Ultimate Decadence In Science Is The Product of The Successful Insertion of Ideological Materialism Into It

In my eagerness to point out what was incompetent in the neo-atheist straw man debunkery of "Pascal's Wager" the other day - most importantly to point out that it was not the basis of anyone's religious belief -I overlooked something more useful than that side show.  The same "thought" that included the "wager" began far more remarkably with a keen insight into the nature of our minds and our perception of the physical universe and some conclusions implied by that, including the limits of our abilities in addressing what was beyond us. 

Infinite—nothing.—Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature, necessity, and can believe nothing else.

Unity joined to infinity adds nothing to it, no more than one foot to an infinite measure. The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice. There is not so great a disproportion between our justice and that of God, as between unity and infinity.

The justice of God must be vast like His compassion. Now justice to the outcast is less vast, and ought less to offend our feelings than mercy towards the elect.

The beginning of that, "Infinite-nothing." is interesting in that it sets up the problem in the most stark  terms.  Now a days it is sometimes phrased, "Why is there something instead of nothing," or more to the point, why our incredibly unlikely universe which can support our life and not nothing?  And the implications of that question, the perceived unlikeliness of it leads some people to conclude that believing it is the will and purpose of God makes the most sense.  That is a conclusion that has led atheists in modern physics, in lieu of explaining the presence of the something we can see and experience, to invent jillions of universes, invented out of nothing so much as their use of the probability that Pascal pioneered to make the significance of our universe in that question seem to disappear.

Literally atheists creating the most incredible addition of matter, energy, ... up to, in some of the most ambitious schemes, the creation of every single thing that could possibly be, so they can make God go away in our one and only known universe.  So, the "evidence only" guys who constantly make fun of people who believe in entirely more modest things, have to make up a scenario where everything exists to pretend that it makes a belief in God irrational.   Of course it's as easy to ask why jillions of universes instead of nothing as it is to ask why one universe instead of nothing.  There are even some who point out that the "fine tuning" of "a" multiverse would probably have to be infintely more fine to produce whatever scheme the atheists wanting to make our "fine tuning" disappear*.  I don't see their reasoning gets them where they want to go.   I wonder if the equations could be invented so that if every kind of universe exists it makes the probabilities of ours being so finely tuned to allow life even more stupendously improbable.  

The modesty of Pascal's observations on the inescapable conditions of our minds, acknowledging our total dependence for anything we can think or articulate on our sensory experience is rather stunning in its succinct statement.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature, necessity, and can believe nothing else.

in contrast to the claims of contemporary atheists which discount the very entity, consciousness, that produces all of that thought.  For the neuro-sci, cog-sci, materialist assignment of non-existence or insignificance to consciousness, Pascal assigns it a value of unity, what every one of us who can articulate or read him experiences in our own consciousness, without which we can do none of those things.

Even more incredibly, even as he reduces our unity to nothing, when compared to the infinity which is God, he immediately goes to the question of justice, something which in the materialist scenario, reducing consciousness to nothing in the absence of comparison to infinity, is generally left out of the question, entirely as being wishful thinking, non-existent, a misnaming of some artifact of natural selection.  Though Pascal's reason for doing that is to support what I'd call an unsupportable contention in theology, what else he says on the way is interesting for more general reasons.

Unity joined to infinity adds nothing to it, no more than one foot to an infinite measure. The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice. There is not so great a disproportion between our justice and that of God, as between unity and infinity.

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After setting up the ratio of one as opposed to infinity, in which the value of the one virtually disappears and is, for all practical purposes, reduced to nothing, Pascal points out that the justice God dispenses is infinitely greater than anything we can conceive of.   And in the next sentence he demonstrates the radical nature of that justice in a comparison of it with compassion and how it confounds our habits of thought. 

The justice of God must be vast like His compassion. Now justice to the outcast is less vast, and ought less to offend our feelings than mercy towards the elect.

Here we part company, Pascal, as a Jansenist, a sort of Catholic puritan, believed in predestination, the division of people into the elect who were chosen to be saved and the outcast who are destined for eternal damnation. In that, I think he is more a follower of Augustine in that than he is of Jesus who declared that prostitutes and tax collectors would enter into the Kingdom before the puritans of his day would. Predestination in life seems to me to produce a level of callousness in regard to those who are unfortunate and who have been weak which is at odds with the Gospels.  I don't think the idea produces justice to the least among us and it makes the ministry of Jesus, who said he came to save sinners, nonsensical.  If, what Paul said is to be taken as true, "This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.," predestination makes no sense at all.

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But that's not what I find interesting it is that, today.  I'm interested in how even while they are arrogantly claiming to be the champions of scientific empiricism, the requirement that all hypotheses and theories find their ultimate test by being held up to observations of the natural universe, it is atheists who are the ones cutting themselves exemptions from that requirement and even insisting that it is an outmoded requirement when the prospects of having that verification are everything from vanishingly remote to of known impossibility.

It is, today, atheists in science are who the ones demanding the right to call their ultimate act of making stuff up "science" and that, without any evidence, whatsoever, that it be inserted into the very heart of science.  And they go so many magnitudes beyond the inventors of mythical creatures in the classical and post classical period so as to make those people seem restrained and carefully rigorous.  I think what we're seeing is the decay of science that Bertrand Russell feared he was witnessing ninety years ago, or at least its fall into a period of decadence comparable to the one that scholasticism fell into in the baroque era. Considering what Russell said, there is a wonderful irony that it's materialists who are insisting on that, Stephen Hawking, Sean Carroll, etc. in physics and, especially, cosmology, the evolutionary psychologists in biology, and in the ongoing scandal that the social sciences are.   In every case I can see where everything from the most pudding headed of the Darwinian fundamentalist inventions, reifications and conflations regarding "behaviors" and their alleged and entirely unobserved roles as positive adaptations to the inventions of 10 ⁵⁰⁰ universes** if not an infinity of them, the motive is to construct a materialist tautology that provides the motive in its invention and, also, the entire substance of what is to be regarded as evidence, if not, in some of the more naive instances "proof".

I am encouraged that even a lot of atheists, many of them rather arrogant in their atheism, are beginning to notice that their fellow ideologues are in serious danger of doing a lot of damage to the reputation and reliability of science.   The extent to which the power of science is dependent on its rigor and the influence and respect it is granted in science is dependent on whatever manages to get itself called science following its own claims will turn out to be important.  If, for example, the collapse of the cracking, crumbling mud arch that is evolutionary psychology forces a decisive critique of the natural selection it relies on in lieu of evidence is far from a settled matter.  If scientists don't take the occasion of its collapse to make that critique I think science will pay a price in credibility and support.  Studying the actual history of natural selection, the radical variation and patching up of the vague idea and the fantastical conclusions derived from it and the horrific actions drawn from confident application of it it makes the triumphalist assertions about it ridiculous and their continued repetition a scandal.   Yet anyone who wants to be taken to be a rational and educated person is required to pledge their faith in it in exactly the same way that professors at English universities used to have to pledge belief in The 39 Articles of (Anglican) Faith.  If that was the actual beginning of the neo-scholasticism which I'm seeing overwhelming science is worth thinking about.  Its gestation in the most unChristian mind of the Parson Malthus before it was brought forth by Darwin into the same intellectual establishment might not be a total coincidence.

What all of this and previous disasters of the insertion of materialist ideology into science, violating the most basic ideals and claims of scientists about methods and rigor says about the limits of those methods to protect the integrity that the reliability of science depends on needs to be considered more often.  I think it will turn out that materialism will turn out to be as much a problem for science as the often feared but nearly non-existent pollution of it by religion, the thing which has, actually, been kept out even as the most outragous and incredible garbage has been allowed in due to it being beneficial for ideological materialism.  If the integrity of science is more important to scientists than the promotion of atheism is an open question but the reputation of science isn't a matter that can just be left in the interested hands of the ideologues. 

* If I understand anything about this article, it would seem that there might need to be a large, if not infinite number of "multiverse" multiverses or at least more than one.  This passage is rather amazing in that it shows both how futile the effort is and how extreme the attempt is.

The Quanta piece isn’t an infomercial like the TV program, it does explain some of the problems with this whole endeavor, including this from Erick Weinberg:

“My own feeling is you need to adjust the numbers rather finely to get it to work,” Weinberg said. The rate of formation of the bubble universes is key. If they had formed slowly, collisions would not have been possible because space would have expanded and driven the bubbles apart long before any collision could take place. Alternatively, if the bubbles had formed too quickly, they would have merged before space could expand sufficiently to form disconnected pockets. Somewhere in between is the Goldilocks rate, the “just right” rate at which the bubbles would have had to form for a collision to be possible.

Researchers also worry about finding a false positive. Even if such a collision did happen and evidence was imprinted on the CMB, spotting the telltale pattern would not necessarily constitute evidence of a multiverse. “You can get an effect and say it will be consistent with the calculated predictions for these [bubble] collisions,” Weinberg said. “But it might well be consistent with lots of other things.” For instance, a distorted CMB might be evidence of theoretical entities called cosmic strings. These are like the cracks that form in the ice when a lake freezes over, except here the ice is the fabric of space-time. Magnetic monopoles are another hypothetical defect that could affect the CMB, as could knots or twists in space-time called textures.

Weinberg isn’t sure it would even be possible to tell the difference between these different possibilities, especially because many models of eternal inflation exist. Without knowing the precise details of the theory, trying to make a positive identification of the multiverse would be like trying to distinguish between the composition of two meteorites that hit the roof of a house solely by the sound of the impacts, without knowing how the house is constructed and with what materials.

Peter Woit is an atheist of the kind who is dismissive of religion instead of rabidly hostile to it but I don't think even a reasonable atheist who is interested in the integrity of science can avoid the fact that science has been hijacked by atheists to promote their ideology, insisting that even the very definitions of what science is and what you need to do it be changed to suit their ideological campaign and that the results discredit anything that gets called "science".  It's time for that ideological hijacking to be exposed and ended before all credibility is sacrificed to their non-god.

**  You could get the feeling that they felt the need to come up with a bigger number than the one often cited as an estimate of the incredible improbability of the fine tuning.

Many examples of fine-tuning have to do with star formation. Stars are important since life requires a variety of elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. Stars contain the only known mechanism for producing large quantities of these elements and are therefore necessary for life. Lee Smolin estimates that when all of the fine-tuning examples are considered, the chance of stars existing in the universe is 1 in 10 ²²⁹. “In my opinion, a probability this tiny is not something we can let go unexplained. Luck will certainly not do here; we need some rational explanation of how something this unlikely turned out to be the case”