What has Become of Us?

There has been a lot of complaining from the right and left, the religious and non-religious, the this or that, and all of them are complaining about what the world has become. The conservative right does like what influence the liberal left has had on the world, and vice-versa. The same can be said for the religious, the social, globalization, community, et cetera. It is as if none of us saw this coming. It's as if none of the sides had enough foresight (or hindsight) to see the world come this "ruinous" state it is quickly approaching.

It's both foresight and hindsight. We all have heard the old saying by Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Could it be that this downfall of society is history repeating itself? Could this be little more than A happening to B, which results in C?


Let me explain. Consider Nostradamus, that supposed profit of all our troubles here in the 21st Century. His strangely coded writings, which have been interpreted as prophecies of things like WWII, 9-11, the coming apocalypse, and similar nonsense, are really just metaphors / analogies. His works have long been regarded as coded analogies of things going on in his time, much like John's Book of Revelations, which is a coding of the fall of the Roman Empire. Considering we can read so much in Nostradamus' works that reflect things going on in our time, couldn't Nostradamus' writings be regarded as a scholar (which he was one, along with alchemist and doctor) establishing historical archetypes; a Carl Jung of history. Couldn't we read Nostradamus' works as "If event A happens to people B, then the result will be C?"

History typically repeats itself, and I think this might have been what Nostradamus was getting at. With a keen knowledge of the patterns of the past will give foresight to patterns that arise in the future. It's not prophetic. It's just understanding patterns. Is this true? Certainly. Just look at how often people see a movie that came out a decade or so ago and see something that speaks to today. I saw recently on Reddit someone who posted Morpheus from the Matrix saying: "You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it." (Which is pointed toward the conservative right's reaction to OWS). Is it prophecy or a patterned structure of the human psyche and how it will react to change? As a fairly rational human-being, I lean more toward the latter.

It is the nature of time, which is often cyclical. Sure, events happen in a linear fashion. The Fall of the Roman Empire doesn't keep occurring every 700 years. But empires always rise and fall. Always. The Holocaust during WWII doesn't reoccur ever 60 years, but the Jews have long been persecuted over and over. These events occur linearly, but individual events occurring over the course of history eventually develop patterns.

The Egyptians had two words to describe time: neheh, which describes cyclical time, and djet, which is non-cyclical time (this doesn't not necessarily mean linear, but simply suspension of time). The former I would like to focus on more, because the Egyptian concept of neheh is similar to Thomas Mann's analogy of repetitious history: "...by its very nature the past is not a straight line, but a sphere. ... The sphere rolls; that is the nature of the sphere. In an instant the top is bottom and bottom is top in such a case. ... But thanks to spherical rotation the heavenly also turns into earthly, the earthly into the heavenly." It is like the ancient saying, "That which is above, so like that which is below." Mann goes to show that this why in Genesis and Exodus there are numerous stories that are retelling of the same story. They are archetypal events that reoccur within the repeating course of history.

Are we not repeating ourselves? Isn't history repeating itself? America has come into a decline. Whether we are in the final downfall of the American Empire, or if we will recover, this much is true: America will fall. We cannot escape that. But certainly all the signs America currently exhibits are symptoms of the End of Empire.

But Santayana said if we know the past we won't repeat it. Right? I don't think so. Santayana is only saying that if we don't know the past we will inevitably repeat it. It don't think it works the other way. History will repeat itself. We are not outside the laws of nature, and it seems only natural that if A happens to B, then C will follow. It might have been better if Santayana had said, "It doesn't matter what we know about the past, we are going to repeat it. Shit happens." It might as well be the greatest human achievement for us to break the cycles of the past, but given our history, I don't hold out too much hope. But, I'm an optimist hiding under a deep mask of pessimism. But, since not once in human history have we ever completely wiped ourselves out by our own hands (and I mean the whole human race), since we're still here, I don't think we're going blow ourselves up. But I don't hold much hope for the ending of all wars.

So what has become of us? Exactly what is supposed to happen to us. And so the calendar keeps spinning.

Beautifying the Illusory Boundaries

When one considers what architecture really is, at its very core, as both an art and an entity, it is little more than a boundary, and an illusory one at that. We fabricate these arbitrary notions such as "inside" and "outside," "my house" and "your house," "public" and "private," and so forth, and then we create some boundaries to tell the difference between the two.

Is there such a thing as "inside" and "outside"? Can the two exist before we starting throwing up some walls? Clearly not. The inside does not exist until the walls are built. So what is "out"-side if there is no inside? Aren't the two mutually inclusive of each other? Does not one's existence depend on the other's existence? Certainly the same can be said for public-private, my house-your house. We simply fabricate these interrelations that depend on one another. We create the opposites via our own constructions. We literally construct the delineation of these opposites.

Architecture clearly depends on constructing the division between "inside" and "outside", two things that never existed until we built them. What is amazing about architecture is, in all its simplicity as the creator of divisions, it is merely beautifying those boundaries. All the history books, all the theory books, all the technical, philosophical, and whatnot books on architecture are little more than how to deal with this boundary. The whole essence of architectural theory is how to work with these boundaries (illusory boundaries, because the opposites didn't exist until we fabricated the walls that divide them, and don't exist without those walls), whether it be: dressing the wall up this way, or stylize that hole in the wall (call it a "window" if you will) in this manner, or don't design the door in the wall that way, et cetera.

The same can be said for anything we fabricate, and religion is not exception. There is this arbitrary division between what is human and what is divine, and we imagine there being a division between the two. All the religions of the world are little more than how the walls between the divine and the secular are to be dressed up. The Christians certainly dressed up their illusory boundaries between the divine and the human than the Hindus did, or the Mayan to the Chaldean, the Inuits to the Taoists.

The concept of culture can be viewed in much the same light: how such-and-such a culture dressed up their boundaries between what is acceptable and unacceptable, which is different from a completely different culture.

And certainly the same can be said for the arbitrary division between science and religion. Science has a certain way of dressing up the division between truth and falsehood, and religion has another. Both are in search of truth, whatever that truth may be and for whatever reason (what is "truth" without it having a wall thrown up between it and falsehood?), though their means of finding truth are different (i.e. how they dress up the boundaries).

This is getting tedious. But the point of it is: what is this or that without the boundaries we, human beings - with our "rational" and "intelligent" minds - have created to divide things that didn't seem all that bothered being mingled together in the chaos of pre-creation? Whatever this or that is, the entire fabric of our reality is merely a product of our making. And because different cultures made things differently, the only difference between Muslims and Christians, Americans and Chinese, Moses and Barack Obama is how these illusory edges have been stylized.

Suddenly, all our differences seem really superficial, and that's because they are.

Burden of Proof

So I was surfing Reddit, because that's what I do during finals, and I was reading some stuff on /r/atheism. I found several times fallacies by both Christians and atheists on the burden of proof when it comes to God's existence. The usual argument goes a little something like this:

Christian: You can't proof God doesn't exist.
Atheist: Since you're the one arguing for God's existence, then the burden of proof is on you, not us.

Somewhere in there is the Martian teapot fallacy and the trump card of "faith," but most of the arguments are the same: where does the burden of proof lie? So to avoid finishing studying I'm going to write about this.

There is no burden of proof. There can't even be one. It is both fallacious and paradoxical. This I think is best summed up in Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy concerning the babel fish.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could evolve purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It proves you exist and so therefore you don't. QED."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

"Oh, that was easy," says man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white, and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.

Well said, Doug. I used to think this quote was just poking fun at God, but the paradox is blatantly obvious. Faith can simply be defined as "believing in and asserting anything at truth without evidence." So if the existence of Deity only works on the premise of faith, then there wouldn't be any proof of God's existence. But, if there is proof, then God cannot exist, because the faith fallacy would not allow Deity to exist with proof of existence. It's a bit like Gödel's Incomplete Theorem: you cannot have truth and proof of truth simultaneously; or, put another way, if there's proof of truth, then that truth doesn't exist, and if there is truth, then you cannot prove it.

It is quite a paradox to prove God exist, because that would mean Deity clearly doesn't exist. (That or the faith fallacy is complete bullshit). But I think this is what Stephen Hawking was getting at when he said (and I paraphrase), "It's not that science says, 'God doesn't exist.' It's that we don't need God for the equations to work. The universe doesn't need God in order to work." So where does the burden of proof lie? Nowhere. You can't prove it, and proof is a paradox. There is no burden, at least with the faith fallacy. The burden is a vagary of certainty.

So, does God exist? That's a loaded question, at least if the faith fallacy holds true. If faith is not a factor in God's existence, then we must ask ourselves: either, can God exist without evidence? Or can there be evidence of God's existence?

The latter is the more serious of the two (as in it can actually be taken seriously), at least in our age of scientific reasoning. With or without faith, the question of truth of Deity is a vagary of logic. Logic is, quite simply, a chain of arbitrarily sufficient pieces of evidence, proofs, and/or reasoning of causal relationships. Put it simply, logic is an arbitrary linkage of ideas that would supposedly prove truth. But logic is merely a human fabrication. God, in typical ideology of Deity, is higher than humans, and clearly exists beyond our petty logic. Proof of truth exists beyond our comprehension, because our lesser minds cannot comprehend God. This is what H.P. Lovecraft was getting at when he said (and I paraphrase), "To truly comprehend God would lead to insanity." To go beyond the forms of logic the human brain has fabricated would lead the mind to higher thinking, or, at least, outside standard human reasoning. That's a sufficient way to define insanity.

If there is proof at all, then that proof is either the Martian teapot or it is ubiquitous. Either the only proof of God's existence is meeting him/her in person, and that is the only proof. Like the Martian teapot, if it exists, then we simply have to find it floating somewhere around Mars' orbit. If we could simply fly out on a spaceship and meet up with God for lunch, then clearly he doesn't exist higher than humans, and is little more than another creature in the realm of creation. I think that destroys the concept of what it is to be God. If the proof is ubiquitous, which it clearly is not, then we would find it everywhere, which we have not. If creation itself is the proof, then that is fallacious by our own scientific logic, since Hawking says that the equations don't need God in order to work.

The other option, can God exist without proof, is the more dangerous of the two. How can it be taken seriously? Doesn't this reinstate the faith fallacy? In a sense, yes, but in another sense, no. This, I think, is the mess we have with our religions and science. It is both yes and no because it makes faith both bullshit and quite acceptable. Both faith and disbelief become legitimate ideologies, and that would be the root of the (supposed) war between science and religion.

So which is it? Is faith the paradox of proof? Is faith legitimate? Or is disbelieve legit? Is it the Martian teapot? I cannot really answer this, because clearly our logical constructions of understanding these esoteric matters are far too inferior to really comprehend the essence and existence of Deity, if comprehension is possible at all. In all instances the conclusion is insufficient. It always diverts back to admitting that we have no idea.

"WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE"
~God's last remark on creation, Hitchhiker's Guide