Swimming in the Fifth Dimension

I like to think about people jumping (or being forced) out of their goldfish bowls of certainty. The sun revolved around the earth, until it didn’t. The earth was flat, until it wasn’t.

Paradigm shifts, in other words. When the aliens arrive, or we go there. When neutrinos go faster than light (maybe).

Last week, on Thursday, I had lunch with a friend who’d decided, for some reason I couldn’t quite figure out but which sounded like a good idea, to start doing things she hated. Like shopping, or reading historical novels or books about dreams.

I hate shopping and historical novels too, but I’m pretty interested in dreams. It’s so weird, making up all that stuff in the middle of the night when, by the looks of it, you might as well be unconscious.

So that was a fun conversation, talking about things we hated and why (she’s not interested in any of the things my erstwhile (and late) friend Connie used to call “the spooky stuff” – dreams, or telepathy, or God (my friend’s goldfish bowl is atheism.))

On Friday I walked with another friend, who told me about the time her partner’s obese mother got stuck in a bathtub and had to stay there till her caregivers arrived to haul her out. She (the obese mother) thought it was hilarious, laughing and laughing as they pulled her out.

On Saturday I got an email from my Thursday friend (whom I’d not spoken to since then). I quote:

After all my badmouthing of dreams, I had a weird one last night and told [her husband], who thought it was pretty funny. It involved a bunch of country dudes in their sixties, trying to heave a laughing, nude 300-pound woman out of a tub. Take that, Sigmund.

The scientists at CERN (maybe feeling a little defensive since they haven’t found the God particle yet) are busy coming to Einstein’s defense – like maybe the Opera physicists didn’t measure the neutrinos’ tunnel right, or maybe they forgot about tidal effects (I didn’t realize physicists could be so prosaic).

But I’m hoping what the guy (Joe Lykken) from Fermilab said is right:

“Special relativity only holds in flat space, so if there is a warped fifth dimension, it is possible that on other slices of it, the speed of light is different.”

And that in that warped fifth dimension, my Friday conversation met my friend’s dream.

From Japan: Adjustment please!

It must have been pre-cognition, or maybe my Adjusters stuck the thoughts in my head, but it was strange seeing The Adjustment Bureau yesterday after writing what I wrote below.

It still makes the most sense to me, that we are some sort of experiment that Adjusters tinker with every so often. In the movie, Matt Damon is told (by one of his Adjusters) that the Bureau pulled back at the height of the Roman Empire, but intervened again during the Dark Ages, bringing mankind the Renaissance. They quit again in 1910, and “Look what happened,” the Adjuster said.

A diverting little movie – but why do they have to stick in long chase scenes and car crashes? And I’m sorry, but even though I think Matt Damon is a great actor, I can’t stand to look at him, so I spent the love scenes feeling sorry for Emily Blunt enduring those long open-mouthed kisses.

And that issue of theodicy: well, there’s free will, which can sometimes override The Chairman’s plan. But it doesn’t quite work, I’d say, for earthquakes, tsunamis, and now snowstorms in Japan.

What atheists and Jehovah’s Witnesses have in common

I’m thinking that the next time a Jehovah’s Witness knocks on Sam Parnia’s door, he needs to invite him in.

Now of course I myself have never done this, being a person who’s so theologically irascible I get irritated even when people say they’re going to pray for me (which I guess they’d better, if they’re right and I’m wrong). But the other day was, as I told my hospice volunteer coordinator at the end of our monthly “Faith and the End of Life” series, the first time I voluntarily took handouts from a Jehovah’s Witness.

It’s pretty interesting, what they believe. When you die, you’re dead (Yes! says my true-atheist friend). You just lie there in your coffin, waiting, to the extent that a dead person can be said to wait, that is.

Then along comes Jesus, and everybody, good and bad, gets resurrected. But here’s the rub: only 144,000 of them get to go with him back up to heaven. And what happens to all the rest of the billions of people? They stay here, on Earth, except that Earth is now a paradise and there is no death.

So it seems like we’d all better try really really hard to become one of those 144,000; because we’re going to be awfully crowded on Earth, not to mention all those bad people rubbing up against us.

But what does all of this have to do with Sam Parnia? Well, I suspect the Jehovah’s Witness will tell him his experiment, to see whether clinically dead people can report back what they saw when they were floating on the operating room ceiling, is a waste of time.

Dead is dead, until…

Don’t pray for me

I flinch when someone tells me they’ll pray for me, which actually hardly ever happens because I choose my friends very carefully.

I realize this is quite uncharitable of me, since people who say things like that are just trying to tell you they care about you, but I can’t help it – I have a reflexive irritation when people assume everyone shares their beliefs.

But now, in case it ever does happen again, I can whip out some concrete evidence to justify my flinching. Believe it or not, some researchers from the Mind/Body Medical Institute, the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Harvard Medical School got together back in 2006 to find out whether intercessory prayer worked.

I remember feeling gratified (and also a bit miffed that they were spending somebody’s money to do this totally anti-rational thing) when the study results were first announced. The criterion was the incidence of an uncomplicated recovery among people who had surgery for a coronary artery bypass graft; and it turned out there was no difference between a group of people who were prayed for, and those who weren’t (complications occurred in 52%, versus 51%, respectively).

Here’s the interesting thing. They also told one group of people they were going to be prayed for, and another group they might or might not be – and 59% of that first, unlucky group had complications (versus 52% of the other group).

One flaw in the study, from my point of view: they didn’t tell anybody they were definitely not going to be prayed for. Next time I have a coronary artery bypass graft, I’m going to insist on it.

Baby belief

My rigorous true-atheist friend asks whether I think Vivaldi would not have written sublime music if he didn’t believe in the sublime.

I think he would have written sublime music, but not that music. I believe Vivaldi and Brahms and Mozart and all the others composed sacred choral music to pay homage to their conception of God.

She says (non-orthogonalicity notwithstanding), “Why not show a photo of a baby as a reason to be an agnostic rather than an atheist?”

They did, and do, seem like miracles.

We can believe, but we can’t know

You do realize that atheism and agnosticism are orthogonal, right?
That is, agnosticism is about what is knowable. The agnostic thinks that it is not knowable whether any gods exist.
Atheism is about what is not believed. The atheist does not believe any gods exist.
It is possibly (and extremely common) for people to be agnostic atheists — thinking that it is not possible to know if any gods exist while lacking belief in any gods.
Likewise, it’s possible and common to be an agnostic theist, thinking it is not possible to know if any gods exist, yet believing in the existence of one or more gods.
So, to try to explain why you’re agnostic instead of atheist betrays a misunderstanding on your part of what these words actually mean.

Since I believe people’s comments get lost on this blog, and since this one really made me think, I’m responding to it here. It’s from someone who calls himself scaryreasoner, and I admit he scared me a bit when I realized I didn’t really understand what “orthogonal” meant, apart from those wonderful geometry diagrams Tina and I used to draw.

But at least I’m in good company! Here’s a bit of transcript from a recent oral argument before the Supreme Court:

MR. FRIEDMAN: I think that issue is entirely orthogonal to the issue here because the Commonwealth is acknowledging -
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I’m sorry. Entirely what?
MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal. Right angle. Unrelated. Irrelevant.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Oh.
JUSTICE SCALIA: What was that adjective? I liked that.
MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Orthogonal.
MR. FRIEDMAN: Right, right.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Orthogonal, ooh.
(Laughter.)
JUSTICE KENNEDY: I knew this case presented us a problem.
(Laughter.)

If you look it up in a dead-tree dictionary, you won’t find a definition that applies, because, I believe, it’s a word that’s been adopted by programmers. Related, but separate, you could think of it as meaning.

I believe the point Mr. Scaryreasoner is making (I think) is that knowledge and belief are separate. As I wrote yesterday, “Thinking and believing are two separate spheres. You can’t think your way into God.”

My problem with his reasoning, though, is that I believe, to quote Scaryreasoner, “that it is not knowable whether any gods exist.” I don’t just think it; I believe it, as strongly as a theist believes in God. An atheist (forgive the triple negatives here) not only “does not believe any gods exist,” to quote Scaryreasoner, but (from the Random House dead-tree unabridged dictionary) believes “that there is no god.” I believe you cannot know this.

I’ve probably lost everybody here, but if Mr. Scaryreasoner is still reading, I hope he will reply.

And, coming soon, a reply to one of my most loyal readers about the symbol for atheism.

I need to touch the wounds

Andrew Sullivan is an intelligent writer who is also a devout Christian. I have to admit I have a hard time putting those two characteristics together – my automatic prejudice is that if someone believes Jesus was actually God, they just haven’t thought about it enough.

This in itself is stupid, I realize. Thinking and believing are two separate spheres. You can’t think your way into God.

Anyway, lately on his site he’s been hosting a debate between atheists and theists that’s fascinating; about what everybody thinks happens after we die. The atheists tend to be a bit arrogant, postulating, for example, that people who believe in an afterlife do so because they’re cowards, afraid to face their own death. But they’re also quite compelling, writing about how their belief in their own dissolution makes them more able to appreciate the lives they have; more eager to live good lives because they will only live on in memory.

Sullivan himself writes:

I have two intuitions about what happens when I die. The first is that I cannot know in any way for sure; and I surely know that whatever heaven is, it is so beyond our human understanding that it is perhaps better not to try an answer. The second is that I will continue to exist in my essence but more firmly and completely enveloped in the love and expanse of God, as revealed primarily in the life of Jesus.

I agree with his first intuition, except for the part about heaven, unless he means that heaven has something to do with how everything got started, the one mystery that atheism has no capability to explain. As for the second, if Jesus popped into my room right now, I’d have to agree. But I just can’t get there from here. My room is empty.

Why I’m agnostic and not an atheist

The big A

It’s funny, when you think about it, that people mark graves with “emblems of belief.” Why are we here? What happens when we die? Just look at the graves, and you can figure out what all those dead people believed about where to find them. Crosses? Find Jesus and you’ll find them. Wheels of Righteousness? They’re reincarnated, so you probably won’t recognize them. Crescent moon and star? Look for all those virgins.

And what about the people under that big “A”?

They’re the easiest to find, right under their graves.

One Latin cross in the desert

Here, one Latin cross in the desert evokes far more than religion. It evokes thousands of small crosses in foreign fields making the graves of Americans who fell in battles, battles whose tragedies are compounded if the fallen are forgotten.

One Latin cross in the desert does evoke far more than religion. It evokes the blinders Justice Kennedy and the four others (all, not coincidentally, Catholics) don’t even know they have. It evokes the presumption of those in a majority religion that all soldiers’ graves need crosses. It evokes the faulty logic that if this one big cross in the desert is removed, all the soldiers whose graves do have crosses will therefore be forgotten.

The whole case came about because the Park Service wouldn’t allow a Buddhist soldiers’ memorial on the site. It seems to me you either take the cross down, or allow all of the 41 “emblems of belief” permitted for use on government graves by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Including this:

and even this (you have to guess what the “A” stands for):