Why Religion Is an Important Way of Thinking
Suppose you cannot concentrate.
From a scientific perspective, you first look at what might be wrong with the way you process information. For example: ADD.
From a religious perspective, you assume that every person is perfect and exactly as they are meant to be.
This may seem like a small difference, but in practice, it makes a huge difference because it leads you to seek different solutions. In the second case, you work more with the materials you already have. If you assume that something is wrong with you (a scientific cause), it’s harder to get past the same obstacles.
Religion acknowledges that both good and bad are part of life, and that both exist within you. Yes, it belongs, and that too. Before you can convince a religious person that something is wrong with someone, well… it takes a while.
You end up thinking more like: “Okay, I’m someone who apparently can’t concentrate for even two seconds—how can I solve this myself?” You will always eventually find a solution. Even if you exercise three times a day, work in five-minute blocks, etc., there is always a solution. You are exactly how you are meant to be; it is supposed to feel this way. It is also meant to be a challenge.
Conversely, children should not be given pills just to make them sit quietly and shut up.
What you see again in quantum mechanics is that you’re trying to fit the world into a little box. You can do that, but there will always be a piece that falls outside the box. You get confused because your original assumption is too binary.
What you’re really saying is: I expect reality to behave in a certain way. But it doesn’t.
Imagine I have a fair coin. The chance of heads or tails is equal. If I now flip the coin, what is the probability of heads or tails?
The problem with this line of thinking is that you yourself have already made the assumption that only (1) heads or (2) tails can happen. In reality, anything can happen: a meteorite could strike as well.
If you see (1) and (2) as a double wave function, then the wave is always in motion.
The probability is, for example, 0.45 (1), 0.45 (2), and 0.1 for a meteorite. And here you see the real problem: we don’t know the probability of a meteorite. You cannot just say “the probability of a meteorite is 10%.” You need a different language than mathematics for that. Otherwise you end up with a probability inside a probability — a spiral inside a spiral.
This is possible: the probability of heads (1) is 0.5, the probability of tails (2) is 0.5, and there is some probability for all other things. If you combine numbers and words, it works. Numbers are a hard, binary way of describing reality, and words are softer, more stretched out. You can try to describe the entire reality only with numbers and formulas forever, but you won’t get there — it’s too strict.
Another recurring problem is that looking backward in time is not the same as looking forward. When I look back, it seems that flipping a coin a billion times gives a 50% chance of heads (1). But you’re not seeing all the things that could have happened.
That you can predict something with accuracy doesn’t mean it’s probabilistic in nature.
Rejecting this statement also doesn’t mean it’s deterministic.
Reality is neither probabilistic nor deterministic.
You act in a certain way, and you bend the odds in your favor.
For example: getting the flu seems random. But everyone who takes care of their body in a certain way knows that the flu almost stops existing for them. In that sense, getting sick is not random. But it also doesn’t mean that never getting sick is a linear A → B process.
Meeting in the middle
So, both classical mechanics and quantum mechanics are a little bit true. Or they are both true, depending on how rigid your worldview is. For many people, debates about science and religion are not binary. Everything holds some truth in it.
Why smart people don’t care about evolution theory
Basically, there are two scenarios.
If evolution theory is right, then there is no point in thinking about it, since I can’t influence that process.
If evolution isn’t true, then there is also no point in thinking about it, since it’s not true.
The other reason why smart people only spend a second debating evolution is that, in the same second, they see that humans kind of look like monkeys. So it’s not a serious point of discussion.
People who don’t care about evolution immediately start thinking about the first person who invented fire, and who single-handedly made the brains of all humans bigger.
The mechanical effect of evolution on humans is so insignificant that it’s almost a statistical error. You would expect a lot more change over all those billions of years. Hardly anything changed if you look at the whole bandwidth of possible chance.
Note: It’s almost as important to find common ground between the evolution and non-evolution camps.
I think the main difference is that people who only believe in evolution overrate indirect effects (like random mutations) and underrate things you can discover and master now (like fire), which have a huge effect on future generations. You call this cultural evolution; I call it people being so far ahead of the curve that they physically change how humans look and how the inside of our bodies function.
Thinking is the most fun thing there is.
You can string thoughts together and turn them into a kind of rap.
A universe within a universe
A universe is multidimensional. This means that for you it may be a mind, while for me it’s a brain, or vice versa.
You can also experience things in a very one‑dimensional way: food only as an amount of calories, for instance.
Some anxiety is excitement, reversed. Or suppressing love and sexuality can cause psychological problems.
There are already many parallel universes existing next to each other. I have been in a lot of social classes in my life, and I can’t explain how differently people can perceive life.
• Physics
• Religion
• Chemistry
These are lenses you use to look at reality. It’s like wearing glasses. There’s nothing wrong with glasses, but if you put on different ones, you see something else — a different “depth” (not the right word, because it suggests one is better than the other; it’s more that you see something completely different).
The annoying thing for people like me, who switch glasses a lot, is this:
• When I put on my science glasses, I see nothing but science, and everything else looks unbelievably stupid.
• When I put on my religious glasses, I have these unimaginable experiences. I see thoughts, the inside of my body, force fields flying around me. It’s unimaginable that others don’t see that magic.
• When I put on my Buddhist glasses, well — I’ve lost my mind — because Buddhism is the silliest thing somebody ever made up (no, this is not my ego talking, obviously).
The point is this: it’s only when you legitimately switch glasses that you see reality through a different lens, which allows you to see things you’ve never seen before. Religion gives you an inner peace you sometimes need, just like the belief in the unseen, the undiscovered.
I know a guy who is a chemist. When I talk to people like him, I truly get what he means — but he doesn’t get what I mean, and that’s the difference. And sometimes, that’s the sad part.