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December 2013 "Des Fois"By chance and necessity, we are often faced with the urgent issue of faith . This issue of faith has invaded this infinitesimal part we occupy in the Universe. In our environment, and particularly among those that we love, everyone has a personal way of treating it. Some are "practicing" of religions, or even part of their clergy. They are diverse. I have agnostics, others atheists, Christians, Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants, Jews and Muslims. I also have Buddhists. Everyone here coexist with beliefs whose incompatibility has yet created many deadly conflicts. When asked everyone finds his answer and takes the side or not risking display its "spirituality". Even wanting to impose his "truth" to others. Because humans feel a pervasive need to share their beliefs, it is essential to get oneself in this practice to protect oneself against it, not to convince, but to deny any implicit agreement that the followers of all kinds of religions are trying to assume as the only conceivable. Why is this so? It seems that it comes from a Darwinian process: the part of humanity that survived has had a better ability to make decisions, seemingly increasingly rational with the increasing development of human cortex . When all the elements to decide are not met, it is enough to invent them, and share as a truth those who seem plausible.
For a decision to be accepted, it takes a community to share these arguments, including those introduced to complete his reasoning model.
For that he must constitute corpus of beliefs, explanations coming saturate its decision-making environment.
These corpus of beliefs are as diverse and mutually incompatible as are human communities. So most of humanity has built beliefs in gods, multiple or single, and ulterior worlds where they rule, from which they interfere with our lives. They are feared as much they give confidence. That these beliefs are true or not, this remains inextricably a matter of faith . Some of these, however, hardly survived the knowledges that humanity accumulates knowledge from century to century. These calling into question always happen in pain when it's not in bloodshed. These new facts take time to turn into knowledge. That does not change the issue of the aporia of things that remain unknown, things of which other things would be the consequences ... Consequences ? If it is necessary for its own survival, to admit the right of everyone to his beliefs it is too often happened that whole swathes of dogmas are proven to be unfounded. No one can claim the truth of his beliefs even if most of people do so. Whether one assumes me to share any belief became unbearable. I must therefore explain a few things, and for that to start with a story; that of my own thinking, after those of few brave predecessors It took me a long time to understand this, which is nevertheless obvious: the necessities of our existence have confined it in an almost flat Universe. A flat space, a portion of the surface of something on the contrary twisted, kinked, curved, hollowed or holed, but local part of it is substantially flat. That this part of the universe is large or small makes sense only for our illusions. These latter, in our experience give this flat space immeasurable dimensions, in terms of humans. Thus our distant ancestors believed as the earth was flat. With some indirect ways of reasoning about some observations incompatible with orthodoxy of the previous thinking, some realized that the earth was round. Their history has been lost. Their fate were probably tragic. We know the experience of history constantly renewed from those who ventured to reveal how the world actually is to their counterparts in the Platon's cave. But as the earth was finally admitted to be round, the avatar of our flat space had the advantage of being closed, with the illusion of a finite universe, centered on earth, around which turn the sky the stars. At each image that they have build of the universe, men have sought to define a consistency. They invented what was lacking in their understanding. Why is it so dangerous, as strong are new arguments to challenge consensual representations ? I understood recently its physiological reasons, reading a book about neuroscience research: to survive every human feels a compelling need of consistency of the autobiographical show of its senses, facing his own memory. Without such a consistancy, in a world of infinite possibilities, no decision is possible for him.
what these experiences show about ourself, ordinary humans that we are, of which the parts of the brain are naturally connected, is a systematic phenomenon of building a consistency of our autobiographical discourse. Other discoveries in the same domain showed that how we decide in all things comes from our emotions, a part of the brain performs this function to resolve conflicts between myriads of arguments of which it maintains the relative weights in memory. At every moment the game is open. Only what is on the mat has value. "No more bets. Whatever happens, we must bet, otherwise nothing can be decided. And to survive, we must decide at every moment. So fortunately for most, the weights of the arguments are based, but some cannot not be weighed, for lack of a way to measure them. So, since we must decide at every moment, it took us a while to take the time to evaluate, consciously or not, arbitrary weights to all the arguments of which we are not able to weigh the value . The lack of evaluation of argument weights of which no one can decide is not sufficient to stop our brain. clinical observation shows that failing to find the values, the brain creates them from scratch, according iterative process of recursive construction of a "probable" that founds what we think to be our rationalities. According to a Darwinian process, only have survived the humans who, filling with their beliefs unfounded their uncertainties have closed the domain of possible decisions. So what is lacking in its coherence, the human built it from scratch, consistent with its own theories, comparing them, and sharing them. The most shared theories are elevated to level of religious beliefs and dogmas, because to be serene, the community life requires compatible ways in order to share how everyone closes its decision domain. Thus faith has saved mankind ... As extensions of humans, societies need joint decisions, who inherit from humans the need to close the decision domains which rely on unfounded beliefs. Through a process this time neo-Darwinian, they ostracize and sometime eliminate those trying to refute their irrefutable model that they built of the Universe. In order to be socially transmitted and shared, each faith is built on a narrative, which is an oral or written tradition,that founded, for a community, the fundamental sense that it lends to things. On these founding narratives of their irrefutable beliefs, humans built the diversity of human societies. They have bound to these narratives all their good and bad experiences; they built their culture on these texts, and in these texts they put the sets of rules of survival which they made taboo. For what they think to be the common good, the most cultivated part in every human society has built sets of taboos with these dogmas in order to avoid to explain it to the less cultivated part. And in order to dominate, they reserved the meanings to the cultivated part. Thus appeared the first political gestures ... They assured, with the etymological sense of economy the existence of societies with well organized inequities that could be accepted by people. The Faith and the politics were born intertwined. The human contingencies of the second have always prevailed over the first, even it was divine. Thus Religions were built, on which societies made their first Constitutions. Religions live very well, as far as the irrefutable beliefs does not mutate, something that may happen by any means of observation, reflection and some refutable opinions. When new experiences happen that undermine these fragile constructions of coherences , political equilibrium of human societies may break. A long time ago humanity thought the earth was flat. Thus Jerome Bosh did represent it in the Middle Ages. It was soon admitted she was round. This was acceptable to many religions in the divine condition that the earth remains in the center of the universe.
When came the Copernican reasoning, looking at planets, understanding that, as these planets, the earth turns around the sun. If the earth is as any other planet, and is no longer at the center of the universe, a lot of divine dogmas are losing their status of truth. The legitimacy of social orders that these representations had founded disappears, such as the legitimacy of those people that these beliefs have placed above all the other. If Copernicus has published late so that he could not be religiously killed, for some others less cautious it costed their lives, who died at the stake of heretics. Galileo accepted to deny what he observed, Were they not fought these heresies due to their unacceptable truth? Then, the facts are stubborn things as well as the need to comply with them, the Church had to recognize that the earth revolves around the sun. The event past, forgotten atrocities, structures of human societies were restored with some new discourse ; until the next time. But they became more cautious, ready to accept themselves without much difficulty that the sun is a star like any other, rather ordinary. Lost in one arms of the immeasurable spiral of a galaxy ... After multiple schisms, multiple revolutions, and multiple confrontations, religions have lost most of their secular powers. In the last century they had to endure other discoveries more destabilizing for them: abandon the Newtonian model of time and space, on which nevertheless they continue to rely, without being able to assimilate the restricted relativity model and general. On these subjects now they try to listen science . But without to hear it they can only be silent and sadly continue to rely on the misleading flat aspect of our little part in the universe. During the last century they also had to undergo the devastating experience of deadliest wars between proponents of same religions. Although they condemn murder in their commandments. The God they pray and from who they hope Justice did not came to the aid of victims of the genocide of the last century, any more than those of prior genocides. Is he just, the God who accepts that occur mass exterminations, whatever human origin or natural origin of these disasters? There are religions that resist more or less well to events that challenge the truth of their statements. According to the poetic ability of their founding narratives to be or not creative, they continue to incarnate themselves. Or not. Number of these disappeared that nobody plans to rehabilitate. Buddhism, regarded as a philosophy more than a religion proves more resilient to unveiling of the reality of things. Unlike all the others, it do not imposes nor erects any dogma . As they exercise the art of questioning of models of the universe, many physicists found the buddhism as better than most of religions. Without necessarily adopting its rites. With its convenient reinterpretation of the founding texts, Judaism offers to its followers some amazing linguistic means to resist to any new knowledge. And give to his ritual practices only a social unification role. Conversely, the Quran, which remained closed to any translation, is acclaimed for its undeniable constitutional capacities. History shows that Islam began its existence by mere political will of a man to be considered a prophet, who was obviously a great political genius. What about the polytheistic religions? With a potential god for every phenomenon, their poems exude strength in cleft societies mentally closed on themselves. The dualism of monotheistic religions implies another hypothetic world which constitutes an impregnable shelter. These other worlds they assume are of a different order than our "worldly". It shares some similar physical laws, although very strange way they seem to conform to almost Newtonian models. Based on the illusions of the apparently flat space in which they live, the construction that humanity imagines for its other worlds happily ignores the relativity of time, unaware that the very nature of time stems from the nature of gravity. If no physical model is a priori eligible to describe these other worlds, as no one is able to imagine anything else, most humans can not resist the temptation to keep their few appearances of our universe: at least three dimensions of space, a dimension of time, and these strange properties that are the translation and rotation, physical properties of which no one questions the ontology ... traditional religions lack ability to demonstrate their creative poetry.
From our little seemingly flat space in the universe, looking at the stars systems of which we are an infinitesimal part, we begin to understand the extreme violence of the phenomena that occur there. As we observe the sky, we must beware the undeniable calm beauty of what we see. All this happens so far away. Why are we protected? By chance or by necessity? If we are actively seeking traces of other lives, is this because we are gradually convinced that Giordano Bruno was right? Already, silently, religious institutions are preparing to adapt themselves. But since our almost flat space of the Universe, we also observe with trepidation the cataclysms that happen there. Very far from us, some galaxies collide with each other, giving beautiful arabesques deformation of galactic spirals. We know that the Milky Way galaxy that hosts us, will be hit ineluctably by the Andromeda galaxy. For gigantic it is, this cataclysm is infinitesimal compared to galaxy clusters, relatively themselves to tiny filaments that form, which are only some anecdotal meshes of a stringy universe... By chance and necessity, how many solar systems have actually collided during these slow collisions of galaxies ? Close to us, some bolides that circulate freely at fantastic speeds collide sometime a planet. Our moon has traces of many craters. If on our earth the tracks of collisions are less visible, we know from experience that these events exist, and that "we can against them nothing but to suffer them, and even to disappear like dinosaurs that preceded us. And within our earth itself, subjected to tides, there exist internal movements beyond our power that generate sets of "natural" disasters, that destroy and kill everything that has the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. By chance and necessity. And all this happens in the apparent indifference of any Divine Justice ... From all these I made my knowledge about existence issue of God, single or multiple, according to times and places of human communities. Does God plays or not play dice ? viewed as a unique concept, never I have met anybody who considered this as a local phenomenon. Yet everyone that I have met and that I have read does consider the God's influence only about the behavior of this sub-microscopic phenomenon that the Earth is, lost in a corner of a small star system, on that small planet where a species emerged allegedly with the uncanny ability to represent itself and to represent the whole Universe ... With a culture of Physicist, I follow its discoveries, I know the illusions that gives the almost flat aspect of the part of the universe we live, subjected to a low intensity of force fields that govern behaviors in nature, in which we are moving at relatively slow speeds.
I also know how many are against-intuitive the laws of quantum mechanics, whose interpretation is problematic as well. "Does God play dice or not ? "" Stop telling God what to do! "Said Niels Bohr to Albert Einstein ... Does God exist ? Obviously yes, if we consider that "it does exist" all that man has conceived, whether it is tangible or intangible. For me "to believe" or "not to believe" in the existence of God is not the issue, but that of the irreducible definition that here and there, on our tiny and greatly ignorant planet, people have given. I could have been born Shintoist, Buddhist, Jainist, Hinduist, Sunnit or Shiit Muslim, Animist, Taoist, Judaist, Mormon, Lutherian, Calvinist... By chance I was born Catholic. During my childhood I have fully adopted all the dogmas that gave me a representation of a comfortable coherence of the universe. I still remember my state of mind at the time. From what was inconceivable for me to be otherwise than what have been inculcated in my mind, which gave me a coherence to my meaning of life. And especially I was not able to imagine that there is not a life "after death" according to the model that priests invoked and continue to invoke every Sunday, and that so many artists have painted for centuries. I myself clung all the more fiercely to that belief as I was frighted by the unknown or the vacuum. But anyway I did felt the need to get out of it, ineluctably, progressively, until adolescence, when appeared clearly to me the history inconsistencies of the Catholic representations of the universe, and human intentions that had built them from scratch. As I Lean out of this world comforted in its dogmas, I have observed that the risk was not the emptiness, but the overflow, as there were so many other beliefs models. Slowly, gradually, my search for the reality of things led me to reject all of these models. And yet I have had a personal experience of some unexplained phenomena that connect the human community. These phenomena of remote consciousness, in space and in time, between humans, but not only. Lot of humans base their faith on these experiences, which are intrinsically linked in their minds to their memory, to their culture, that allow them to resolve their unquenchable need for consistency in their representation of reality.
At infinitesimal scales of quantum mechanics, "particles", "waves", "resonances" are perfectly synonymous, each term giving an aspect of things. Waves and resonances are not localized. The crucial experiment of Alain Aspect on Bell's inequalities has illustrated the non-intuitive nature of an experimental ubiquity. That has been a deterministically crucial experience of indeterminacy. it has demonstrated the entanglement of all that collides in the Universe. What in the Universe is not colliding ? With infinite scales of cosmology, is proven the relativity of the time, of the space and of material itself. It is wrong to consider the illusions that our senses give us. The Copenhagen physicists showed that the spatial concept of "emptiness" is a potential "material", and that "material" is a potential "emptiness"1. The philosophy has hardly yet accustomed to this knowledge, and nobody knows how religions may assimilate them. It remains unexplored fields of physics, in the immediate reach of our reflections, apparently too trivial for our questioning : what is, in the very nature of space and time this amazing phenomenon that is "rotation" ? In our days and in our incidental place in the Universe, we are not about to give its meaning. But apparently, even if everything "turns" in the universe, should we not avoid to base any other religious system on this mystery ? I parted with my Catholic origin, but I keep my respect to all others, without attempting to discuss the veracity of each of the beliefs that may be mere facets of the same reality, that very bad optical alterate with chromatic and geometric abberations. As a Researcher, I consider any research with respect and compassion, so much the appearances of the reality of things are deceptive. finding an error give more teaching than any experience that confirm a bias No one knows if among all living, animal or plant species, humanity is only to be concerned with these issues. Is it not one among others, with no other superiority than it has arrogated itself ? The development of his brain actually made it a vital subject. Why is there something rather than nothing ? As I need some element to respond to that question, As I need in some way to choose a belief, I do adopt the inclusive rhetoric of Spinoza, which cost him its banishment, as opposed to the dualism of Descartes and Plato before him. I am in a positive way an inclusive immanentist. On one immanentism , disjoint from all Theism . And I disapprove the contemptuous term Atheism that was built from theism. the most unpleasant I feel, is the negative character, the way the use of religious majorities to qualify those who are involved in no religion: the so-called "atheists" to who they say I belong . I am not an atheist, but can be an archaeologist. And yet this definition does not satisfy me, because of its negative character. I could be said to be profane, but that term is associated to supposed ignorance of those who are so qualified. While my immanentism is inclusive, it results of curiosity I feel for the diversity of human beliefs and behaviors they generate, for better or for worse. The magnificence of religious buildings in all latitudes and the worst horrors of religious genocides, pasts, presents and future. for the Better or worse, the beauty of songs and religious music, sometimes so beautiful it would take to how Odysseus be attached in order to not get caught in the game of these Sirens. until now I did not speak about my immanentism , but there are believers around me to reproach me that, at their difference I transmits nothing of my philosophical vision. This is the only reason for this text. I usually do not talk about it, because that is only a definition, to which is not attached any intention of separation of moral concepts of good and evil. I do not have any expectation nor judgement of that immanantism if not human. What do we know from all kinds of possible relationships between humans? There are so many strange phenomena of expected or unexpected, that timely observation comes to explain, unfold, and systematically contradict some previous beliefs. Theological debates of humanity are confined into humanity. They concern what Catholics call the "communion of saints". I stand aside, wish only to content myself, as regards of our earthly contingencies, of an actual generous humanism, trying to love my neighbor, as far as possible more than myself . I have experienced the entanglement of humans, and their normal and paranormal ability of mutual influence. I am not an adept of "scientism"; the science produces only models to understand the reality of things; these models are incomplete, approximate, and sometimes turn out to be false, as a result of crucial experiments. At any other irrefutable belief, I prefer the refutable opinions they advance. I fear all comfortable modeling of the unknown. I accept it for what it is. My spirituality is only based on humanity and more generally to take care of what is alive in a universe devoid of any intention, essentially indifferent to its fate. Does the universe be God? If this may be a human definition, then God is indifferent to the fate of what is living in the Universe. Like any human being, for my own survival I need to complete my mental model of the time, of space and things, and formalize my own ontology, full of compelling concepts. But because I knows this contingency, and the inability to get a representation of all the universe, inside of a few hundred grams of it, namely my brain, I know that have to question, as likely false, everything that is irrefutable in my own metaphysical ontology. I do not care about to share it, on the contrary I want to keep it mine. It is not a comfortable life. It is not intended in anyway to be unique, as there are quantities of other humans to be like me, with their own interpretations, always unique. Interpretation unique , as opposite of religious because it refuses any sharing that would result in freezing it. As well as I am ready to doubt and to correct my view in every moment, I suppose a priori false all beliefs religiously and secularly imposed , as far as experience does not rise these beliefs to the level of actual facts . I condemn any collective action that proceeds of any religious belief. I stay away from any possible manifestation of their powers, as history is filled with unforgivable atrocities in their name. I conduct the trial of the intentions of humans who have committed them in the name of their beliefs, for other ulterior reasons. But I stop before pronouncing the judgment, and give neither conviction nor acquittal. Understandable humans. I reject about them any Christian idea of "Redemption" , prefering the Buddhist notion of "Karma" that attaches indelibly to their memory. Unforgivable religions. For now, I say think of God as did Spinoza, giving my own definition. As did themselves the missing authors of the great founding texts of all religions, since the concept of divinity has always been a human creation. If I do not enter in any debate on the irrefutable issue of faith of anyone, I always look at it with the attention and the respect for the followers of religions, though I rejects all dogma, and any prescription power over any people. As in the fable of the wolf and of the dog, I prefer the singularity of the wolf and the discomfort of his life. I do not envy the comfort of religious beliefs. As a factual belief, I just considers the existence of the Universe, as the Goddess mother indifferent to the fate of humanity. Indispensable religions ? Indispensable they seem to be, as they have created the initial cohesions of human societies, and formed the foundations and of the constitutions of their states. The experience is that no state has ever survived the opposition of the religious beliefs of its people. At best they had to accommodate them, at worst they have chosen to adopt and integrate them into their law, in violation of inalienable human right to have any belief. The issue of faith still remains dangerous by its political consequences: the absence of religion is just seen as a form of anarchy in the etymological sense of the word, but with all the negative connotations associated with revolutionary movements that claim for anarchy. to be continued... 1 To understand this phenomenon, that the vacuum is a result from the phase opposition of all the involved resonances , everyone can do the experience the Young slits but also the musical experience of organ concerts, for instance at Notre Dame de Paris : the columns that form a network do cancel the sounds that interfere along to the collateral naves. |
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