h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, keep an open mind and it was ordained: in the sense that it is the apogee of the evolution of matter.

Sam Beckett's uncle Gerald used to say that "life is a disease of matter" and that is certainly witty, but only fashionably pessimistic.

"You were sick but you're well again, and there's work to do" -- Kilgore Trout

Okay okay - ordained as in 'It was gonna happen anyway", not as in "It was done on purpose".

The emphasis is on "all one with". We are not simply a drop in the ocean, we are the tip of the crest of the wave.

If the authors do make one leap of faith, it is in the possibility of a Grand Unified Theory which will hopefully tie together the ends of the size scale of the universe. This extends from 10^-25cm (about the Planck length) to 10^25cm (the size of the cosmic horizon).

We live and operate, they point out, right in the middle of this scale: between small insects (10^-1cm) and mountains (10^5cm). "This is the 'reality' in which common sense works and normal physical intuition is reliable."

This week's 'In Our Time' on Baruch Spinoza: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/ (downloadable).

Excellent! I listened to the first half last night. Very relevant to much of our recent discussions...the interchangeability of 'god' and 'nature'; the meaninglessness of Free Will vs Predestination; etc.

In the days when I vaguely thought there might be something in this god thingy, I got interested in Spinoza. I think I was eventually put off him because the theists took him as one of theirs (a pantheist). But it seems he was moer akin to what I'd say was an atheist. So maybe my juvenile intuition was correct. Certainly, his religious contemporaries and their descendents didn't like him.



Having heard the last part of 'The Anscestor's Tale', I forgive Dawkins. He deals with all the chemistry stuff in no uncertain terms. I still think that 'selfish' is an unfortunate way to describe a gene, though.



More Muslim theology: I introduced my children to the word 'insh'allah' yesterday. Muslims don't presume to know the will of god. The future will only turn out a certain way if god wills it. The best we can dom is guess.

Have a nice day, insh'allah.

Bertrand Russell was a great admirer of Spinoza, and a famous atheist. Wittgenstein didn't go for Spinoza and spoke respectfully but at arm's length about theology (he is now influential in theology, despite his refusal to dabble in it).



The good thing about 'selfish' is how it conveys the toss genes don't give about their creations (incl. us).

One thing you have to remember about Spinoza is that at the time he was writing being an atheist was actually dangerous. That said, part I of the Ethics is still a head on refutation of dualism, for which he deserves the praise of all of us.

Noggin

Oh, and I'm currently reading The Ancestor's Tale myself.

It is amazing (perhaps) how recently it has been illegal to be an atheist. Blasphemy laws . . . perhaps "most countries" still have them. Britain seems to have been extraordinarily tolerant in letting Darwin and Huxley live peacefully and letting Russell get his rants off.

Then the officially atheist countries invent blasphemy laws of their own.

If you have not already, take a look at Antonio Damasio's books.

'Looking For Spinoza' is particularly relevant

Next on my list: Julian Barbour's, 'The End of Time'

I suppose with Spinoza - yes, to be an atheist was dangerous. But also, as far as the world of ideas was concerned, god was the only game in town. I get the impression from the In Our Time thing (which really *is* worth a listen to), he may have regarded himself as a pursuer of divine truth. As opposed to us modern Atheists who, standing on the shoulders of giants, might regard the abandonment of the divine as a necessary step towards the truth.

I'm not sure. It's hard to say.

Or perhaps only by abandoning the dualistic pursuit of the divine can the truth possibly be revealed.

Perhaps Spinoza was aware of the seemingly inescapable dualism inherent to our thinking

In this regard, Spinoza's motto may have more than one shade of meaning

I agree. It _is_ hard to say

For many philosophers of roughly the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, the primary problem which they were trying to deal with was that an absence of God seemed to make no ethical sense, while the existence of God seemed to make no metaphysical sense. Even Berkeley, in making *everything* spirit, effectively dispensed with a dualistic view, and his characterisation of the necessary properties of spirit as dynamic and existing in its own right are just those that we now apply to energy/matter.

Noggin

I suppose we had to wait until the 19th/20th centuries for Nietzsche/ Kierkegaard/ Sartre and the realisation that there *is* no ethical sense.

Were we also compelled to wait for the 21st century in order to realise that neither is there a metaphysical one?

Hah! Good one. Post Dennett, there's only 'physics'.

But the point of the Centre-of-the-Universe writers (Primack and Abrams) is that

a) there is an ethical act
b) those who spoke about gods weren't talking about nothing: they were talking about the hidden sources of action in the universe
c) we now for the first time have a non-personified explanation for those sources

I suppose I really should read the book before commenting (although it's seldom stopped me in the past), but...:

a) Yes - there are 'ethical' acts: those which light up various 'this is ethical' centres in our brains.
b) Not necessarily. Was Conan Doyle talking about 'something' when he imagined Sherlock Holmes? (Although, yes, I suspect that gods did arise from an impulse to explain the real world).
c) That seems to me to be coming from the perspective of desparately clinging to god. Another way of putting it would be: "All the previous, personification-based explanations were found to be wrong. We can now move on and look at the universe in a totally different way."

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Bet you knew I couldn't let that one pass .

Dennett wouldn't agree with you either. He refers to mathematics as a branch of metaphysics (as opposed to a branch of physics), and speaks highly of Kant (the last but one of the great metaphysicists).

What would be true to say is that the only *viable* metaphysics is the one that underpins physics, and that since science became specialised in the nineteenth century most of the best work in this field has been done by scientists rather than philosophers (Dennett himself is an honourable exception).

But there is still very definitely metaphysics. Kant showed that the universe could not be understood as either bounded or infinite, and that there would always be some limit to our observations (uncertainty principle etc), and Schopenhauer that the universe consisted of cause and effect (being dynamic, operating according to rules, and being a conserved quantity makes causes an equivalent of energy). None of these were deduced (or are deducible solely) from observations. That's what makes them metaphysics. And they underlie all modern science in one way or another.

Noggin

Do read the book Ed -- it is impossible for me not to misrepresent it in such short bursts as I can give here. They don't cling on to religion, but maybe offer an exit to those who do wish to.

Do read it, it is quite an amazing mix of science and interpretation.

I'll add it to my list. Along with Christopher Hitchen's latest:
http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=%27God+Is+Not+Great%27+Author+Christopher+Hitchens+on+Religion%2C+Iraq%2C+and+His+Own+Reputation+--+New+York+Magazine&expire=&urlID=22118127&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnymag.com%2Farts%2Fbooks%2Ffeatures%2F31244%2F&partnerID=73272