Since my research into what made the so-called left fail has led me into a confrontation with materialism and its conjoined twin, atheism, I've learned a lot of things about the philosophy of science which are well known to a few who have had to go into that for their work, mostly physicists, but which is entirely unknown to even many scientists considered to be quite brilliant and capable of sophisticated thought. Even some physicists seem to be rather startlingly naive about exactly what it is they do and even the simpler consequences of some of the most obvious facts about their field.
I have boasted several times about when, in a discussion about the incredibly short-sighted and massively arrogant idea that physics and cosmology were at the advent of having a Theory of Everything, I got one of the more arrogant physicists of our time, Sean Carroll to admit that science didn't even have a theory of everything about a single object, not even an electron, never mind the entirely more complicated entire universe. And it was like pulling hen's teeth to get him to admit it. Yet I believe the guy is still trying to sell the equivalent of hen's teeth rather successfully to the true believers in and out of science. That is unless he has done the typical thing and bailed, using the golden parachute of anti-religious propaganda to tide him over in retirement in lieu of starting an antique shop. Well, considering the recycled nature of the entirety of neo-atheist invective, perhaps that's exactly what you can call that.
The fact is that physics and cosmology are no closer to having a theory of everything than they were a thousand years ago. In fact, the findings of physics, mathematics and logic early in the last century have, if anything, made the disbelief in the possibility of them ever having a theory of everything something of a reliable certainty. The belief in the possibility of having a theory of everything would seem to fly in the face of "laws of science" and even the equivalent in mathematics. Yet such a thing is entirely respectable among exactly those who blow a gasket if someone questions something which is entirely more uncertain and even doubtful, such as I also did recently when I expressed my doubts about the reality of natural selection. More on that in a minute.
One of the most shocking things I ever read about science was from a physicist, one who, in spite of what he obviously know about the unlikelihood of coming up with something like a theory of everything, fell into the trap of trying to find a shortcut to one, his Fundamental Theory. The brilliant astrophysicist, Arthur Stanley Eddington, said:
Eighteen years ago I was responsible for a remark which has often been quoted:
"It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has had no control It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational and we can never succeed in formulating them."
This seems to be coming true, though not in the way that then suggested itself. I had in mind the phenomena of quanta and atomic physics, which at that time completely baffled our efforts to formulate a rational system of law. It was already apparent that the principle laws of molar physics were mind-made — the result of the sensory and intellectual equipment through which we derive our observational knowledge — and were not laws of governance of the objective universe. The suggestion was that in quantum theory we for the first time came up against the true laws of governance of the objective universe. If so, the task was presumably much more difficult than merely rediscovering our own frame of thought”.
Since then microscopic physics has made great progress, and its laws have turned out to be comprehensible to the mind; but, as I have endeavored to show, it also turns out that they have been imposed by the mind — by our forms of thought — in the same way that the molar laws are imposed…
A. S. Eddington The Physical Universe: The Philosophy of Physical Science
I ask you to imagine what would happen if you said that the laws of science are imposed by the mind, that the mind creates the structure and order which is the substance of science instead of it merely being like gold nuggets that were picked up off of the shore of a riverbed or mined in its raw state. I don't have to imagine because if you point out the nature of scientific knowledge, that it is the creation of human minds, you will enrage the typical hearer of that idea. It happened to me yesterday in that exchange about natural selection, which is a far more obvious imposition of order onto nature by human minds and culture than the discoveries of subatomic physics. But I've gone into why I am skeptical of the idea in far greater detail than I can take up your time with today.
The reason I'm revisiting these topics is because I think I've realized something new about the consequences resulting from the character of the atheist framing of reality, apart from the naive and arrogant scientism I've concentrated on before. I think there is something far more basically wrong with the entire enterprise and it hinges on the character of the materialism that underlies it.
Materialism is, as I've been pointing out, a monist system in which one essential substance is the ultimate reality of everything, the physical universe, objects and their movements, the forces that are perceived as a part of that reality but which are intrinsic to it. A materialist or, in Carroll's name-change, "naturalist" or, in the denotation switch of others, "physicalist" will angrily admit to no possibility that there is anything else which is real which can be real or which ought to be real. It is a closed system, even our thoughts are inevitably bound up in the nets of causality contained in the materialist monist system. Like Biblical or Koranic fundamentalism, the proposal or consideration of nothing outside of its demanded monist system can be tolerated.
Just as a religious fundamentalist ideology will confront inevitable problems when it comes up against real life, apart from people who don't happen to believe in that particular monist framing, materialist monism runs into some really bad trouble when it confronts reality. Since just about every materialist is also a devotee of scientism, science being what comprises its official catechism of faith and the profession of its clergy, you have to pretend that science is not what it is and, also, that if science is, like everything else, merely the result of the combination of molecular precursors, it can't attain an objective view of the very thing that it studies. That its claims to comprise truth depends on something else being there, otherwise it's just another result of physical precursors going through their paces. Nothing else can be allowed to impinge on their central monism. Unlike those other fundamentlisms, which hold that there is a supreme conscious mind which can intervene and change the typical operations of physical reality - such as the creation and freeing of other minds - materialist monism, depending on the actions of material objects within the limits of causality, can only be true if it is also false.
If you want to enrage an atheist, point out that science has no disembodied existence but consists of whatever ideas scientists have in their head that they successfully sell as science to their colleagues. Science has a merely contingent character, depending on the collective state of mind of scientists at any given time. And, since scientists in good standing are hardly in uniform agreement, it is not any one thing, it is quite variable. Despite those obvious truths, for these scoffing, debunking and deriding atheists, there has to be something which is "science" which has some metaphysical existence external of human minds, which is invisible, timeless, enduring and, most amazing of all, omniscient. And they will maintain an angry insistence on this disembodied thing, "SCIENCE!" can both be absolutely and objectively true and, at the same time, be susceptible to falsification and overturning. How it can be both at the same time is a question that is not to be asked. I know from practical experience that it will enrage just about any atheist you ask that.
Neither are you allowed to point out the things held by scientists to be real which are, then, in the normal ways of science, found to be not real or at least unbelievable. You can add in those ideas which are constantly being shown to have been mistaken or even the product of outright fraud which passed through the review of their peers*, undetected, which are unmentionable, though their detection and reporting and rejection are supposed to be intrinsic to the "scientific method" the origin of its reputed reliability and the proud boast of exactly the same atheist-ideologues who have pushed the same romantic view of science which depends on pretending that science is what science cannot be, even on its own terms.
So the materialist-atheist view of science is entirely romantic and unrealistic and self-contradictory. But it goes much deeper than that. The very same habits of thought which produce it also produce an even more bizarre concept of disembodied information, of which this imaginary thing which they hold to be "science" is comprised.
I have had a problem with the breezy way in which the word "information" is often used by people in cosmology and in other parts of science because one of the most salient features of information is that it informs minds. I don't think there is any reason to think that you can remove the mind which receives and understands information from the concept of information and have the word retain any meaning. Information doesn't just lie there as a potential to be picked up or not, it is created in the act of some mind or minds being informed of something. It would seem that just those minds which are in the habit of believing that there is some unconscious property of nature which comprises information are also the minds which are in the habit of making believe science has some disembodied existence in some perfect state which contradicts their other faith statements about what science is, what doing science consists of and its claims to the faith and reverence of all of humanity. Tempted as I am to bring up things like multi-universes, the obvious product of atheist crusading as science, not of the observation of nature, Boltzmann Brains and other such creations of these mocking materialists because I suspect they are all the product of the same wrong ways of thinking flowing from the basic and inevitable contradictions of their fundamentalist and monist faith in confronting the actual universe, I think I've used up enough of your time today. Perhaps in the new year.
* Considering its essential and formally demanded (though often less than rigorously insisted on and obvious liability to malfunction) act of review by scientists, the bizarre, disembodied, concept of science held by such atheists is amazingly superficial. Who do they think does that review and how could the imperfections in thought and act by those mere human minds not determine the imperfect character of science which could not be better than the minds that went into making it?
Not exactly on topic, but I got to watch most of "From Jesus to Christ" on PBS the other night (Part 2; I'd seen Part 1 last week). It came out shortly after I left seminary, so I was steeped in those thoughts at the time.
ReplyDeleteTime, of course, leaches away.....
It was so refreshing to hear truly informed and intelligent people discuss Biblical scholarship and history, and everything from the gospel times to the conversion of Constantine, and give (in a documentary, not a textbook or even scholarly tome) a lucid picture of a complicated history (all history is complicated).
And I thought of the on-line atheists I've encountered, who watched a video about how Jesus didn't exist, or how Paul invented Xianity, and thought they'd learned the great secret of Western Civ (as the documentary says at the end, the conversion of Constantine started a new chapter in world history).
They are literally too ignorant to be embarrassed by how ignorant they are.
It was that latter sentiment I thought of while reading your piece. Most of what you say is basic empiricism; it's fundamental to the thought of Hume as well as Kant (who is mostly a response to Hume). Science is empiricism; supposedly. Yet point that out, and, as you say, expect the howler monkeys to fill the air with flung poo.
It ain't worth it, I tells ya....
There's a reason I've come to think of these neb-atheists as neo-Puritans: their determination to "purify" knowledge and reduce it to an absolute. They despise ambiguity and contradiction in Xianity (the only religion they really know; they just imagine other religions, like Islam (but never Judaism) are variations on the Xian themes. Judaism is always excluded from critique because, well, you know: anti-semitism.), but embrace it in their own thought by refusing to even examine it.
ReplyDeleteAnd they insist on a purity of thought and understanding which is literally impossible, but is the foundation of their conviction. It's why I've come to realize arguing with them is pointless.
One might as well argue philosophy with a five year old.
I have to say that I think the survival of such a difficult faith under such adverse circumstances is more convincing to me of its truth and, also, of the essential character of the person who originated in it than any textual or historical information these days. I remember introducing an online atheist to the minority Christian belief that Jesus accepted the role of Messiah at his baptism instead of by birth, though I have to say that, while I'm not a total believer in the incarnation, the problems I used to have with it don't seem to matter to me anymore. Neither are the problems with the miracles attributed to Jesus. I wasn't there, there is no evidence concerning them, and, as my mother used to say, If you believe God is all powerful you couldn't disbelieve in their possibility. Look at how science requires us to believe in the possibility of chimpanzees spontaneously typing out Hamlet, or whatever and the rather more incredible improbability the "tuning" of our universe as measured by scientists. If you can accept that then why not?
ReplyDeleteI have to say if someone told me eight and a half years ago that I'd have turned, mostly, into a writer on the topic of atheism and religion I'd have thought that was highly improbable and entirely removed from my intended topic. Only not, as it turned out.
I have to add that I hope you enjoyed the idea of the new atheism as the retirement antique shop of past-it scientists.
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