Hide and Seek.

I have an acquaintance who I'd heard is a Flat-Earther. When I asked him if this was true he said “Well, I believe many things aren't as we've been told they are, including Science's assertions about space.” He went on to explain that these revelations came to him when he took Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, sometimes referred to as the 'god drug.' It's "a naturally occurring chemical found in both plants and animals . . .the active hallucinogenic compound in ayahuasca, the Quechua name for a tea brewed from the shrub Psychotria viridis, which is used for ritual purposes by the indigenous people in the amazon [link]." He said under DMT's influence entities came to him and explained that much of the world is not as it seems, including the assertion that the world itself is round. I'm sure I had a skeptical look on my face, so to add some gravitas to the aforementioned, he exclaimed “if I told you everything they shared with me it would freak you out!” I was freaked out, but not in the way he was hoping.

I asked him some pointed questions: Were you alone or with other people for this DMT drop? If you were with other people did they receive the same information? What if they were given the exact opposite revelation from the DMT gods, would their revelation also be true? Lastly, why would your drug induced epiphanies carry more weight than the hundreds of years of scientific inquiry that have lead us to the conclusions most of us take for granted?

He was not alone. His friends did not have the same revelations. The other answers will have to wait for another conversation.

Recently a friend turned me onto the podcast, The End of the World with Josh Clark, in which the first episode deals with Fermi's Paradox. Physicist, Enrico Fermi, wondered if the universe is as vast and full of galaxies with stars similar to our sun, as astronomers have deduced, and if it's likely these galaxies have Earth-like, potentially life-sustaining planets, then why don't we have evidence of other intelligent life? As he famously put it: "where is everybody?" The episode then tries to cover all of the possible reasons why we haven’t found clear evidence of extraterrestrial intelligent life, including the conspiratorial-sounding-verging-on-secret-lizard-people hypothesis that alien intelligence is living among us and we're simply unable to detect them.

If you run in the circles I run in, you probably feel a scoff bubbling up right now. And yet the scoff that pours out of so many of us at the idea of a “They Live” scenario might be suddenly squelched if we take a conversation turn toward God and the idea that God is moving among us. Humans seem to be very adept at maintaining paradoxical thought patterns.

I regularly grapple with our inconsistency concerning our beloved with whom we have supported the idea that Santa is real and fun but the things that frighten her are not. Every time we watch something spookier than we expected, or she awakens from a nightmare, we do our best to convince her the goblins, witches, or bad-guys-who-just-love-being-bad, don’t really exist.

Our kid loves the crap out of surprises! So much so that nearly every time one of us returns from work, comes up from the basement, or descends the stairs for breakfast she tries to Boo! us like it’s Halloween. It is exhilarating and exhausting, but it’s the element of surprise she values most in Santa, The Tooth Fairy, and other creatures who bestow gifts upon children. Navigating this push and pull between fictional fun and the opposite side of the coin that may keep her up at night . . . keeps me up at night. As adults my wife and I aspire to value reason and maintain a healthy amount of skepticism (mine verging on unhealthy skepticism, a point of contention at times), but often what is reasonable clashes with what was introduced to us as the capital-T-Truth by people who’ve lived different lives and had utterly different experiences than us.

The Atheist Experience is a long running debate show based in Austin, Texas primarily hosted by notable atheist debater, Matt Dillahunty. A theme or question that is commonly raised deals with why God doesn’t reveal himself in such a way that his existence could no longer be questionable. In Episode 696, in reply to a caller question, Dillahunty wonders and posits:

How is it that you use reason as a path to truth in every endeavor of your life, and then when it comes to the 'ultimate truth' - the most important truth - you're saying that faith is required. And how does that reflect on a god (who supposedly exists and wants you to have this information); what kind of god requires faith instead of evidence? . . . I have reasonable expectations based on evidence. I have trust that has been earned. I will grant trust tentatively. I don't have faith. Faith is the excuse people give for believing something when they don't have evidence.

Similarly, Greta Christina, in her 2010 article, Why Does God Reveal Himself to Some People and Not to Others?, tackles one of the more common explanations by believers to the the title question: free will. (Setting aside the various arguments that Sam Harris and others far smarter than I am make that free will is an illusion . . . ) Christina explains that the free will response to God's game of 'hide and seek' says that were God to reveal himself unequivocally, humans would have no choice but to believe, and this choice is what God values most, but she puts it this way:

Imagine you’re on a jury. You’re asked to decide whether something is or is not real, whether it did or did not happen; whether the accused stole the diamonds, or set fire to their warehouse for the insurance, or shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

The prosecution doesn’t offer much evidence at the trial — it’s all circumstantial at best, third-hand hearsay at worst, with excessive appeals to emotion and fear, and arguments based on faulty logic. So you decide to acquit.

And then, after you’ve reached your verdict, you’re told there’s a videotape, clearly showing the accused committing the crime. You’re baffled. You’re outraged. You confront the prosecutor in the hallway, and ask, "Why didn’t you show us this evidence at the trial? Why show it to us now — when it’s too late to do anything about it?" And the prosecutor replies, "Because you had to be free to decide for yourself. If we gave you that videotape, it would have made your choice too obvious.

Free will is a precious gift, a crucial component of the justice system — and in order for the jury to have free will, we can’t make the right verdict too obvious. That would have forced your hand."

Would you nod your head sagely in agreement? Would you think that was a sound and reasonable explanation? Or would you think he was out of his gourd? And if you think this was a ridiculous and outrageous explanation from the prosecutor — then why on earth would you think it’s a good argument when it comes to God?

Having more information doesn’t make us less free to decide what is real. It’s the exact opposite. The more information we have, the better able we are to make a free, independent conclusion about what is and isn’t true.

Not sure I feel the need to talk about souls hanging in the balance between ‘paradise’ and ‘damnation,’ like I always do, but certainly if there were any possibility of the latter, it seems like believers would stand in protest trying to persuade God to reveal himself to save their friends and family from it. The complacency and ‘tough love’ position believers often espouse about this quandary strikes me as likely proof no one believes it at all.

What if we concede that knowledge of the ethereal is disguised, that only certain people are lucky enough to gain exposure to the one true god, as much of the world’s population believes, how could we level the playing field? Imagine that every adult in the world took a drug that revealed God to them. What percentage of the stories coming out of this humanity-wide trip would tell the same story? If 51% of these stories had some semblance of a similar narrative, would a simple majority make it the true story? What if the other 49% tripped into narratives that were at odds with the majority? This is the calamity we’re in as the elephant in the dark room feels different to so many hands that claim to touch it. The claims of connection to a god alone demand inquiry enough, the fact that the claims are at odds with so many other claims just compounds the entire process.

Tale after tale of the drug, MDMA, or 'Ecstasy,' tell of it inducing the purest feeling of love; a love free from self-interest and wants nothing but the best for those around you. Chasing a sober version of this love is a noble venture. We should all want to abandon our baggage and self worry to give more and see others with more love. A trip that illuminates how we can see each other in a more beautiful and connecting way should be better embraced. However, a trip that told you the Earth is flat, Heaven and Hell are real, or Aliens walk among us, requires at least wondering about the nature of the trip. When the information revealed poses un-provable conclusions or directly clashes with scientifically tested assessments of the physical world, it seems reasonable to doubt that your information is relevant post-trip.

In the Fermi Paradox episode Clark covers all the possible answers to why we have no evidence of extraterrestrial life. Whether it be the 'Aestivation hypothesis,' a self-induced hibernation where E.T.s are waiting for the universe to change to a more efficient energy status for their civilization, or the 'Zoo hypothesis,' which asserts that E.T.s keep humans in a 'Matrix-'like illusion which prevents us from attaining knowledge of their existence; what is most compelling to me is the idea that other  intelligence is just staying away from us for their own survival. Humans are rarely anything but hostile to the unfamiliar. Other intelligent life may have myriad reasons for keeping their existence secret, namely their survival, which perhaps makes it more plausible they exist because they wouldn’t have an agenda that requires us to believe in them.

There is plenty we'll never understand in our lifetime about the physical world, let alone, the universe and beyond. But time and study has revealed more and more about what we are experiencing and how we experience it. What my DMT-dropping friend had was something close to what people call a mystical experience. The problem with mystical experiences is that they can’t be recreated. The truth he believes he received is more likely a “truth” his brain conjured. How we experience the world, even when it doesn’t correspond with what can be proven about the world, usually overrides everyone else’s experience. His experience, for now anyway, is the Truth for him.

As our child grows she will gain more information about how the world seems to work. At some point Santa’s annual journey of generosity isn’t going to add up, just as UFO sightings lose legitimacy when they’re virtually never supported by astrophysicists, and religious claims of miracles from thousands of years ago lose bearing when we apply the laws of physics to them. Though Dillahunty and the atheist debaters may seem like they have answers to every inquiry, their primary refrain is “I don’t know and neither do you.” They hope we can all get more comfortable saying “I don’t know” when our experiences and ideas present unanswerable questions, and so do I.

(image stolen from here.)