ONE OF THE THINGS that I've regretted in the blow-back of a recent post is that the eminent physicist and anti-religious atheist polemicist Steven Weinberg didn't have a blog with a comment thread during the new-atheist fad, the way that the somewhat less eminent physicist and more polemical atheist Sean Carroll did. I know long term readers might remember that I've bragged several times about forcing Sean Carroll to make a rather embarrassing if not self-impeaching admission in the course of an argument that ranged across at least a couple of somewhat atheist-scientistic blogs. As I recall it originated from his and Stephen Hawking's declaration that physics was on the verge of a theory of everything, the elusive TOE, and so had disposed of any need for there to be a God. Which only shows that even the most famous physicist of his generation could remain at a first semester freshman level of philosophical competence, one which I know Weinberg sometimes surpasses.
In the course of a comment thread fight I asked Carroll if there was even one, single object in the universe which physics had described comprehensively and completely. He dodged the question on the first blog we started out on for going on three weeks but posted his claim on his own blog which I don't think I'd ever commented on before. I pinned him down there by repeatedly asking the same question in front of his blog community. But it wasn't until I promised never to post on his blog again if he'd answer the question if physics had a complete and comprehensive knowledge of even one object in the universe. As I recall I specified an electron, to which he finally admitted that physics, which he and Hawking and others claimed would soon have a complete theory of the universe, didn't have such a theory of everything about even one single object in the universe.
As a matter of credibility of his claim regarding the imminence of a TOE, physics having no theory of everything about even one object in the universe completely blows the idea that they will have a theory of everything about every object in the universe - not to mention things that aren't objects - out of any plausibility.
If I'd commented farther, I'd have asked him since physics didn't possess a complete description of even one object, how could physics know that there were not an entirely new set of issues that they hadn't known about before, which would have been another refutation of his claim that a TOE was imminently had. That problem, that there may well be, as Eddington said, "laws" of nature that surpass human comprehension, pretty well does in the claims of a "theory of everything" ever being reliably had.
I'd like to be able to ask Weinberg a similar question about his quip that "If you've seen one electron, you've seen them all." My first question would be, "Have you seen even one electron?" I mean that quite literally because everything that's known about electrons is inference on those limited aspects of them that physics and chemistry has managed to theorize about and demonstrate. While I don't doubt the existence of electrons or question many of the things physicists assert about them, I doubt that physics has that intimate a knowledge of them so as to make such a claim. I'd say you have to at least have an actual confirming observation, including a number of indirect observations in different contexts, of something before you can claim to "know" something, to demonstrate it through observation of the universe or observe in a repeatable experiment.
And since science is supposed to reveal the state of the natural universe, I would like to question someone of his expertise on a good part of that experimental evidence which seems to me to be based on some extremely artificial conditions, such as smashing atoms into each other at extremely high energies and velocities to blow them apart, some of which I wonder if there is really a natural analogue of in the known universe. I'd wonder what the difference between electrons in their typical, natural conditions and those which are put under such atypical conditions might be and how much of the information you got from that state of things can tell you about more typical conditions under which atoms and subatomic particles exist. I've never heard anyone ask that question before, though it wouldn't surprise me if it had occurred to someone else before I wondered about it.
I would guess that if he were pressed, he'd have to admit that what we know of electrons can't really discern if they are different in ways that might be significant if we could discern them more deeply in nature than we can now. That is if we could master the equations and concepts which comprise the "knowledge" we might then have of them. We don't know if they may fall into distinctly different types or kinds or perhaps exhibit some level of individuality. The image he projected in his quip may be about as complete as the crude classifications of human beings that some of the worst of biology and the so-called social sciences have made of us, ignoring our individuality and differences. Or how 19th century biologists conceived of those cells they could barely make out under their microscopes.
I do think that Weinberg's quip may have had in it what I doubt Carroll's claim did, an element of humility about the subject matter of Weinberg's specialty, in which the objects that are studied are taken as quite simple and undifferentiated whereas other sciences attempt to study vastly more complex entities such as, you know, the universe.
Or organisms, everything from single-celled to the largest and most complex of multicellular organisms of many different body-types between and within species, complex behaviors and changes over long lives and in relation to other very complex and (merely relatively) simple life forms and such things that may not really be alive, such as viruses. And how, at least in humans, learning and choices can make an enormous difference in how they are different and how they are the same.
And, also, much of what biology studies is so complex that large parts of organisms and, certainly, as those function biologically and, even more so, in their environments, that even the most known aspects of them are a tiny fraction of what they are as living beings. Science cannot comprehend even the entire life of one single cell either within a larger creature or as a single-cell organism. Adding speculations about the parts of organisms which are truly and will almost certainly forever exist outside of what is observable such as consciousness, personal experience, change due to experiences and choices and preferences, the effects of unknown aspects of those on future biological functioning, if and how those are determined by past experience, etc. cannot and, I will say, will never really be susceptible to scientific methods of study and discovery, I don't think that there is much reason to think that most of life can ever be the honest subject of science. Any claims of complete theories of biology or psychology or sociology or, in rapidly declining orders of reliability, anthropology and ethology, are pure and complete sci-superstition.
Science, especially when it has been extended past where it honestly can presently been done, has absolutely generated superstitions which, having the confident faith in "science" that some few areas of science have generated about some limited number of natural phenomena, are extremely potent and dangerous.
I think we never really appreciate how dangerous it is to use a word to mean quite different things, such as reliably and rigorously done science and those fields which are more given the title of science with all the substantial content of some idiot who is given an "honorary degree."
Even most scientists who know better won't consistently and insistently distinguish between hard science (such as hard sciences are) and areas that are called "science" as a professional courtesy when there's little science to them. That any of the "social sciences" are considered science has to count as one of the greatest of all scandals in science. But even many areas within conventional biology fall outside of that, even some of the most revered and orthodox of holdings of science.
Recently, I mentioned the anti-vaxx superstition that was set off by a disastrously bad and fraudulent paper that was published in The Lancet, one which got at least hundreds of thousands killed in the United States, Sweden and other places in the context of Covid.
I also noted that in both of those supposedly sophisticated countries, there was a distinct aspect of Darwinism, the theory of natural selection, in the death count, as well. Trump's regime was advised by those credentialed in the dismal science of economics, specifically those who explicitly claimed to be practicing "Darwinian economics." And considering what Charles and Leonard Darwin said about the imaginary dysgenic effects of vaccinations, opposing universal vaccination, they weren't unjustified in naming their scientific superstition, that.* And that was hardly the only deadly superstition set off by the theory of natural selection. I have repeatedly demonstrated here, using the primary documentation from Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel, (look it up in my blog, if I linked the whole thing would be red) and many others including one of the vilest of the Nazis, Reinhardt Heydrich, giving a natural selection argument for killing all Jews at the Wannsee Conference where the industrial genocide of the Jews was planned. The theory of natural selection has repeatedly motivated attempts to cut entire populations of human beings out of the human future.
Steven Weinberg is also famous for his claim that "for good people to do evil, that takes religion," probably a claim made out of the typical post-war college credentialed population's ignorance of the primary documentation, given that the Nazis, both by practice and by claim, were not motivated by religion but by what they understood of science. That's not deniable in any honest way when you read the primary documentation. Many of them were not only highly credentialed and hired as faculty in the sciences by some of the world's greatest universities, they were knowingly and intentionally engaged in the genocides of the political and military Nazi regime, supplying them with scientific justification for their mass murders, some of that having been also supplied with scientific arguments by scientists outside of Germany such as Karl Pearson and Margaret Moul. A number of them, even some of the worst, not only kept their university positions after the fall of Nazism, but at least one was given a Nobel prize in science, Konrad Lorenz.
And it's unquestionable that Hitlers rivals in mass murder, the Stalin and Mao regimes, the lesser but still formidable genocidal regimes of Marxism such as in Cambodia were motivated by a totally different stream of would-be scientific assertion from the social sciences. In the 20th century, any regime that sought to replace religion with science could be counted on to murder millions and millions of people. His fellow scientists who were active as weaponeers, giving the world the means of killing all of us in a day, were frequently atheists and materialists. Time may yet prove that science has been the deadliest thing that human culture has ever given rise to. The old argument, such as was used to defend the gas weaponeer Fritz Haber, that his development of nitrogen fertilizer saved more people than his gas weapons killed may not hold for nuclear physics. In the immediate aftermath of WWI, the war which made him a war criminal, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Science demonstrating that his war crimes were nothing scientists felt a need to consider.
If Weinberg spent less time on his anti-religious polemics and more time looking at the primary documentation of the Nazi and other genocides, he might have realized that. And I'd admit that Weinberg is generally a few steps up when it comes to knowing something about things outside of his narrow specialty than many of his younger colleagues and contemporaries, he has some actual philosophical erudition. As I quoted Sabine Hossenfelder recently, he has some knowledge of the limits of science which some others don't have.
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The conception of cells and single cell organisms and, especially DNA has changed drastically since the last advanced biology classes I took in college. I did well enough in those that one of my teachers encouraged me to consider changing majors, though I'd certainly have had to change a lot of what I believed when I took their classes if I'd taken that road. Much of that was everything from overly simplistic to definitely wrong. Some of what was known even then, through the work of the latterly famous Barbara McClintok and others, was actually suppressed because it didn't go along with the orthodoxy that reigned and, to a good extent, still does in much of biology. The science described by James Shapiro in that lecture I posted the other day shows that the complexity of what happens on a molecular level in "simple organisms" and in the cells of multi-cellular organisms is enormously more complex than was imagined by anyone in the 19th or early 20th century, even by the majority of biologists into my adulthood.
The complexity of just that very famous molecule and surrogate-god of atheism, DNA, and its manipulation by extremely complex and remarkably effective cellular action, on a level that human science would be hard pressed to imitate with the most sophisticated of conscious, rational thought and imagination and technique, has to make traditional materialist-atheists of a scientistic bent extremely uncomfortable when that's discussed. James Shapiro has tangled with one of the more infamous of those, his University of Chicago colleague, Jerry Coyne who, I'm sure, bristles when Shapiro and others attribute consciousness (quoting McClintock, as I recall) to single-cell organisms or "cognition" to cells and their molecular and physical components. As the physicist Arthur Eddington might have said, far from it being "turtles all the way down," it's consciousness all the way down.
Though perhaps not all the way down. I don't think it's possible or even reliable to attribute consciousness down to a lower order of physical organization, to inorganic molecules or atoms or subatomic particles, I'm deeply skeptical of the latest safety pod of materialism, "panpsychism" because if cellular consciousness might be apparent to us based on its level of sophisticated cognitive functioning, I don't think we can automatically or even reliably identify it outside of biological action. If atoms and subatomic particles have "consciousness" I doubt it would be anything like what the word means to us as the central aspect of our experience and being. It was just a few years ago that there was a considerable furore in biology when a group of dissident scientists issued a declaration that animals, other than human beings were conscious, many of the hard core materialists among them apparently detesting the idea as much as Thomist theology detests the idea that animals have souls.** Some of the really hard cases reject the idea that human beings, including, at least in their formal professional make-believe, themselves and their families.
I don't think the old simplistic nonsense of abiogenesis(to talk about pseudo-sciences) can be believable if you think even not that hard about it. That anything like even the "simplest" of known organisms could come about by sheer chance, random chance (an even more widely propitiated god of atheists), or from knowably non-teleological material causes on the early-Earth. If there was an extraordinarily simple "first organism" that gave rise to all subsequent life on Earth as a purely random-chance assemblage of molecules, it was no kind of life form that has ever been observed by science. The idea that it was some imaginary naturally assembled RNA or DNA or even a few random amino acids that just came together would seem to be of such incredibly remote probability so as to make that idea less believable than the idea that it happened by intelligent design. Now that cognitive behavior is seen as necessary for even the most rudimentary of cellular functions, given the seeming improbability of any abiogenetic scheme of things which have been peddled as science, the idea that God created life at least has a definite origin for the input of cognitive possibility into it. It's not science and it never could be but, then, neither is any materialistic-atheist scheme dreamed up by Oparin or Urey or Miller or anyone else. It couldn't be science because they have no means of observing that original organism (which, I, by the way, believe in while admitting that's not a scientific idea, it's one of conjecture and imagination). I reject the idea that you can do science in the absence of observation and testing and measurement and honest, NON-IDEOLOGICAL analysis. I respect science for what it can honestly do, I reject it when it is not based on observation, measurement, etc. I especially reject it when it is based on the only ideologies that have successfully been injected into science, economic interests and atheist materialist ideology being the most successful of those pollutions.
*
There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
When Leonard Darwin, his son, ran for a seat in Parliament, he ran against universal vaccination, luckily, unlike in so many districts in the U.S. now, he lost.
There is also the fact that Charles Darwin, himself, admitted that the theory of natural selection was inspired by his reading of the pseudo-scientific economic theories of Thomas Malthus. The theory that was generated in the pseudo-science of economics is a constant and continuous valuation of living beings on a scale of economic utility and value. His use of the economic activity of animal husbandry, with its inherent practice of early killing those which are not chosen for breeding stock, and plant selection and hybridization as the entirely artificial and entirely intentional analogy and inaptly chosen demonstration of "natural" selection only ties those ties to economics tighter and unites them with the immediate product of the belief in natural selection, eugenics.
** As I understand it, Thomas Aquinas reasoned that since humans in the afterlife didn't need to eat, that animals were obviously superfluous in the afterlife, so they had no souls. From there the idea became common in Western thought. Considering how often Aquinas was called an ox, you'd have thought he'd have more of a feeling for animals. I can't imagine anyone who has had a close relationship with an animal could really miss that they have a soul, though apparently most do. While I doubt that there would have been much less brutality and murder of animals even if he'd concluded that they did have souls, it was an idea that certainly didn't make those who believed it less callous in their treatment of animals. But, then, when Aquinas experienced a mystical experience late in his life, he told other monks that his enormous theological-philosophical work was mere straw. As I understand it, he stopped writing at that point.