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BergerWasTaken
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Name: Berger
Country: United Kingdom
Metro: London
Gender: Male
Interests: WHY, ethics, philosophy, politics, computers, technology and current events. I read, write and think. I enjoy sleeping.
Expertise: Thinking and brief moments of clarity. Finding problems in systems and poking them. Asking awkward questions. Fixing computers. I'll let my blog decide whether or not I'm good at writing.
Occupation: Being me.
Industry: Thinking
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
10/18/2004
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| A Note on My Writing |
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| Usually when I write on this blog I write it quickly and passionately. This means that my ideas flow out quickly and I will occasionally make mistakes. Please forgive me. Sometimes I may even omit the word 'not'. Scary stuff.
Thanks for stopping by, please subscribe. Oh and if you think I'm wrong, please let me know.
Berger |
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| This evening I watched Paranormal Activity and I am trying to decide whether I was genuinely entertained by it. For the sake of it, let's say I am. It was entertaining. But not in the way that others may have experienced it.
I am a sceptic. I doubt things. One of the big things that I doubt is paranormal activity: ghosts, ghouls, demons, parapsychology, alien 'visitors' etc. None of these things have ever been demonstrable rigorously nor does credible records or evidence exist that suggest that such phenomena are real.
There is a psychological term called the 'suspension of disbelief' also used in literature to describe the way that people interact with fictitious events. To take an example: cartoons. We know that cartoons cannot possibly be real: they are, after all, just drawings - a series of images with sound that we take (to some extent) to be 'real'. We do not believe that are truly 100% real (or else we might get really distressed when an anvil falls on a character's head etc) but that they are suitably real enough for us to laugh at them, imagine the dialogue between real people and follow the story. This happens everywhere and quite often not only with fictitious events.
However, I have limits.
When I was watching it I could not help find it funny. Even though it was a horror movie and with an excellent use of suspense and camera work I could not help but laugh when the 'demon' moved the door or dragged her off. I was genuinely impressed by their ability to do that on camera - seriously - I thought it was very well made but I simply could not suspend my disbelief to take it seriously.
There were a lot of scenes designed to make you jump or feel tense and I had reviews from people who had felt genuinely terrified. How could they? Don't they know it's not real?! (*sarcasm*)
So how far can I suspend my disbelief? The last time I remember feeling genuinely terrified by a movie was 'Signs', way back in 2002 when I was 15 or 16. Obviously back then I was not the sceptic that I am today. I was still relatively agnostic in my belief in God and I was far more willing to accept paranormal activity as being true. If I were to watch it again I doubt I would get the terror that I felt during and after the movie.
So let me ask anyone who reads this, how far can you suspend your disbelief? Can you jump in terror at a horror movie? Could you cry at a Disney movie? Could you genuinely will on the hero, even if you know he's gonna catch the bad guy and get the girl?
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| No matter how much I listen to Otis Redding it won't make me fall in love again. Don't got me wrong - I'm not saying I'm against it, just that there seems to be no one in my life who I meet who really seems to be that sort of person. I wrote a little while ago that I thought I had prospects on the horizon for a new girlfriend but I find myself no longer being attracted to them. One of them is cute and we flirt but I often end up being mean to her without meaning to. I haven't seen her in about three weeks, though that's my choice not hers. Then there is another girl who I am good friends with. Whilst I think she will be great 'girlfriend material' I can't seem to really find her attractive. There are some days when I look at her and she looks great but then some days I just don't. She's a lovely person and a great friend but I get the feeling that she doesn't find me attractive.
It's funny. When someone asks you what your ideal woman would be, it's easy to reel off properties like "funny, good looking, interesting, smart, witty" but what I really want in a woman is that they find me funny, good looking, interesting, smart and witty. I want a girl who's interesting but also interested in me. I want a girl who I think is good looking and thinks I'm good looking. Y'know? You can't put those things on a dating profile.
I don't 'date' FYI. I did go 'on a date' about a week before Christmas with a girl who I liked and got on with. She accepted, we went out for a drink, had a good time and we sent a few texts to each other over Christmas. Then after Christmas, when I asked her out again, she said that she didn't really want a relationship with me. She wanted to be friends. Like I said in a previous post, she didn't even have someone else that she wanted to see. She just knew that she didn't want to be with me.
No matter, right?
Well my self-esteem wanes and waxes more rapidly than the moons. As if I were some sort of psychiatric patient I feel like I have "good days" and "bad days". Some days I am happy with life and some days I'm not. I'm sure other people experience that too but often I just reflect on it and think "oh what's the point?" Then I fall into this depressive spiral where I think about things like relevance, mediocrity, love and meaning. It's usually the case that I feel like I have one of those things and the other three elude me. I'm sure you can guess which is which.
So I won't fall in love because there are no arms for me to fall into. And that makes me sad. But then I forget about it for a while. I put on a TV show, play a game or something and then these thoughts dissipate and I am allowed to forget about them. But for how long next time? I'm not happy but I know things could be worse. That seems to be the mantra that a lot of people live by. Even if they don't know it.
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| Music is nothing short of powerful. I defy anyone to reason otherwise.
It's not uncommon for people to list as one of their interests 'music'. I struggle to think of anyone who doesn't enjoy music. Music is amazing. Allow me to tell you two of my recent experiences.
Firstly, I saw one of my favourite musicians perform live. Ludovico Einaudi is a classical composer and pianist who defies genre-definition. I lumped him in with classical music but really I only say that because he composes music for the piano (often solely) and for the strings. However his music his nothing short of amazing. I had seen him live twice before this recent occasion and both times I have been deeply moved by the sheer energy that I feel when I listen to him perform. Check out his music, especially his power recent stuff which has attracted a wide audience, on Amazon or Spotify if they have it.
Each piece I feel like is inspired by an emotion or feeling. When I listen to him live and I'm sitting there, it's dark and all you can see and hear is his loud and beautiful music I am rocked by my own imagination. You get lost in your thoughts and feelings. It takes me back in time to memories and emotions that I have felt and it is a truly life-affirming experience. Each piece of music a different time and place. A different feeling. Listening to it from the CDs just seems sanitised and fake. Don't get me wrong, it's still beautiful music and often I can just find myself drifting away to it but it's nothing to hearing it live. Amazing.
The second is one I got just now. I put on Moby. Two tracks, the first Porcelain and the other In My Heart. Again these stirred up emotions inside of me. I felt it bubbling up, like the lyrics were talking to me. They were about me. I was the song. It took me back to care-free times in the Summer when I was younger, say 17 and 18 when I used to smoke weed in my down time. They really were care-free times. I don't talk much about drug taking here on this blog. Naturally there is stigma attached and people I know can read this. But it's the truth and people should know that some of the best times of my life were during my down time in Summer. I didn't necessarily had to be with other people. I didn't have to share the experience of getting stoned. Often I did it in my room. Music loud... spliff... window open with sunshine beaming in. Just... being.
It would be a lie if I said I didn't miss those times. I wasn't necessarily optimistic about the future nor was I particularly happy with the direction I was going in. I was doing very badly at college, I was dreadfully unfocused. I had a great girlfriend but she hated it and I had lied to her a few times about smoking. She couldn't understand why I did it. "Why alter your mind?" We were both studying psychology and philosophy and she saw drugs as a way of narrowing the mind, or dumbing it down, rather than expanding it.
Those two Moby tracks typify the feelings I had during those times. The two songs conjure up feelings of freedom but also fear. Like, I could be optimistic but also angsty. They are the feelings that adolescents feel. And I miss those days. Part of me wants to regress to it but I fear that if I do, especially this summer, then my future will suffer as it invariably did when I was that young. Drugs drove away my girlfriend, or at least it was one of the things that helped her lower me as a priority. If you don't do drugs or drink alcohol but your partner does then it's hard to understand why they do. It's hard to connect with them. I'm sure there are people who will read this who will find herself empathising with her and not me.
But I can't afford to it this summer. Not financially, of course, because I have the money for it (it's relatively cheap in bulk) but because I have to spend my summer working on my dissertation. I basically have the entire time from the start of April to the end of August to plan, research and write 12000 words and drugs would mess that up. Whilst it's true that when you're stoned you think your imagination is expanding, and it probably does if I'm honest, it also cripples your (or at least my) ability to think coherently. You lose analytical skills. You become trapped in circular arguments. You think you're profound and you're not.
I've been drug free for a while. To be honest I don't really remember how much I did of it over last summer. That's probably a side effect of it. But I've made the rule never to mix academia with drugs purely because of my terrible past with it messing it up for me. I messed up my A-Levels and because of that I didn't get to go the type of the university that I wanted to go to. I didn't get the type of experience or education that I wanted. Things could have gone very differently.
Or they might not of. Things could have turned out the same, for all I know.
But I can't know.
So there you have it. Music as a force. Music has dredged up all of these memories and experiences of mine. It's made me nostalgic. It's reminded me who I was, who I am, who I could have been.
I don't really understand music. It's a bit of a mystery. I mean, I get it. I listen to it. I know what I like about it. But I don't understand it. I'm not musical. I'm not very talented in that department and my experiences learning to play the piano and the guitar have been bad. I don't think I'll pursue those avenues again. It's mysterious and powerful and I respect it for that. I love it. It's one of the greatest things about human culture.
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| Regular readers will know that I am currently in postgraduate education and that I have mentioned my worry about my progress in it. To summarise: "am I good enough?" Well, I've got one of my results back and I scored 62. Now to put this in some context I've put together some 'facts' about this grade:
- 62 falls within the 60-69 category which is described as being of very good work. The 70-79 category mentions excellent understanding and 'original thinking'.
- It was the third highest mark in a class of nine people. The two people above me scored 70 and 72.
- My undergraduate average was approximately 68.8 without weighting, 70 with weighting.
- Anything within 50-69 is considered a 'pass' and anything above is considered a 'distinction'.
- The grade only counts (is weighted) for 12.5% of my final grade. I take four modules in total at 12.5% each and a dissertation which counts for the other 50%.
So I'm trying to work out whether or not I should disappointed with this grade. I'm yet to get the mark from my other piece of work but to be honest I had higher hopes for this piece of work than the other, which (in my head anyway) puts me at risk of getting a lower mark for that.
I had mentally set myself a target of scoring 65, though I really wanted at least a 70 (in philosophy it's very difficult to score more than 74 out of 100 without being particularly original or brilliant). I remind myself that marks at postgraduate mean very little or, at least, less than they do at undergraduate where each band of ten marks (e.g. 60-70 / 70-80) can change your award. I remind myself of the words that a postgraduate gave me last Summer when I visited the university - "don't expect to do as well as you did at undergraduate - it's a lot tougher here". Even so - I think of myself as being of researcher material, as being a good PhD candidate. What does a 62 say of my abilities?
I haven't got my feedback form yet, which lets me know what I did wrong. I can imagine that it's going to say that I was too adventurous and that I failed to offer a truly balanced representation of the arguments involved. Those were my worries, anyway, and there would be some solace in hearing them echoed by my lecturer.
So - should I feel disappointed? I guess I should. By personal standards I have fallen foul of expectations. I am no longer special, like I was at undergraduate, but mediocre. By objective standards I am 'very good': third in the class, better than the majority but not the best. Being the best is something that I have wanted to be since being young. It was something that I was told that I would be. My fatal flaw has always been, however, not trying hard enough. 'Coasting' is what just about every teacher I've ever had has said about me.
There are two Bergers: one, which is me, describable with adjectives synonymous with mediocrity (e.g. average, common, normal, under-achieving) and the other, the idyllic me, describable with adjectives synonymous with excellence (e.g. brilliant, quality, original). That latter Berger is what I thought I could be if I tried much harder.
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| RRRAAAAGGGEEE.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2010/feb/12/religion-atheism-science
Andrew Brown runs the 'Comment is Free: Belief' blog on the Guardian website. The blog primarily focuses on religious issues, almost all of which are theistic - he is, after all, a religious god-believing man. However when he writes about atheism he almost always gets it wrong. His writing shows a complete misunderstanding for what religion, science, theism and atheism are exactly. Quite clearly, he is no philosopher.
Read the article.
If you're scientifically minded, atheistic, philosophical or just down right analytical chances are you'll have seen the major flaw in the article.
I'll give you a moment...
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Got it? Well let me tell you the problem I have with it. The question he poses, the same as the title of this blog post, is "are science and atheism compatible?" and yet he goes on a meandering ramble not about science nor about atheism but about religion and its historical spread throughout the world. There is a complete failure to answer the question: this article is NOT about science or atheism but religion.
Religion and theism are completely separate: one is a belief system set with rituals and doctrines and the other is the belief in one or more Gods. That is a very fundamental difference that changes the nature of the question. A belief in God does not require an adherence to religion (e.g. Deism) nor does the adherence to religion require a belief in God (e.g. 'lapsed' believers who continue to do some religious practices). With this in mind the question could become much simpler: "Are science and religion compatible?" - well it depends on which parts but ultimately yes. Can scientists still celebrate Christmas? Why not? It may have had a religious root but it has become a major part of Western culture and has now completely transcended its religious basis. Can scientists believe in Catholic dogma concerning the creation of the universe? Probably not. This latter question is much more interesting than the former and its what leads to the generalised question posed in the article, i.e. can an adherence to scientific method be compatible with a belief in God? THAT is a very interesting question and one which I won't try to answer but offer questions that need to be overcome.
Naturally, whenever we are threatened by such a difficult question it's important to start with what we know about science and atheism. We need to know what they are, how they operate and what their key characteristics are.
Science is not a system of belief like religion is, instead it seeks to objectively find out evidence about the physical universe and construct theories which it tests and attempts to disprove. It finds phenomena and seeks to explain why it is the way it is. Once it thinks that these phenomena are explained consistently and a theory has passed all of its tests then it is considered to be scientific fact, i.e. probably true.
Atheism is the disbelief in the existence of God. Defining God is a notoriously difficult thing to do. However, for the sake of argument, allow me to posit my impression of what I consider the concept of God to be. God is a supernatural being who has the attributes of infinite power, infinite knowledge and infinite presence. Furthermore, God is all loving and regularly intervenes in the goings on of our lives, not just in the case of miracles but in emphatic cases where he talks to prophets and inane ways in the lives of everyday people: God helps us when we ask him to via prayer or sets us tasks that we must overcome in order to improve ourselves. Furthermore God has set out commandments, a system of morality and regularly allows natural disasters to occur, even if it means the death of thousands of people and allows the existence of evil.
Upon this very definition of God (one which I hope hasn't done an injustice to theists) the existence of God REQUIRES that man cannot prove or disprove his existence. The fact that he is supernatural, i.e. out of the realm of the physical universe and thus the limits of senses and ability to discover facts, requires that it is impossible to 'discover' God. However, if we disallow this supernatural requirement and posit a conception of God that allows for his discovery then we can ask the question : "are science and theism compatible?"
The answer, I believe, is probably no. I choose my two words carefully. The reason I say "probably no" is because science deals with probability. What the attackers of science often call 'scientific dogma' or 'scientific doctrine' (indeed some scientists call it this too) is what is considered to be science to be so close to being true that we cannot imagine it being false. Such facts have been tested and retested over and over and over again and STILL they explain all phenomena within its remit and still it provides fertile intellectual ground for new work in its field. Such facts are called 'laws' because as tested theories they function so well, it is seemingly impossible to complete work in the field in which they operate without obeying them. For instance, one cannot work well in the field of physics without adhering to the laws of thermodynamics nor can one work well in the field of biology without adhering to the 'law' (theory) of evolution.
Considering this, ask yourself the question again: "are science and theism compatible?" The answer is probably no. Suppose that the search for the existence of God is considered scientifically, we can ask the scientists searching for God "what evidence do you have for the existence of God?" The scientist would reply, "none". The idea that the existence of God can explain phenomena that other scientific theories cannot is moot. The fact that there exists no evidence for God complicates things greatly. If the answer to the question "why is x?" is "God did it" then you have answered nothing if you cannot prove the existence of God. The incredibly simple fact that there exists no scientific evidence for the existence of God AND that many conceptions of God as a supernatural entity contradict all current understanding of the universe counts very much in favour of answering 'probably no'.
Now, importantly this does not rule out (i.e. disprove) the existence of God nor does it say that science and theism are logically incompatible. If our conceptions of God change as to allow 'Him' to be scientifically discoverable then that would a step in the right direction. Indeed, something like Deism is something along those lines. As Richard Dawkins has said if God were scientifically discoverable then 'His' discovery would be single-handely the biggest discovery that human beings could possibly make. The idea that there is a being existing somewhere in the universe that cares about us and interferes in our lives would be amazing. However, there simply is no evidence for God. To paraphrase Dawkins again, the probability for the existence of God is so close to zero that it is not even worth thinking about.
Finally I must return to the question posed, like Andrew should have done. The question, then, of whether atheism and science are compatible the question is 'almost certainly yes'. God joins other supposed beings that have been rumoured to exist such as fairies, unicorns, the Loch Ness Monster, Santa Claus et al. and scientists simply cannot say that they believe in them. The disbelief in unicorns and Nessie is scientifically founded because the scientist can say "if I am to believe in them then I need to see evidence of their existence first". We do not have terms for the disbelief in unicorns and Nessie because we do not need them - no one takes them seriously (or at least they shouldn't).
Science and atheism are probably very compatible because of what they are. The attempts by Andrew to try and make a quasi-sociological attack on their compatibility is unfair because that is not really what is at issue. The ideas are certainly very compatible and so the sociology will one-day follow. To suggest that history has shown that atheistic societies always fail is unfair. Religion has had a major head start and, to my knowledge, all attempts to remove religion from society have always been under oppressive totalitarian regimes. Atheism has really only had a few hundred years to try and succeed; religion has had, well, almost all of humanity. Time will tell.
I hope.
... I should sleep now.
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