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Comment by yumraj | Hacker News Reader

I was visiting Chabot Space Center in Oakland several years ago and saw a large poster on a wall which had thousands and thousands of star-like dots filling the entire sky.

Except, they were not stars, they were galaxies. A poster of a small portion of the sky full of thousands and thousands of galaxies, each looking like a dot, as small as a star looks in the night sky, and each of those galaxies has billions of stars...

Something snapped in my brain that day and I went on from being somewhat religious/agnostic to a full blown atheist.

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I don't understand the relationship between awe at the grandeur of the universe and atheism. They seem orthogonal to me, each unrelated to the other.

There is a palpable difference between the universe described by many religions and the universe described by science. The former is all built from concepts rooted in human society such as father, son, judgment, commandment, obedience, sacrifice, punishment etc. The latter is built from eerie ideas such as force field, wavefunction, observable, reference frame, superposition etc. The former feels small, ordinary, familiar and manmade. The latter feels like we're fumbling for words to describe something that fundamentally transcends ordinary human experience.

BTW: The numbers involved in each description are also telling. Those used by religions are often small and comfortable for a human mind, e.g. ten commandments, seven days of creation. Even the supposed large numbers such as 144,000 never come close to what you need to describe nature such as the number of stars in our galaxy (around 10^11) or the number of atoms in a human body (order of 10^27). See physics constants for even better examples. Also, religions often describe reality using numbers that look suspiciously memorable in decimal notation. OTOH, nature never gives us round decimal-friendly numbers for constants. I think this also makes religion feel manmade and science authentic.

what's wrong, or inauthentic, about being man-made?

Man-made is relatable. It’s understandable. It’s comprehensible. All things that the universe, when considered in its entirety, could never be.

God was supposed to have created men not the other way around.

Nothing, but I suspect your concept of "religion" is not the same as the parent's. Some people think of religion is a valuable tool humans invented to help them govern their lives . To others, religion is a doctrine that teaches ostensibly facts about the nature of the universe. Typically these facts lead to conclusions such as "humans SHOULD do x, MUST NOT do y", etc.

Two completely different concepts, one word. So it's a bit confusing. But for someone discussing the second type of religion, saying it's "man-made" is definitely a knockout punch.

It's hypocrisy to claim that religion X is divine revelation only to turn out to be man-made.

I don't think there's anything wrong with religions that acknowledge (and even embrace) the man-made aspect.

The scale of numbers in some Buddhist works such as the Flower Ornament Scripture are unimaginably large (infinities for every infinite item).

You are projecting christian view a bit here.

Buddhism and perhaps other Indian religions have some really large numbers, e.g. http://allergrootste.com/big/book/ch1/ch1_7.html

Another large number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Hanoi#Origins

second that. it's so easy to be atheist in west in the midst of modern understanding of science and universe. but if you venture out to other religions and scriptures in countries like India you keep discovering more ancient scriptures with much larger sense of time and advanced thoughts like multiverse[1].. May be inadvertently but even some scriptures have approximated the age of earth to be 4.3 billion years which is not accurate but closer [2].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_cosmology#:~:text=Every%....

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalpa_(aeon)

The word "religion" has a lot of baggage associated with it where it seems to invoke a stereotypical undereducated westerner who interprets ancient spiritual texts literally. There's a lot more than just that. Ancient Buddhist cosmology frequently uses metaphors to describe aeons, such as grinding mountains to dust by brushing it with silk cloth once per century, etc. They do the same with countable objects to describe the numbers of worlds and so forth.

I have the opposite experience you described. Contemplating the infinitude of reality draws me toward religion via logic. Through contemplation it seems to follow that there's something important happening with meaning beyond our comprehension.

Perhaps GP and GGP were "stereotypical westerners who interpreted ancient spiritual texts literally". I for sure was, having been brought up in particularly scripture-obsessed denomination of Christianity. But I'd argue that view holds true for all Abrahamic religions, which comprise the majority of active faiths on Earth. Religions based on the Bible tend to be half faiths, half community management handbooks. Despite promises of various forms of life everlasting, they're very much focused on micromanaging the profane, the mundane.

>stereotypical undereducated westerner

I take offense with this description. Take Christianity and Islam and you've got half the world's populations. Are those 3.5 billion people all stupid westerners?

Who said anything about stupid? I'm not sure why you dug that description up but I think it says more about your views than mine.

Atheism is about not believing in any God. That’s different than not believing in any religion.

Believing in god(s) and believing in religion is the same thing, is it not?

Nope. Religion is thinking you can SPECIFY god, and interpret it. Godel had some thoughts about that ;)

I'm not sure I agree. I think you're conflating religion with the broader term of spirituality, which indeed is not explicitly rejected by atheism. Religion as in theism / deism, however, is.

It’s not a matter of opinion, fortunately it’s a regular word in the English language that has an established meeting.

First definition I find of religion: "A set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs."

Almost every atheist will reject religion, given what religion typically is and which is captured pretty well in the definition above.

We’re not debating the definition of the term religion, but take a look at the definition for atheism. That’s what we’ve been discussing, what does it mean to be atheist?

This reminds me of my favorite Richard Feynman quote:

“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”

"For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it."

Or, indeed, any religions.

gag, pet peeve of mine. Religion is, to quote TeMPOraL "Religions based on the Bible tend to be half faiths, half community management handbooks."

you can generalize that statement very far; religion is one of the key "technologies" which allows communities to scale past 5K people. Think "city".

Thus religion has a very different purpose than physics. It is about psychological health on a community and individual level.

The stories of physics, on the other hand, "eerie ideas such as force field, wavefunction, observable,..." don't really tell you much about how to handle things when your neighbor's barking dog is frustrating you.

(insert snarky comment about engineering a force field to solve the problem)

Even assuming that the bible is the literal word of deity, it is inconsistent to believe that the creation stories of genesis are descriptions of actual physical processes. because that is not why deity put those stories there. because deity was talking using a language which is 1.5-3K years old (let's agree to not argue dates, I'll accept the date you prefer), and words like "world" and "universe" meant something very very different back then than they do today. So if it is deity's literal word, then it must literally mean what it meant in the context of that earlier culture.

https://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2009/08/size-doesnt-matter-...

TLDR: Importance does not equate to size, just as space does not equate to mass nor mass to value (value being the particular distribution of elements within a mass).

Given the sheer scale of it all, statistically there must be uncountable ants, and human-likes, and gods, and gods OF gods. Do we understand 'em? Of course not. So we make up human-scaled stories about 'em. What would ants say about us?

> BTW: The numbers involved in each description are also telling. Those used by religions are often small and comfortable for a human mind...

That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies[1]

1. https://biblehub.com/kjv/genesis/22-17.htm

It's certainly possible to have a religion that accounts for the grandeur of the universe, and there have certainly been many religious folks whose religious experience is heightened by their understanding of the cosmos, but I'd guess those folks have put a fair bit of their own efforts into such belief because IME the common teachings of the major religions imply that the actions of the humans that live in a tiny slice of history in a tiny piece of the cosmos are of major significance. I would argue that perceiving some of the grandeur of the universe may make it difficult for the most common teachings to really resonate without significant modification.

Also, for folks who are drawn to religion primarily due to "spiritual" experiences they've had with the religion -- where they experience a loss of self, a one-ness and connected-ness with others, and a distinct sense of clarity -- it may be that having a very similar experience in a non-religious context may lead to new beliefs about what that experience is or means.

It depends on what theism is to you. For many people [0] believe in God is tightly intertwined with the idea that this supernatural being has strong opinions about how life on Earth is to function. And it's hard to believe that when you look at the scale of the universe and how small our lives are relative to it all.

It's possibly to believe in God and think that God is too busy with the cosmos to be concerned with our tiny lives. But it isn't a very "useful" belief, in the sense that it's a belief with no practical implication.

[0] certainly those who grew up in Abrahamic religions, I'm not familiar enough with other schools of thought to comment

> It's possibly to believe in God and think that God is too busy with the cosmos to be concerned with our tiny lives. But it isn't a very "useful" belief, in the sense that it's a belief with no practical implication.

It would imply that God has limitations, which goes against the usual view (at least in abrahamic religions) of god being unlimited by definition. It would also invite the question of where those limitations come from. If that's not a practical enough implication, there would also be: dont rely on God for personal attention.

I think we're in agreement. What I meant by no practical implication was that if I'm an atheist and then I learn that there is in fact a God, but he's either too busy, limited, or otherwise uninterested in my life, then I can shrug off that information with no negative consequences. It doesn't matter to me if there's no God or if there's an uninvolved God, except as an academic question (ie no practical implication).

But if I'm an atheist and I learn that there's a God that cares about me or my behavior then I will likely have to change my lifestyle. Maybe I'll have to start praying, or giving charity, or stop stealing, or start dancing around a fire now and then so that the rain comes, or marry in a certain way, etc.

It's no surprise to me that the popular versions of God-belief out there describe a God that's very involved in Earthly affairs. Because otherwise, what's the point?

Many or most religions are concerned with what comes after life. To many people, that is the point.

Exactly. To my knowledge most religions teach that what comes after life depends, at least in part, in what we do during our lives. In other words, God is concerned with us and how we live on Earth. Which is remarkable, given how large the universe is and how apparently insignificant we are.

Why is it remarkable? The point is that (in Christianity), God is all-knowing, and doesn't suffer from the same limitations as humans, or ants.

> It's possibly to believe in God and think that God is too busy with the cosmos to be concerned with our tiny lives.

A counterpoint is this idea:

Imagine how much awe you feel on realising that the awesome scale of the universe is nothing to the even awesomer scale of God who can give personal attention to everyone's tiny lives throughout the entire universe!

Agreed. A religious person coming to terms with the magnitude of the universe either feels a humbling awe or struggles to reconcile the unbelievable idea that God made all this and is still interested in humanity.

Most religion is a way of explaining what can’t be explained through reason. Back in the day it was “Persephone is in Hades and Zeus is throwing angry lightning bolts” but now that we’ve figured out a lot of science, religion just talks about unfalsiable stuff like the creation of the universe and the afterlife. Not a stretch to imagine that those things are as imaginary as all the rest

It's not a direct relationship, but IMHO an indirect one.

Personally for me it is basically like this, that the Universe is so infinitely huge, somehow just calling it huge doesn't do it justice, wherein the concept of God or Gods as is defined by most Earth religions seems too tiny to describe an entity or a race of entities that could be the real God or Gods.

Moreover, even if the above mentioned entity or race of entities does exist, which created the Universe, I'm so infinitesimally tiny that they don't care about me, and certainly don't care about whether or not I pray to them.

In other words, the human concept of God or Gods is just one level above the humans. And, then if you add the fact that this one-level-above is also just a matter of faith and there is no evidence even of that, then the whole thing crumbles.

In other words, whether or not there is a God or Gods, has no bearing on me and my life and me and my life's decisions are not going to be bound by that.

Whether that is atheism, or being agnostic, or something else can be left undefined. It's more like, I don't care. It is simply that my life's decisions are not going to be in any way influenced by whether or not God or Gods exist, whatever the right word for that is.

BTW, the Hindu cosmology [0] does delve into such philosophical things, and perhaps my Hindu upbringing has something to do with my beliefs wherein asking such questions and pondering over them is allowed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_cosmology

It's more like, I don't care. It is simply that my life's decisions are not going to be in any way influenced by whether or not God or Gods exist, whatever the right word for that is.

And yet here you are, spending your time and energy making the decision to post on an internet forum about whether you believe God does or does not exist. Seems like you have been influenced and you do care.

If you truly didn't care (roughly the same level of care someone puts into their thoughts on unicorns and leprechauns), you'd spend exactly zero energy talking about the subject. Keep searching and testing for the truth my friend, it is out there.

Interestingly, I know many scientists who take a general theistic worldview (might I say universeview?) despite (or, I think, because of) this vast universe. But their perspective generally has little to do with organized religion and often in really just an intelligent creator, who may or may not share qualities with “God”.

Alan Watts talks about this idea in The Wisdom of Insecurity. I don't have the book to hand so this is the closest quote I could find:

“The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism. We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.”

I'll try to answer your comment more directly. The other responses are good, but they're not exactly responding to your comment about the parent commenter's change from agnosticism to atheism upon learning the scale of the universe.

I've had a vaguely similar experience, but over a longer period, not a single "moment", and not entirely to do with the physical sciences.

They way I look at it is this: To ants, we are gods. We can provide an unimaginable bounty to them by simply dropping the remains of a sandwich. We can destroy their entire world with callous indifference. A step in the wrong place is all it takes to crush an anthill.

But do we care about an individual ant's good behaviour? No. Not in the slightest. I don't meet out punishment on one particular worker ant because it failed to respect the queen, or move enough seeds one day.

Simply put, we are so far removed from ants, so far above them, so much greater, that there can be no meaningful interaction of this type. The UN general assembly does not give a flying fuck about the misdeeds of a particular ant in some particular ant-mound in some particular forest, in some national park, in some country far away. Conversely, an ant can have no concept of the latest UN resolution's effects on international tourism and its side-effects, such as the likelihood of an increased number of dropped sandwiches in national parks. There is no though that an ant can possibly have that can encompass even a fraction of such concepts. They're simply too abstract, too advanced for such tiny brains.

Any God that could possibly have made a Universe as vast and complex as ours would be similarly far removed from us. We would be ants to such a God. Personal, individual communication of any type would be hopeless. A "relationship", as Christians like to say, would be absurd in the extreme. Ants don't have relationships with senators, or kings, or generals. It's simply unthinkable.

Science could study such a God, if it existed, but it wouldn't be entirely clear if it would be possible to actually gain a truly meaningful understanding. A superficial, surface knowledge, perhaps, but that is all. Prayer would certainly be an utter waste of time. Holy books could not have possibly be written or inspired by such a God. Rituals would be meaningless. Rites and celebrations would also be embarrassingly pointless.

I have had the same exact analogy of of God -> Humans -> Ants in my head for so long, that I can no longer remember if it was my own thoughts, or something I've read. I was literally taken aback when I read this comment. Did you read it somewhere?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLZW8Deq8vE

It's a pretty common analogy. I got it from https://youtu.be/rhFK5_Nx9xY?t=238

There are two basic reasons to give up on religion. Reason One: It's obviously silly. Reason Two: Some personal epiphany.

For a lot of people, Reason One just isn't enough. They need a story to go along with their revelation. They need to look at a picture of a galaxy, or watch their religious grandmother die slowly, or read about pedophilic priests, or whatever.

People are irrational.

I think it's because the more we learn about the universe in which we exist, the more and more apparent it becomes that we are not a special part of it, that there is so much more to it than tiny slice of space and time we happen to occupy. The universe existed long before us, and it will continue long after us. We are inconsequential. This is all pretty contrary to what most religions tell us.

Personally I have no reason to trust or believe what clergy say (they're as human as the rest of us and make lots of unverifiable claims), so all I have to go one is what we collectively discover about our universe.

This. I went to thinking the Universal God is more supreme than the Christian God

The crazy thing is the amount of stuff we are able to observe is constantly shrinking. As the universe expands faster and faster, eventually the stuff at the far edges is moving away faster than the speed of light so we will never get there or even know it exists without records.

Sounds like we're in a black hole.

Or in a video game where the background is an unreachable layer.

Ironically, I realized yesterday that if the universe was destined for the Big Crunch (until quite recently, this was believed to be a possibility), then we'd be literally living inside the event horizon of an universe-sized black hole!

A black hole containing all matter in the universe wouldn't be much denser than the current average density of the universe. Spacetime expanding sorta helps keep things from blowing apart.

It's an interesting factoid that blackhole mass isn't related to their volume but their surface area, so by adding mass they grow a lot faster than you'd expect and density goes down fast. Larger black holes are barely denser than water.

I was surprised by this and I don't think your sentence is entirely clear, but the ending figure seems to check out. I think it's more clear to say "the radius of a black hole increases sub-linearly with its mass" (specifically, the square root of mass).

Sagittarius A*, the closest black hole, is 4.1 million solar masses, so its Schwarzchild radius is 12.1 million km, so its density is 0.25 kg/m^3, which is about 1/5 as dense as air at sea level--much less than water.

A black hole made from Jupiter would have a Schwarzchild radius of 2.8 meters, so its density would be... denser than a neutron star.

Hang on, it’s been a long time since I studied physics at uni in the mid 80s, but isn’t the Schwarzchild radius just the boundary which marks the point within which even light cannot escape gravity? A black hole is a singularity, a point (if non-rotating) of infinite density. I didn’t think the mass of the back hole was evenly distributed within the Schwarzchild boundary (which is a mathematical boundary, not a physical boundary such as the surface of a body). Or have I missed something?

Depends on how you look at it.

If you look into holographic theory (which I prefer personally) then the entire mass of a black hole is represented as information on the surface of the black hole, explaining the relation between mass and surface not mass and volume. This solves some problems with the information theorem (no information can be lost) by presenting all information contained within a black hole on it's surface where it can be read, atleast theoretically. (Here information and mass would be considered equivalent)

To some extend, it still holds true if you just consider the mass of a black hole to be it's singularity and it's volume the volume that fills the event horizon.

edit: Also consider; if you placed an equivalent amount of mass in space that occupies less volume than the event horizon would, it would automatically be a black hole (and note; the schwarzschild radius is not necessarily the event horizon, the event horizon can be tighter if the black hole rotates)

The relevant figure is that the radius grows faster than mass^(1/3). What it does, because it grows with mass^(1/2).

If it grew more than linearly with mass, we wold see the same reducing density, just faster.

For extra mind blowing, do compare the Schwarzschild mass of the observable universe and its radius.

Spoiler: gurl ner abg whfg fvzvyne, gurer ner gurbergvpny erfhygf gung gurl unir gb or rdhny. Hasbeghangryl gur cncre vgfrys nffhzrq jnl zber culfvpf xabjyrqtr guna V unir. Ohg, guvf znxrf bhe havirefr pbafvfgrag jvgu gur fvzcyr qrsvavgvba bs oynpx ubyr ("n znff ragveryl jvguva vgf Fpujnemfpuvyq enqvhf").

So I quickly did a back-of-envelope calculation using [0] for source of mass and diameter of the universe.

Then I used the formula given in [1]: r = (2 G M) / (c^2).

    You have: (2 * G * 1.5 * 10^56 grams ) / (c^2)
    You want: lightyears
            * 2.3548373e+10

So about 23,548,373,000 ly of SR, while the radius of the observable universe is given as ~46,500,000,000 ly. So the ordinary-matter ratio is about half the density of a black hole. Not quite there, but still _much_ closer than I would have thought!

If we account for not just ordinary matter but dark matter (a ratio of 4.9% to 26.8%) the picture is different:

    You have: (2 * G * (1.5 * 10^56 grams + (1.5/4.9*26.8) * 10^56 grams) ) / (c^2)
    You want: lightyears
            * 1.5234355e+11

So the SR then would be about 5 times larger. But I have no idea whether dark matter would count towards the black hole mass and SR, and I don't know if anyone does.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius

(The scientific calculator I used, which is awesome every day is "units" btw: https://linux.die.net/man/1/units)

Yes, dark matter has mass, this is its defining characteristic: it seems to be a detectable mass, just doesn't interact electromagnetically.

In any case, it's important to note the Schwarzchild model is a spherically symmetrical ball. Mass in our Universe seems more or less uniformly dispersed (with some anisotropy). Without a center for mass to collapse, I suspect the black hole dynamics don't apply.

Hint: Caesar cipher

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/2/140218-black-...

For me it worked in the opposite direction, the more I learned how all the World elements are connected, how laws of Physics made live possible, how those laws are connected with the logical rules that our World has to obey (like causality) the more I become convinced that all this had to be designed.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1)

That's cool. I hope you can find and be satisfied with the materialistic explanation of the sheer awe you are feeling when you think about all these galaxies.

Jokes aside, atheism is a religion (as in fundamentalist belief system), and not a nice one either. Being agnostic probably keeps your mind more flexible [citation needed].

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