The Atheist to Agnostic Pipeline
Plus a Week in Review
Some weeks are like every other week. They are remarkable in their unremarkableness. They are identical to the weeks that fall behind and unfold before me. But some weeks, friends, I feel like opened a door to a new part of my life and everything after it changes.
I finish work, I go home, read a book, have a couple of beers, take myself for a walk, and go to bed.
How I Used to Be
I used to be pretty sure about, well, everything. I knew how the universe worked. I trusted science and reason to lead me, and the entire human race, out of the dark. It went beyond just obeisance to reason—it was a whole hog dedication to the material universe and our ability to figure it all out.
I had a song to sing, and I sang it. I sang it even when people told me to shut up. I was an insufferable jerk on social media and sometimes in person. Materialism, science, and reason provided me a convenient and loud drum. I sure banged it.
When I embraced this materialist philosophy (in early adolescence, I think), everything that vexed me or confused me fell into place. The things that didn’t make sense were just waiting to be discovered, either by me or somebody. I believed that everything could one day be understood. We know why the sky is blue, and what causes storms. We learn more and more about how the universe works through observation, hypotheses, and experimentation.
I read Carl Sagan and watched Bullshit and James Randi.
Magic wasn’t real, it was just sleight of hand and gaffer’s tape.
Psychics weren’t real, they were hucksters playing tricks with cold readings and boring old human psychology.
UFOs and ghosts weren't real, they were just frail humans with fertile imaginations.
Bigfoot? Don’t make me laugh.
But somewhere along the way, I let that perspective color everything, like the yellow tint they use in movies whenever the characters go to Mexico. Some part of me stopped questioning and adapting. In my youth it, was a comfortable and consistent way to approach the staggering, vast unknown.
I rejected everything labeled “spiritual” as hokum. And in so doing, I lost something of myself that was vital and affirming. As I got older, and this is the important part, it became a boundary to empathy.
Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.
- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
I’ll tell you how I got to where I am today. But first, science.
The Bone Prison
One of the lessons science has taught us is that our brains are the seat of our essential us-ness. If you take everything else away except for the brain, the person is still mostly the same person with the same memories and feelings.
Our skulls are protective prisons for our brains. We don’t experience anything directly. The only way to influence the brain directly is to pop open the skull and poke it.
Our senses provide information and data to the brain via chemical and electrical signals from the organs of sense (ears, eyes, etc.) to our brains via internal network cables called nerves. Those senses are our only awareness of the outside universe.
If you look at a human being now, right now, you only see the thing in front of you. You don’t see the billions of years of evolution and the millions of generations of reproducing creatures that made that person happen. Even that human itself knows their parents, and maybe their grandparents, but that’s usually the limit of their awareness.
However this started
It ends up just the same
A Brief History of Seeing
Way back a long ass time ago, a blind little creature mutated and its offspring had a novel new way of experiencing the world around it: light that came from the sun bounced all over the place and it could detect where it was brighter and where it was darker.
This tiny little mutation let it survive even longer than its siblings, and then some generation later mutated so it could actually detect shapes, and so on down the ages until an eagle flying high up in the sky can see a rabbit from 2 miles away.
Without that single mutation way back then, we wouldn’t have eyes to look at a beautiful painting or look at the faces of our kids, or anything else. Aside from the physics of light and eyeballs, even the vision you have is tuned to a particular way of seeing.
For instance, some animals like owls and cats are really good at noticing things that move. This is advantageous to a cat because all of that light bouncing around isn’t as valuable to a cat as noticing when it moves. They have all the same data about the light, and are all seeing the same things, but the cat’s processing of that data is different thanks to a different set of mutations. You can hold up a sheet of music to a cat and he’s not going to understand it. If you hold up that same sheet of music to a person who reads music, and they’ll hear the music in their heads.
I wrote all of that to write this:
Holy shit. What the fuck. Are you kidding me?
Big deal, you might say. Anybody who’s ever played with a cat knows that. But cats are animals just like us, right? I mean, eagles have such good vision it would be nice if we did, too. A ton more humans would have survived if we could see as well as an eagle.
But we can’t because evolution never went that way. It was never advantageous to our ancestors to see better than we already do. This is the case for everything about us: it was enough for our ancestors to survive up to the moment they made us, and that’s it. Everything we love about ourselves, about humans, is either a direct or indirect result of that process. Humans are good at detecting patterns. Humans are really good at recognizing even subtle, small differences in the faces of other humans. Humans have language and walk upright because our ancestors who had those mutations survived.
Did you know this: one of the reasons humans are so scary to animals is because of this upright walking. In most of the natural world, an animal is quite a bit longer than they are high. Look at almost any other creature that walks on four legs and its body is like twice as long as its head is high. Imagine if humans were twice as long as we are tall and you can understand why so many animals run away from us (aside from the pointed sticks and the friends we coordinate with).
Anyway, this is where my mind goes: what kinds of mutations do we have that we don’t even know about? What kinds of mutations do we not have?
The Last Blind Ancestor
The little blind creature I mentioned? It didn’t know it was blind. Consider that for a moment. Until its offspring happened to mutate in that specific and random way, neither it nor any of its friends, family or acquaintances had ever heard about light. They didn’t know that there was a whole spectrum of energy in the universe that was colliding and bouncing off everything. How could it know what it didn’t know?
Imagine that newly-mutated little creature trying to convince its parents that it can detect light. What’s light? They don’t even have a word for it.
But then again, they didn’t have any words for anything because the peculiar ability for humans to communicate, and our incredible biological bias toward language and communication in very specific ways, is uniquely human.1
We see the universe the way we do because of a million tiny mutations over the course of all that evolution, mutations that led us to our current us-ness. From the tips of our toes to the thinning hair on our heads, every little mutation in our DNA conspires in our bodies to make us who we are. We can’t be who we aren’t, and we can’t be what we aren’t, either.
We look at the world, at the entire universe, with extraordinarily limited perspective. How much don’t we see? What kinds of things and spectrums and energies are out there in the humungous universe that we don’t even know we don’t know about? There might be entire symphonies playing in the energy of the universe but we have no idea because we can’t hear it. We don’t even know it’s there!
Well, we have a pretty good idea about some of those things because we have ways of detecting the things we can’t see. We’re still discovering things we can’t detect without our tools. We know how planets work but we don’t know why.
We know that gravity exists, and we experience gravity all the time, but we don’t really know what it is or how it works. All the stuff we think we know and one of the biggest most fundamental parts of existence is a big, fat, mystery.
Here’s Where it All Comes Together
Those realizations conspired within me to make a brand new person with a brand new way of looking at the universe and humans and everything in it. Well, that’s what it feels like sometimes but I’m still the same dude I always was.
Instead of looking at the mysteries and dismissing it with “pshaw we’ll understand it eventually” I embrace the vast quantities of other things we don’t even know we don’t know.
And it’s in there, it’s in the terrifying fullness of an unknown and vastly imperceptible mysterious universe that I find unending, overflowing, oceans of hope, love, and beauty.
But Maybe It Wasn’t the Realizations
I’m letting the intellectual deductions carry an awful lot of the weight here, but let me be clear: it wasn’t instant and it wasn’t recent. It was a gradual change in me that coincided with a lot of other things. One of those things is the death of my newphew, Miles. Another is the death of my father, and the death of my Aunt Posy. Another is the death of my friend Elicia. But it wasn’t all death, it was also the pandemic, and my brain tumor, and my relationships and my friendships.
Through hard work and many years of struggle and medications (both self-medicated an prescribed), I have come to accept uncertainty. Actually that’s not entirely true, not only do I accept uncertainty, I love it. In some ways I fear I have overcorrected in the wrong direction, because I love it so much.2 Now I seek out the things that scared me as a kid, and nothing scared me more than talking to strangers. Now, I love talking to strangers. The stranger the better.
But looming astride all of these factors is the unmistakable stink of age. I am 47. I am neither young nor particularly old. The things I did to my body and my mind in my youth have come home to roost. But I’ve also gathered up some wisdom.
Instead of rejecting everything that doesn’t rhyme with my own song, I stop singing for a while and listen.
The Parable of the Forest
This isn’t something I read somewhere, it’s something that occurred to me when I was driving and thinking, which I love doing. I am recording it here because I thought it was a pretty good illustration of how I changed my thinking and because I love parables about animals. I might have read this somewhere or heard Alan Watts talk about it, but this version, at least, is mine:
The worm in the ground knows only the dirt. It knows how it smells, how it tastes. There might be something in the air above it but the worms who go up there don’t come back. All that matters is the dirt. It has everything it could possibly need.
But the beetle who walks along the surface of the dirt sees the worm and scoffs. You think you know everything there is to know but you can’t see the beauty of the world on the surface. The beetle has everything it could ever need under the roots of the tree. It knows its food and the enemies that want to eat it.
But the warthog who snuffles and trots along the paths of the forest knows that there is a lot more than just what’s under the roots and in the ground. That stupid beetle is so sure that nothing above it is important, but to the warthog everything that matters is there.
The monkey on the tree scoffs in turn at the warthog and its silly certainty. The monkey can climb up to the trunk of the tree and swing along the high branches. It sees the whole forest floor stretch out beneath it.
But the eagle sees not just the forest tops and the warthog and the beetle and the monkey and the worm but the wide, wild lands even further afield. It sees the mountains, the plains, the deserts.
Above it all are the most arrogant of all, the humans who make satellites and helicopters. Surely they know everything.
The Week in Review
I was going to start writing these newsletters weekly, but I don’t think my brain works in weeklies. Every two weeks seems like a more attainable goal, so let’s aim for that. So, this would be more light a fortnight in review but let’s focus on the week that was.
Having said all that, I don’t have a lot to add that wasn’t what you read already. But there are these:
This Week’s Obtrusive Thought
I have recurring and, sometimes, relentless thoughts. I think of them as vestigial flailings of the anxiety that is always with me. Sometimes they’re loud and sometimes they’re quiet, but they’re always there. Imagine getting a song stuck in your head but it doesn’t stop, ever, and it goes on and on and on all the time.
This week, I was worried a lot about choking. I live alone. I have been chewing my food extra hard, just in case.
Things I Read This Week That I Loved
I read this essay about Ursula K. Le Guin’s blog and I enjoyed it so much I subscribed to the writer’s substack. I’ll have more to say about the history of the internet and how the humble blog is still the purest and best mode of communicating on the web, and, of course, how I’ve been on the web and making stuff for it the whole time, but this is a great little piece of writing about it.
Sobbing on the Subway, by Leah Reich
I always enjoy reading Leah’s perspective and this issue of her newsletter is my favorite thing I’ve read in a while.
This Week’s Passport Photo
I’m taking a trip soon so I had to get my passport renewed. My old passport and the check to pay for it and the form I had to fill out is still sitting in an envelope in my bag because I cannot scape together enough minutes in a day at the appropriate time to carry sad envelope to a post office to mail it.
I tried to take the photo myself but gave up and went to CVS. Before I did all that, though, Emmitt helped me.
Interestingly, this is related to what I wrote about vision and stuff because before a few months ago, Emmitt couldn’t see screens. Well, he could see them, but he didn’t realize that there are things there that move around in a pleasing way. Now he can’t get enough and every screen I use is entertaining to him. What changed in his perception? What new pathways did his neurons make?
This Week’s Song
Well, maybe not. There’s some debate.
I don’t mean physically dangerous scary things, so don’t worry, Mom
James I really enjoyed reading this.