Facing our own mortality

Hello all, I am writing to you tonight about a serious topic that many people face when they lose their faith and develop an open, skeptical, rational mind. One that I faced myself when my mind was awakened. Our own mortality and life. Is there a reason to it? Do we have a purpose? This was sent to me yesterday by a fellow atheist and I was asked to respond.

"I can't process. I can't make sense of it. I just wonder why. Why are we able to partake in such magnificent, immense, grandeur thought processes; just to have it all wiped clean? Why do we bond? Why does our subconscious want our species to procreate; just to feel loss and end up torturing one another? Why don't we all just stop having babies and end the viscous cycle? Death leaves me feeling uncomfortable. Not because I'm scared of there being a hell; but the thought of being nothing, feeling nothing, thinking nothing...is unbelievably terrifying to me. How can everything just vanish in an instant? I'm overwhelmed."

This is a real issue that all of us face. Whether religious or not we all deal with our own mortality. After all we are mortal beings that have an expiration date we just happen to not know when. The differences between a theist and atheist answers are vastly different. A theist tells you that this isn't it, that there is more after we die. They will tell you this with an enthusiastic, gleeful cheer in their voice. I have no doubt that they truly believe this with all their heart. The problem with this explanation is they do not actually know. There are 4200 different religions being practiced today. All with their own versions of an afterlife. You have utopias in some, others state you spend eternity doing battle to earn your seat at the feasting table. There ares some that state you will get your own planet when you die, a few say that we are reincarnated into another living creature and the species of that creature depends on how you live your life. Some even combine a heaven and reincarnation, where you spend time in a utopia reflecting on the events of your life then you are reincarnated into another creature. There is even an afterlife where you must spend years upon years going through trials and tests to achieve utopia.

With so many different versions of an afterlife how do we know which one is correct? How do we prove which is real when the very ability to confirm it is to cease to live life as we know it. We cannot plain and simple. We cannot know which is correct and which ones are false. Are they all correct? Are they all false? We just cannot answer that question. Some Christians will claim that they have died, seen Jesus and then they came back to life. The issue with this is that this same thing happens to Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Norsemen, Greeks, Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, and the list goes on and on. So, we have to go back to the original question. How do we know which is right?

This is where Science comes into play. Science is our way to understand reality, ourselves, the Cosmos and everything in it. The great Carl Sagan once said

“The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us, there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.” Why does he say that the Cosmos is all that is, was, or ever will be? Because that's what we know. We know how time and space started, what we don't know is what happened before time began or what happens after it stops. But to say you don't know isn't admitting that it is unknowable but rather we are just being intellectually honest. I admit that an atheist cannot give you a comforting feeling by explaining to you the reality of life. But they won't lie to you. They won't lie right to your face just to make you feel better. A theist will lie to you, they will lie and smile while they are doing it. They may even want money to lie to you. This is one of the issues I have (among many) is the utter lies they will tell you to serve their own agenda.

Now back to the universe. There is no evidence to show what happened before or after. There are a few theories of what happened before the big bang happened like the multiverse theory which I personally think is the most logical explanation. We once thought that our planet was the center of the universe. That we were the only planet. Well then we discovered the other planets in our solar system. So, we thought surely we are the only solar system and have the only sun. Nope, we discovered there are millions of solar systems in our own galaxy with billions of stars. Then we believed that surely we are the only galaxy...wrong again there are billions of galaxies in our observable universe. Well, surely we are the only universe. Why? Why should we believe that nature creates anything in ones? The Cosmos has proven to us that the evidence vehemently points to the contrary. Our universe may be just one droplet of water in an ocean of universes.

(Below is a conversation between Joe Rogan and Neil Degrasse Tyson about the multiverse)

Now, think about that for one second. There could be billions of universes with billions of galaxies and trillions of planets of their own. How could we possibly say that we know for sure what happens after we die. How could we be so arrogant while also being so naive at the same time? This is one of the biggest mysteries in our existence.

To answer the question as to why we exist. I, nor anyone else knows. You, I and everyone else are merely a product of reproduction. I look at it like this. I am very thankful that I was one of the lucky ones that got to exist. How many eggs and seeds never became a living organism? How lucky are we that we get to be those very select few? Then you wonder why? Why me? Why was I chosen? You weren't, you were not "chosen" by anyone but rather the natural process of reproduction. Religion again will tell you that you were chosen. That you are special and important to some deity. Why would a deity allow you to be born into a home that is somehow capable enough that you survive to adulthood yet 15-20 percent of all pregnancies are miscarried in the U.S. alone. Is that the deity just playing tricks on us? Is he/she evil? Or are the miscarriages merely a sad product of reproduction? The answer is yes they are. Statistically speaking for every eight fetuses that make it to term there are two that do not. This is a tragic reality of nature. We should feel lucky that by the tiniest stroke of luck we are the ones that made it.

Reproduction is hard wired into our brains. The very survival of any species is predicated on its ability to survive. That is how evolution works. Survive long enough to pass your genes along. I wouldn't say that we are merely torturing ourselves by reproducing knowing that all we will do is die. There is no need to focus solely on death when the one life we get is so worth living. To answer the question of why we bond, this is another hard wired instinct that our ancestors needed to survive. We had to live in groups to survive. Just like our ape cousins live in large groups we do as well. These are leftover instincts that we no longer necessarily need to survive but we still do it subconsciously. We all have friends and family that we keep close. No one likes to be alone. This isn't by accident, we had to have this feeling or there is a huge possibility we would not be here today.

Being worried about there being nothing is a reasonable feeling. I often hate knowing that I won't be here in 200 years when major technological advances are made and amazing discoveries happen. This is a scary, saddening thought. But then I remember again that I am here now. I was one of the few. Ask yourself this, do you remember what it was like before you were born? That is the same thing that happens after you die. We should make the best of the life we were lucky enough to have and not worry about getting another one. I often think about the vastness of the universe. Sometimes my primate brain simply cannot wrap itself around it. Its so huge!! There is so much out there, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be known! We have a way to be immortal. Do something that transcends the limits of our mortality. Authors, scientists, discoverers, inventors, people that made a difference in one way or another. We still speak of Shakespeare, Newton, Galileo, Einstein, Tesla, Hitchens, Darwin, Epicurus, Alexander the Great, and many others. We must live on through our kids. Be something special to them at the very least. In closing I will leave you with a short excerpt from a speech given by Sam Harris. Please watch it, it is strikingly beautiful to listen to. I wish you all the best and remember life is what we make of it. You are living your own movie. Do you want your life to be a straight to DVD or a huge blockbuster? The choice is yours...choose wisely.

Misconceptions about evolution

Hello everybody. Figured I needed to write a new blog because I see misconceptions about evolution on a daily basis. Sometimes it's due to a lack of understanding about it, religious indoctrination teaching people that it didn't happen or plain willful ignorance which drives me absolutely crazy. Anyone that would rather be willfully stupid is beyond me. Let us start with the most common misconception.




1."If we evolved from monkeys why are there still monkeys?"

This is probably the most commonly spoken misconception about human evolution. We did not evolve from monkeys. We share a common ancestor with them.This means that at some point in the distant past we split off and went our separate ways. Let's take a look below.

This is a chart showing when we split from our great ape cousins. As you can see we shared a common ancestor not evolved from each other. They are our cousins not our ancestors.

Our family tree is very vast, whether you follow that line for Geckos, Giraffes, Parrots or Dolphins. If you go back far enough you will find common ancestors for every living thing on this planet that has ever existed. 

The second one is merely a basic lack of understanding.

2. "Evolution is just a theory"

Yes, at face value evolution by natural selection is classified as a theory. The issue with this statement is not knowing what a theory really is. A theory is a well substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that is acquired through the scientific method and repeatedly tested and confirmed through observation and experimentation. As a result, and inherent in its nature, a theory can be modified, tweaked, or even discarded when new evidence or results come along. In the case of the theory of evolution by natural selection, all of the evidence collected and tested over the past 150 years have supported its validity. 

There are no beliefs in science, no presuppositions or wishful thinking. Merely data. Empirical data gathered through numerous experiments and observations. There are a few other theories that I bet you have no issues with. Such as the theory of gravity, plate tectonics, germ, general relativity and special relativity. All are just theories but I hear no one saying earthquakes do not happen and that if they jumped off a building they would go up!

3. The eye is too complex to have evolved

People usually quote Darwin here when he said that the evolution of the eye seems "absurd in the highest degree". However, Darwin follows that statement with a three and a half page proposal of intermediate stages through which eyes might have evolved via gradual steps. Below is the list of steps the eye evolved through.

• photosensitive cell
  
• aggregates of pigment cells without a nerve
• an optic nerve surrounded by pigment cells and covered by translucent skin
• pigment cells forming a small depression
• pigment cells forming a deeper depression
• the skin over the depression taking a lens shape
• muscles allowing the lens to adjust

All of these steps are known to be viable because they exist in animals living today. The increments between these steps are slight and may be broken down into even smaller increments. Natural selection should, under many circumstances, favor the increments. Since eyes do not fossilize well, we do not know that the development of the eye followed exactly that path, but we certainly cannot claim that no path exists. Therefore we can see how the eye became complex.

4. The second law of thermodynamics says that everything tends toward disorder, making evolutionary development impossible

The second law of thermodynamics doesn't state that at all. It says that heat will not spontaneously flow from a colder body to a warmer one or that total entropy (a measure of useful energy) in a closed system will not decrease. This does not prevent increasing order because the earth is not a closed system; sunlight (with low entropy) shines on it and heat (with higher entropy) radiates off. This flow of energy, and the change in entropy that accompanies it, can and will power local decreases in entropy on earth. Entropy is not the same as disorder. Sometimes the two correspond, but sometimes order increases as entropy increases. Entropy can even be used to produce order, such as in the sorting of molecules by size. Even in a closed system, pockets of lower entropy can form if they are offset by increased entropy elsewhere in the system. In short, order from disorder happens on earth all the time. 

The only processes necessary for evolution to occur are reproduction, heritable variation, and selection. All of these are seen to happen all the time, so, obviously, no physical laws are preventing them. In fact, connections between evolution and entropy have been studied in depth, and never to the detriment of evolution.

Several scientists have proposed that evolution and the origin of life is driven by entropy. Some see the information content of organisms subject to diversification according to the second law. So organisms diversify to fill empty niches much as a gas expands to fill an empty container. Others propose that highly ordered complex systems emerge and evolve to dissipate energy (and increase overall entropy) more efficiently.

5. "There should be millions of transitional fossils"

You have to understand a few things about fossilization. Fossilization is not a very common event. It requires numerous factors in order to happen. First it requires conditions that preserve the fossil before it can be scavenged  or decays. These conditions only happen in a few habitats, such as river deltas, tar pits and peat bogs. Anything that has died outside these areas rarely fossilize. Many animals do not preserve well. Evolution of new species is fairly quick in geology terms so transitions will be uncommon. 

Other processes destroy fossils like erosion destroy millions of years of the geological record. Heat and pressure destroy fossils when they are buried deep underground. Even as rare as fossils are to find them is even more rare for the most part we find fossils when erosion exposes them or a job site digs one up. My paleontologist buddy Trevor Valle knows that all too well. There are also shortages in the people that dig for fossils. It can take up to a decade of work on one site! Also, only Europe and North America have been vastly searched for fossils thanks to the lack of paleontologists and political reasons. There are however plenty of transitional fossils that we have found. Such as Tiktaalik, Ichthyostega, Darwinopterus, Archaeopteryx, Dimetrodon, and then to our own evolution we have found Apidium, Aegyptopithecus, Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus, and Homo Rhodesiensis. The fossil record clearly shows evolution by natural selection.

If you have any other questions please feel free to ask and I will gladly answer them! I hope you enjoy the read and learn a little more to help you understand your actual origins in this life.