What Colour Is It Outside the Universe?

Sorry for the delay posting, but I was on my way back from Kabul, Afghanistan to North Vancouver, Canada.  I had lots of time to think about my post on long flights and layovers, but posting wasn't possible.  It turns out free airport Wi-Fi is one of the big lies of all airports.  Also, I was a little disappointed; I didn't really plan this thing out, but I expected that things would come together in this final entry.  But they didn't; my grand finale just kind of fizzles out like a damp squib.

The last few posts have demonstrated that science is not the engine of perfect rationality it is often perceived to be.  Logical induction and deduction are not, in the purest rational sense, justified.  Induction requires a faith in a rational, consistent universe where there is cause and effect.  Deduction relies ultimately on unproved, possibly unprovable, axioms.

But faith in religion (at least the Judeo-Christian ones) is not like faith in science, is it?  So how to the qualities of these faith differ.  To start off with I'll sum the entire breadth of human knowledge and faith in the next three bullets. 

Spiritualism: Spiritualism is faith in the supernatural.  In the case of monotheism (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) it is faith in an intelligent, purposeful, present, personal and omniscient God that exists independently of humankind and who is active and interested in the affairs of humans.   Polytheists belief in a pantheon of separate gods (such as the Norse or Egyptian mythologies, and some Hindu belief).  Pantheists believe that God and the universe are the same.  This entity is normally not imbued with traits like personality. They believe that “the eye by which I see God is the eye by which God sees me.” This includes some Hindu beliefs, Taoism and Zen Buddhists.

Idealism: This is the belief that the universe is essentially a mental construct. A solipsist is an idealist who believes that he is the only real thing in the universe and the rest is just a mental construct. A Buddhist who believes that reality is an illusion might be an Idealist.

Materialism: Nothing exists but matter, and all things are composed off matter. There is no immaterial thing, and there is no requirement to invoke a First Cause, or spirituality. Anything non-empirical leads to sophistry and illusion.  Scientific empiricism falls under materialism.

Religions are primary spiritual, with some, such as forms of Hinduism and Buddhism, perhaps veering towards idealism.  Science, being based up on empirical observation, is materialistic.  Science doesn't say that the supernatural does not exist, just that the supernatural lies beyond the ambit of science.

Here's another significant difference: Religious truth is revealed and eternal, whereas the truths of science are discovered and provisional. The scientist is taught from early on that she must be prepared to jettison her most cherished scientific beliefs in the face of significant empirical evidence to the contrary.  (Of course, this doesn’t happen in practice--for instance in the case of Albert Einstein's rejection of quantum physics).  In most monotheistic religions(systems with one God such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam), acolytes are taught to hold on to their faith despite evidence to the contrary.

Another big difference.  Monotheistic religious faiths are normative; they are concerned with the way people ought to be. They're moral (at least the ones I'm familiar with).  Science is positive; it is concerned only with the way things are.  

If we assume, for the sake of argument, that an objective universe exists and that you are not all just figments of my imagination dreamt up to keep my mind occupied, then we admit to a common reality shared by other minds.

Language--from Swahili to body language to mathematics--is the means by which we communicate between minds about the common reality we share.  So Ug the caveman, at some point, developed a word for "water," to express the common experience of that wet stuff that we like so much.  Even in other languages, where there is no communication between the cultures, we find that, in each, a word for water has developed.

We are sufficiently rooted in this common reality, it seems, that we can progress to abstractions.  So, for instance, abstractions such as astronomy and mathematics have developed independently in different cultures and, when compared, these abstractions have been compatible with each other, suggesting this common reality.

However, with creation myths, the common reality model fails.  Cultures have remarkably different creation myths, that do not correlate. This doesn’t of course, disprove God, but suggests that religious creation myths do not address a common reality.

Although supernatural creation myths do not generally correlate, they do exist in every culture I can think of. The universe, it seems, is unknowable through mere empiricism and logic.  It doesn’t stretch the bounds of imagination to suppose that humans of all ages have had an inkling that, in the vastness of the universe, they don't have an inkling.  So perhaps it's human nature to construct or (more usually) adopt a cohesive model of the universe to make sense of that which we don't understand.  It's a necessary anchor.

It said that "nature abhors a vacuum."  Perhaps the same is true of our minds.  Where a vacuum exists, we will create connections, extrapolate intuitive patterns we already know.  We see our Father who art in Heaven as a big beard in the sky, because our father--a figure of compassion and power from our pre-memories--was a big beard in the sky.  Or maybe we are actually interpolating patterns which are really out there, but not within our rational minds to grasp--that is to say maybe there is there is a God Supreme Being or gods, which are simply beyond our rational sense, but within the bounds of intuitive reckoning.

We can look backward and see that we (probably) came from apes.  But where are we going?  Because we can imagine Perfection, perhaps religious faith embodies a perfection for which we strive.  Where, as Terry Pratchett puts it, "the falling angel meets the rising ape."

Or perhaps it is a sheer act of will to accept something as an certainty--Jesus, Buddha-nature, miracles, Zeus--despite the mutterings of our rational minds.  To collectively impose order on the universe.

Anyways, a rather lame end to my series on Faith in Science and Religion.  Kind of got all vague and blathery in the end, but on the other hand I'm not the first to delve into the deep sea of basic principles and come up with a handful of mush.

What do I believe?  Well, for what it matters, I suppose it's kind of  Zen like thing--the ego is an illusion, the universe is an undifferentiated whole, etc. When I help someone else, I help myself.  When I die, I'm done, but it's like a cell dying in a body.  The universe carries on, energy, like the energy I am made of, is indestructible. I also believe in the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum physics; that is to say an alternate universe is created for every quantum possibility.  So there are an inconceivable number of universes, and a universe somewhere that is exactly like any universe you can imagine.  And the whole thing got started by some impossible, absurd bootstrap; it invented itself.

But it does bother me that I don't know and (if I am practically certain of anything, I'm certain of this) never will know what colour it is outside the universe.  I'm hoping it's orange. I like orange.