I skimmed “Why I am not a Christian” by Bertrand Russell and wanted to share some quick thoughts that had arisen. Russell addresses some fallacies in arguments for the Christian god typically used, which is all well and good. I think he mainly has a problem with institutional religion and some particulars about Christ. I do not mean to debate or corroborate anything he says here, just mostly tangential thoughts. Firstly, about Russell using reason and intelligence galvanize action in the face of the Lovecraftian horror that is our world and the universe. Living by human reason and intellect is well and okay, but swearing by it as in the Cult of Reason, I think is in some sense delusion. Human reason is nothing more than our ability to pick up on the rules of what’s around us. We can only reason with what we can sense, that is, using our five senses or man-made devices to shoddily emulate another sense. E.g. we cannot sense electromagnetic waves, hence use capacitors and coils and whatever other trinkets as sense proxies, from which we can observe this natural phenomena and come up with something like Maxwell’s equations. How do we know we’re not able to observe everything possible? I think we should understand randomness and stochastic processes as nothing but the shortcomings of our senses (both intrinsic and man-made) of dimensions imperceivable to humans, and therefore limitations in what we can reason about. If a causality model, including inputs from all dimensions unknown to us, were created, there’d exist a deterministic equation for everything. Stochastic models are the best we can do with our shortcomings. Maybe God really doesn’t play dice; we simply cannot perceive underlying forces causing quarks to flip, hence we deem it “random”.

When I look at the sun, the moon, the endless black of the universe, we can come up with laws to describe them, but nothing deeper. Still left to mesmerize. Then I adopt that state of mind to viewing what’s immediately around me. Abstract geometric shapes arbitrarily perceived by the thing they call eyeballs. My eyeballs much different from dogs’ or dragonflies’. My hearing enabled by some tiny bones hitting each other. I.e. I see no obligation to believe that natural selection creates the perfect vessel that resonates to the whole kit and caboodle of the universe.

Ergo human reason has everything to do with what it has to reason with and can only go as far. In the face of insurmountable uncertainty, human reason as one’s chief navigator cannot be a bad choice. But it is foolish to believe it is the be all end all.