Existence is horrifying if plumbed too deeply

Old saying: The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I'm listening to Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain , a very good, easy-to-listen-to perspective on the brain and faith by a former fundamentalist (pleasant and inoffensive even if you are a believer, in fact almost disconcertingly sensitive; you can imagine him just as easily discussing the delicate folds of an origami swan).

The book covers a wide variety of topics, but the ones I find especially interesting are physiological. The experimental basis of a chemical explanation for supernatural phenomena is basically two-fold: 1) We can induce the same sensations in a laboratory with electrical stimulation (and other things like sensory deprivation), and 2) we cannot verify the paranormal claims experimentally. (There are also many insights from history, psychology, anthropology, etc, that indicate we are wired for a propensity to believe and even to believe many of the same things; very interesting to be sure, but as Shermer notes, the fact that we believe or the number of believers does not correlate to the veracity of the beliefs.)

I got to thinking however, about something a wise uncle[1] told me once when I asked him if he accepted the Documentary Hypothesis of the Old Testament, ie, that several authors and a redactor (JEPD) contributed to the Pentateuch (first five books of the bible). I mentioned that no early source exists with all the pieces, so we assume they were knitted together later from different sources. He said that just because we haven't found an original source with all the pieces doesn't meant it doesn't exist.


This is more complicated than it seems on the surface, since as you know we routinely find earlier examples of human activity around the world, and that activity doesn't arise in a vacuum. Just as when you find a Tyrannosaurus Rex that's 65 million years old, you know that there were many similar dinosaurs that preceded it, so if you find a written account that is 6,000 years old, you know that writing and the culture that produced it is older and we may or may not ever find evidence of it.

So: Just because we can induce a religious experience with an electrical jolt to a certain area of the brain doesn't mean that it cannot be induced in other ways. (A jolt to a different area induces sexual arrousal, and we know there are myriad other ways to do that.) It does certainly cast doubt on paranormal phenomena, but it doesn't rule it out. 

If I have only ever eaten oysters my whole life, it does not mean I could not be equally satisfied with hot dogs, it just means my taste buds have never enjoyed them.

I wrote elsewhere allowing for the possibility that invisible things may interact with us. I'm a big fan of Kurt Vonnegut. I've read most of what he wrote.[2] I'm not reading much anymore (my free time is so limited, I spend what little I have traveling, writing here and there, and listening to books, which I find just as enjoyable as using my eyes). When Bagombo Snuffbox was released, I devoured it, as it promised to be the last work of Vonnegut's I'd get a chance to read for the first time. In it is a short story, "Thanasphere," in which an astronaut encounters the souls of the departed.I don't recall the specifics of the story, but it struck me as eerily possible, and permitted by the laws of physics. Read Michio Kaku's Parallel Worlds for an amazing speculation on how a conscience could survive the slow stretching out of the Cosmos (should it expand forever and not collapse); that scenario posits scales of time, distance, and temperature so vastly large and small that we can not conceive them; it is not hard to imagine how the energies of the lives of perhaps 300 generations (back to the earliest written human records) could still be circulating and interacting in the ether.



[1]
Davis A Young, geologist, professor and author. Science Held Hostage: What's Wrong With Creation Science and Evolutionism

[2]
One of the few books I've put down and never picked back up was Vonnegut's Palm Sunday. At the time, I was dieting and exercising vigorously and simultaneously had to deal with an onset of anxiety; I associated the themes of the book with the anxiety and decided I had to let go of both, at least for the time being. That was 2004 or so and I never picked the book up again, though I think I could now. Vonnegut understood the utter absurdity of existence that is horrifying if plumbed too deeply.