Is "Something" More Likely than "Nothing?"

by Jonathan Bellot

Why is there something rather than nothing? The question seems valid at first glance, and probably at second and third glances, as well. It seems easy to imagine a "world" where there is "nothing," but to have this vast universe around us seems somehow special, somehow worthy of wonder. There could have been nothing, the question implies, but look: we've got something, and that something is a big something, and it demands an explanation. It's all very intuitive. However, there's something--to use that devious word--very wrong with the question of why there's something rather than nothing. Beneath the intuitiveness, it reveals a drastic and unfounded presupposition about the entire universe: that "something" is more likely than "nothing." I say "unfounded" not because the opposite is true, but because we simply don't actually know, despite all our feelings on the matter, that one is more likely than the other. 

Grunbaum

Indeed, if you ask the man considered by many arguably the greatest living philosopher of space and time, Adolf Grunbaum, about this, he'll likely say what he has said before: that those who think "nothing" is more likely than "something" are unjustifiably prejudiced towards what Grunbaum calls "the Null World" (nothingness). The problem Grunbaum refers to as "the Spontaneity of Nothingness"--our quickness to assume that we should only have nothingness around us but, miracle of miracles, we have "something." There is no reason to think that having "something" is somehow less likely than "nothing," Grunbaum says. And, if you stop to think of it, there's reason in that. Where on Earth did we get the idea that the things that allow for the universe to exist--even down to forces like gravity--had to have been created somehow? It's intuitive to think that something being somewhere implies that it was somehow put there or arrived there in some manner, and this is indeed the case inside the universe, but why should the universe, taken as a whole--the proverbial "something"--be less likely to exist than no universe? 

Copleston and Russell

As Bertrand Russell put it in his famous radio debate with Father Copleston in 1948, "the universe is just there, and that's all." Russell also said, going back to the idea of the whole universe being distinct from what goes on with the individual things inside it, that it is wrong to assume the universe itself has a cause just because things inside the universe have causes. "I can illustrate what seems to me your fallacy," Russell said when Copleston brought up the something-rather-than-nothing question, the question of why the totality of things--the universe--exists. "Every man who exists has a mother," Russell continued, "and it seems to me your argument is that therefore the human race must have a mother, but obviously the human race hasn't a mother." In other words, what applies to individual members of a set may not apply to the set taken as a whole--and, as a result, asking why there is a universe rather than no universe is to assume that everything that makes the universe possible, even down to forces, is to assume that the laws that apply in the universe must apply to the universe as a whole. While this seems intuitive and sensible, we actually have no evidence that this is true. And we also have no evidence that "nothing" is more likely than "something."

This can be a bit startling. All of a sudden, it seems possible that, even if the universe emerged in the Big Bang, whatever makes the formation of univeres possible--the "quantum foam" that produces "bubbles" of universes due to gravity, for instance, to paraphrase Stephen Hawking--may have simply always been there, and we were wrong to assign a probability to it at all. Maybe there is a probability to universes forming out of this quantum foam, but not to the quantum foam itself being there. In a conversation with Jim Holt in Why Does the World Exist: An Existential Detective Story, Grunbaum says that while he will "grant that nothingness may be the simplest [thing to imagine] conceptually," we still have to ask why this concept applies to actual existence, to reality--that is, "what makes simplicity into an ontological imperative?" And, lest you think that "before" the Big Bang there was indeed absolute nothingness, Grunbaum adds that "Physics does not allow us to extrapolate back and say, 'Before this singularity there was nothingness. That's an elementary mistake...the lesson of the Big Bang model is that before the initial state there was no time.'" As Holt writes later, reflecting on his discussion with Grunbaum, the singularity is where relativity breaks down and where time ceases to have clear meaning. 

"Unlike the beginning of a concert," he writes, "the singularity at the beginning of the universe is not an event in time. Rather, it is a temporal boundary or edge. There are no more moments of time 'before' t = 0. So there was never a time when Nothingness prevailed. And there was no 'coming into being'--at least not a temporal one. As Grunbaum is fond of saying, even though the universe is finite in age, it has always existed, if by 'always' you mean at all instants of time." And so, "[i]f there was never a transition from Nothing to Something, there is no need to look for a cause, divine or otherwise, that brought the universe into existence." The steady-state theory, basically, has been married to the Big Bang in one sense--while the universe did "appear" at the Big Bang, it has, strictly speaking, always been around, and there is no "before" the Big Bang in which there was nothing at all. 

Krauss

Even Lawrence Krauss, famous and infamous for his Universe from Nothing of 2012 and a speech by the same name from 2009, does not say, contrary to popular understanding, that there was nothingness and then there was something, but that virtual nothingness--not literal nothingness, as he acknowledges in the book--is actually a sea of virtual particles popping into and out of existence, which is the likely origin of our universe. In other words, the laws of quantum mechanics still apply. Indeed, if this is the case, while there would always have been "something" in the form of the virtual particles, their frequent appearance would suggest even more strongly that "something" is more likely to exist than "nothing."

And, more simply, Grunbaum asks, "What could possibly be more commonplace empirically than that something or other does exist?" In other words, we have been observing something since we could observe at all, and "something" is the easiest of all things to observe--indeed, the only thing we have ever truly observed. To observe nothing is a hell of a thing; I'm not sure it's even possible, given that nothing is, well, nothing. And that leads to the question being flipped on its head: what makes us think "nothing" is the natural way for things to be, and "something" is unusual? Do we have any evidence to prove that nothingness is, in fact, far more likely than anything--again, even down to forces--existing? And the fact is that we don't. The whole bit of probability that something is less likely than nothing is based on a presupposition, not an actual observed fact. Again, this common-sense-but-meaningful observation from Grunbaum doesn't make the question about something and nothing into a pseudo-question (as Grunbaum calls it) we can dispense with, but it does mean we need to stop looking at the universe, the something, around us as if we are standing outside it; after all, from that view, it is easy to think there is the universe and then black empty space around it, but we have no idea what, if anything, can be said to be outside the universe, except perhaps for other universes, and it's not at all clear that other universes exist, popular as the multiverse hypothesis is. By looking at the universe from where we are, not an articifial invented position "outside" of it, we see the something we know, and there is not as yet any clear proof that there is nothingness or that nothingness is more common than its opposite (though we must be careful here too not to speak of nothingness as if it is a distinct thing, like that "empty" space. In short, this is far from resolved, but we at least know we have "something" so far).

None of this makes God impossible, mind you. Indeed, William Lane Craig, attempting to get around the problem of time and the singularity, suggests that God, while himself timeless (whatever that somewhat cheap expression may mean), may have produced the universe at the same moment he intended to create it, so intention and creation are all concurrent, and there is no need to say God existed "before" anything else began to exist (despite God being, in Craig's view, eternal and necessary). But it's very odd to imagine an intention literally being simultaneous with an action--downright impossible, actually, going by anything we know about neuroscience. (Of course, to assume God's mind, if God exists, is like a human's is to commit the same fallacy Russell chided Copleston for, but that does not mean anything one says about God is therefore somehow worthy of having a free logical pass.) It's a real problem to simply get rid of God's involvement with the singularity by saying that he is "timeless," since this word has no clear meaning--or none I've seen as yet. And, if you imagine that God and the universe--the "something"--are one and the same, as in pantheism (but not panentheism), there's no real contradiction. And Krauss himself, in his book, says that "on the basis of logic alone one cannot rule out such a deistic view of nature"--not a view he accepts or that has evidence going for it, but one that can't absolutely be ruled out. But, if you imagine that God is a personal god, and that this god is logically necessary--that this god, in other words, cannot not exist--and is not equivalent to the universe, you may have run into some trouble. Quite aside from the temporal problems raised by relativity breaking down at the Big Bang, the fact remains that we cannot assume "having a universe" is less likely than "nothing" and that, therefore, the universe's creation is somehow special and requires a special creator. This assumption is just that--an assumption. Whatever allows for the production of universes, like gravity in the theoretical model Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow present in The Grand Design, may simply take the place of God as a "necessary" force--and maybe there's no real reason to think this is strange or special.

My intution rages at this. And it's true there is a lot we have to learn. It may, in fact, be true that something is less likely than nothing. Who knows. But that's precisely the point: no one knows. And, going by what we have to observe around us, and everything we have discovered in cosmology so far, it would appear that nothingness is not, in fact, somehow more likely than something. And even if it is, and we all just popped into existence in a way so absurd that even Camus would crack a smile, none of that has to involve a divine creator. God, of course, could have popped into existence along with the universe--but how superfluous is that, eh? Our origins are still shrouded in mystery, hidden behind a veil we may never be able to part, but things still seem better for us at the moment than for personal gods.

Arif Ahmed

Towards the end of a 2011 debate in Cambridge, in which the question under discussion was whether or not belief in God is a delusion, the Cambridge philosopher Arif Ahmed made a curious point. He had been talking about the necessity of God--"necessity" meaning that God (or any "necessary" thing) simply must exist, cannot not exist. (It would, indeed, be logically contradictory to say this necessary thing does not exist.) Ahmed said that "nowhere" in the book he uses to teach formal logic to first-year students of Philosophy, Introducing Formal Logic, "is there any logical principle that shows a contradiction in the premise that 'nothing exists.'" There is nothing logically contradictory, Ahmed asserts, in the statement "nothing exists"--but, if this is true, it means there is a logically sound statement one can make that does not include God or any necessary being at all. Therefore, it is wrong to assume that God's necessity--or anything's necessity--is, well, necessary. Even God's necessity, then, is suspect.

Ahmed and his partner lost the debate, seemingly largely because many people did not want to cast votes that appeared to insult the opposite side by saying they were deluded. But the real loser may be our age-old question, "why is there something rather than nothing?" We must elevate the discussion and stop making assumptions like the ones embedded in this question, even if those assumptions have dug deep roots inside us. By doing so, things may become much more confusing and chaotic for a time--but that can be a good thing, if that confusion and chaos leads us closer to the truth. And, while our intuitions are often correct, we must be prepared to accept that some of them may be very wrong.


Some links: Russell/Copleston debate: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t-oME07OVI
Lawrence Krauss's "A Universe from Nothing" lecture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjaGktVQdNg
Cambridge debate with Arif Ahmed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYlQL-Gakh0

For the New Year!

So, it's 2013.

Normally, that would start off a chain reaction: what resolutions I made last year (and perhaps did not keep), what resolutions I'll make this year, why there's promise this year, and so forth. I've included a strip from my favorite comic, and what may just be among the greatest comics of all time, Calvin and Hobbes, below, in which Calvin (named after the theologian) discusses the problems of New Year's resolutions.

But I want to do something a bit different. I'm going to put down a list of things I plan to do, organized by categories. Each is relatively open-ended. Feel free to take those categories and list your own resolutions, or add your own categories in the comments or in your own personal list. Enjoy!

Books, Films. As an English major, I find myself reading a lot of books. But I could always be reading more. Goal: find an extra hour or so to read each day. Make a list of books to check out, and make sure I can check them off the list at the end of the year. But leave the list open. And I'll read widely: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and everything, or nearly everything, in-between. Same goes for films. I'll try to further develop myself, acknowledging I have a lot to learn--but I'll also remind myself, if needed, that I've managed to learn some things so far. It's easy to forget, after all, that we've reached anywhere at all.


People and their Ideas. Despite what I wrote above about books, I won't forget to spend time with the people I love, and I'll try to understand the people I don't love more. I'll try to put myself in the shoes of people whose minds I don't understand, like religious fundamentalists and Young Earth creationists (assuming I can find the shoes), so I can see if we can actually have a good dialogue. Empathy, and all that good stuff. And I will never assume I know all there is to know on a topic, or that my opponent/discussion partner can't teach me something new. And if I'm wrong, I have to be intellectually honest and admit it.


Issues I Care About. When an issue comes up, be it at home or abroad, and I have a chance to let my voice be heard in some way--be it by submitting a letter to an editor, a commentary, or trying to do something more visible--I will try to do so. Little efforts sometimes pay off, sometimes become big efforts--but only if we make the effort.


Stop Hiding. If something is important to you, like a cause, belief, or part of my identity, it might be worth finally sitting down with someone you trust and getting it out into the open--or just letting everyone know in a sudden social-media blitz. You may find idiots if you do the latter (and some fun screencaps for the future, no doubt), but you may also find friends who sympathize. And, more importantly, you'll have taken a step towards being closer to who you think you are. (Whether or not the self is an illusion of the brain, possibly like free will, but that's a whole different article.)

Have a great new year, from the Caribbean Freethinkers' Society!
- Jonathan Bellot

It Might Get Better: LGBT Rights in the Caribbean

by Jonathan Bellot

In a proposal from June of 2012 that briefly made him infamous on a variety of pro-gay websites, the Minister of Education of the Commonwealth of Dominica wrote that he had teamed up with former secondary school principal Simeon Joseph to combat “deviance and homosexuality” in a number of schools on the island. And eradicating homosexuality was a significant factor in fighting this deviance, Education Minister Peter St. Jean asserted. By stamping out such evil and disgraceful behavior, the Minister assured Dominicans, the schools would be well on their way to becoming safe havens for normality, places no longer ruled more by the devil than by God. Indeed, St. Jean noted in September of 2012 that the problem of homosexuality, violence, and general deviance was bigger than he had imagined and that he now had to form a “committee” to deal with the matter. For gay young Dominicans, the message was anything but gay: you are deviant, and you must change your desires, or face the consequences.

Portia Simpson-Miller

St. Jean’s proposal was hardly the first to demonize homosexuality in the island, much less the Caribbean (though St. Jean’s is all the more notable coming from a minister of, of all things, education). The Attorney-General of Antigua, Justin Simon, went on record in 2011 when asked about a repeal of the buggery law to make his stance clear: “there will be no change in the law,” he said, “being gay is morally wrong,” and, in case it was not clear, “I’m still homophobic.” Bruce Golding, the former prime minister of Jamaica, is well-remembered, among other things, for saying on BBC Hard Talk in 2008 that he does “not know” that a Jamaica in which homosexuals can be in the cabinet “is necessarily the direction in which I want my country to go” and does not want pro-gay lobby groups to change Jamaica’s values, while an extraordinary (though obscure) immigration law in Trinidad preventing gays from even entering the island briefly made international waves in 2007, when Elton John, who had been booked to perform there, came up against church leaders. Elton John made it in, and since then, Trinidad, like the other islands, has battled against the issue. However, both Jamaica and Trinidad may be on their way to creating more equitable landscapes for gays: Portia Simpson-Miller, current Prime Minister of Jamaica, famously said she supports civil rights for the LGBT community during her election campaign, and, more recently Kamla Persad-Bissessar, Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, has been at work with Minister of Gender, Youth, and Child Development, Marlene Coudray, to draft a gender policy that will end discrimination against individuals based on (among other things) sexual orientation.

Why the fuss over homosexuality? And, more on point: is there a legitimate reason for granting gays in the Caribbean rights they enjoy elsewhere in the world—the right to civil unions or same-sex marriage, the right to not be discriminated against at school or in the workplace, etc? At first, if you’re liberal on this issue, the answer to the second question might seem simple: yes, yes, and hurry up with it already so we can move on. Some islands have abolished their laws making buggery illegal, after all, and Saba, while part of the Netherlands, has made the pioneering step to not simply recognize but allow same-sex marriage. My own kneejerk reaction is to say “yes” as well. But the question is more complex than a simple “yes” can admit because of how deep assumptions and misunderstandings about homosexuality go in some islands. And to see why the question is complex, we need to look into the first question: what the big fuss over homosexuality is.

The most obvious source of antagonism over homosexuality comes from the bible’s references to men lying with men as with women being an abomination and to the popular interpretation of Sodom and Gomorrah’s destruction as stemming from God’s displeasure at the homosexuality of its inhabitants. Bring up homosexuality, be it in person or in an article online, and you can count on more than a little religious fanaticism. I’ll return to this issue later, but three quick points are relevant: it is by no means clear the Sodom and Gomorrah story refers to homosexuality; it is a serious question why those who proclaim themselves Christian obsess over this rule and not over the other rules near it, including the infamous ones: do not eat shellfish, do not wear clothes spun of multiple fabrics, etc.; and, this may be the biggest hurdle gays have to face in the Caribbean and is one reason getting rid of these laws quickly may not be for the best. So deeply rooted in so many islands is Christianity, in particular the evangelical versions that appeared in the 20^th century, that to decriminalize buggery and in particular to legalize same-sex unions or marriages is to potentially endanger gays in the islands. But I’ll return to this shortly.

Another source of antagonism I have seen comes from race and heritage—specifically the idea that, in Africa prior to the Europeans getting involved, homosexuality was simply not an issue because it was not something any true African allowed or was involved in. Homosexuality, and in particular the LGBT civil rights movement, is a product of the white man in the West, so the argument goes, and one does not need any biblical verses to see that homosexuality was distasteful to descendants of Africans long before their ancestors even knew the bible existed. This argument, while not as pervasive as the religious one, appears relatively often in muted form. It is part of a series of sometimes very broad anti-Eurocentric arguments against a variety of practices and ideas, arguments employed by Africans and those descended from African ancestors alike. The most striking of such arguments is a recent claim by the proudly Zulu president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, that owning a dog is "not African" and is a "white" practice that should not be employed in Africa; similarly, Zuma claimed earlier this year, polygamy (part of his heritage) is the natural state of things, single women are abominations, and women are trained to be, well, women by bearing multiple children. More common racial claims, ones I heard myself growing up in Dominica, were that certain types of music and food were “white” and others “black”: dancehall and hip-hop were easily “black,” while electronica in general (but especially techno) and rock of almost all kinds were “white.”

These claims, while too sweeping to possibly be correct, often contain kernels of cultural truth: hip-hop, like jazz (which it partly evolved from), was developed by African-Americans, certain types of food are eaten more by cultures containing dominant populations of a certain color, etc. But none of this makes them “black” or “white.” And the fact remains that whether or not a society practiced something in the past, what matters more for human rights is what people practice today. Individuals should listen to and do what they enjoy, regardless of cultural norms.

Other common arguments are easier to deal with, since these stem from misunderstandings or propaganda from the anti-gay. These are the claims that homosexuality is “unnatural,” that it does not occur in any other animal but humans (though most users of such an argument would not accept evolution enough to accept that humans are animals), that homosexuality spreads like a virus, that allowing gay marriage will turn the world gay and cause the end of reproduction around the world, and that homosexuality is equivalent or inextricably linked to pedophilia and sex tourism.

The first thing to say here is that over 1,500 species of animals have been confirmed to engage in homosexual activity—and that’s only the confirmed species, not the ones suspected to, as well. (This is not an argument for following whatever animals do, however, since many of those species also engage in less savory practices, including rape and necrophilia. Rather, this is only a clarification of a claim that humans are the only animals to engage in homosexual activity.). Given that homosexuality is not a virus and that there is no evidence it is a choice (it seems there may be some genetic basis for it, though this is unclear; Richard Dawkins describes it as a misfiring of the brain in The God Delusion), it is impossible for it to spread if people are “exposed” to TV shows containing gay characters. All that can happen is that those who are already gay or bisexual may begin to understand their feelings better by seeing people they can identify with. As for the pedophilia/prostitution claim, which I have never seen anywhere more prominent than in Uganda, this is simply false, since pedophilia is separate from hetero- and homosexuality, and prostitution is an act that has nothing to do with orientation whatsoever, since you can as easily prostitute grinning dolphins as flamboyantly gay men. A pedophile can be gay or straight; there is no reason to link homosexuality with pedophilia. Moreover, the issue with pedophilia, both on an emotional and legal level, is primarily that of consent, and it’s clear that a normal young child is not in the same position to give his or her consent as a normal adult. Homosexual intercourse between two consenting adults, therefore, is very different from intercourse between any adult and a child, since the latter is, in many ways, closer to rape.

A chilling possibility?

With all this said, it sounds great to say we should have gay rights in the Caribbean. And I’m in full support. But I’m also a realist here. And it’s quite clear that, if I could brush a magic wand over the law books of the islands and decriminalize buggery and allow same-sex marriage across the board, the problem would not suddenly be solved. If anything, the problems might, at least for a while, be significantly worse. There would likely be riots, calls to miniature crusades by the evangelists, and more blood spilled than I would like. This is a somewhat absurd hypothetical scenario, of course, as opposed to more drawn-out legislation, but there is nothing to suggest it would be false. The infamous recent beating of a presumably gay young man at U-Tech in Jamaica, while tame compared to other such beatings and killings in the island, shows that the mob mentality to surround, attack, and antagonize “the other,” in this case the gay male, is alive and well there, and it is similar in other islands. Of course, the number of persons in support of gay rights, or, at least, indifferent to homophobia, is on the rise, primarily among young people who have gone to school or to live abroad in societies where homosexuality is not stigmatized to the same degree, but I fear that we still have a long way to go before people in general can be more comfortable with gay rights in the Caribbean.

But here’s the thing: we need to make those steps. While there has been international pressure from America and Britain in particular to stop abuses of human rights for gays in the region, we also have such models to look to as Uganda, which has done precisely the opposite: Uganda has recently signed in a law that, prior to being softened up, was rightly known best as the “Kill the Gays” bill. Uganda’s model is not the way to go. And while some people may say that this is an extreme example of homophobia, one far beyond anything even in Jamaica, this is simply not the case, in the sense that the seeds for such backwards-looking laws are already planted, amidst a few seeds of progressive opposition to the mindset that allows for such laws. We need to plant more of those progressive seeds. We cannot make the Caribbean a welcome harbor to the LGBT community overnight—eBay has stopped selling magic potions, after all, and few obeah men or women will help me with such otherworldly legislation—but we can make it a welcome harbor for tomorrow, or a few tomorrows from now. We need to attack the problem at the root, so it will be easier for better things to grow. Easier said than done, I know, but possible to be done.

We need to speak up. We need to keep this issue in the public eye. There must be more visibility for the LGBT community—more specifically, we must not allow the issue to be forgotten. The more we make the LGBT community visible and real, the more it will become humanized, and the more we will slip into our opponents’ minds the fact that gay people are not, surprisingly, evil monstrosities that must be beaten up and stoned.

But we also need to be careful how we speak. As much as I acknowledge that religion is a central problem here, attacking Christianity and Islam (those the central problem-makers) with broad, militant strokes is not the best solution. We must be prepared to have discussions, and we must be prepared to answer questions: why the bible is not the end-all-be-all of truth and advice, why we should not cherry-pick verses we like, etc. But we must do so empathetically. After all, there are many gay Christians and Muslims, and while I don’t deny the contradiction in that, it is a fact that we cannot ignore. The goal is not so much to eradicate religion as to eradicate homophobia, and so our first goal should be to show that one can still be religious and accept the LGBT community for what it is, without demonizing them as sinners. The next step may be to show more general problems with religion, but this is a much larger step than the first, and so we must go one step at a time if we’re to make realistic progress: that is, those of us, like me, who are nonbelievers can say so, but so as not to isolate our audience, we must also show the reality that many liberal Christians and Muslims accept the LGBT community, and then we can move from there.

We also need to acknowledge that many people simply know nothing about gay, bisexual, or transgender individuals (and transgender individuals will be a whole other post, given that transgenderism is related but nonetheless requires more nuance) and have gut reactions of disgust. I admit I have similar reactions at the idea of a man being attracted to a man, since I cannot personally see the male body as something to be attracted to. But even so, I fully acknowledge the legitimacy of such attraction for those who have it. We need to work to make the very idea of homosexuality more humanized, more everyday. Otherwise, the LGBT community will remain “the other,” a fringe group vying for superiority via transoceanic lobby groups.

The next time this issue comes up, please take the time to contribute in some way: a comment, a letter to an editor, a rebuttal, a petition, art, stories, something. After all, if you’re a heterosexual, imagine being in other shoes: being forced to go to secret areas to be among others like you, areas that, if discovered, could lead to your doom, all because you dance a different dance, a dance that should hurt no one, but that you must dance in private. Just imagine not being able to be who you are, to live a false life you hate, to be driven to depression, self-hate, and suicidal thoughts. The skeleton key to dealing with homophobia, you see, is empathy.

As Kei Miller writes in “This Dance” in his collection, Fear of Stones, a story that humanizes the struggles of a gay youth in Jamaica: “Jeremy would find a girl to hold on to. Always the one with the strong back, the wire waist, the foot movements, he could on, and wine down low low low low. Take the woman to the ground with him. And people used to say, ‘Lawwd, that yout’ can dance eeeeh.’

“But that wasn’t his dance.

“Wasn’t it.

“Almost his dance, but not quite.”

Let’s work to open the floor, so all may dance their dance in peace.

Small Islands, Big Eyes: How Jack the Ripper, the Cosmos, and Myth-Making Are Connected

by Jonathan Bellot

In the autumn of 1888, a series of extraordinary murders began in Whitechapel in London. Whitechapel was well-known for its prostitutes—its “tarts,” who, to use a wondrous Victorian euphemism, would take their customers to “Hairyfordshire” for some action—and the victims of the Whitechapel murders were female prositutes—five in particular. I say “in particular” because many more than five female corpses turned up that dark autumn, but five stand out for the cold, clinical brutality the killer—if not killers—exacted upon their bodies. Their bodies had been sliced up and eviscerated, organs removed with a surgeon’s precision. While murder was nothing new in Whitechapel, the brutality was, and the story of a mystery killer—even from the first corpse on—spread throughout London and beyond. The precision of the murders, alongside the darkness—literal or otherwise—cloaking the identity of the killer, shocked and excited the public.

The murderer soon received a name. Or, more accurately, someone sent Scotland Yard a letter that supplied the murderer with a name, a name that would become nearly as well-known (if as little popularly understood) as Shakespeare’s. (And Shakespeare, as we see with Titus Andronicus and the impressive kill counts in Richard III and other plays, was not above gory details himself.)

I’m speaking, of course, about Jack the Ripper.

Even after 124 years, we’re no closer to unmasking the Ripper. Many tried, of course. Queen Victoria’s personal psychic, Robert Lees, supposedly declared that he had used his clairvoyance to determine that her personal physician, William Gull, was the murderer; a discredited conspiracy theory by Stephen Knight goes so far as to claim that Queen Victoria personally ordered Gull to assassinate the women because they had attempted to blackmail her due to an affair with one of them Prince Albert had had, and that Gull’s brutality was in reality part lunacy and part Masonic ritual. The solitary and possibly homosexual cricket enthusiast and teacher, Montague Druitt, is another possibility. Then, of course, there are those who claim that there is either no one Jack the Ripper or that “Jack” was a woman. (Incidentally, scholars of Ripper lore—Ripperologists—deem most of the letters from “Jack the Ripper” fabrications, but the one person who was caught writing such a letter was a woman.) Because of how open the case is, the possible identities of “Jack” and his victims have expanded, in fiction, to include not merely human beings but no less than a gigantic version of Mr. Hyde (Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), Jack Seward from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula, in which Seward’s victims are vampire prostitutes), and, as Kim Newman notes in “Drac the Ripper,” an article in The Ripperologist (#60, 2005), just about any literary figure from the 1880s, from Count Dracula himself to Algy from The Importance of Being Earnest (“Bunburying” takes on new meaning here!) to H. G. Wells’ Martians and Marlow, Joseph Conrad’s extraordinary narrator.

In short: we don’t know, but we want to know, and yet we don’t want to know, because that would spoil the mystery. Mystery, after all, can be both beautiful and infuriating, and yet we might prefer that bit of fury to having the case put to rest.

Why resurrect Jack (or Jill?) the Ripper? Well, there’s something significant in the way people responded to those killings. Although the killings took place in a small area of London, in a tiny patch of the globe, they quickly took on grand dimensions. The strangeness of the crimes, alongside, perhaps, a society desiring a new thing to wonder and shudder about, generated a myth. Perhaps there was no Jack the Ripper, per se, or, if there was, he, she, or they were nothing like the legends. But people wanted to believe in something. They wanted excitement, danger. In many ways, the murders were just what they wanted—though those who actually saw the gruesome bodies might not agree. What should have been a blip on history’s radar became a myth that has lasted over a century and shows no sign of dying away. Murder, of course, is no minor thing--but murder, unfortunately, is also no uncommon thing.

It is worth looking at how this idea—taking something relatively small and making it into something grand, into a great legend—may apply to how many people view the Earth in relation to the rest of the universe. After all, in a sense, we tend to do the same thing. We are tiny, scarcely even blips on a cosmic radar, specks on a vast map God might lose sight of for thousands of years if he had the misfortune to blink or sneeze. The Earth is utterly nothing, size-wise, compared to the Milky Way galaxy where we live, to say nothing of the billions of other galaxies out there. And the Milky Way alone contains at least 809 (as of September 20th, 2012) confirmed exoplanets—planets outside our solar system, planets with their own suns and moons, planets with their own valleys, cliffs, icy seas, storms, and—perhaps—life forms, be they microbes or multicellular pranksters that tease Americans as they drive along dark highways. There are likely millions of planets just in our galaxy, and if the same is true for other galaxies, there are too many planets to conceive of. The Earth, in other words, is only special so far, only special because we have not confirmed that life exists on another planet. If we do that, we will finally put to rest the belief that our planet, and by extension we humans, are alone in the universe, and are alone for a reason—because we’re somehow special. No, we may simply be alone because, well--dull as it seems--that's how things worked out.

Of course, this applies to history, too. We haven’t been here very long, and it isn’t clear we’ll be here for much longer. As John McPhee once put it, if you imagine geological time like both arms outstretched, human existence takes up no longer than a bit of a fingernail. 99% of all species that have ever lived on our Earth in the 3.8 or so billion years life has been around are extinct--there for perhaps millions of years, and then gone. And all for what? It is easy to believe that we must be here for some grand reason, a cosmic mission greater than anything Ian Fleming could dream up James Bond doing. And perhaps we are, but the evidence is against it. We are newborns in Earth’s history and scarcely sperm and egg in our universe’s. Those of us who think we are the key to some grand design, in short, have not read their history books—and I mean the history books of the universe. “The universe (which others call the Library),” Borges begins his uncanny short story, “The Library of Babel,” and it holds true here.

The cover of Moore's novel

And, just as in the Ripper case, some of us know we’re deluding ourselves, but we play along, anyway, because some part of us yearns to be part of something bigger. In a scene from Alan Moore’s From Hell, a graphic novel partly following Knight’s vision of the Ripper murders, we see a collection of normal people sitting down to write fake letters purporting to be from Jack the Ripper. Some kids may be doing it for kicks; an older man does it while his wife calls him down to read scripture to the children. The man, in particular, is living a double life, vicariously becoming the Ripper—or, at least, injecting some excitement into a dull, puritanical existence. It’s fun to delude ourselves sometimes, to imagine that we, ourselves, are no longer the prisoners of small and boring lives but are part of something larger: a conspiracy, a mission, a societal or global (or cosmic) plan. The Ripper chilled many—but his legend excited far more. People wanted to be involved, to catch a glimpse of a bloodstained murderer, without being the victim or being in any real danger. Fantasy. If a sketch of Goya’s says that the sleep of reason produces monsters (perhaps ones that rip), deliberately giving reason some sleeping pills might produce sharp-toothed exhilaration, comfort, softer (real) sleep at night.

Goya's "Sleep of Reason"

This, of course, is how many people justify a simple theism: I don’t know if it’s true, but it helps me feel better and more meaningful, so I’ll believe. (Indeed, , Henri Bergson ends The Two Sources of Morality and Religion with the statement that the universe itself is nothing less than "a machine for the making of gods.")

I appreciate and understand this impulse. But I think we need to sit back, clear our heads as best we can, and reevaluate what we know. The fact is that the Ripper cases were not, taken as a whole, anything special, and neither are we, put up against the universe. If it turns out no life exists anywhere else in the universe—an unlikely prospect, but who knows—then we may well be unique, but that doesn’t mean we’re special so much as lucky, a fortunate fluke of planet formation, abiogenesis, and evolution. (I'm not saying we can't be special on some cosmic scale, but I just don't see why we should be; if the purpose of the Big Bang was God's way of creating life, the universe is a literally epic failure, with so much of it apparently utterly unhospitable for life.) Of course, we have much to learn about how life formed in the first place, and I don’t pretend to have the answers—but the evidence, again, points to no special creation of humankind or even of life itself. We are, and that seems to be about it. Whatever meaning we make, whatever beauty and horror we produce, bloom and fade, appear and vanish, like tiny bubbles over the vast river of time (to steal E. H. Gombrich's image from A Little History of the World). The grand myths we have made about what we mean, the global and cosmic epics, may well be no more than bubbles themselves, soon to pop and vanish as microbes and new organisms feed on our bones and the skeletons of our civilizations before the sun dies.

And in the Caribbean (and elsewhere, of course, but I have seen this often in Dominica and other islands), we do this all the time. We do not see the bigger picture; we make small things into the entire world. It is easy to make this mistake, to forget that a whole world, and a whole universe, exists beyond the shorelines. The city, the town, the village, the rooms, the streets we live in and on the most: these become the world to use, and our eyes narrow and we forget, sometimes altogether, that there is more out there. And for many people, there’s little need to remember this, to be fair, since those “small things” are really quite big in their own lives: our jobs, our loves, our losses. But that doesn’t mean we should all willingly see the world with such narrowed eyes, if we know better. There is too much else out there. And it certainly means that we should be careful about mythologizing things around us, turning tiny events into grand stories that they do not deserve to be. Myth-making isn’t bad—as an artist, I could hardly say otherwise—but it can blind us, if we don’t step back once in a while and try to take in things on a bigger scale.

But once you’ve seen how vast and seemingly baffling the universe is and how forgettably tiny we are by comparison, it may be worthwhile, too, to indulge in some mythology, some whisky against the horror of feeling small. After all, our little patch of space and times would be far less interesting without the ghost of Jack the Ripper to haunt it once in a while. And even if the Ripperologists know the myth of the Ripper is likely more interesting than the truth, and cosmologists and astrophysicists are well-aware of how infinitesimal we are--"a piece of cosmic lint," Bill Bryson calls Pluto in A Short History of Nearly Everything, and it might as well apply to us--there's no reason we can't enjoy ourselves and continue to speculate, even as we acknowledge that all the grand myths we've conjured and dreamt up may crumble away when we're gone, forgotten by ghosts and gods alike.

Just Who Is This God You Speak of?

Just Who Is This God You Speak of?

by Jonathan Bellot

            It is easy to forget that “God” is a proper name. For most theists and some deists, God, after all, is supposedly in some sense personal, if not a person outright; it’s only convenient he, she, or it have a name one can refer to. But while it may seem convenient for this thing, this deity, to have a name, it’s ultimately more problematic than convenient. A name, after all, should refer to someone or something one is in some way aware of, acquainted with. To use a name that does not clearly refer to someone or something is a bit odd. In a talk entitled “What’s Next for Atheism?” A. C. Grayling put the problem like this: if we replace God’s name with something more common, like “Fred,” the oddity of our claims becomes pretty apparent. If I say that Fred went to the 7-11 on Friday, and, once pressed, must admit that I do not know much about this Fred—what he looks like or sounds like, how old he is, where he lives, even if he is truly a “he”—you would be right to ask me how I can say that “Fred” went to the 7-11, since “Fred” has no clear meaning in this context. No Fred could be identified by me or anyone else on a security camera, either, since no one has the faintest idea what Fred looks like, assuming Fred looks like anything.

            Or, as Grayling put it: “Who made the universe? Fred. I have a deep personal relationship…with Fred.” By humanizing God, by making this indistinct person seem more intimate by nothing more than the change of a name, you might suddenly realize how empty the space seems beneath the word “God,” in the sense that it’s not clear who or what should go there. If I were to say I have an intimate relationship with Melissa, but have no idea what she looks or sounds like, no sensory details at all, indeed don’t even know she’s a “she”—well, you’d be right to look at me with raised eyebrows and start stepping back.

            The same, you may be about to say, goes for God. While it’s true that some speakers will provide specific definitions and traits of “God,” it’s also true that many people use the name to refer to whatever “supreme” being they have in mind, regardless of whether or not that being’s characteristics may accord with someone else’s. Thus, a Christian, a Muslim, and a deist who do not know each other’s respective beliefs can all say “I believe in God” and think they are speaking about the same being, though each one of them may have a being with different properties in mind. It’s not unlike if we imagine that there are two people chatting in a café, and each has a friend named Brian; without asking for further identification, each assumes that the “Brian” the other person is talking about is the same Brian, when, in fact, each is talking about a different person who simply happens to have the same name. This can easily lead to misunderstandings. One need only turn to various American conservatives’ attempts to claim that America is a Christian nation because the founders (such as, say, Jefferson and Paine) believed in “God” to see how easy it is to make mistakes, if not simply deceive the simple-minded. Jefferson and Paine, after all, were deists; Paine, in particular, took pain to emphasize the fact that he was not a Christian by ridiculing Christianity in an infamous pamphlet of 1807 (in its final form), The Age of Reason. Yet he spoke of believing in God, and misunderstanding—or manipulating—such passages might lead one to believe he was talking about the same “God” fellow as the founders who actually were Christians. The same, of course, is true for Einstein and Spinoza—and Spinoza famously equated God with “Nature,” thus revealing a singularly different being from the God of the Abrahamic faiths.

            Clearly, then, it matters what person—or thing—we mean when we say “God.”

            But it’s interesting to note that this seeming emptiness behind the word “God” doesn’t only extend to potential ambiguity; it extends even into the more complex definitions of God one may run across. The Reformed Epistemologists, like William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga, for instance, have made—though they did not invent the definition—a certain description of God infamous: God, we are told, is spaceless, timeless, eternal, immaterial, changeless, enormously powerful (if not omnipotent), omnibenevolent, and metaphysically necessary (uncaused). On the surface, this sounds great; God has finally been pinned down. But on closer examination, the matter is hardly clear—or perhaps it’s all too transparent. Taken literally, these definitions inform us that God takes up no space, consists of no matter (appropriate, really, given that he takes up no space), and exists outside of time. One could stop there. God, if we take this literally, is theoretically indistinguishable from nothingness—or, at least, frighteningly close. Mind you, like Parmenides, I don’t quite know what nothingness is, not having ever experienced anything but something; as Wittgenstein said in a 1929 Lecture of Ethics, “it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing.” But God here is as close as I can get.

            Of course, there is another way to take these words, which is to invoke the possibly apocryphal medieval exercise of counting how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. (Such exercises did exist, but it’s unclear whether or not this specific one did or was created later as a caricature of the exercises in general.) It is possible to think, intuitively, of something taking up space without taking up space (and that was the answer to the pins question—angels take up no space, not being material, so an infinity of them could fit on the head of a pin). A mind, Craig likes to assert, is not material and does not take up space as material things do. And, as for time, Craig asserts—though more shakily—God might have created the universe at the exact same moment he desired to do so, since the desire cannot have preceded the creation of the universe, or God would have been acting in time—and time, according to the Big Bang model, cannot meaningfully exist at the moment of the Big Bang (and thus, there isn’t really a “before” the Big Bang, since relativity means that time loses all meaning when the universe is bunched up altogether at once in the point of the Big Bang, the singularity). Mind you, all neuroscience currently points to the mind being a product of the brain and not independent of it, as the dualists would assert (and Craig is not unsympathetic to dualism). Moreover, while we can say that things can take up space “without” taking up space, it’s not actually clear that this is either possible or even a meaningful statement. What is actually beneath those words? What does it mean to take up no space or to be “beyond” space—or, worse, time? (On the assumption that time even is even real, that is, more than just a convenient illusion, which I’m unsure of, somewhat alongside Julian Barbour and J. M. E. McTaggart.) At this point, someone might retreat into saying we can’t understand these concepts, just as a negative theologian—someone defining God by what he isn’t—might say that God can exist without existing. And I don’t deny that it’s possible that we just can’t understand these things but that they may be possible. I don’t believe in a deity, but I’m well-aware of the fact that I do not know everything, and there may be much more out there to learn. Hell, I can’t even disprove solipsism—and you—some irony for kicks—can’t, either. Perhaps God can exist and not-exist at the same time, not unlike Wittgenstein’s parody of Freud’s notion of the unconscious: “Mr. Nobody,” Wittgenstein called it. 
            Or, as Samuel Beckett asked in the addenda at the end of his novel Watt,
                 who may tell the tale
                 of the old man?

                 weigh absence in a scale?
                 mete want with a span?
                 the sum assess
                 of the world's woes?
                 nothingness
                 in words enclose?

            And mystery, indescribability, can be beautiful, in a deep way, as Einstein and Gabriel Marcel knew so well. Perhaps there are names we cannot speak because we will never have the words. 
     But at the same time, we should be careful. If we say something doesn’t take up space, maybe it doesn’t—and maybe that’s all it means, and there’s nothing there. As Julia Kristeva writes in The Feminine and the Sacred, those Christian mystics who went very far in negating God’s existence while affirming it may simply have been avoiding the fact that they were saying there was no God. Kristeva uses the example of Angela of Foligno, who described the divine as “an ‘abyss,’ ‘a thing that has no name.’” For Kristeva, this “thing without a name may betray…a suggestion of disbelief…[t]he latencies of a mystic atheism.” In so negative a theology, God may well vanish if one presses hard enough. Perhaps we cannot escape from this disappearance by using words to cover them up, to cover up the terrifying emptiness and ambiguity behind the very name of “God.”

            But the thing is, I love these discussions. I want to be challenged, to have my world and my beliefs spun on their axis by a new argument or new evidence. I want to hear and have these discussions in the islands—and, believe me, there are people from the Caribbean who are having them. But the average person there (and not only there, of course) does not choose to examine who “God” is or if God is truly Mr. Nobody. We revel in a simple, childish Christianity and, in some cases, Islam. We do not elevate the discussion; we assume that God is as obviously what we think he is as it is obvious that we breathe—and thus to assume God may not exist or may be other than we think may well be tantamount to being a fool or mentally ill (both of which skeptics are routinely called by fanatics, should the topic of skepticism even come up). We need something more. We need to be questioners, to be proud of ourselves for stepping away from simple answers and asking questions.

The world we find behind those questions may not always be pretty or comforting; it may well be bleak and depressing. Or it may be glorious and marvelous. Or depressing. But we will have found it ourselves. And that is the journey—the never-ending journey, like Jose Saramago’s tale about a man searching for an unknown island—we in the Caribbean should be happy to be on. Instead, we tend to attack others for asking too many questions.

Let us make our voices and questions heard—now and not forever after, but for a good long time.

Introducing the Caribbean Freethinkers’ Society

Welcome to the Caribbean Freethinkers’ Society, a new website and community devoted to giving a voice to the many Caribbean skeptics, atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, and those who may be none of the above but who still think the islands of our archipelago are generally a bit too biased towards the religious. We hope you enjoy your stay. Here, you will find articles, essays, reviews of books and films, creative writing, rants, musings, and more—all connected to the project of examining what it means to be a skeptic in a region so generally inclined to not be skeptical of religious claims.

            The idea to create a space like this, a voice for the too-often-voiceless, was born out of two main things: many of us in the Caribbean who had shed our religious beliefs felt alone and often quite seriously wondered if anyone else in our island (if not the entire archipelago) thought like we did; and those of us who tried to look online to see if any other skeptics in the West Indies existed found that virtually nothing existed online, either. For a while, anyway. If you looked harder, you would find a few blogs written by daring persons from the region, like David Ince and Seon Lewis; and if you were on Facebook, you might discover the thing that united many of the people now writing for this site, a Facebook group simply called “Caribbean Atheists.” The mere idea that such a group might exist at all surprised many of the members there, myself included; and, though the members were from a large number of different islands, including Dominica, Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad, many of us felt, for the first time, a sense of community as skeptics in the Caribbean. We had found other people like us. And, with this newfound sense of not being isolated, some of us who had kept our skepticism secret began to be more vocal.

            But some of us in that group wanted something more. We wanted to create a space online where we could get our message across to a wider audience, a space that would represent our community, a space that would say, We exist, and we aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Because the idea of not being religious was so foreign to so many of the people we knew around us, be they government officials or family or friends, we wanted to prove that we exist—and, beyond that, to get our message across to as many people as we could, a message we felt was needed now more than ever. And so the Society was born—with less assistance than impediment from the Holy Spirit.

This site is not a place where anyone’s beliefs will be forced upon anyone else; it is rather a space for discussion, argument, and investigation. Here, you will find people talking about contemporary events, historical events, events in their heads and far beyond the reach of the pale blue dot that is our planet. There will be jokes; there will be scholarly studies. You’ll also find links galore, including links to projects members of the Society are involved with: podcasts (such as the Freethinking Island podcast, one of the first, if not the first, podcast devoted to Caribbean freethought), videos, interviews, and more. In short: good stuff awaits you. And there will be material from guests very often, as well; feel free to submit pieces that you would like to be featured on the site, and, if you’re lucky—I’ll say nothing about praying—you just might find your piece gracing the front page.

This is a diverse group. I’m a writer from Dominica, currently working on getting a PhD in Fiction from Florida State University, and I’ve written a few pieces on skepticism in the Caribbean that you can find linked online. The same is true for many of the other writers on here, whose excellent blogs and articles you can find linked to on here, as well. There are people in the sciences, the arts, in business; there are people who live far from the islands now and those who have rarely left the island in which they were born. Some of us were born overseas and moved to the West Indies; some of us moved out of the West Indies overseas. But, wherever we are at the moment, we are all linked by our common desire to make our views heard, to make our presence better-known in the island.

Welcome, once again, to the Caribbean Freethinkers’ Society. I think you’ll like it here. And, on the off-chance you don’t, make sure you stick around, anyway.

Jonathan Bellot, Editor