I gave up reading the misnamed Religion Dispatches long enough ago that I didn't know it had moved and, apparently, wisely gave up posting comments.
There's a kind of silly article on its new site about the black hole "photo" that wants to bring God into it, God Need Not Be Real, But the Black Hole Photo Is, which, I suppose, is inevitable though I can't help but feel it's oh, so last decade and more past it. He makes one mistake, sort of, in that the eminent astro-physicist who took the most famous photos in the history of Enistein's theory of relativity, Arthur Stanley Eddington wasn't only "the son of Quakers" he was an actively believing Quaker throughout his career. I was impressed enough with his Swathmore Lecture, Science And The Unseen World, that I typed it out to post online before the book, itself was available online, without typos. Given what he says about the risks of trying to mix theology with science, at least on the science side of it, I don't think this is exactly a successful article. I'd say anyone who wants to try to find theological or, even more, anti-theological implications in this image are fetching it pretty far. As to science disposing of God, Eddington, pointing out the folly of a materialist conception of consciousness and its inability to judge the wrong answer to 7x9 as inferior to the right answer, Eddington pointed out:
Dismiss the idea that natural laws may swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table single-handed*.
You could probably find other things in Eddington's Gifford Lectures, or Tarner Lectures to find some passages that, in the context of this image and article, are quite ironic.
I'd listened to Dr. Katie Bouman in an already out of date TED talk the other day and found her both informative and extremely appealing - does everyone younger than me sound like a bright, precocious, energetic, high school student from now on - and pretty honest about what leads me to continue to question this passage from the article:
For me the photograph (made possible by an algorithm developed by Dr. Katie Bouman) both confirmed and exceeded expectations; in many ways the picture appeared as I sort of assumed it would, but when I actually viewed the image it shattered my sense of what I was looking at, of what’s possible, of what lay at the center of distant galaxies.
I still would question the extent to which this "photo is real," considering it's a product of fitting together disparate data points and choosing among what Bouman said was "an infinity" of possible visual interpretations of that data using the artificial, human construct of algorithms, based in what would be expected to be seen, based on existing theories about black holes. It's not a philosophical game to ask in what sense the product of that kind of thing is "real". The "photo" isn't even like what Eddington took, the images of starlight as deflected in relation to the position of Mercury during a solar eclipse, that was light falling on a photographic plate - which didn't by the way, keep some sci-guys on the make from floating the idea that Eddington fudged it. Even the description in the article shows the problem, this is an image that is based, not on light hitting a photographic plate, but based in "expectations" on things "as [we] sort of assumed". I don't doubt that the picture very well might be as valid a "picture of a black hole" as we're going to get but it's worth asking if it's "real".
That's a question that has every similarity to my criticism of opinion polling, surveys, with so many other kinds of "science" as done in the social sciences which construct artificial stereotypes of human populations which are, then, taken as not only "real" but far more real than the individuals who comprise the real group in real life, in all of their variation from that type. Which, given its proven potential to blight lives, to blight the lives of entire groups of people, to promote discrimination against those who, oddly enough, are the groups already disadvantaged and to discriminate for those who are privileged and even gets huge numbers of people killed or forcibly sterilized, cutting them out of the future, there couldn't be a more important question to ask. That kind of algorithm based construction of "reality" is the reason I decided to comment on the article. Unless we're going to be sucked into a black hole sometime in the future (and what would we do to prevent that?) the reality of that picture is of vanishingly little importance as compared to the clear, present and immediate danger of repeating an all too humanly constructed past that hasn't really passed, considering the use of this construction of reality is entirely important.
* Suppose we concede the most extravagant claims that might be made for natural law, so that we allow that the processes of the mind are governed by it; the effect of this concession is merely to emphasise the fact that the mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions. If, for example, we admit that every thought in the mind is represented in the brain by a characteristic configuration of atoms, then if natural law determines the way in which the configurations of atoms succeed one another it will simultaneously determine the way in which thoughts succeed one another in the mind. Now the thought of “7 times 9" in a boy’s mind is not seldom succeeded by the thought of “65.” What has gone wrong? In the intervening moments of cogitation everything has proceeded by natural laws which are unbreakable. Nevertheless we insist that something has gone wrong. However closely we may associate thought with the physical machinery of the brain, the connection is dropped as irrelevant as soon as we consider the fundamental property of thought – that it may be correct or incorrect. The machinery cannot be anything but correct. We say that the brain which produces “7 times 9 are 63" is better than a brain that produces “7 times 9 are 65"; but it is not as a servant of natural law that it is better. Our approval of the first brain has no connection with natural law; it is determined by the type of thought which it produces, and that involves recognising a domain of the other type of law – laws which ought to be kept, but may be broken. Dismiss the idea that natural laws may swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table single-handed.
Interesting, first, that we prize the visual over all other ways of knowing. So we "see" the "black hole" (that really looks like a black hole!) and know it again for the first time. Except we agree on what a black hole looks (else why name it that?), so the picture fits nature? Or our need to make the visual both primary and the real source of truth?
ReplyDeleteWe are creatures of sight (just ad we are social beings). Sigh is our primary sense. Nobody speaks of "making up" for the loss if other senses. If you lose your sense if smell, how do you compensate? Or hearing, or taste? Yet we tell stories both real and fanciful of the blind learning to employ their other senses, because we prize sight above the other four, and have to make up for its loss. (I have almost no sense of smell, but no one has ever expected my sight or sense of touch to improve and cover the loss).
Ultimately, if we can't see the phenomena of this world, we can't trust in their reality. Or at least we behave that way.
I've wondered how they can be confident that such entities, theorized to be so unknowable and in which, perhaps, the normal physics demonstrated by observable objects is drastically different have internal uniformity. That's the problem with the unknowable, you can't know much about it or how it relates to what you do know. The Hebrew, monotheistic conception of God is big enough to contain whatever they throw at God, though the limited idols most people conceive of when they talk about God can't, the reason they always make recourse to those inadequate idols when they argue with believers and why they, irrationally, overlook that God created the entire universe, what is known and what isn't known.
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