inside your own body, I have my deep, deep sympathy, because we're not really wired to be intimately aware of all the details . . . That would be what philosophers call tragic embodiment.
At min 2:00 of his TED talk, Robert Lang asks what has allowed the recent explosion of innovation in the ancient art of origami:
And it raises a question: what changed? And what changed is something you might not have expected in an art, which is math. That is, people applied mathematical principles to the art, to discover the underlying laws. And that leads to a very powerful tool. The secret to productivity in so many fields -- and in origami -- is letting dead people do your work for you. (Laughter) Because what you can do is take your problem, and turn it into a problem that someone else has solved, and use their solutions. And I want to tell you how we did that in origami.
In his excellent talk, Lang refers to modern examples of origami, including a cuckoo clock made from one sheet of paper and no
cuts. Lang proceeds to discuss the mathematics of origami. Beautiful, mathematical and mind-blowing. It's an excellent talk with more than a few laughs along the way.