“Sit down, shut up, and ask yourself what’s true.” Write your own metaphysics, question everything until you hit bedrock.

“The one and only truth of any person lies like a black hole at their very core, and everything else—everything else—is just rubbish and debris that covers the hole.” Enlightenment is truth-realization: the self is false. “Your moments of blackest despair are really your most honest moments, your most lucid moments.” Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing by Jed McKenna is one heck of a book. McKenna is enlightened, he tells us, and most people are not. It is a cocky claim, but his clear thinking and the effective dispatching of the usual spiritual trappings suggest a person with first-hand experience.

Damnedest is set in an ashram in Iowa where McKenna is a spiritual instructor of sorts, though he is quick to disclaim any special mystical status. “Think for yourself and figure out what’s true.” Dialogue with students provides a light narrative around his philosophy. Life is a dream, says McKenna. The core of this delusion is a belief in the self and all the ensuing dualities, including right and wrong. Happiness is a good dream, and suffering is a bad one. It is neither desirable nor important to become enlightened unless you are one of those rare few in a hundred million who insist on truth.

McKenna advises a form of truth-seeking called spiritual autolysis. “Sit down, shut up, and ask yourself what’s true.” Write your own metaphysics, question everything until you hit bedrock. Done. I agree that there is no constant self, no soul. There is no external world of pure forms, no essence. Change is at the heart of our universe and human nature.

I disagree with his reductive approach to truth. “All beliefs. All concepts. All thoughts. Yes, they’re all false; all bullshit. … If you’re going for truth, you’re not taking any of them with you.” What about scientific truth? Is it all bullshit? McKenna might be surprised to learn of the consistency between the laws of physics and his views. Take the second law of thermodynamics, which asserts that everything falls apart. It is an empirical truth, a predictable dynamic in space-time, and quite useful for understanding the big picture and our little lives. What about existential truth? Yes, I might die tonight, but probably not. Meaning is fleeting and beautiful. There is both truth and beauty.

Enlightenment is both difficult and liberating. It can take years to fully sink in. It changes everything. For McKenna, it is the end of the human drama. He jokes that he has become a vampire, a post-human. I think enlightenment is more common than McKenna knows. Life inevitably forces the realization upon us, and many choose to embrace it.

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Newton’s personal library of a few hundred books was quite enough to found physics

The Universe Within by Neil Turok is the 2012 Massey Lectures. I have read several histories of physics and perhaps did not need to read another one, but Turok speaks with profound wisdom. A theoretical physicist, he has worked with Stephen Hawking, Paul Steinhardt, and other brilliant minds to develop our understanding of the early universe. He is currently Director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. He has a deep political consciousness and is dedicated to connecting abstract ideas with everyday people and young minds.

Turok makes many thoughtful reflections. I highlight three of them here. First, the problem of information overload in the modern digital world is not a new one, but Turok stopped me with this observation:

“In the Wren Library in Trinity College, Cambridge, Isaac Newton’s personal library consists of a few hundred books occupying a single bookcase. This was quite enough to allow him to found modern physics and mathematical science. A short walk away, in the main University Library, Charles Darwin’s personal library is also preserved. His entire collection of books occupies a ten-metre stretch of shelving. Again, for one of the most profound and original thinkers in the history of science, it is a minuscule collection.”

Maybe the internet, with its millions of books of data, is required for the rest of our average brains. More likely, digital technology and the internet simply allow too much text to exist. A little curation goes a long way to intelligence.

Second, I was glad to find a heavyweight physicist who shares my skepticism of the multiverse theory. Put simply, the multiverse concept proposes a universe for each possible outcome in space-time. Cast a six-sided die, and each outcome occurs in a different universe. The multiverse is proposed to resolve certain logical problems arising from quantum mechanics. It was delightfully rendered in the fictional work The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter. I am skeptical about it as a serious idea. As Turok says:

“It is hard to imagine a less elegant or convincing explanation of our own beautiful world than to invent a near-infinite number of unobservable worlds and to say that, for some reason we cannot understand or quantify, ours was ‘chosen’ to exist from among them.”

Finally, I am grateful to Turok for giving the new atheists a kick in the ass. Scientists like Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss have caused me to re-evaluate my vague agnosticism, even to acknowledge that I am an atheist, at least on weekdays. I maintain objections to their smugness. In The God Delusion, Dawkins opens by describing his profound wonder at the vastness of the universe. The same feeling has been shared in religious terms by Sagan, Einstein, Hawking, and other scientists. When these scientists talk about God, they are doing so in a poetic sense. The God Delusion, says Dawkins, is not an attack on their God. No, his attack is not on the poetic thinkers but on the literalists, those who think in fairy tales rather than in good, solid physics. You can make a bold claim – God is a delusion – only if you exclude all good thinking on the subject and focus just on a straw man.

I was also disappointed by Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing. The book promises to take on the deep philosophical question: Why is there something rather than nothing? I learned fresh ideas about the distribution of energy in the universe—fascinating, but not informative about the primary question. I get his argument: the sum of energy in the universe has been accounted for, so there is no need to invoke a creator. Fine, don’t invoke a creator. But why is there something rather than nothing? As Turok says: “The rhetoric is impressive, but the arguments are shallow.”

If you are looking for a modest and reflective take on the subject, I recommend Why Does the World Exist by Jim Holt. Turok makes another recommendation which I have added to my reading list:

“In comparing Krauss’s and Dawkins’s arguments with the care and respectfulness of those presented by Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, all the way back in the eighteenth century, one can’t help feeling the debate has gone backwards. Hume presents his skepticism through a dialogue which allows opposing views to be forcefully expressed, but which humbly reaches no definitive conclusion. After all, that is his main point: we do not know whether God exists.”

Of late, I have wondered if the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not the peak of human intellect. Neil Turok is an equal for our own day.

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Good people looking after one another; the Dutch were better than their theology

Westerhof—now there’s a Dutch name, like all the names in Catch Me as I Fall. There’s the Van crew, of course, like Van Dyk. There’s an abundance of Frisians, the Northerners, names with vowels and often ending in the letter a: Boersma, Dykstra, Veenstra, Zylstra. I am a Miedema and grew up with people just like them. There are many immigrant stories in Canadian literature, but few Dutch ones. Dutch immigrants were a quiet, practical lot, quick to assimilate. Westerhof’s collection of eleven loosely related short stories is a rare treat.

The immigrant story is not a new one, but the Dutch perspective is unique. The church was the core of this community. Religion was heavy-handed, and the book’s title was well chosen. The fall of man is central to Dutch theology. Of course, there was doubt. In the story Unfailing Mercies, Sarah stands in front of the church for the ritual Profession of Faith. She ponders how casually she had drifted into the faith, agreeing to believe. When Reverend Post asks her to commit her life to Christ, she feels an urge to laugh, then panics. Personally, I declined to undertake the ritual. It was my point of departure from the church. Still, I remember that they were generally good people looking after one another; the Dutch were better than their theology. I still love to sing the old hymns.

The stories touch on all the memorable points—the difficult ones and the happy ones. There was the Dutch school, with all those young blond heads and blue eyes. In Canada, it is not uncommon to hear about discrimination against immigrants, but the Dutch were bearers of prejudice against Catholics, Blacks, gays—you name it. To be fair, during the war, many Dutch people risked their lives to hide Jews from the Nazis who occupied their country. On a happier note, I was reminded of our good farm foods: meat and potatoes and green beans, soup with Maggi, boterkoek, and apple pie with ice cream. My diet has diversified since those days, but I have fond memories.

Westerhof’s stories are often sentimental, and this works because the Dutch are sentimental. That, and stubborn. Wooden-shoed and wooden-headed. In the story Probability, Ellie is never as confident as her aptly named friend, Will. Maybe the certain answers of his faith made him feel there should be certain answers for everything. Westerhof nails it there. Belief in a grand design has a way of programming a person to see the world in a structured way. Now Will is dead. What will she write for a eulogy? Well, Westerhof’s book is a eulogy of sorts—a testament to a past time that still echoes with love in me. Thank you, Patricia.

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Our universe may have started as a hack in a physicist’s lab

Why is there something rather than nothing? Any world view worth its salt needs an answer to this question. I recently read two books on the subject: Why Does the World Exist by Jim Holt, and A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss. Of the two, I preferred Holts existential detective story because of its humbler, broader approach.

There are creation myths, Christian and otherwise. A creator brings the world into being out of nothing or out of chaos. People generally think creation myths are just nice stories, but any move to take them literally invokes quick criticism. There is a problem with creation theories. Where did the creator come from? Self-created of course, or eternal, but then why can’t the universe be self-created or eternal?

A logical person might argue, look, there is either going to be nothing or something. When there is nothing, there’s nobody there to notice. Something is bound to turn up sooner or later. See, there’s something. A Buddhist would not agree. Is there something, really? One does not get something from nothing. The substance of things is an illusion. The universe never came into being.

Does nothing exist? Heidegger said you can’t use the verb, is, when it comes to nothing, as in, nothing is. As usual, he invented a new word, noths, nothing noths. It may be nonsensical to try to talk or think about nothing. Logical positivists preferred formal logic and empiricism to account for the world. One of Wittgenstein’s main propositions is poetical and wise, Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Physics proposes a new answer. Our knowledge of the universe has expanded. We have empirical proof that there was a big bang, a point in time when the universe began, likely from a random quantum fluctuation. If the sum of energy in the universe can be accounted for, there is no need to invoke a creator. This answer introduces the notion of the multiverse, the possibility that many different universes can exist, each with its own set of physical laws and constants. I am intrigued by the cheeky suggestion that our universe may have started as a hack in a physicist’s lab in another universe, initialized with values then launched for expansion.

I begin to think of physics as religion, only better because it can be proven. Consider entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, energy always dissipates, nothing lasts. It’s a good explanation of just about everything, the fate of the universe and my balding head.

Of course, each solution sets up its own problem. If our universe came into being because of a hack in another universe, where did the first universe come from? We circle back to the beginning. Does it even make sense to talk about other universes? Doesn’t the definition of universe necessarily include everything? Recursion is the trick and curse of origin questions.

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I have a plastic brain and a tin flute

One of the happier research findings of the 21st century is that the adult brain isn’t fixed—it continues to grow and change throughout life. This phenomenon, known as neuroplasticity, is something I’m putting to the test as I learn my first musical instrument: the tin flute. To help me along, I’m reading Making Music for the Joy of It by Stephanie Judy.

This book is a welcoming guide for beginners, addressing common myths like tone deafness and demystifying the basics of reading music. Part of it feels like an introduction to adult learning, with practical advice such as finding a good time and place to practice. But it’s also a broader reflection on the nature of practice itself. For some, there’s a quiet satisfaction in the act of practicing; at the same time, as Judy notes, I find that I can explore more complex techniques when I simply allow myself to play. “In the place we call Music,” she writes, “improvisation is that window off to the side—an irresistible view for some musicians, all they ever look at, really.”

The “mapping technique” she describes is especially fascinating for beginners. While seasoned musicians can often approximate a new piece after just one look, my attempts are awkward and error-filled even after several tries. The mapping approach involves practicing in layers. First, study the piece briefly, noting a few key details. Then, try playing through without the music. With each pass, you add depth and observation until the music starts to feel more natural.

One quote from Judy resonates with me: “People only half listen to you when you play. The other half is watching.” Yikes. I hope, one day, to feel comfortable enough to perform with and for others. I’d always imagined that would be far in the future, but Judy suggests that playing music with family is not only joyful but also a great way to ease into performing. Inspired by her suggestion, I’m rehearsing Joy to the World to play for my family this Christmas—a dream come true.

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“To think that knowledge itself is shaped like books is to marvel that a rock fits so well in its hole in the ground”

My mother grew up in a small village in Friesland, a northern province of the Netherlands. Her family farm was near a canal, where she skated with friends. These days, it’s rare to get the freezing temperatures needed for hard ice. My mother often says life was simpler back then. When I asked her if it felt that way at the time, she looked me sharply in the eye and said, “No, no it didn’t.” She lived through the Great Depression and the Nazi occupation during World War II. It’s an illusion to think life is more complex today than it was in the past.

In Too Big to Know, David Weinberger explores how the nature of knowledge has shifted over time. In the past, traditional knowledge was closely tied to print. Academics followed a disciplined scholarly process, researching and writing papers and books—the foundation of what we consider “classic” facts. It may seem like a neat and orderly system, but Weinberger argues that this view is oversimplified, noting “The limitations of paper made facts look far more manageable than they seem now that we see them linked into our unlimited network.” Today, knowledge is no longer confined to books; it’s shaped by networks like the web. No longer written by a single expert toward a fixed conclusion, knowledge is now more of an interactive dialogue, weaving together multiple perspectives with outcomes that are fluid and changeable.

It’s a good thing that our information technology has evolved to handle the inherent messiness of thought. As Weinberger points out, “To think that knowledge itself is shaped like books is to marvel that a rock fits so well in its hole in the ground.” Yet, messiness isn’t a virtue. If print makes knowledge seem too tidy, that tidiness is also its strength. Print tames chaos by filtering out distractions, dismissing unreliable sources, and fixing reference points for evaluation. It distills knowledge from raw data, allowing for periods of consensus and informed action.

Life has always been too big to fully comprehend. I’ve written elsewhere about how Dutch immigration shaped a “people of the book.” For them, reading the Bible provided focus and refuge amidst the uncertainty and hardships of starting a new life in a strange land. While digital technologies enhance our ability to engage with the complexity of life, networks remain leaky buckets. The stability of print remains, in many ways, the gold standard for knowledge.

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A brilliant book that provokes deeper thinking about the modern digital world

We often forget what life was like before literacy, when orality was the dominant mode of communication. In Orality and Literacy, Walter J. Ong explains how the shift to literacy fundamentally restructured human consciousness, altering not only how we communicate but how we think, perceive, and understand the world.

One might assume that an oral culture could not produce complex works, yet the ancient Greek epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, were oral creations. Ong explores the properties of orality that make such feats possible. Oral memory, for example, relies heavily on repetition and cliché to aid in retention and transmission. Phrasing is often aggregative; instead of simply saying “soldier,” one might say “brave soldier” to create a rhythmic and memorable pattern. Ong contrasts these properties with those of written language, illustrating how oral cultures developed sophisticated mechanisms for preserving and transmitting knowledge. This analysis effectively defines the lifeworld of thought before it was shaped by the permanence and fixity of literacy. It reveals an intricate architecture of oral consciousness that remains underappreciated in literate societies.

Writing fundamentally transforms communication by fixing speech in a physical medium, enabling us to remember events and ideas in precise detail. This permanence facilitates the extension of thought into more complex and abstract forms, which are essential to philosophy, literature, science, engineering, and technology. Literacy forms the bedrock of modern civilization, including digital innovations like the internet. It allows for the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge across time and space, creating a vast, interconnected web of information.

Ong explains how writing abstracts communication and removes it from the lifeworld. Writing and reading are slower, more reflective processes compared to the immediacy of speaking and listening in an oral performance. The writer works in isolation, crafting a message for a hypothetical reader who remains a fiction until the text is read. This introduces a degree of alienation; communication becomes less about direct human interaction and more about creating a one-sided dialogue. This shift is evident in the rise of the novel in the 1800s, a form of literature that emphasizes introspection, internal monologue, and the psychological development of characters. Ong suggests that this development may have contributed to a heightened sense of self-awareness in human consciousness. Writing also allows us to transcend time, enabling us to “hear” the voices of those long dead, to engage with thoughts and ideas far removed from our immediate context.

Ong describes orality as “natural” and writing as “technological,” but this dichotomy may oversimplify the relationship between the two. I suggest that orality, too, can be considered technological in a Heideggerian sense. Heidegger understood the lifeworld—the implicit domain of thought—as a mode of being he called Dasein. If we accept that all human activity involves some form of technological engagement, then speech itself can be seen as a technology—a tool for processing symbols embodied in sounds. This perspective challenges the notion that writing is the sole marker of technological advancement, revealing that orality has its own complex, systematic properties that facilitate human cognition and social organization.

Orality is not simply “pre-literate” or a lesser form of communication than literacy. It is a domain of knowing unto itself, capable of achieving complex design and cultural sophistication. Even today, oral practices persist and play a vital role in many societies, from oral storytelling traditions to the spoken word in contemporary digital media. Written words are ultimately transformed in the brain back into their original spoken utterances, illustrating that literacy is, in fact, founded on orality. Similarly, whatever comes next will not be simply “post-literate.” Literacy is built on orality, and post-literacy will be built on literacy. Future developments will likely further abstract communication. Programming code, for example, represents a powerful new form of symbolic processing, distilled from the inefficiencies of written speech. Code is a language of precision and utility, free from the ambiguity of natural language, yet it remains rooted in the human need to communicate complex ideas in writing.

Orality and Literacy is a brilliant book that provokes deeper thinking about its relevance in the modern digital world. The properties of orality—such as its emphasis on immediacy, communal participation, and mnemonic devices—could be applied today to analyze unstructured and conversational data in big data projects, such as crawling the open web or training artificial intelligence.

The rise of social media and digital communication tools is, in many ways, a return to an oral culture where immediacy, interactivity, and communal discourse dominate. Yet, these platforms also retain the benefits of written communication, preserving dialogue for future reference and enabling asynchronous interaction. This blending of oral and literate properties suggests a new phase in human consciousness, where the immediacy of oral exchange is paired with the permanence and scalability of written text. As digital communication continues to evolve, it is reshaping how we think, learn, and engage with the world. How this development will again restructure consciousness remains an open and compelling question.

~ Book review by John Miedema, with suggestions from an AI language model

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Each Generation Must Go Through the Hard Work of Learning to Read

Early into Reading in the Brain I knew I had found a very good book. It is packed with research and informed insight. As I continued to read it, however, I noticed something odd. I was struggling with the e-book edition I had purchased. I found myself wanting to physically grapple with the device more than the buttons would allow. The book contains diagrams that are useful to consult when reading the text, but I could not easily cross-reference them. The book is lengthy, and I found it difficult to track progress without the thickness of a print book. I had already enjoyed a few novels on my e-reader without this problem. This material was more challenging. I have read many similar scientific books before but always in print. For analytical reading the absence of tangible pages felt like a phantom pain. What was happening? Dehaene’s book was compelling enough, and the digital challenge troublesome enough, to merit a second purchase of the more expensive print edition. The completed reading answered my question.

The Reading Paradox

Dehaene begins with the reading paradox. Our brains evolved over millions of years without writing. How is it that we can read? The hardware of our brains has not evolved in the mere 5000-year history of writing. New studies repeatedly show that the brain is more plastic that we thought but no so plastic as to invent new structures for reading. Dehaene explains that reading became possible for humans because we had the good fortune to inherit cortical areas that could link visual elements to speech sounds and meanings. Our limited plasticity allowed us to recycle existing brain circuitry.

Learning to read still takes years of training. It starts with visual recognition of shapes, e.g., “T” and “L”. The brain learns to detect subtle differences in words, e.g., “eight” vs “sight” while ignoring big ones, e.g., “eight” vs “EIGHT”. We do not scan words letter by letter from left to right like a computer program, but instead encode units of meaning for easy look-up, e.g., the morpheme, “button” in “unbuttoning”. The brain uses two pathways in parallel, sound and meaning, to reconstruct the pronunciation of the word. With sufficient training and practice reading seems virtually effortless.

We are not born to read. The only evolution that occurred was cultural – we optimized reading over the centuries to suit the brain. One more thing is needed. Why are cultural phenomena like reading so uniquely developed in humans? Dehaene attributes it the evolution of our prefrontal cortex. “My proposal is that this evolution results in a large-scale ‘neuronal workspace’ whose main function is to assemble, confront, recombine, and synthesize knowledge.” The workspace allowed us to exploit the cognitive niche made possible by neuronal recycling.

My Brain Needs Re-training for Reflective Reading of E-books

I was struck by the tight coupling of brain structures with their physical counterparts in the world. Learning to read, the brain becomes encoded with the specific shapes and sounds of words. The aim of reading is still to reconstruct the original physical speech utterances. The skills required for processing text should be mostly transferable from print to digital books. After all, the text is still there. Indeed, I find the reading of light or familiar material to be nearly equivalent on an e-reader.

When words are less familiar some slowness is to be expected. As Dehaene explains, we perform extra processing to decipher letters for rare or novel words before attempting to access their meaning. When words, sentences and paragraphs combine to express complex ideas much more processing is required. Reduced reading speed can be expected for reading abstract and challenging material regardless of the medium. To be sure, I wrestle with print books, snapping pages when I am unconvinced, wearing the binding from too much turning, attacking the text with a pen. I experienced this with the print edition of Reading in the Brain. I experienced a greater challenge when using the e-reader. How come?

I speculate a connection between reading technology and access to the neuronal workspace. Dehaene argues that literacy changed to suit the structures of the brain. The print book, the codex, is two thousand years old, a design that surpassed the scroll. It is an evolution of technology, finely tuned to our neurons to optimize reading. I can compel its knowledge. We assume the e-reader represents an advance on print because it embodies digital technology. Integrated with the web, it is easier to discover, purchase, search and link to other material. The text is readily ported to an e-reader and I can adjust its font-size for readability or play it aloud for listening. However, the mental struggle with a complex text suggests the e-reader is inferior for global analysis functions, the most obvious differences being parallel access to pages, easy turning and cross-referencing across any two points. These are reflective reading functions that are used to “assemble, confront, recombine, and synthesize knowledge,” the functions served by the neuronal workspace. If you think I am cutting too fine a point, recall the tight coupling between brain structures and the world.

I am certain that my brain is already being reprogrammed to work more efficiently with e-books. It is happening to all readers. This phase of re-training explains some of the fourty-year delay in the popular adoption of e-books. If my speculation is correct, e-reader design must evolve again if it is to compete equally with the print book for complex texts. What would an advanced digital e-reader look like? I offer a suggestion. The print book has facing pages, a feature that serves forward and back-referencing. Attempts have been made at a dual pane e-reader, but the feature could be amplified digitally using multiple tabs like modern browsers, available at once for parallel processing, still bound within the reading device.

Reading is Always at Risk

Dehaene’s book focuses my attention on two serious concerns. First, we are not born to read. The alphabet and literacy are cultural inventions finely tuned to our brains. Each generation must go through the hard work of learning to read. The internet does not offer a shortcut to knowledge. Second, the invention of reading re-purposed existing neural circuitry. Dehaene suggests the mental “letterbox” we use for recognizing letters may have once been used for identifying animal tracks, a skill we have lost. Cortical reorganization is a competition, a zero-sum game. As we re-train our brains for digital technology what skills will be lost? The capacity for long-form reflective reading, perhaps. Reading is always at risk.

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Religion is Poetry and We Cannot Live Without It

It took many long thoughts before I was ready to write a response to The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I have tossed a lot of things in my religion closet over the years and was overdue for the cleaning this book provided. I still feel a bit raw.

I will give you my personal context as briefly as possible. I grew up in a fundamentalist church, believing the literal heaven and hell story as a child, rejecting it as a teen, and settling with agnosticism as an adult. I look back at the childhood experience as a positive one. I read the bible multiple times and can speak knowledgeably about it. It fashioned me into a reader and a philosophical thinker. Like any teen I decried hypocrisy. In truth most Christians were better people than their principles. My main contention was the general unwillingness to admit the religious story might be wrong. I still root out the occasional blind spot caused by fundamentalism but today I feel easily clear of its influence. I had settled into a cozy agnosticism when Dawkins’ book came along. I am not a new atheist and will not begin deriding theists. In fact, I am clearer on the role of religion though uncritical theists will not find in me an easy ally.

I am religious, just like Dawkins. In the opening chapter Dawkins describes a feeling, a profound sense of wonder at the vastness of the universe. The same feeling has been shared in religious terms by Sagan, Einstein, Hawking and other scientists. When these scientists talk about God they are doing so in a poetic sense. The God Delusion, says Dawkins, is not an attack on their God. No, his attack is not on the poetic thinkers but on the literalists. Put crudely, those who believe the fairy tale of a guy in the sky, waiting for you with pie when you die. Creation, heaven and hell, Jesus dying to save your immortal soul then coming back to life, miracles, the stuff you learn in Sunday school. Dawkins is using a rhetorical strategy. You can make a bold claim – God is a delusion – if you exclude all good thinking on the subject and only focus on a straw man. Like Dawkins, I reject the fairy tale and instead use religion poetically. Thing is, we are not all eloquent poets. Many theists use the language of religious tradition, but the essence of their belief is the same awe at the grandness of nature. I dusted off my old Psalter Hymnal and its Confession of Faith begins by saying that we know God by the “creation, preservation, and governance of the universe.” Argue if you must, the religion begins with a naturalist testament, just like Dawkins.

God is not a empirical question. Either he exists or he doesn’t, says Dawkins. Who is being simple-minded? Tackling the origins of the universe Dawkins considers the two hypotheses of creation and evolution. Intelligence, he argues, occurs at the end of a process, i.e., evolution, not at the start, i.e., creation. In fact, that is only true in a local context. According to physics, the universe was highly ordered matter, a singularity, and history has been the unfolding of the big bang. This is entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. The order or intelligence is found at the start of the process. My point is that big questions do not have simple true or false answers. There is the middle value, “mu”, often excluded, which rejects the context of the question as too small. Agnosticism seems a sensible response, but like the religion of the scientists, Dawkins argues away the agnosticism of great thinkers like Huxley.

Religion is poetry and we cannot live without it. Whenever one talks about God and the singularity the inevitable retort is that we are placing God in the “gaps”, the unknown things science hasn’t figured out yet. Yes, I say. That’s right. God is a poetic or mythological concept for mystery, the things we do not understand. Religion is false in the same way that Shakespeare is false. The events of his stories probably did not happen, but this does not stop us from retelling the stories, enacting them for audiences again and again. We quote his lines. It affects our decisions and changes our lives. Poetry, mythology, fiction, we constantly underestimate the vital role of these things in our lives. Genuine religious belief is not consoling. New atheists explain religion as a comfort factor.

Genuine religious belief is not consoling. Believers are challenged to reflect carefully on their thoughts and actions, live up to a rigorous moral code, and sacrifice their wants for the needs of others. It is a wonder that anyone would want to be religious. Dawkins provides a better explanation. A meme functions like a gene but causing ideas to reproduce instead of DNA. Religious ideas are memetic because they require acceptance without question. It is a brilliant explanation. Modern theists accept the value of doubt but only as a step to greater faith. Not good enough. Genuine faith must be subject to constant critical examination. Not comfortable at all.

Atheism abets the ascendant religion of consumerism. I sometimes forget how powerful the pro-religious, anti-science lobby is in the United States. It explains some of the militance of the new atheist movement. Even in Canada, the pro-religious lobby is currently rising along with conservative politics, and I oppose it. Still, on a larger scale, I observe the waning of Christianity and other religions as consumerism rises to replace them as the new religion. Atheism abets consumerism by overstating its rejection of religion. Dawkins, like me, is religious in a poetic sense, but unfortunately, he reserves it as a special case. Without some poetry or mythology to imagine the unknown, we are reduced to creatures of physical matter alone, admitting only the things we can touch and taste, serving the economics of our want.

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The Paths of Meditation and Action Reach the Same End

A hundred years ago a wise old professor recommended that I read The Bhagavad Gita. I put it on my list but only just read it. The reading was prompted by another, The Razor’s Edge, in which a pilgrim finds his way through books to enlightenment. Among them was the Upanishads, of which the Gita is considered a beautiful and accessible work.

The Gita is the story of Arjuna, an Indian prince the night before battle. A powerful army has gathered to deny his rightful claim to the throne. He does not want to fight because the army contains members of his family. He receives counsel from Krishna, an apparent charioteer but in fact Lord Vishu, greatest of the Indian gods. The battle is a metaphor for the spiritual struggle, and Krishna provides personal guidance on the paths to enlightenment.

Krishna explains that there are two main paths, one of knowledge and meditation for the few who prefer a life of solitude and contemplation. The other path is that of love and service, the path of action suited to most of us who prefer to live among others in the world. The two paths reach the same end.

A core theme of Eastern philosophy is the impermanence of the ego. “The ego’s job is to go on incessantly spinning the wheel of the mind and making new karma-pots: new ideas to act on, fresh desires to pursue.” Meditation teaches insight into egolessness while action exhausts the ego, yielding the same result. It is this path of action that Krisha recommends to Arjuna, faced with his difficult situation. Conditionality is our existence and Arjuna cannot escape the battle that is before him.

Arjuna must face his fears, but that is not the last word. A recurring theme in the Gita is to renounce attachment to the outcomes of our actions. We choose only our actions, and should make each act with care, an act of worship, an offering, but the results are beyond our control and should not engage us.

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