ECCE SIMIAE

Behold the Ape

One of the things I find difficult to discuss with fellow Liberals is the question of intelligence and its heritability.  That observable differences in cognitive function may be no more than learned behavior, or a the most a product of childhood experience, seems to be one of the credos that today's Liberal must share at the risk of losing the label.  Of course there is evidence to show that childhood deprivation of several kinds does affect the way one performs on IQ tests and perhaps in the experiences of life, but looking at people who are incontrovertibly brilliant it's hard to select parenting skills as the cause without looking silly.  The result is often that  people who have achieved great breakthroughs, often incomprehensible to the rest of us: people with great powers to analyze, calculate and create have their accomplishments explained by diligence or the willingness to work. That is something to which we can all aspire and fits into our cultural ethic

I heard in a movie trailer yesterday, that old and quite untrue saw "we only use 10% of our brains" which is patently untrue but  survives by offering hope that, like J.N. Barrie's Wendy Darling, we too can aspire to great ability if we only try hard and truly believe. No matter how hard I try, I still cannot follow Einstein's math much less develop the ability to have worked it out myself.

But to preserve the ego: to preserve the hope of a possibility that we're not second or third rate, we analogize with other achievements.  After all me can train to run farther or faster, to lift greater weights, to play sports better. We only have to use that latent 90%, to buy the "Baby Einstein" CD's and never mind the lack of evidence for success.  We can decide that specific talents are not part of some greater measure of mental ability, and some remarkable ability to calculate or to write music might just be latent in all of us if we try harder. We might decide to see some physical ability as a compensatory type of intelligence to offset our other intellectual lacks and in fact that's a component or the " intelligence is learned behavior" school of Liberal thought.  How brilliant must a Gibbon be, a squirrel, a bird!

But as I said, one risks ostracism by the trustees of conventional enlightenment by discussing, even in jest, such shibboleths as the genetic basis of intelligence, of racial features or even physical stature. What I'm saying is that by many measures, we Liberals are not the opposite of conservatives but just another variant. We too believe what is comfortable and what makes others comfortable with us and what is very uncomfortable to all good people is racism. I've heard it said many times that we cannot research certain things lest we play into the hands of racists or sexists or eugenicists and other miscreants. It's so much like that refrain from so many 20th century horror films: "there are things men were not meant to know."

And so we will ascribe that bell curve to other things. We will question, and perhaps rightly, the ability to test intelligence accurately, writing off vast differences in number crunching ability or short term memory or pattern recognition to cultural things, even when culture has little to do with those tests.  We talk about 5% differences and ignore the 100% differences that can hardly be written off so easily and  not only because we aspire to undeserved greatness, but because we're afraid others will misuse the data.

So it's interesting to see how we very conservative Liberals will see peer reviewed studies like the one in Current Biology that arrives at these conclusions:

•Individual differences in chimpanzee cognitive performance are heritable

•Cognitive traits found to be heritable show significant genetic correlations

•Sex and rearing history do not significantly influence cognitive performance

Will we decide that a biological basis for intelligence only pertains to modern Humans and not our immediate or more distant ancestors?  Perhaps it will be decided that our ancestors learned to be sapient the way we learned to lose out body hair and gain larger brains.  If not, we're going to have to learn to stop hiding and to address the real problems, the cultural and social and ethical problems of how we treat other people directly. We're gong to have to learn to separate all sorts of human variation from estimations of human worth, rights and dignity.  That's far harder to do than to wear a blindfold and demand that others do as well.

My guess is that the "no scientific basis" will remain a strong political force despite any degree of  sabotage by science because truly, there is no conservative more tenacious than a Liberal.

God and the Buzzard

He who foretells the future lies, even if he tells the truth

--Moroccan proverb-

I suggest the same is true of those who quote or speak of God's word. Perhaps that's demonstrated by the inexhaustible supply of such "words" and the necessary logical contradictions of all assumptions and assertions divinely attributed. God says this, wants that, does, doesn't, will or won't, can or can't and all in a flood of language that could bring down the tower of Babel -- and yet with little internal consistency and very much in the way of mutually contradictory theorems.  Perhaps that's why "Bible studies" so often consist of isolated and hermetic universes, never compared to others from the same source.  It's the well founded fear of refutation. We hardly need science to make it all unlikely and make much of it impossible and absurd, but arguing with the convinced is a bit like playing Scrabble with someone who makes up his own dictionary as he goes along and has a hidden box of tiles.  Love thy neighbor, seek justice -- kill everything that breathes and rejoice while you dash their children's brains against the rocks.

And they do speak of God's word: the people who insist science is untrustworthy as a method to ascertain truth and far less dependable than the politically selected words of God chosen to justify or demand or proclaim or delude.   But it's not so much the disparity between the vast Universe Science reveals and  religion talks of that disturbs the people who have their own alternate reality to maintain at an ever increasing cost.  It's the scientific method itself they pretend not to understand and need to deprecate because scientifically derived theories must be subject to testing and refutation. Received wisdom and divine authority cannot, for obvious reasons. God cannot, should not, must not be tested.  Yet we hear them insist that there are 'many scientists' that deny Darwin, many scientists that doubt the age and nature of the universe and the changing nature of our planet from people willingly or mendaciously oblivious to the contradictions.  The Biblical God demands we protect him by lying.

"Those among us who are unwilling to expose their ideas to the buzzard of refutation do not take part in the scientific game" 

Said Karl Popper of such people who hide behind Biblical authority and he's right -- by definition. "Scientists" who are cited as not supporting Darwin and doubting the thermometer aren't scientists. The religious opinions  regarding ontology to which we are so commonly forced to listen, usually rely on fallacious common sense axioms like ex nihilo, nehil fit to insist someone must have made everything -- nothing comes from nothing, but the weight of that 'axiom' rests on being ignorant of science since not only is nothing provably something, but things, virtual particles, are repeatedly observed as spontaneously arising and extinguishing without any agency. 

The ontological argument for God is a flimsy fallacy but it satisfies a legion of smug folk-theologians and their flocks. The void has properties not dreamed of in the bronze age and still not known about by most. It has properties that seem strange to people who went to Bible College and didn't study physics, and of course physics and common sense were divorced a long time ago. Should I point out that like all 'proofs' of God,  it would, if valid, support an infinite number of gods equally but not any ascribed attributes?  Indeed it can be used to 'prove' virtually anything.  It's hardly the thing to base a religion on since a religion is based not on the existence of a divine entity, ineffable, inscrutable or otherwise, but on it's attributes and attributes that have nothing but tradition and speculation and conjecture and arbitrary assertion as support.

Of course not all religions and denominations or their leaders are equal.  The Vatican has, under several pontiffs, expressed support for evolution and that the observable universe expanded from an infinitesimal point, but then any Pope has likely read Augustine's warning against "utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements" whereas that's not likely to be true of the kind of  Christians who roll on the floor babbling in gnostic ecstasy or insist that God hates Fags and punishes us with hurricanes.  But there's so much wriggle room in Genesis, after all. What is meant by "the heavens" isn't clear.  Is the author talking about our planet and the visible sky or about a universe unimaginable to the writer?  Perhaps the Roman Catholic Church now has genuine respect for the method it once persecuted as heresy, perhaps it's simply exercising Augustinian caution.

The astrophysicist Mario Livio observes that:

"instead of acknowledging  an error in judgement, people tend to reformulate their views in a new way that justifies their old opinions." 

 I can only speculate that normative Christianity, particularly of the American type, is trying to preserve what it can without embarrassment and yet will continue to push the old presumptions where it can get away with it. So it's no surprise that the continuing revelations of science will be trimmed and tailored and offered on the altar of God to "prove" biblical accounts of history. Hence we have the usual suspects asserting that the recent detection of gravity waves or ripples in space-time said to  support the theory of inflation in the very early universe also supports the Genesis account:

In the beginning God (the Elohim) created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Sorry The Earth wasn't created until the universe was ten billion years old, nor was the universe made of water that had to be separated by a "firmament"  into the waters above and below the Earth -- nor was it divided into day and night of course, or lights placed on the ceiling for our benefit. 

The Earth, even the larger one we learned of long after the current Biblical account was formulated, is so tiny in comparison to existence itself as to totally defy analogy. What we know about the origins of the universe doesn't allow for the specific and omnipotent actions described in the Bible as we have it today much less the essentially infinite size and great antiquity thereof. Yes, both scenarios suggest an existence prior to ours outside our universe but one relies on evidence and the other relies on the will to believe and to believe in a tiny, simple universe designed for a purpose: for human use. It relies on the importance of Man and his actions and thoughts and that demands an egotism, a desperate search for importance and meaning that is as incomprehensibly large as existence itself. 

Of course the promotion of science as supporting The Bible, as contorted as it is, is desultory and opportunistic. In this case, that it gets as far as it does relies not only on the scientific ignorance of the faithful as it does the Biblical ignorance.  A good reading of Genesis, with it's interleaved stories having different names of God and different accounts patched together like a fool's motley is almost as much at odds with itself as it is with science, with it's assertion that God had all kinds of sons on Earth and that they were a randy and unruly lot resembling satyrs or the assertion that animals have souls.  Perhaps the incoherence itself lends a hand to misrepresenting the contents and dressing them up as support for science, but I'm being foolish myself for pointing out mankind's foolishness and dishonesty and delusion.  Not only can't I get there from here but religion of all kinds is 'writ in water,' and like water, it fills in the interstices in truth, settles in the lowest places and flows from one gap to another. 

But neither Genesis nor Science can do much more at this point than speculate about beginnings. The concept of God as we have him in the West presumes that the beginning wasn't the beginning of everything and the current scientific theories allow for other and perhaps prior universes -- even universes to come.  We don't know much at the extreme level of the infinite and infinitesimal and that we don't know is the beginning of belief itself. There will always be more carrion than the buzzard of science can swallow.  It's left to fools like me to dream that it were otherwise.

The Face in the Stone

There are many metaphors for the human tendency to assemble an argument from useless or irrelevant fragments. "grasping at straws" comes easily to mind but the desperation of a drowning person isn't a prerequisite to finding order, a coherent narrative and even 'proof' of a conjecture in randomness.  At breakfast every morning I stare at a granite counter top with as yet uncaffeinated eyes and see a myriad of faces and recognizable forms.  Evolution has designed our brains to identify faces in the weeds and  probably to identify other things that are not there. Better after all to flee the tiger that isn't there than to be eaten by the one that is.

Once you see that face, it's hard thereafter to see it as random assemblages of feldspar or mica or other minerals.  The eye hangs on, the way we hang on to other constructs we form out of the randomness of  being.  Once you've had Orion pointed out in the sky, you'll always see those stars as the hunter that isn't there and who never existed -- and apparently, once you decide that some sentient physical entity caused for instance, a particular Uranium nucleus to fission, it's nearly impossible to see it any other way, even though it's so random there's no way to predict the phenomenon. "If it happened, something caused it to happen" is the genesis of  theology and science emphatically does not support that assertion. Something indeed does come out of nothing and "nothingness" itself  is a condition we imagine but does not exist.

It becomes increasingly obvious that what we call the "Big Bang" occurred nearly 14 billion years ago and what we now see as the Universe expanded from a singularity at an incomprehensibly high rate: so much faster in the first instant that it's current limits are far beyond the distance we will ever be able to see. A discovery announced Monday of ripples in space-time or gravity waves are said to be evidence for that brief time of rapid inflation in the nanoseconds after "the beginning" which seems to be another piece of evidence that Einsteins predictions were right and "inflation" occurred. It's said to fit in with models including multiple universes.  It's a profound moment for cosmology and for the prevailing model of how the universe we perceive began.

But wouldn't you know it, the faithful see it otherwise -- as proof of the idea that a sentient entity who looks like us is behind it all.  It's proof, says Leslie A. Wickman, special to CNN.com of the Biblical Genesis story.  It's nothing of the sort, of course, but in a construct some will not recognize as a decoy, Wickman asserts that the results of this new development offers "strong support for biblical beliefs." and that "it adds scientific support to the idea that the universe was caused – or created – by something or someone outside it and not dependent on it."

If in fact some argue that universes arise from some  random fluctuations in other universes, inflating into themselves as they separate forever from the host universe, it hardly fits the assumption of a God of any description. No condition that created all we see can persist as an entity today any more than we can travel to another universe. It's more than a stretch to say that the observations of polarized light through an Antarctic telescope have anything to do with a god, anthropomorphic, Biblical or not. But such is the parasitic nature of  religion, changing our eyes to see prescribed patterns in randomness, to see proof of God -- of a certain God in yet another piece of evidence that there is nothing even vaguely like that in this universe or elsewhere, nor is such an entity necessary or even useful to describe it's origins.  The implication that we can somehow attach all the ancient baggage we are liable to find in the Bible to a fallacious fabrication erroneously based on intentionally misunderstood scientific observation gives, I think, "strong support" to the idea of  our precious and often beautiful theology as hokum riding on conjecture born of blind ignorance.

The notion that the increasingly substantiated model of  the Big Bang answers any kind of ontological question like "who caused it," stems from the  assertion that for something to happen, something or someone must cause it, is the kind of common sense notion prevents us from seeing beyond our tiny frame of reference. Just as I see faces, usually human faces in the stone, we see in nature what isn't there and what we see is a reflection of us. In fact the stone contains nothing, and we are not able to see in it what we can't recognize elsewhere.

If it's indeed possible that some human may be able to create a new universe that immediately detaches from ours and inflates into itself like ours, it doesn't suggest that he who flips the switch is God or that she has any further influence on the course of history contained in that new place forever inaccessible to us.  Even less does the possibility that this is a natural and universal condition with universes budding off into some unimaginable hyperverse argue for "Biblical Beliefs."  It argues for some staggering sense of awe inherent in the infinite not in how we reduce the infinite to fit our biological limits.  If there is some universe of universe that may even be a mote itself in other universes -- if there is a reality in the infinitely small where nothing is true and everything is permitted, it hardly argues for anything whatever in our religions.  It argues instead that what we see has mostly to do with what we want to see. We want to see our significance and the significance of what we do and think and what we are.

So is there a God?   Is that in fact a question or an attempt to package a vast number of conjectures as an answer?  Maybe the answer is in the question: "what do you mean by God?" After all, the very word God is a concept smaller than the limitlessness of reality. Do atheists believe in nothing at all?  As Frank Moraes says so pithily: "So we have our gods, they just aren't anything that would be recognized by theists."   Perhaps reality itself isn't recognizable by Theists or the the faces in the stone aren't faces or in the stone.

Mars needs women

It's an odd fact that, for some male astronauts like former Space Station resident Mike Barratt, spending 6 months without gravity produces changes in vision that often are irreversible. He went up nearsighted and needing glasses for distance and came down eagle eyed and needing reading glasses. His condition seems permanent. The phenomenon is under serious study at NASA which is concerned that the possibility of a long trip to Mars might just carry the risk of blindness. Just why it happens and whether or not it can be prevented may be, according to CNN.com, the determining question as to "whether he or any other astronaut ever journeys into deep space or sets foot on other worlds."

Prolonged weightlessness causes papilledema -- a swelling of the optic nerve for about half the male astronauts, some of whom recover and others, like Barratt do not. Women seem to be immune. Of course another question that doesn't seem to be addressed here is why we don't just hire more female astronauts? Sometimes we obsess so much about a puzzling matter that we neglect to look at obvious alternatives.

Dawn patrol

The last time I watched the movie Spirit of St Louis, about Charles Lindbergh's 1927 flight across the Atlantic, I wondered what he would have done if someone had told him: "hey wait, in a few years you'll be able to do this in a few hours while drinking champagne and watching this movie. That's not how the human ego operates however. We take huge risks to be the first. Risks that would be far, far smaller if we waited a while for technology to catch up.

Of course if it weren't for the Cold War we might never have gone to the moon or built a space station or have our hopes for a verdant Mars dashed in the 1960's and 70's. Sometimes you are better off taking the risk, spending the money; but is that an argument for not moving on with the times?

While the press and much of the public is lamenting the end of the seriously flawed shuttle program, the real science of space exploration is continuing to produce astounding advances that dwarf the advancements to knowledge produced by our manned program. With the rapid advance of semi-autonomous robotics and miniaturization, it's foreseeable that the huge risk and titanic expense of sending people around the solar system and returning them alive and sane may be less and less worthwhile.

What have we learned from the shuttle experience? That space travel is still very risky, still vastly more expensive and difficult than we imagine when we design these things. Expensive enough that we will always make serious compromises in design that eventually make things even more expensive when we have to work around them. The shuttle is a textbook lesson in the perils of design by committee and politicians. It's catastrophes result directly from design decisions driven by economy.

If we are to continue the Space Station project for a while, perhaps there will be sufficient motivation to develop a smaller, lighter, truly reusable, economically sound and more modern supply vehicle, but the Space Station, if it has any justification, is all about practice in sending people to places to do what robots will probably be able to do much better before we get there.

Yes, perhaps we'll be able to support some sort of human existence on Mars for a period of time and perhaps construct a moon base that could, for a time, house humans, but it wouldn't be much of a life and it certainly shouldn't be called a "colony" in the way European settlements in the Americas were colonies. We still lack the money and the technology as well as a reason to develop them. In that respect science fiction tends to be a somewhat cloudy fun-house mirror of the past more than a window into the future.

Would we ever send; would we ever expend the huge resources to send men and women to Vesta, or Ceres much less to the vicinity of the outer planets with their monstrous radiation belts and no resources -- a journey that would force the new Conquistadors to live in conditions we now reserve for pickled herring -- and keep them in constant danger and deprivation for years? No, but we can send and have sent patient, unemotional and replaceable robots whose capabilities are expanding as fast as the universe itself. Would we spend trillions and ask a crew to take a decades long trip in a stinking tin can without a shower, drinking recycled urine and eating horrible food just to orbit Pluto? Will we ever travel to the nearest star? I doubt it, but the technology to send an unmanned vehicle is at least a real possibility, even if we won't live to see the pictures.

Robots can be sent in small vehicles; can be small vehicles, powered by small efficient ion motors and won't suffer from emotional problems or long for the cool, green hills of home. A cheap cell phone now has more computing power than existed anywhere when we first walked on the moon and high resolution video cameras are smaller than the human eye. (remember when color TV cameras were the size and weight of refrigerators and required a two man crew?) The rate of change is accelerating. Think of what we'll be able to do in the 20 or 30 years it would take to build manned rockets and ancillary equipment for a very risky Mars mission.

The shuttle was a 1970's design loaded with so much design compromise that it was obsolete before it got off the ground. Robotic missions on the other hand can go from the drawing board to landing on Jovian moons in fairly short order. The real science is done on places that would incinerate, irradiate, freeze and squash an astronaut, even if he survived the mind numbing confinement and squalor needed to get there and back.

Not so with the Dawn mission now, as of yesterday, in orbit around the asteroid Vesta; an object so small and distant that even the Hubble telescope can't see anything but a featureless smear. Expect a flood of hi-res images in the next few weeks. In time it will move on to Dwarf Planet Ceres and surely gain some insight into the formation of planetary systems. That may be less a thing of dreams than small boys and Sci-Fi fans like to imagine but much more of a thing of science. We've already seen the sunset on Mars and watched dust devils cross the endless desert. We've heard the wind blow on Titan and seen its methane rivers and lakes and there's more to come as the technology improves.

It's impossible to do more than guess, but I'm guessing that long before we discover bug-eyed monsters on alien worlds, we'll be building our own in Pasadena and sending them there. You and I can see the dawn rise on worlds more alien than we can imagine and we can do it poolside with a glass of lemonade.

The First Thing Is to Admit What We Don't Know

I search for truth in our shared experiences, our disagreements, the good that humankind promotes and the evil that we enact. We are artists and poets, writers and musicians, but destroyers of life. The one thing we never are is boring. It matters not one whit as to whether you believe or don't believe in God, for me it's about examining all of the possibilities. Science offers many answers but not all. Science is continually changing because valid science is born of a hypothesis and proof (See the scientific method). Sometimes the hypothesis cannot be proven. Sometimes the proof reveals a totally unexpected truth.

However, science without contemplation, without moral considerations can lead us into dark places. The medical experiments of Josef Mengele and others were clearly a search for scientific proof gone wrong. The whole science of eugenics was a perversion of science, yet for a time, those who believed in eugenics boldly cited scientific proof to support their beliefs. Is science bad and responsible for the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the United States' own little foray into forced sterilization of some of its citizens, mostly poor and black? Of course not, but such events are an indication that science can be perverted just as any other belief system.

Just as many of the Christian faiths in the U.S. sought to justify slavery, so did science. Negroes were judged inferior. Skulls were measured, brains were studied and the conclusion was that black people were intellectually inferior to whites, an idea that continued to be presented as having a scientific basis in 20th century works such as The Bell Curve. From the early 1920s to the 1970s, some 65,000 men and women were sterilized in this country, many without their knowledge, as part of a government eugenics program to keep so-called undesirables from reproducing. Then there were the scientific experiments known as the Tuskegee syphilis study. The clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama, studied the natural progression of untreated syphilis in poor, rural black men who thought they were receiving free health care from the U.S. government.

The current worship of nuclear power is a perversion of science. We have the science to create nuclear power plants but it seems highly irrational to play with a substance that creates radioactive waste that is toxic to all life in some misbegotten belief that we can keep it under control. Depending on the half-life of the radiation, it could stay in a person for much longer than a lifetime. The half- life is the amount of time it takes for a radioactive material to decay to one half of its original amount. Some materials have half-lives of more than 1,000 years. I find this no more rational than the religious sects that deny medical treatment to their children because they believe that if they pray hard enough God will heal them.

What is inherent in our nature that makes us need to believe in something so strongly that we exclude reason and compassion from our thought processes? Our belief in science created the first atomic weapon, a weapon capable of wreaking havoc and devastation, a weapon capable of leaving behind lethal radioactive waste with an indefinite shelf life, when reason should have perhaps suggested that just because we could didn't mean that we should. Science has helped us create more efficient ways of killing; we can now kill humans and leave the buildings standing. What an accomplishment!

Am I opposed to science? No. Science has also been used to promote the greater good and I would not condemn all of science for its missteps. However, a belief in science is just as potentially dangerous as an unwavering belief in a man with a beard who lives in the clouds. Looking inwardly isn't about justifying our worst impulses; it's about studying what makes us who we are in order to find our way to being better than we are. Most people act without ever considering why they act. This is why mobs form so easily and get so out of control. Individually, most would not engage in the type of vicious and sadistic behaviors that they will as a group. How do we move beyond this mob instinct?

I think that it is far more complex than simply declaring that all people need to embrace science and reason. Either can be perverted as much as any religious belief because the issue lies within ourselves not the stars (Thanks Will). Certainly there have been magnificent advancements in science that have benefited us all; however, humankind has also used science to develop even more efficient ways of killing one another. Hanging the solution to today's problems solely on science or reason is no more rational than announcing that it's all in God's hands.

For me this is where psychology and philosophy must be added to the mix. Science is a type of knowing, based on proposing a hypothesis and designed experiments test and hopefully prove that theory. But that which makes us human goes beyond the concrete, factual answers that science can provide. What we do with that science is based on a complex working of human nature and science hasn't designed an experiment to take the full measure of what makes us tick.  Perhaps psychology and philosophy lack the straightforward factuality of science but it is their study that continues to reveal the human psyche, bit by bit.

I doubt that I will persuade anyone who finds all of this to be some esoteric discussion based on belief that cannot be proven to consider this seriously but at least let's respect that we have differing perspectives.

Of the nature and State of Man, with respect to the Universe

Say first of God above, or man below,
What can we reason, but from what we know?

-Alexander Pope-

Of course those of the Age of Reason had no idea of the size of the universe and the English language has no word to describe just how much bigger the visible universe is in comparison. Indeed they did know that it wasn't as the ancients thought: our floating planet covered by a rotating bowl with lights affixed, above which gods lived -- a bowl so close that it was possible for bronze age people to reach it by building a tower. Intimations they had, that a universe vast enough to include other suns, other worlds, could not have been designed to be a place for humans; a place for humans to dominate; a place designed for no other purpose.

Ask for what end the heavenly bodies shine,
Earth for whose use? Pride answers, 'Tis for mine

The Anthropic Principle suggests otherwise. As Steven Hawking says, it simply states that the suitability of Earth for life on Earth is self explanatory: any form of intelligent life that evolves anywhere will automatically find that it lives somewhere suitable for it. If existence wasn't created for us, that's one less ineffable mystery that needs to be dressed up in godlike robes.

Indeed, 16th century astronomer Jerome Wolf wrote to Tycho Brahe that the "infinite size and depth of the Universe" ( if only he knew how close to infinite it is) was the greatest danger to Christianity. Fortunately for that enterprise, most today still haven't grasped that size and what it says about the irrelevance of Human values and indeed the importance of anything to do with us.

What we've come to know about the nature of reality; about what the meaning of is is, has presented us with a landscape more vast and more inaccessible to the public grasp than is the 14 billion light year fraction of what is that we can see. There are whole dimensions that we can't see and can't come close to comprehending and what we can see and comprehend is little more than the shadows in Plato's cave. That everything in this infinite universe can be attached to a two dimensional membrane floating in 11 dimensional space/time requires more than fasting, chanting, meditation and drugs to become apparent keeps reality well out of the reach of all of us. Certain conclusions about it however, are hard to avoid without avoiding the entire question of just why is is. To my admittedly limited mind, questions of creation, of entities involved with creation, entities beyond the properties of matter and energy and dimension and in what places they exist, are absurd. Isn't it absurd to discuss the number of angels that can dance on a pinhead without being able to ascribe any characteristics or properties necessary to their existence? And of course we cannot without dragging them into a place of scrutiny, which is impossible.

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatum

Said old William, hundreds of years before the Enlightenment; don't create entities if you don't have to, yet we're still doing it. We're still creating creators, plugging the ever narrowing gaps in our ability to explain nature with gods and demons and angels and disembodied spirits, although it's long since become obvious that we don't need gods of gravity or electricity or of the nuclear forces. We don't need gods to determine why and when it will rain or to give purpose to earthquakes and storms or to make it very important to the cosmos that we worship a certain god and avoid another or refrain from sleeping with the wrong people or obtain knowledge reserved for the gods.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is Man

What we see as energy and matter and time are properties of other phenomena, not results of conscious or unconscious entities that create and control them. We don't need to create them to explain what is otherwise explained by what we can demonstrate and we can demonstrate that random fluctuations of that fabric which manifests itself in all things can more easily do what the old consciousness needed to create entities to create.

Stephen Hawking's soon to be released book claims that existence explains itself, that there is no need to invoke entities for which existence contains no place and allows no properties to explain the spontaneous origin or virtual particles or indeed that tiny part of an infinite thing called existence. If indeed, current theory is correct, there are such an infinite number of conditions that can be called universes, inaccessible from one another, all our religions become absurd. In such isness, the creation of ever more universes is an inevitable result of the nature of is. No nebulous incorporeal entities need apply.

And in spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear: whatever is, is right

M-Theory is hard to grasp. OK, it's damned near impossible, but as theories do, it predicts outcomes otherwise not predictable. Hawking has come to embrace it as it makes the singularities embedded in classical theories nugatory. It makes it unnecessary to postulate something existing before time that caused time to start, for instance. It makes it unneccesary to postulate the entire idea of anything before time.

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going,"

Hawking writes in the introduction. Indeed, it's no longer necessary to explain the tides, the winds, the orbits of bodies in space, lightening or the nearly infinite number of gaps in our knowledge in which gods once found refuge.

If there are no more gaps for our gods to hide in, no more firmaments to divide heaven and earth, what then will become of them? Perhaps we'll find him in the one place we have never looked. In ourselves. If universes can be self-creating by virtue of physical law, cannot we be self creating in terms of what we wish to be?

History says no, Glenn Beck thinks it leads to death camps, theologians trip over their tongues trying to show how even if there isn't a God or any place for him or anything he could do if he could -- there is a God. Personally I prefer the freedom of knowing nothing matters for very long; nothing a hundred billion years of time won't wash away. I prefer to think that only the free can be moral, only the mortal can be compassionate and only in our transience can we find glory.