Monday, June 29, 2020

(Missing key to) A Scientific Explanation For God? | Joe Scott


Joe started 2016 with one of the biggest questions of all - does God exist?

I started Joe's video with a cynicism that evaporated as Joe’s perspective unfolded. His well told story impressed.  It helped that his words resonated with my own evolving experience.  

Still while listening, at times, an image of playing basketball in zero gravity crept into my imagination because, like so many others, Joe lacked a fundamental frame of reference to stabilize the mind boggling complexities and conflicting notions of our inner and outer worlds that he was doing his best to rationally discuss.

Something so fundamental it’s never thought about, ergo its implications remain lost to us.  Namely, recognizing the profound difference between our Human Mindscape (individual and collective) and Physical Reality.

This lack of a clear baseline appreciation for our own brain’s* place in the universe leads to all sorts of hubristic assumptions, and a reflexive disregard for information outside of one’s own realm. 

Let me go through that key again quoting from an essay I wrote a couple years ago.
“… missing was a much more fundamental division crying out for recognition.  Specifically, the magisteria of Physical Reality vs the magisteria of our Human Mindscape. …”
What’s important about that is that it forces us to recognize that both science and religion are products of the “realm of Our Mindscape.”
Science seeks to objectively learn about our physical world, but we should still recognize all our understanding is embedded within and constrained by our mindscape and all that we’ve learned through our minds.  
Religion is all about the human mindscape itself, with its wonderful struggles, fears, spiritual undercurrents, needs and stories we create to give our live’s meaning and make it worth living, or at least bearable.  
What’s the point? Religions, Science, political beliefs, heaven, hell, even God they are all products of the human mindscape, generations of imaginings built upon previous generations of imaginings, all the way down.  
That's not to say they are the same thing, they are not!  

Though they are both valid/necessary human endeavors, 
but they are certainly fundamentally and qualitatively different.

Religion deals with our interiors, inside our minds, hearts, feelings and souls,
Science does its best to objectively understand the physical world beyond all that.
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*Or more specifically our mind, that thing our brain creates, during its short dance of life.