Letter four: The question at the end of science
A tale of the battle between the scientist and the believer
Dear Past-Micke,
I’ve had a couple months’ break since I wrote my last letter. This letter turned out to be incredibly hard to write. I’ve been pondering what about me would surprise you the most. Is something that still surprises me, so much that I have a hard time writing, let alone talking, about it. Here it goes: I am no longer an atheist. I’m not sure if that would make you relieved to hear, or if you’d see me as some sort of villain who has betrayed you to the core. I’m not sure because on one hand, you declare yourself to be an atheist, on the other there’s still belief in you. Think of all your superstitions. In order to be superstitious, you must believe in something supernatural, even if that something isn’t God.
According to Swedish urban legend, stepping on manhole covers marked “A” brings bad luck, especially in love, and so you carefully avoid them. If things start going too well, you start looking for the inevitable doom that must be around the corner. You don’t leave keys on the table, and you’re afraid talking about good things too early will jinx them. You make small bets with … not God. Life maybe? The universe? You make small bets with whatever it is when you want something that you can’t control, like “if the subway train stops so that a pair of doors is right in front of me, he will call soon”. You deliberately don’t define what it is you make the bet with, you just articulate the bet in your head. Almost as if daring that something, if it exists, to reveal itself by taking the bet.
Remember Sunday school in Poland? The nuns were strict and brooked no nonsense from the six-year-old kids they tutored. They taught you about angels and demons, heaven and hell, and as the sadistic cherry on top: the Last Judgment. You learned that the devil and his demons had horns to mark their evil. This coincided with you hitting your head on something or other (seriously, we need to talk about you hitting your head, it happens quite a lot), which gave you a scab on your scalp. It was right about where you imagined one of the horns of demons’ was. You felt the hard scab with your fingers, but your hair was in the way so you couldn’t see it in the mirror. You asked mom about what it was, and she jokingly said “it’s a devil’s horn growing, because you’re so naughty”. You spent the following days being the saint-est, sweetest little child on earth, hoping that it would reverse the growth. It would be years before it dawned on you that it actually was a scab that healed, not a growing horn that receded.
Heaven seemed like such a boring concept to you: you imagined everyone as angels on clouds, doing nothing but sitting around worshipping God. Heaven was better than hell in the same way not being in pain is better than being burned by fire. You could very well not be in physical pain, and yet be bored to death, which the nuns were very capable of demonstrating. The Last Judgment, on the other hand, was all the more frightening. At some point (that in your head seemed like it could be tomorrow) God would take all humans who had ever lived and divide them into sinners and saints. The saints would sit on his right side, the sinners on his left, before they departed to their designated eternities: worshipping God on a cloud, or being tortured by the devil. You had a nightmare the night after this particular Sunday school class. You dreamt about the Last Judgment, which you pictured like a mass held on the clouds, instead of in a church. There were two sections of pews, with a wide divide between them. You sat in the left section, which you knew was the one with people going to heaven — come to think of it, that section was “God’s right side” as God in this dream was facing the pews, with the Pearly Gates at his back. On the other side, among all the sinners, sat your mom and your little brother. They seemed unaware of which side they were sitting on, and you felt completely powerless to help them. They would spend an eternity in hell, and you couldn’t do anything to help them. I’m still amused about how saintly that six year old saw himself, but for him it really wasn’t about going to heaven; it was about being forever separated from the two people in your life that you loved, about being utterly powerless to save the two people you felt responsibility for from eternal damnation. It was a nightmare about abandonment forever.
I can’t recall if you continued Sunday School in Sweden, but you did get confirmed as Catholic when you were twelve. Around that same time, you came to the insight that the judging Peeping Tom that the Catholic God was, was not your God. Catholicism was like lawyer; a default option and therefore easy to leave after some scrutiny. But for a while, the default option worked. You believed in God. If your faith was like a flashlight, the process of quitting Catholicism was like realizing you were aiming the flashlight at the wrong thing. You still had faith and therefore you did not quit religion, just Catholicism. You chose to become a Protestant. That God seemed kinder, less judging and more forgiving. It was partly that, and partly that so many of your peers went to Bible studies, to be confirmed the year they turned fifteen. Confirmation was a small rite of passage for Swedes in 1993, so I think your identity as a Swede played in as well. You were confirmed as a protestant in May, but you your class photo from 9th grade, taken around the same time as the confirmation, reveals that you had already strayed into an occult phase. For the class photo, your class decided to have a theme. I can’t recall the exact theme, but it was something along the lines of “what you’re interested in”. Your class mates have books, sports attire, movies … and you’re wearing what looks like a burlap monk robe with a cone-shaped hood, and a crucifix around your neck.
On your confirmation photo you look like an angel, with the white confirmation robe and clean-cut, well-combed hair. On your class photo, you look like the bastard love-child of the Blair Witch and whatever haunts the house in “Paranormal Activity”.
That occult phase, with crystals and tarot cards, didn’t last for long. As you were becoming a man, you shed all things that a man isn’t in your world. He’s not a wishy-washy, hippie mysticist. He’s logical and rational, and therefore not superstitious. He doesn’t believe — he knows, and what he knows he can prove. For you, it’s easy to argue that God doesn’t exist using logic, and logical argument is tantamount to proof, so: atheist it is. And still …when you saw “Contact”, the scene where Jodie Foster’s character (the scientist) asks Matthew McConaughey’s (the priest) to prove that God exists, his response stuck with you so hard that I still remember it:
Priest: “Did you love your father?”
Scientist: “What?”
Priest: “Your dad. Did you love him?”
Scientist: “Yes, very much.”
Priest: “Prove it.”
Rewatching that whole two-minute scene now, I realize that the dialogue is a perfect description of your relationship with faith: the scientist using logic and rationality to prove the believer wrong, the believer countering by switching to a game where logic does not apply. I remember one of those battles in you, that the scientist won. You know how you always look over your proverbial shoulder for the bad luck that inevitably must follow good? In ten years or so, you’ll be hit by a flash of insight: There’s no balance in luck. Some people have it most of the time, some people have it none of the time and most of us have it some of the time. You can’t prevent having bad luck, only handle the results of it. Anticipating bad luck certainly kills some of the joy of good luck. That battle went something like this:
Believer: “It’s a question of balance”
Scientist: “Really? So you believe in balance? But how do you explain people who lose their family in some tragedy, then get diagnosed with cancer and lose their home and all memories in a fire? The only explanation to it is that there’s no balance. Your belief is wrong.”
The only weapon that has any effect on the believer is feelings, and when you feel that the argument is true, that there is no balance to luck, it will be a mortal blow to the believer. You will feel free to enjoy your good luck without looking for impending doom, the scientist will feel triumphant. Neither of you realize that the believer, much like Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, disappeared rather than died. From that point, you’ll no longer care about the letters on the manhole covers, or avoid talking about things out of fear of jinxing them. You’ll stop using fictional bets to draw out that something, knowing that it’s pointless.
I remember that this is also the time when you realize that the flow chart of a happy life is quite simple: if there’s something you’re unhappy about, you have three choices:
- change it
- accept it (if you’re unable to change it)
- use it as an explanation for why your life sucks
The last choice leads to what Swedes call “offerkofta” (literally victim coat). Wearing it leads to bitterness and unhappiness that will permeate everything you experience. To me, choosing the third option is like playing a single hand of poker with billions in the pot, and only focusing on the fact that everyone else seems to have been dealt pairs and three-of-a-kinds and you have neither. Except that poker is a zero-sum game: someone has to lose for someone else to win. Life isn’t. You can only win this game in one way: doing the best with what you have. But in order to make the best with what you have, you must first accept that you have it. This realization will be so empowering: you and only you are responsible for your happiness. It will make you feel confident, free and happy in a rather profound way.
I’m not sure which came first: the believer’s disappearance, or the realization that you’re in charge. I’m not sure it matters. Cause and effect is such a mechanical way of viewing life and the world. Simple. Linear. Catenary. Every effect has one specific cause. I’m trying to re-wire my brain to think in a reticulate pattern, a multidimensional network of increased probabilities. Those two events were part of the same web, and as such they both supported each other. If there’s no God, no third party who plays the tune to which the universe dances, then there’s only one in charge: you. If you’re completely in charge, and the world is an unfair place, how can there be a God?
Choosing atheism was a clean severing of all ties with religion and God. A God whose followers made you furious with it two-facedness: they single you out, judge you and exclude you just for existing, all while claiming that they are doing it out love for you. We get judged by our actions, and if we’re lucky, our intentions, yet these people demand to be judged for being loving, when their actions are hateful, all while claiming the moral high ground of doing the bidding of the entity that created everything.
Another thing that drove you to leave Christianity: answers. Christianity offered you convenient answers to really hard questions like “why are we here?” and “what happens when we die?”. But you thought that was too easy. Like solving a puzzle in a magazine by turning it upside down and reading the solution. Atheism seems to you like the only path where you don’t only get to, but are forced to, find your own answers. But even if atheism is compatible with you in many aspects, the believer in you is still very much alive. He stirs every time you read or hear something that blows your mind, every time you think about the sheer immensity of the universe, every time you suspend disbelief when watching a sci-fi movie.
I didn’t understand your dislike for your superstitions until now. Superstitions imply belief, and the whole point of being an atheist is that you are logical and rational. An atheist don’t believe in somethings, especially not God. The sad thing is that you do believe in something. You believe that a real man is an atheist. You see your journey as an evolution towards a higher state: from conservative Catholicism with a Peeping Tom God, to the more liberal but still Christian Protestantism, to wishy-washy but even more forgiving occult beliefs, only to end up at what you see as the pinnacle of faith evolution: the logical, rational and very liberal atheism. In your word, a real man is a rational and logical person, someone who knows rather than guesses, so being an atheist means being more of a real man. Much like for some, drinking expensive red wines makes them more of an adult. Besides, you felt you had looked at all major religions and none of them could be right, even if Buddhism still tickles your fancy. Atheism must be the right answer. Right?
The hardest part about writing this letter is trying to describe what I believe now, in a way that makes sense to anyone else but myself. It’s like explaining how a paradox can be true. I have no problems accepting that two seemingly opposite answers to a rather profound philosophical question both can be equally true. To me, the atheist view “when you die, you die” and the view of several major religions “when you die, you go to heaven” are both true. I don’t think this makes sense to you. In our mechanical cause-and-effect view of the universe, logic dictates that there can be only one true answer to that question. Logic demands binaries, that it’s either 1 or 0, yes or no. Only one of them can be the true at any given time. To see the world like this is so seductive. So simple. We use it to define ourselves and others. Are you a boy or a girl? A cat person or a dog person? Gay or straight? An atheist or a believer? We quote science, argue and make jokes about which of these is better. That, of course implies that the other is worse, and we become flattered or offended depending on which of these we are. We look everywhere for things that support that our view is the truth: in science, the Bible, the Torah, the Quran. There can be only one true answer to the question whether God exists. Logic dictates that if we are right, the others must be wrong, turning the answers to deep, innate questions we have been asking us for millennia into a zero-sum game. And so, we become the mad kings and queens of truth, barricaded in fortresses built of the things we know, trying to destroy the truths of the other side using logic, science and God as weapons. If our fortress is true, then theirs is imaginary. Destroying it means saving them by making them see the truth. We have few qualms about it. Righteousness rarely does.
In the dichotomy atheism vs. religion, you stand firmly on the side of atheism. Perhaps not yet, at twenty, but you’re well on your way. As you learn things and encounter people, your knowledge will expand and your views will change. You will see it as an evolution. It’s not knowledge, but questions, that make your universe expand. They still expand mine. It started simply enough with questions like: Why is the sky blue? What’s the capital of Australia? How do earthquakes happen? How long does it the sunlight to reach earth? This inevitably led to other questions, which in turn lead to still others. There is always one more question. Each question you answer discovers a bit more of the universe, and it reveals another question. Perhaps this is why you never had a problem with the concept of an infinite universe: it is simply that there’s always one more question. It’s turtles all the way down.
You’ll learn so many things that your friends will jokingly call you “Mickipedia”, driven by the curiosity of exploring the world and expanding your universe at the same time. You’ll evolve, and you’ll see it as an evolution towards enlightenment. Knowledge and science are a way to see things for what they truly are, and what is enlightenment if not seeing the world for what it is? But at the end of science’s reach, there’s of course that one more question, the one that demands a leap of faith to answer. Since faith an antithesis of atheism, you cannot answer it. But what does it matter? The’s enough mysteries in the universe to fill a multitude of lifetimes of exploration, and you will find enough to fill yours. For a while. You will explore through experiences, podcasts, books, teaching, scientific articles, TED Talks. Maybe this is why you’re so in awe of the potential of the internet: it’s an endless source of knowledge at your fingertips. You’ll try on different professional roles and cast them off once you’ve learned them, listen to even more people who know, and every answer will reveal more of the universe. At 39 you will see yourself as something of an enlightened atheist, tolerant towards religion, even if you know that it’s not for you. But each answer no longer expands your universe, because there’s that question at science’s end which never can be answered. Strange as it may sound, you’ll subconsciously find that concept claustrophobic, as if the universe somehow is finite after all. If there are limits to the universe, then there are limits to our minds. Deep inside you know that this is not true. So, if there is no limit to the universe, there must be an answer to that question that halts the expansion of it. You just need to be reminded of it at the right time.
I remember the exact moment that happened. You’ll be on a plane on your way back home from an exhausting four day work trip, and make an attempt at reading “Syntheism — creating god in the internet age”. After hearing about this new religious movement “focused on how atheists and pantheists can achieve the same feelings of community and awe experienced in traditional theistic religions”, you’ll hope that perhaps there is an atheist answer to that question that science can’t answer. Upon finishing the first chapter, you’ll close the book and think to yourself “I don’t understand it. I couldn’t tell someone else what this chapter really is about.” For someone who seemingly knows so much and is so good at connecting the dots that his friends call him “Mickipedia”, it’ll be a rare moment of clarity. It’ll be the spark that brings back the believer.
You’ll fan that spark by talking about it to other people. Those conversations will inevitably lead to someone mentioning Alan Watts. You’ll search for “alan watts” on Youtube and the first video, called “The Real You”, will turn that fanned spark into a flame, a flame in which the scientist and the believer become one and the same.
When you’re ready to wake up, you’re going to wake up. And if you’re not ready, you’ re going to stay pretending that you’re just a ‘poor little me’. And since you’re all here engaged in this sort of inquiry and listening to this sort of lecture, I’ll assume that you’re all on the process of waking up. Or else you’re teasing yourselves with some kind of flirtation of waking up. Which you’re not serious about. But I assume maybe you are not serious, but sincere that you are ready to wake up. So then, when you’re in the way of waking up, and realizing who you really are, what you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call here and now. You are what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing. The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around, the real deep, down you is the whole universe. So then, when you die, you’re not going to have to put up with everlasting non-existence, because that’s not an experience. A lot of people are afraid that when they die, they’re going to be locked up in a dark room forever, and sort of undergo that. But one of the most interesting things in the world — this is a yoga, this is a way of realization — try and imagine what it would be like to go to sleep and never wake up. Think about that. Children think about that. It’s one of the great wonders of life. What will it be like to go to sleep and never wake up. And if you think long enough about that, something will happen to you. You’ll find out, among other things, that it will pose the next question to you: what was it like to wake up without never having gone to sleep? That was when you were born. You see, you can’t have an experience of nothing, nature abhors a vacuum. So after you’re dead the only thing that can happen is the same experience, or the same sort of experience when you were born. In other words, we all know very well that after people die, other people are born. And they’re all you, only you can only experience it one at a time. Everybody is I, you all know you’re you. And wheresoever beings exist throughout all galaxies, it doesn’t make any diferrence: you are all of them. And when they come into being, that’s you coming into being. You know that very well. Only you don’t have to remember the past in the same way you don’t have to know how to work your thyroid gland, or whatever else is in your organism. You don’t have to know how to shine the sun. You just do it. Like you breathe. Doesn’t it really astonish you that you are this fantastically complex thing and that you’re doing all of this and you never had any education in how to do it?
Alan Watts will guide you to your answer to that question at the edge of science, and all of a sudden your universe will again expand, reveal a question with each answer. This is when you turn into I, in regards to these letters. If the only experience that can happen after death is the same kind of experience that happened when you were born is true, and the universe is infinite, does that not mean that it is bound to happen again? How can finite experiences be possible in an infinite universe? Do I really believe in reincarnation now? Am I not an atheist anymore? I had found myself to have evolved so much away from religion, that I was right back at it. It led to a period of being constantly more or less mind-blown. Not only could I start asking questions beyond science, but every time I revisited those questions I had answered during the period when answers no longer expanded the universe, it expanded my universe again. Even if the answer was the same, it now led to a new question.
And so, I have found myself to have evolved so much away from religion, that I’m right back at it. It’s not a single answer that leads from atheism to this deep spirituality I experience now. It is an endless series of questions that expanded my universe beyond the one we see. Once I accepted the paradox to be true I was able to trace the steps to either viewpoint and see the truth from it. Waking up is an apt term for it. You know when you wake up from an amazing dream that feels so real that you feel disappointed that you woke up to this reality? This is like waking up from that awesome dream, only this reality is even more amazing than the dream. That was the moment I truly realized that for all the things I think I know, I know nothing at all. In that moment of extreme clarity, that paradox of not knowing anything and yet understanding the fundamental nature of my true self, I felt a deep gratitude and awe for the fourty years long pattern of events that had taken me there. I felt that same gratitude for every person that had touched my life, even if the touch had felt like violence at the time, like a pinball hit by the bumpers so that it eventually falls down that hard-to-reach rabbit hole. I heard once that the true role of Zen Masters is not to imbue wisdom in their students, but to make them frustrated until they realize they’ve suffered enough, and realize they had the answers all along. Once you feel you have paid the price, that’s when you’re ready to wake up. I cried for a good hour, feeling the weight of the world lifted from my shoulders, and all I could say was how crazy it all was. Victor, one of my guides, answered “It’s not crazy. You were insane, and now you’re out of sane.”
Am I enlightened now? In some ways, but not in others. I realize that this can be perceived as a pompous statement from someone who is full of himself, and yet tries to project a humbleness. But this is just another paradox, both are true at the same time.
The questions now seem less like isolated points with no way between them, and more like points connected by an intricate pattern of questions. The pattern may seem to take you away from religion, that answer which seems too close, too convenient and too dishonest. But if you follow the pattern long enough, that’s where you’ll end up. You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. I know I’m still a hero in my book, but am I a villain in yours?
Love,
Me
This is a semi-finished chapter of a book I’m writing called “Letters From The Person I Needed When I was Younger”. Once it’s finished — the planned release is in 2018 — it will be available as paperback, e-book and audiobook on Amazon. All chapters will be available for free here on Medium, and if you want to support my writing it (and support keeping it available for free) you can help me in any of these ways:
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