Stopping on a paradigm

When one doesn’t have faith, one has to have something to rely on to make sense out of existence, because sense/sensation/sensibility is all one has left when belief is stripped away. Now some would argue that all knowledge is belief because all we can know, thanks to Descartes, is that we are. Period. Even such self-evident knowledge that the sun will rise in the morning or that the world is a sphere is just belief. Strong belief since we have had so much corroborating and historical evidence, but not one hundred percent, stone-cold, immutable fact. But we can approximate objective reality, in the absence of recourse to the metaphysical, by successive approximation and inquiry.

For non-believers, such as me, Figuring Out How It All Works (FOHIAW) is not a matter of trusting to dogma and tradition but becomes a continual evolution of paradigms. Since we have no anthropomorphic deity to which we can ascribe the mysteries of existence, we must trust our own senses, including the common one, in order to bring our own subjective reality in line with the objective reality which may or may not exist. Back in the halcyon days of philosophy (when people would actually reflect rather than watch from the stands) people like Bishop Berkely believed that subjective reality was the only reality – you stumble through life and God keeps track of everything when you’re not around. In such a world there is no room for the evolution of paradigms apart from better understanding God’s purpose. FOHIAW is a waste of time because we already know HIAW.

That’s not a bad cosmology for sheep and most living and non-living things that don’t care HIAW but our position at the pinnacle of evolution – so far, we think – has its own advantages and responsibilities which oblige us to the actualization of the abilities with which the evolution of matter has endowed us. As such, it is incumbent upon us to use our adaptive advantage to make sense of being rather than to clothe it in the raiment of the supernatural as was the wont of our paradigmically challenged, bone-wielding ancestors.

We have gone from finding a god behind every bush and breed of wildlife, to a handful of pivotal deities, to one. Doesn’t it seem like we’re headed in the right direction to go to zero, and start taking responsibility for our lives, the lives of others, and the life of the planet? (We won’t worry about all sentient and non-sentient life in the universe because we can’t destroy it yet.) If everyone thought that this is the only go-round that we and other living things have, would we kill and war and execute as freely as we do?

And the evolution of spirituality that has taken us from multiple deities to one is an example of paradigm evolution, where successive paradigm shifts have taken us closer to objective reality. Nobody is throwing lightning bolts because that paradigm doesn’t stand up to physical evidence. No trident wielding deity is calling on any windy deity to conjure up hurricanes to punish evildoers (unless you’re Pat Robertson) because there’s no room for gods in the data. But paradigms die hard (which is a good thing, by the way) and people still believe that the HAND ‘O GOD had something to do with the earthquake in Haiti – either punishing the people for sticking pins into dolls or saving the anointed. Either way, the metaphysical progenitor is more to be censured than praised.

So here’s room for work on the old deist paradigm. If you’re in the “God is love” camp, there is no room for paradigm evolution because you’ve gotten off that bus at the station. The God of Warm Fuzziness gets a pass on all the gut-wrenching stuff because he’s non-anthropomorphic – a sort of New Age song with more whimsy than purpose. If you’re more ready to admit that your deity actually has a purpose and existence and concerns Him/Her/Itself with the vagaries of that existence then you have to wonder. Did God spare your life and take someone else’s because you were more worthy? because you prayed harder? If He/She/It pushed that wall (that could have fallen either way) away from you and onto someone else, was it because of His/Her/Its divine plan for you? And if that is the case, do you have any free will? If the Book of Everything has already been written, does God have any free will? And if he doesn’t, what is His/Her/Its purpose in existence other than to turn the pages?

Paradigms are like politics should be. You vote for a politician/idea until it doesn’t work and then you try something that does until it doesn’t. In the area of paradigm evolution it has brought us Einstein’s relativity theories which are an improvement on Newton who was an improvement on Aristotle. It has brought us from believing that the Earth is flat and the center of the universe to our modern ideas of the structure of both our planet and the cosmos. It brings us from a belief in Santa Claus (sorry kids) to the reality of the commercial nature of modern society and from a fear of something under our beds to the realization that we have to vacuum there more often to fight off the dust rhinos.

So, am I advocating Science over spirituality? I’m not sure. Science is, after all, just another belief system and has its own shamans and charlatans. But if you keep that in mind, and realize that chaos plays as great a role as (and perhaps greater than) entropy and enthalpy, then verification of beliefs becomes more important than having them, whether they are scientific or not. And using your mind for FOHIAW and hacking out your unique place in the scheme of things is what it’s all about.

Or you can take the blue pill . .