Metaphysics.

Human narcissism is probably most well captured in religious belief and practice. There may or may not be a God, I tend to think not but rigorous philosophical arguments and concepts are typically never settled. I can say with confidence that we have no reason to suspect that the miraculous stories we find in dogmatic texts are true. Take the new testament for example, the earliest writings are that of Paul; a man who admits to never meeting Jesus in the flesh and never quotes him or shares his familiar parables. At the very least, his ministry took on a very different tone from that of the Jesus in the gospels, even though they agree on major issues. The gospels themselves were written decades after Jesus' death by people who did not know him. We can be relatively certain of this because the early followers described in the gospels were illiterate fisherman and carpenters. Remember, for most of history only a wealthy minority could read or write. (It should be noted that the names of the gospels are mere traditions added over a century later by the church, the author of the Gospel of Mark did not claim to be Mark, etc…) The best assumption is that the stories were passed along by opaque followers trying to proselytize anyone who would listen and somewhat knowingly exaggerating each step of the way in a protracted game of telephone. The alternative, that Jesus really did all of the miracles attested to him requires much more evidence than what is outlined above. While this may seem to be abstract etymilogical thinking, it's worth noting the grief that even devout theists feel when a loved one dies. Where does this grief come from if not the understanding, even if subconscious, that death really is the end?

I'm singling out Christianity because of the culture I happened to be born into, but I doubt the situation is very different for Islam, Judaism, or pagans. The fact the greatest predictor of what religion an individual adopts, or rejects, is their parent's religion itself speaks for the arbitrary nature of religious belief. It is my deepest feeling that adults ought not to even take seriously tales of talking snakes or walking on water and without constant social reinforcement I doubt they scarcely would. Society itself is amazingly cultish in the way it reinforces all sorts of superstitious behaviors.

Assuming some kind of God exists and intentionally created us, it shouldn't take long to look around us to see what this God must be like. Most life persists strictly by consuming other living beings. He or she has shown little interest in preventing us from waging genocide and overwhelming sadism against ourselves and the rest of life on this planet. This is thought to be because God refuses to infringe on our freewill (itself a fully vague concept that has never been adequately articulated.) This belies the possibility that we might have been created with a greater appetite for peace rather than war and altogether fails to explain pestilence and disease. There are certain parasites that cannot even have babies without planting them in the brain of other creatures who are eventually devoured from the inside out by larvae. Either God is all powerful or God is all good, but this world cannot be the creation of a God that is both.

Dawkins, speaking on a similar topic, said, "The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."

Needless to say, whether or not God exists is of very little consequence once it's indifference and/ malice has been established. Certainly trying to placate it through worship is as pointless or disastrous as it is for the dark cults of Lovecraft's eldritch gods. Schopenhauer described this world as a penal colony and pointed out that if life existed for any purpose beyond maximizing suffering, then it must utterly fail in its objective. That the world is seemingly so well orchestrated for misery is, to me, the best argument that God might exist. The feeling, however, betrays the same sense of human centrality I am here criticizing.

Much of the success of the scientific method, and its limitations, come from reductionism. Reductionism gets a bad rap among most non scientifically oriented thinkers, as if it were somehow a crutch. At best, I think this view reflects the fact that there are still unexplained phenomena. There are things that cannot be explained merely by reductionism, at least not in a way that falls within the scope of possible human understanding. It should be no surprise that some things in the universe are too complex for human bandwidth. That said, everything that has been explained by science has been done so from bottom-up explanations. Physics explains chemistry and chemistry biology. This simple chain doesn't exhaust the complexity of all of scientific knowledge but no one expects that sociology is going to yield deep, quantum truths. There is a hierarchy, even if it isn't clearly defined.

It seems everything is ultimately explained by the (for our intents and purposes) random movements of atoms in the void (technically, vibrations in the quantum field, but the distinction here is irrelevant.) It is expected, from this perspective, that the universe has no greater purpose for us. We're chemical machines driven by biological drives, bashing about for no intentional reason. It shouldn't be surprising that most of our DNA is considered "junk" as we evolved through the blind forces of evolution, a 4 billion year long process of ongoing chain reactions. Some DNA just became vestigial and since it didn't hamper our adaptation, there was no evolutionary benefit in erasing it. With reductionism in mind, consider something like the prosperity gospel. The prosperity gospel is a popular notion that God blesses good people with wealth. A capitalist equivalent to the divine right of kings. The idea that we must be pleasing to God, or else he would not reward us with riches is no different than barbarians thinking their gods have blessed them with the spoils of pillage and rape, which they must condone. The material conditions of worker exploitation, 3rd world plundering, a legacy of slavery and corrupt political influence are irrelevant. The richest in the world are the most virtuous of us. God is in control and this is how he wants us to act. It's a similar fallacy as the western notion of karma. In it's original context, karma has nothing to do with rewards in this life. Ancient Hindus would have laughed at the idea that good deeds are rewarded in this life, accrual of good karma meant that we would be rewarded in the next reincarnation. This is a theoretically elegant explanation for the disparaging caste system associated with Hindu society and the problem of evil in general. Proles deserve their lot because of sins they committed in a life no one, even in principle, can point to. The western idea betrays this very human intuition that God, or at least the universe, has a sense of justice and that all things are as they should be.

The callous optimism of any such doctrine that justifies victim blaming and celebrates barely veiled cruelty cannot be more offensive to an honest observer.  In this sense, it is more compassionate (not to say also realistic) to see this world as merely chaotic. Those who are blighted with disease or disaster are not being punished by god, they've merely been inflicted with the misfortune of being born. Those who hold this optimism mostly do not intend the consequences of their philosophy, but it is hard to see how it can be evaded. The situation is not any different with those who claim that nature or life itself is beautiful. There are many things in the world that inspire the divine, oceanic feeling described by Freud as the core experience behind all spirituality. The aurora borealis, the new born of most mammals, supreme acts of kindness and sacrifice, or an unpolluted night sky. Yet to claim that these rare and inspiring moments justify rape, medieval vivisection and the bombing of civilians is no less callous and unrefined as the prosperity gospel; instead of blaming victims it simply claims their hardship is worth the price of life's mysterious beauty. If we're being honest, it isn't that mysterious, even the things we are ignorant of have some mechanical explanation, like every magic trick after the secret is revealed.

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that complex life evolved from simple life. It began with a bubble of lipids in a chemical soup that was struck by lightning, or some sort of heat related reaction that occurred near valves of boiling water in the ocean floor. The science of abiogenesis isn't settled but the rough idea is well agreed upon, non living molecules combined into structures that can react to their environment. It's theorized that structures that met the bare minimum requirements for all life were also the most efficient way of hydrogenating carbon, which is a process of going from a high energy carbon state to a low energy hydrogen state. In a biological sense, then, the purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon.

Things were complicated by the emergence of DNA, a molecule that seems maniacally bent on self replication. When Dawkins titled his book "The Selfish Gene", critics mistook this to mean that our genes make us selfish as individuals. In fact the book is mostly dedicated to explaining altruism in nature. He covers the notable example of ants, who are mostly genetically identical within the colony, who readily sacrifice themselves to save larger or more vital sections of the colony. Dawkins explains that, while the individual ant dies, it's actions cause its genes to be preserved. Hence it is the genes that are selfish, lifeforms are merely the vehicles driven by their selfish genes. Cooperation, as has been pointed out by multiple biologists and leftist thinkers, is a very common survival strategy throughout species and that selfishness is frankly not a good strategy for most organisms. Human beings are no exception to the process of evolution and while (as always) there are murky details, we have a rough idea of how we came to be. We have adapted large brains compared to what physiologists would expect for a mammal our size. Natural selection, as it does everywhere, rewarded mutations that benefitted survival and discarded those that encumbered survival. It should be noted that the majority number of mutations are benign, neither helping nor hurting the individuals in which they occur. Even our altruistic impulses are shaped by what benefits the long term reproduction of our genes.

A surprising consequence of this is that our brains, impressive as they are, are primed for survival rather than objective truth. A more advanced organism doesn't necessarily have a more accurate view of the world (in fact the idea of an organism being more or less "advanced" is misleading. There is not some sort of value-hierarchy of beings but a range of organisms more or less complex and more or less suited to their environment.) Imagine a creature that is adapted so that it can perceive atoms and understand the unthinkably complex atomic structure, (think Laplace's demon) of an apple. This information overload would be of no benefit for beings that simply need to identify food and eat it. We need to know how to avoid predators and catch prey. Being able to perceive every single blood cell involved in running from or chasing after other creatures simply would not have any benefit in the game of survival. There is a trade off between information processing and metabolism, evolution selects for the optimum balance.

An interesting consequence of this thought is that the qualia of colors we perceive is totally arbitrary. We need to be able to make distinctions between different wavelengths of light, but so long as the colors we perceive are consistent with the rest of our personal experience, it doesn't matter if what I see as red is what you see as blue. Bats don't primarily perceive the world around them by sight or color at all, they use echolocation. The exact range of electromagnetic waves that humans are sensitive to is also the same range as the lightwaves given off by our sun, meaning that aliens from another star would likely perceive a part of the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation we aren't sensitive to (infrared or ultraviolet.) Technically speaking, you don't see with your eyes, you see with our brain. Your eyes collect data and your brain creates a functionally accurate representation. Same with the other senses. If a tree falls and the forest and there are no observers, it still causes vibrations in the air but those vibrations are never represented as sound.

Among the more complex animals there is the evolved ability to veto certain impulses in favor of other impulses. This ability to delay gratification is often confused for freewill, despite it being nothing over or above the function of competing portions of the brain. In the end our brains are made of the same chemicals and tissues as most other life on earth and every single particle within it behaves according to the differential equations of quantum physics. Spinoza, with his gift for articulation, said "Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up on consciousness of their own actions and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined." We know that consciousness, somehow or another, supervenes on the brain. Plato, in the Phaedo, described the theory this way: the mind is like the harmony of a chord made up of individual notes that taken separately lack the character of the whole. He also rejected this idea because it would mean that the behavior of the notes would ultimately determine the behavior of the harmony. Free will cannot be defined, we know there is an unconscious impetus behind our behavior and supervenience precludes free will; but there is also the problem of denying determinism known as the Horns of Determinism. The dilemma is that the alternative to determinism isn't free will, but noncausal randomness. This true randomness differs from the statistical nature of quantum mechanics, which can still be defined by differential equations in that it is completely unpredictable and unpatterned. 

The issue of freewill is further settled by the growing number of neurologists who agree with Thomas Metzinger that the "self" is merely an illusion. Descartes, writing in the 1600s, thought that the pineal gland was the part of the brain associated with the human soul. His reason for thinking this is that the rest of the brain was symmetrical while this gland alone was central and unique. He was wrong, naturally, and no subsequent scientists have found any single structure in the brain that would by itself operate like a homunculus. Instead there are separate, competing regions (notes in a chord) in the brain that fight for expression in consciousness (the harmony). Many regions could even be eliminated without fully annihilating the "person" they make up.

Metzinger argues that our first person perspective is another functional representation, the same as the virtual simulation our brain generates of the external world. He defines this first person perspective by 3 key features, the feeling of ownership, self-narrative, and perspectivalness. Metzinger points to phantom limb patients who can still feel missing limbs and are generally unable to move them, unless tricked by a mirror. The brain has a representation of the limb, that is what is actually experienced, and through some neurological defect it remains despite the annihilation of the limb. Further, through mirror synesthesia it is possible to manipulate the brain into thinking the limb is moving. Look up "fake hand experiment" videos, watch and try for yourself. It's surprisingly easy to manipulate your brain into thinking some other object that looks like your hand is your hand and you will "feel" the sensations of whatever touches the fake hand. You don't see with your eyes and you don't feel with your hands, "you" only ever experience the hallucination generated by your brain. Our sense of ownership can be mistaken in other ways as well: schizophrenics may not believe certain of their thoughts belong to them, patients with unilateral hemineglect may wake up believing their right leg does not belong to them and patients experiencing extreme depersonalization may feel as though their volition does not belong to them.

Our self narrative can be mistaken. In "Free Will", Sam Harris describes individuals who are highly suggestive to hypnosis, who may be compelled to do jumping jacks out of nowhere and when asked why they are, they will come up with some vivid rationalization. "I've been meaning to workout more for weeks." Patients with anosognosia may be unaware that they're blind. A doctor might ask them "How many fingers am I holding up?" and they will refuse to answer or claim the room is too dark, but jingle some keys and ask what that is and they believe they're seeing keys. Simple studies where subjects are to press 1 of 2 buttons at random intervals show the brain deciding to push the button nearly 7 seconds before the subject is consciously aware. This latter experiment is often taken by itself to disprove free will, but at the very least the conclusion to draw is that our decisions are often made unconsciously and then narrativized into a story that meshes with our self narrative. That narrative is not always correct. In many ways, it is necessarily incorrect since we are unaware of our neurology. What we are left with, seen outside of any illusory self narratives, is an unthinkably complex series of conditioned responses to our material environment and the ideas we have invented or been exposed to.

Finally, our sense of perspectivalness can be mistaken. Perspectivalness is the sense of "where" we are in our bodies. When asked, most people point to their foreheads, almost no one points to their thigh or their spine. This, like every other process of the brain, can be altered by drugs or injury. Some patients feel their sense of perspectivalness to be boundless and feel as though they are doing everything, from setting the sun to puppeteering traffic.

This is all to say that even our internal senses are hallucinations just like our external senses. They are functionally accurate, our sense of ownership tells the brain that the body is intact, our self-narrative regulates social roles and perspectivalness gives us a sense of orientation. There is no necessary connection between our representational properties and the objective properties they are representing and unlike redness, which is correlated with electromagnetic frequencies around 430 terahertz, selfhood is not a physical or objective property. The best we can say is that our sense of self is the representation of complex, physical processes going on within the bodies we call our own. Every sensation we have of our selves is a hallucination. There is no one over and above the meat sacks fumbling around the Earth eating, fighting, fucking and dying. 

If there was a soul that could be detached from the body's sense organs, it would have no access to information about the external world and would likely carry out its existence in a state of blank delirium; without being attached to the brain's memories it wouldn't even be able to hallucinate a dream world or a dream body. It's hard to see how such a thing would be distinct from nothing at all. While the debate over freewill is forever unsettled, despite the concept of freewill having no coherent definition or any empirical support whatsoever, it is safe to say that without a unified "self" there is no one to have freewill to begin with. We are ultimately puppets with the illusion of being some "one" when in reality, we are just a microcosm of competing impulses and entropy.

Bruce Hood, in his book "The Self Illusion" points out a very common misunderstanding about the consequences of determinism. There are studies demonstrating that participants primed to believe there was no free will were more likely to engage in antisocial behaviors and it's easy to see why. They had adopted base animality as part of their self-narrative and began to act on it. However this is because determinism is often confused with fatalism and there are just as many studies showing that those who were primed to believe in free will engaged in prosocial behaviors. Put another way, our behaviors being determined does not prove that we must act in the worst way. It is possible to behave compassionately and prudently, even in a predetermined universe.

Jesus likely shared much of my pessimism and I will conclude with an ironic (though sincere) homage to what should have been his legacy. Bart Erhman, a Christian scholar who eventually lost faith when confronted with the problem of evil, reconstructs a likely image of Jesus from the new testament using mainstream historical methods. His account differs widely from laymen Christianity and while generally not accepted by faithful scholars, is still admitted by those same critics to be not far off from their account. Jesus, according to Erhman, was an apocalyptic jew. This was common for jews in first century Rome. Throughout the old testament there are accounts of prophets who claimed that the evils inflicted on Israel were punishments from God. Note, this is the logical inverse of the callous optimism described above; if the good are rewarded on earth, the wicked are punished. By the time of the Roman occupation, many jews grew unsatisfied with this theodicy, why did God allow the heathens to desecrate the temples? Why did misfortune rain on the faithful and unfaithful alike? Why were the wicked often rewarded?

Later prophets of the old testament, perhaps most notably Daniel, provided a new explanation. For whatever mysterious reason, God has allowed the forces of evil to rule this world. To my knowledge, no one ever explains why this might be, except the few who concede that God is not all powerful. The wicked, who were unable to delay their desire for gratification, would ransack this world with their lust and greed. The meek, who had the spiritual maturity for delayed gratification, would have to endure their earthy brutality. The day would come however, when the son of man would come down from heaven, raise the dead, and judge everyone that ever existed.The righteous would be rewarded with eternal reparations and the wicked would be cast away. (Note, before Christianity the son of man and the messiah were not seen as the same person; also the concept of "hell" was nonexistent.)

Certainly this isn't a far cry from Jesus' own ministry. John the Baptist is recorded as preaching this message and Paul, a Pharisee, continued it on. The connection between John and Paul is Jesus and it would be strange if he did also have a similar message as his mentor and his student. The Pharisees, it should be noted, believed in the corporeal resurrection of the dead when the time of judgment came. In Matthew 27:52 it is claimed that many saints rose from the dead at the same time as Jesus,  although this claim is absent from the other gospels. This is why Paul gave so much emphasis to Jesus' resurrection and referred to him as the first fruit of the harvest. His resurrection indicated that the apocalypse was nigh.

Apocalypticism is still not unheard of to this day and it invariably is expected that the apocalypse will happen in the lifetime of the believers. Outside of the innumerable Christian sects that try to predict the exact date using dogma, there's also the infamous cases of Y2K and 2012. There are environmental apocalypticists, arguably I am one of them, though I doubt total extinction will happen in my lifetime. There are surviving verses in the new testament of Jesus claiming that the apocalypse would happen during the lifetime of his followers. 

Matthew 24:34-35: Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.

Matthew 16:28: Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.

Matthew 10:23: When you are persecuted in one place, flee to another. Truly I tell you, you will not finish going through the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes. 

Matthew 26:64: You have said so,” Jesus replied. “But I say to all of you: From now on you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.

Mark 9:1: And he said to them, “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”

Mark 13:30: Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. 

Mark 1:15: The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”

Thessalonians 4:16-17: For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.

Basically all of 1 Corinthians 15 corroborates this theme. It is telling that Paul, in his epistles to the Thessalonians and Corinthians speaks of "We who are alive." Implying that he expected the judgment day to come during his lifetime. This context makes the rest of Jesus' message much less surprising. Given that humanity was awaiting imminent judgment by God, it was in our best interest to act accordingly. Be forgiving. Abandon your possessions and worship God that he might see fit to give salvation. Walk the earth and spread the message. In fact, there isn't even time to say goodbye to your family or bury the dead (Luke 9:59-62.) Given that we're still alive today, it's safe to say Jesus was wrong. In fact, even later gospels writers would reinterpret his message in response to this observation. We see this in the last arrival, the gospel of John, written over 50 years after Jesus' death. The church reinterpreted the references to the kingdom of god and resurrection as metaphysical events and places. 

John 11:23-25 Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give You whatever You ask of Him.” "Your brother will rise again,” Jesus told her. Martha replied, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me will live, even though he dies. Here is an explicit contradiction from the belief in a physical resurrection that never came. The same sort of ad hoc rationalization is seen in every failed doomsday prediction. They have to recalculate the dates, or perhaps the change did happen in some sort of energetic/ spiritual shift. It's common for believers in these doomsday cults to double down on their beliefs when the predictions do not come to pass. Hence Christianity is still around today.

There is a common notion that without God there can be no absolute moral framework. My only ethical claim is that suffering is intolerable to consciousness and that we ought to reduce it, all else being equal. Call me close minded, but I have no interest in skepticism regarding this simple fact. All the same, theists don't enjoy a privileged place in moral philosophy even if we did accept the existence of a benevolent God. As far back as at least Plato, there is the well known dilemma of Euthyphro. As Plato writes it, Socrates was discoursing with the Athenian theologian Euthyphro. Socrates asked him, essentially, is this or that good because God declares it is good, or does God declare something to be good because it is? They lived in a polytheistic society but the essence of the problem remains regardless of how many gods one believes in.

If a thing is good because God declares it so, then prior to his command there was no reason for him to say this or that was good or evil. Everything was morally neutral, since it didn't have the property of goodness or wickedness, God's choice was necessarily arbitrary and random. On the other hand, if a thing was already good or evil and God simply conveyed that information to us, then God is not the reason why things are good or evil, he would be basically irrelevant. Apologists try to claim that goodness flows from God's nature and thus he doesn't choose what is or isn't good, but goodness wouldn't exist without him. Honestly, it isn't completely clear what this means but it sounds like they're claiming God is automatically good no matter what. Which means that saying God only does good and never evil is saying God only does what God does and doesn't do what he doesn't do. Further, if God orders genocide against the Canaanites, or decides to flood the world, or doesn't think the holocaust is worth interfering in, or designs a cosmic justice system whereby most human beings will spend eternity in perpetual torment, while the rest suffering and die on earth for no reason except for the few which are enslaved by mankind, these things are automatically good. I consider all of this to render the word itself meaningless, but at any rate nowhere is this issue even remotely addressed in any major holy book. It is completely a response by later theologians to a problem first thought of by the ancient Greeks. The ancient Hebrews never considered it and if they are to be believed, neither did God.