I don't have an awful lot to boast about which is good, imagine what it would be like if I did. But one of the things I have boasted about, probably a half a dozen times in the past decade was when I got one of the most arrogant of scientist-materialists to admit that there was not a single even "simple" object in the universe that physics could define and know definitively, comprehensively and exhaustively.
It took me about three weeks of badgering Sean Carroll at his blog to finally get him to admit that most obvious disproof that contemporary physics and cosmology was anywhere close to have a theory of everything, that TOE that has been the atheist's holy grail since the invention of science.
Some scientists, notably those who were not very good at philosophy, fully believe that such a TOE is within reach, those who pooh-pooh the need for philosophical analysis are some of the greatest true believers. They are more invincibly ignorant of the deficiencies of their faith because they deny it's faith but claim it's knowledge. Carroll is a bit smarter than that, it's the stand he takes without explicitly admitting that it is because he knows once claimed, it is relatively easy to knock it down. For a physicist to make any such claim,rather hilariously, is double-speak.
At the time I thought that my question, asked repeatedly over a number of comments on one post of his spawned another post, the one on which I got him to give the obvious and for his faith, entirely inconvenient answer to my question.
"No" as he tersely, I imagine rather pissily, answered, physics, science, cosmology does not have a theory of everything about even one simple electron. It was one of the major discoveries of 20th century physics that physics could never have such comprehensive and exhaustive knowledge of even one electron in the entire universe. My guess is that discovery was of a significance that little that has been discovered in Carroll's generation will be.
The reason I'm going through this - other than finding out that I'd copied the blog brawls and stored them at the time - is that the scientistic conceit that everything can be counted on to follow the humanly articulated laws of nature at all levels is that idiotic faith that the "founders" as members of the 18th century "enlightenment" also held and which accounts for several of the most dangerous defects in our Constitution and the legal tradition that just lets things happen, figuring they'll all work out to how they're supposed to in the end.
In Carroll's second post included in the brawl, he made this absurd and irrationally confident claim.
Obviously there are plenty of things we don’t understand. We don’t know how to quantize gravity, or what the dark matter is, or what breaks electroweak symmetry. But we don’t need to know any of those things to account for the world that is immediately apparent to us. We certainly don’t have anything close to a complete understanding of how the basic laws actually play out in the real world — we don’t understand high-temperature superconductivity, or for that matter human consciousness, or a cure for cancer, or predicting the weather, or how best to regulate our financial system. But these are manifestations of the underlying laws, not signs that our understanding of the laws are incomplete.
Since those "plenty of things we don't understand" are not understood, his declaration that "these are manifestations of the underlying laws" is an entirely unfounded declaration of not only his faith in materialism being a monistic system, but that everything must conform to the current human articulation of such "laws" as is found in science.
That is made clear in the rest of the last sentence, "But these are manifestations of the underlying laws, not signs that our understanding of the laws are incomplete."
That is the underlying faith of materialist, scientistic, atheism, and a more obviously wrong and blitheringly anthropomorphic article of faith statement could not be made. It also presents such "laws" as if they were objective, not humanly mitigated and eternal truths, instead of specifically limited by human capabilities and contingent for the time in which they are held in human minds. It is the kind of cluelessly arrogant and dishonest claim that it was the conceit of scientific method turned from a practical methodology for finding some useful information into an all encompassing faith claim that includes many if not all of the defects of the old scholastic system that it replaced and scorned.
For Sean Carroll to claim to know what is there in that enormous gap in our knowledge between subatomic particles and economics and the law is putting his god in that gap.
The fact is that the mathematical framing of science works for a limited number of things, as I've quoted the French mathematician René Thom, even in chemistry, when the molecules start to get even a little bit large, the effectiveness of that method starts to break down rather fast and that breakdown increases as chemistry becomes more complex and in biology it becomes a serious problem. As Thom said,
The relatively rapid degeneration of the possible use of mathematics when one moves from physics to biology is certainly known among specialists, but there is a reluctance to reveal it to the public at large.
Yet with that Sean Carroll and Supreme Court Justices such as Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. want to apply the methods that have produced some admittedly good results in studying very simple, very small, objects to enormously complex human problems in worlds of no knowable relationship, if any, to the contingent holdings of physics but which Carroll claims, on what can only be the baldest of dogmatic faith, are "manifestations of those laws," It is a faith they hold in common with all such claimed "scientific" political-economic and legal systems, such as can be seen in the Marxist, fascist, Nazi dicatatorships and, indeed, in the first such manifestation of "enligthenment" scientific governance that ended in the Reign of Terror in which the enlightened killed off each other along with those who opposed them and which ended in the Napoleonic military despotism and wars which killed millions.
In the American version that produced our Constitution, it resulted in the enhancement of the violence and terror that slaughtered the Indigenous People of what would become the expanded United States, the enslavement of Black People and, in the application of the words of the founders, the total dehumanization of them by Supreme Court fiat, the subjugation of women, and a whole host of other evils that are resurgent under the libertarian regime of free press, free speech absolutism.
The idiocy of believing that egalitarian democracy can exist without people choosing that and forcing those who don't like it to abide by its prerequisites and requirements is enlightenment lunacy. It ignores that just letting things go in the name of liberty (though its real name is libertarianism) will be gamed by the worst among us, the enemies of equality and democracy and a decent life for everyone. I think that the post-war trend that was to allow a complete freedom to lie in the mass media should be considered a definitive test of what you get when you do that. You get enormous inequality and the destruction of democracy. As the United States in the post Sullivan decision era shows, it gets you increasingly bad anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, mobster rule, even when there are elections. People who have been successfully sold lies can't even vote in their own interest, when they are also morally corrupted by appealing to their bigotries and paranoia, they will certainly vote to deny other people their rights.
The idea that "more speech" bleated by some impotent college profs in small journals and on pathetic podcasts was going to win out over billionaires who had the media and a license to lie to their own advantage has been given the test of time and it produces fascist gangster rule, it does here, it does in Europe, it will anywhere where the prerequisite conditions of the truth being told can make people of good will free is swamped by pseudo-scientific benighted-enlightenment nonsense that "nature" can be depended on to do the right thing.
We don't know what "nature" is. The likes of Sean Carroll - who calls his sect of materialism "naturalism" - have a professional and ideological interest in peddling the idea that we do, the fact is that if we can't even know an electron comprehensively, exhaustively, we are an effective infinity away from knowing what the hell "nature" is or what its meaning is as our experience of the world, the universe, human society and life on our planet is. We have no more of an ability to define what is contained in "nature" or if it is one or plural in its character. It is quite possible, likely, I believe, that Carroll's reductionist monism is a gross distortion of what it really is.
In the mean time, we've got to make choices. And we have to do that on some other basis than science is capable of providing us. The Law should be divorced from that ideology, it leads to death.
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