Category: Religion

Confessions of Faith

The biggest lesson my parents taught me was the love of truth. They were Christian missionaries, in the business of convincing other people to change their most fundamental beliefs about the world. They offered the one true Truth that stood above all others. There is such a thing as absolute reality. It’s worth knowing, even worth dying for. It’s also possible to be wrong about the universe. That’s why people have to change their beliefs when they learn something better. All this left a deep impression on me. I want to know things as they actually are, no matter how inconvenient the truth may be.

We had the World Book Encyclopedia on our shelf, and I spent many long afternoons browsing it. (The Internet hadn’t been invented yet.) One thing that frustrated me was how uncertain scientists were about their conclusions. Everything was just a theory. I dreamed of an encyclopedia that contained only things we were 100% sure about. I expected it would be a lot thinner than the World Book.

My sense of uncertainty grew as a teenager. The seeds of all that scientific thought started to take root. What if the universe were older than 6,000 years? What if life actually did evolve? It would be a disaster, of course, for my fragile evangelical beliefs.

I tried reading apologetics books by the greats, like Josh McDowell. Nothing did more to destroy my faith than “Evidence That Demands a Verdict”. It was all just a bunch of opinions by big shots. I couldn’t help but think, if that’s the best we got, then there’s no substance to this faith.

At the same time I wanted a relationship with God. A real relationship, where God talked with me and I could feel his love. Love-hunger gnawed at me, thanks to awakening hormones. Not that I confused God with a girl, just that all those powerful feelings are connected inside. But God didn’t talk to me. I felt absolutely nothing, ever, not matter how much I prayed or tried to get his attention. I could imagine what God might think about or say to me, but I could never fully convert those into a separate being inside my head.

For a while I thought God was telling me to fast. I dreaded that “voice”, but I wanted to be obedient. I skipped meals, sometimes entire days. All it did was make me hungry (and the skinniest I’ve ever been, before or since). I never felt any love from God.

Have you ever heard that miracles happen on the mission field? (They don’t happen at home, of course, because Western church-goers are spiritually deficient somehow: not enough faith, too rich, whatever.) One time a baby was born with severe encephalitis. Our church went all-out praying for that child. My dad put everything on the line, really taking a public risk.

And the baby died. If there ever were a time for God to show his reality, that was it, but he declined to do so. In my life, God has declined all such opportunities. I don’t accept the notion that miracles happen somewhere else, because I lived in that magical other place. It’s no different than right here.

I learned at an early age my own capacity for unreality. When I was about 6, we spent a year back in “the States”. We had a cabin in the Ozarks. I played with my cousin on a sawn-off-truck-bed trailer, imagining it was a rocket that would fly to the other side of the lake. We had to put rocks in it for fuel. But no matter how many rocks we put in, no matter how hard I believed, it never flew.

I also had an imaginary friend named “Wendy”. I told my cousin that she could see Wendy by looking though this kaleidoscope. She couldn’t understand why it didn’t work for her. Part of me knew this was all just a game, but I was so intense at pretending that it seemed perfectly real to her.

Many years later I told a fireside story during a camp out (Mirror of the Soul). Some of the young people came afterward and asked me if it actually happened. That surprised me, as the content was clearly impossible in the real world. Maybe I have the gift of Storyteller, like my father.

Thanks to my parents’ influence, I thought I wanted to go into the ministry. I earned a bachelor’s degree in pastoral ministries, finishing in a record 3 years. When I did the final internship, the supervising pastor had enough sense to give me permission not to continue on that path. I rebooted my life and started studying for a computer science degree at a 100% genuine secular university. It took over a decade and several more universities for me to complete a PhD in AI.

I spent years “struggling with faith”, pouring enormous amounts of emotional energy into convincing myself to believe. The process of publishing peer-reviewed journal articles gradually infected me with some expectations of any idea worthy of belief. If Christianity is the ultimate Truth, it should stand up to the most rigorous possible examination.

The study of AI gave me new ways of understanding the nature of belief itself. It’s not black-or-white, all-or-nothing. Belief is better expressed as a probability, and it can be distributed over multiple different options. This framework allowed me to embrace uncertainty as an expression of my actual state of knowledge.

I can assign belief to propositions based on the amount evidence available for them. I am no longer in the business of propping up ideas. They must stand or fall on their own merits. This has brought me incredible peace. Not that everything is great. I’m still just a tiny bit afraid of being tortured for all eternity for having the wrong set of ideas at my moment of death. On the other hand, I have no hope of anything beyond this life. Compared to the agony I was in before, trying to make myself believe things without justification, this is bliss.

I’ve never really stopped believing in God. Rather, my probability weights have shifted over time. It used to be that I believed 99% in God and 1% in materialism. As the years went by, filled with zero evidence for God but a relentless stream of evidence for materialism, the weights shifted so now it is about 1% God and 99% materialism. They could shift the other way with some solid evidence.

AI shows how limited we are. We can observe only a tiny fraction of the universe (POMDP, HMM, Kalman Filters, etc.). It also explains how different people come to different beliefs. Your input stream is necessarily different from mine, because you are physically separate from me. I’m willing to accept that some people have experiences that convince them of the reality of God.

However, I suspect that more than 90% of people who call themselves believers are not really in that state. Perhaps I’m merely projecting my own experiences on others. I suspect that most people are just forcing themselves to believe, thanks to all those same horrible control mechanisms that kept me in bondage for so long.

Maybe that’s why the most vocal Christians I know are also the most hateful. At some point in your life, you either let go of uncertain beliefs or you fully embrace them. If part of you still doubts, then the effort to embrace those beliefs makes you a drowning person clinging to a millstone. You go down with it—and hate yourself for doing so. But since you can’t acknowledge that, you build all kinds of defense mechanisms. The pain and anger coming from that closed-off place in your soul turns into bitter attacks on anything or anyone who threatens the belief.

What kept me enslaved to belief for so long? Obviously, fear of Hell is a big one. It’s not something you can verify, but boy are you screwed if you end up there. Don’t take any chances. Another chain was the fear of what my parents or close friends would think of me. If you reject the Truth, it’s because you’re a bad person. You never were one of us to begin with.

Christians may use reason to move you away from another belief, but once you’re in, you are taught to distrust your own mind. Reason is broken, a part of this evil world. Instead, the Christian method of belief is authority. Anyone who dares elevate their own reason above authority is arrogant and sinful. And of course, no one wants to be rejected for such antisocial attitudes.

Information Death

My mother died this morning. She was on life-support for hours as we agonized about when to let her go. Was her brain already dead, or was there a chance she could wake? We decided that if her heart stopped again, they should not do another CPR. Then her EKG line gradually faded away. Did she die at that moment?

I realized only recently that when I talk about death with others, there is some missing common ground between their views and mine. It’s easy to get caught up in arguing ethical choices and not realize that we don’t even share the same definitions. Many people work with traditional notions: death is when your heart stops beating or you stop breathing. Something similar can be said about the start of life.

This is my attempt to write down a careful account of my definitions and assumptions, to help with discussion. Thanks for taking the time to understand.

I do research in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly brain-inspired (neuromorphic) computing. There are only a few hundred people in the world who share this discipline. We design chips and software that process information using a simplified version of nerve impulses. I am deeply biased to think of the brain as a machine and the mind as information inside that machine.

In what sense is the brain a machine? It is a collection of atoms organized in a very particular way. When something happens in one part, it cause stuff to happen in other parts. All those interactions work together to control your body and process what you see and hear.

Your mind is the “state” of your brain. In a regular computer, “state” would be all the ones and zeros in memory. In the brain, state would include a lot of things, such as which neuron connects to which, how much voltage is on cell membranes, and the concentration of chemicals at certain places. Just like a computer, these are constantly changing according to rules built into the structure. The actual picture is more complicated and subtle, but this is sufficient for the sake of discussion.

Imagine that the human mind could be put into a regular computer. This is a rather controversial idea, even among AI researchers. However, it lets us make some useful analogies.

My definition of death is the permanent loss of information. If a neurosurgeon goes in and cuts out a part of my brain, the information contained in that piece dies. Maybe it is only 1% of my brain. Afterward, I am 99% of what I used to be. That is a partial death.

When part of the brain is damaged, there is a corresponding and predictable damage to the mind. IE: damage to Broca’s area impairs speech. A blow to the back of the head affects vision. Messing with serotonin re-uptake changes rational behavior. The deterioration of Alzheimer’s produces genuine changes of personality.

In computers there is a neat separation between machine structure and the information in it. Not so with brains. That’s why you can undergo anesthesia and come back to yourself again. Brain activity gets disrupted for a while, but nearly all of you is in the structure.

Some people point out that your mind resides in your body as well as your brain. This is because the structure of your body shapes how your brain processes. A similar argument could be made that your mind extends beyond your body into the surrounding environment, particularly the social structures you are part of.

While I agree with all this, it is a matter of degrees. I would guess that at least 99% of your mind is in your brain. That’s why people can get a spinal injury and still be themselves.

Suppose that some amazing new technology lets me make a backup of my brain, and from that backup we grow a replacement for the part that the neurosurgeon cut out a few paragraphs ago. I would be back to 100%. The loss is not permanent, so that part of me did not die.

As long as the information exists somewhere and can be restored, I’m in a kind of suspended animation. I only live if my mind actively runs on a computer or in a body. Being in storage creates the potential of future life. This potential is realized when the backup is either erased or restored.

(For computer experts only: This notion of mind-as-information creates some interesting scenarios. If mind can be captured in a backup, then it can be put under version control. It would be possible to have multiple branches and even merges. Then the question arises, what rights do each version of me have? The novel SuSAn explores this concept, particularly the chapters Susan Too and Custody.)

When my mother “died”, the material structure of her brain started to break down. This takes a while. Even though her brain could no longer function as a living organ, 99.99% of the structure was still there. After several hours there was still enough structure that my mother’s mind could be retrieved, if only we had the technology.

True death does not take place when the heart stops. It happens gradually over the next few hours. It makes me want to scream, the thought that my mom could still be saved, if only we had better brain-scanning technology. The fact is that we are letting her wither into oblivion right now because we’ve given up. We passively let souls be destroyed because we’ve never conceived of another possibility. Some day our descendants will look back on this era in horror.

Theology of the Quran

I recently read a translation of the Quran (reviewed on Amazon). The main motivation was to better understand how Muslims think. Partly this is background for a character I’m writing. Partly I just want to know whether Islam really teaches the kind of violence we westerners have come to associate with it.

Based only on their scriptures, it seems to me that Judaism is the most violent, Christianity is the most peaceful, and Islam is somewhere in the middle. Historically, equally atrocious deeds have been perpetrated in the name of each of these religions.

Sometimes I’ve heard Christians claim that Muslims worship a different God. Given Islam’s claim to worship exactly the same God, this is an incredibly insulting statement. From what I saw in the Quran, they do worship the same God. The Quran affirms both the Jewish and Christian scriptures, and simply asserts that it is a clear revelation for Arabs.

The few specifics that the Quran addresses are well within the variance of Christian doctrine, with one significant exception: Islam is rigorously monotheistic, and thus finds the notion of the Trinity to be heretical. As a consequence it rejects the divinity of Jesus. Islam accepts with virgin birth without question, but denies that God has any children.

Setting aside that one small point, Islam could pass as any number of Christian movements, past or present. There’s a heavy emphasis on eternal reward/punishment, faith in God’s word, and holy living.

Islam describes God as “merciful” in the sense that he forgives any sin, provided that you believe the message he sends. This is very much like salvation by faith in Christianity. The main difference is that there is no atoning sacrifice of Jesus. It is simply God’s mercy.

There is a notion of grace for future sins as well. You can screw up and still be saved, as long as your heart is in the right place. Basically, everyone is a sinner, no one achieves perfection, and salvation is only by grace.

OTOH, I find the notion of God’s mercy to be a bit broken. God has no mercy on those who reject his message. They get tortured for all eternity without reprieve. This is of course a Christian doctrine as well. God is portrayed as feeling no sorrow for those he sends to hell. Just like with Christianity, my objection to this view is that annihilation would be infinitely more merciful. (The theology of Hell requires a whole post by itself.)

It seems God is much more offended by disbelief than by any particular sin. This of course reflects Mohammad’s own feelings about the matter. He dealt with mockery and outright persecution. In a position of powerlessness, it made sense to rely on poetic justice.

Regarding prophet-hood, the Quran asserts that God sends every community a messenger who communicates with them in a culturally-appropriate manner. I could accept that Mohammad was that messenger for 7th century Arabs. I really want to think well of him. Mohammad was a reformer and holiness preacher. He never set out to create a movement, it simply grew around him.

OTOH, he wasn’t perfect. The most disturbing thing was Surah 33, which justifies his marriage to his adopted son’s ex wife, and particularly ayat 50, where he gets an exception that doesn’t apply to other Muslims. Of course, the list of famous Christians and Jews who weren’t perfect is very long indeed.

Good Death

Without being specific, there have been occasions when someone died and I felt like things were better because of their passing. For a few, I’d like to dance on their grave like that scene in the Scrouge musical (“Thank you very much, that’s the nicest thing that anyone’s ever done for me.”) For others, it’s simply relief that I don’t have to deal with their problems any more. This would include friends and relatives with mental illness or a wasting disease.

But I feel ashamed of this attitude. Certainly, part of “love your enemies” is to cherish their life. “Love does not rejoice in evil.” And as a humanist, I place a high value on sentient life.

Belief in Democracy

A few months ago I considered making a post that asked the following question: “If Trump announced that he is suspending the constitution, dissolving congress, and that he is the only authority, would you still follow him?”

My guess was that about 5-10 of my more extreme social-media friends would have actually said yes. Then I would have pointed out how ironic that is.

I almost wish I had made that post, because since then we had the riot on January 6, and today one of my friends posted that they want Trump to become a dictator. Two months ago, it would have been an exercise in warning about the slippery slope. Now, clearly, many have already slid to the bottom of that slope. What this tells me is that there is a disturbingly large number of US citizens who have never truly embraced the principles of a democratic republic.

This reminds me of another question I wanted to ask my mother back in the 90s. If Evangelicals could gain complete power in this country, would they respect principles like freedom of speech and religion, or would they oppress non-evangelical ideas and lifestyles? What I would hope is that simple Christ-likeness would be enough to create a merciful and good government. Apparently not. IMHO, the modern Evangelical movement in America is every bit as vicious as the Inquisition. They can’t see that evil inside themselves, nor have they had the power to exercise it. I’m pretty sure if they got the chance, Handmaid’s Tale would seem like only a mild exaggeration.

I’m going to be blunt here with one more confession. I would consider it compelling evidence for the existence of God if Christianity made a supernatural change in human nature in a large-scale and repeatable way. What I see in practice is that Christians are every bit as evil as everyone else, but they are more in denial about it.

The relationship between Humans and Nature

Some of my favorite quotes regarding natural consequences:

“In the law of God, there is no statute of limitations.” — Robert Lewis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.” — Wendell Berry

On the relationship between religion and environmentalism:

“We should not destroy what we can’t create. The time and energy and physical computation it took to evolve each species is unfathomable. If there is a God in any sense of the word, then He speaks through those things–and I want to listen.” — Ryan Dellana

You are precious

I believe that individual human beings are the most valuable thing in the universe. Your mind, with the unique experiences that have formed your view of the world, and the well-being of the body that carries that mind, are very important to me.

I won’t pretend to always live up to this principle. I’m a selfish and reclusive person, but I aspire to treat everyone well, even those I might hate.

Torture

One meaning of “litmus test” is a single issue on which you judge a candidate. Someone who says the right thing on, for example abortion, gets your vote regardless of any other moral failings they have.

A candidate’s position on torture should be a litmus test. Of course, this would never be adopted by the Evangelical community because it teaches that God tortures people for all eternity after they die.

Science Fiction and Fantasy

The literary world wants to combine the genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy under a larger umbrella called Speculative Fiction. Seems reasonable, but there is a real difference between the two. One way to explain this is to show you the Scale of Science Fiction Hardness on TV Tropes. You could view this as a continuum between scifi and fantasy. Simply replace techno stuff at the low end with medieval stuff.

Science is about describing reality as accurately as possible (and of course it is never perfect). Fantasy is about escaping reality, and imagining the world the way we wish—or fear—it is.

Scientists must constantly exercise discipline to keep themselves grounded in reality, but they can’t do very good science without a bit of imagination as well. The strongest forms of scifi involve taking a small step back from reality and wondering where things could go.

A growing concern I have is with repackaging religion as science. This is the real-world analog of lumping fantasy with scifi. For example, the oriental notion of chi gets renamed to “energy”. Energy is a concept from physics, perhaps a bit hard to define, but we can do calculations about it and predict how real objects behave. Chi is more like the western concept of vitalism. Calling chi “energy” pulls a cloak of scientific legitimacy over it that it has not earned. Likewise, blending our fiction genres could cost us the ability to make those distinctions in daily life.

Is the Universe personal?

This summer I battled the elements to finish the exterior of my “doomstead”, an underground house that Crystal and I are building. We needed to wrap the thing in several layers of plastic and Styrofoam. Unfortunately, both of those can blow away in the wind rather easily, and you can’t tape them together when they are wet.

After a month of constant setbacks, storms and destruction, on the very last day my sister and brother-in-law came (yet again) to help us. The plan was to bury the “roof” under dirt the next morning. We worked 10 hours straight, and got it mostly done. Then the rain came.

My sister said, “God, please don’t let wind blow away all our work.” The very instant she finished her prayer, the wind started blowing.

I turned to her and said, “Looks like He didn’t listen to you.”

“It’s still working its way down through the bureaucracy.”

They drove away. Then a big storm came up, the kind that can spawn toradoes. The loose ends of our work started peeling off the roof. Crystal screamed “No!!” and threw herself onto the plastic to hold it down. Justin and I did the same. Whenever there was a break in the wind, I ran and got heavy things to put on the roof. For almost an hour we battled to save the work.

Later that evening, after things were somewhat secure, we went to my parents’ house. My dad asked, “Why don’t you pray?”

There is an interesting thing about how the human mind works. We are built to predict the world immediately around us, and we are built to understand and interact with fellow humans. Our success as a species is due to both skills. The world is unfathomably complex, and we can only sense a tiny fraction of it at any time. It seems mysterious. We become tempted to fall back on our powerful social faculty to help interpret the world.

Is the Universe a person? Does it care about me? Does my attitude toward it make any difference in what it does?

I suspect most people of the “personal” persuasion would accept that at least some of the operation of Nature is purely mechanistic, that its dynamics can be described by highly simplified rules we call “natural laws”. This is due to the success of science and technology. On a very fine scale we apply natural laws to do amazing things, like make a tiny tablet that can communicate with someone on the other side of the planet.

The more we apply ourselves to understand the world in a mechanistic way, the more it yields. One example is weather prediction. When I was a child, they could barely predict today’s weather. Now we can predict almost a week out with fairly good accuracy. Why? Because we started using computers to simulate, in ever increasing detail, all those mechanistic processes. Along the way we refined our models, adding details as we discovered them.

God causes it to “rain on the just and unjust,” but the size of the levers God is willing to pull on our behalf are growing either very tiny or very large. Either God adjusts things at the quantum level, or the answers to our prayers were baked into the Universe at the dawn of time.

The further God is from the details of our daily life, the more impersonal the Universe seems. At some point the distinction no longer matters. Trying to interpret the Universe as a personal being leads to some rather absurd conclusions. Why do bad things happen to good people or vice versa (the “problem of evil”)? Why doesn’t God answer prayers? Why don’t miracles happen? Maybe all those heart-wrenching issues arise from thinking about the world the wrong way.

My dad’s question made me angry. He was hoping that in a moment of emotional weakness I would cave back in to superstition. Then hopefully the complex of ideas he gave me as a child would retake my mind.

My parents have dedicated their whole lives to convincing others to change their religion. As an impressionable child, I learned from them that the highest goal was to find truth, to understand the world correctly. For of course that is the reason why someone would change their religion. So I dedicated my life to finding the truth, based on reason and facts. It led me down a long painful road, in which I learned that the Universe is not personal. I do not want to travel that road again.