There is a philosopher called Friedrich Hegel, whom I must confess I specifically detest And I am happy to share that profound feeling with a far greater man, [Karl Friedrich ] Gauss. In 1800 Hegel presented a thesis, if you please, proving that although the definition of planets had changed since the Ancients, there still could only be, philosophically, seven planets. . . On 1 January 1801, before the ink was dry on Hegel's dissertation, an eighth planet was discovered - the minor planet Ceres.
Jacob Bronowski: Knowledge or Certainty
I cannot pass over without a comment on old Hegel, who they say had no profound mathematical scientific education. Hegel knew so much about mathematics that none of his pupils were in a position to publish the numerous mathematical manuscripts among his papers. The only man to my knowledge to understand enough about mathematics and philosophy to be able to do that is Marx. Fridrich Engels: Letter to A. Lange, March 29, 1865
If you can't find intelligent life in this universe using the best guess of the sciency designers of such equipment as the Mars lander and planners of the SETI program and whatever, you're not going to do it anywhere on the basis of equations or even logic. Or eliminate it by number work. In the jillions of, in that most paradoxical of phrases "other universes" numbering in the quadrillions if not, and why not, infinities of them, that atheists needed to create to get rid of the improbability against us existing maybe there are who knows how many of the best minds of bazillions of species who, looking at a description of our universe, couldn't imagine the possibility of life arising in such an absurdly improbable place? When you do science by making it up to suit your ideological purpose, why not imagine that?
I mean, when you're talking multiverse, you're not talking about anything but the ultimate Just-so story of all Just-so stories, the whole thing is make believe, not observation, measurement and analysis. It's no different from any other creation myth, their god "random events" being constrained by the power "probability" under an overarching theme that whatever Earth physicists and cosmologists can dream up MUST BE. It's a bunch of atheists declaring they have the power to create worlds by dreaming them up. And if you think that's far fetched, I'll refer you, once again to Hugh Everett's, I kid you not, taken-seriously "many worlds multiverse" fable. Those insane girls who believed they had communicated with Lord Voldemort and tried to murder a classmate to propitiate the Slender Man weren't any more detached from known reality.* But it's atheist-satisfying creation myth made up by people with degrees in science, so it's got a nihil obstat imprimatur from the official organs of science. Compared to that, at least the six-day creationists are dealing with things that we can see around us today, wrong as they get it and for dishonest purposes, at least they're that reality based.
* For some reason, writing that, I was reminded of Ayn Rand's c. 1928 diary entries in which she drooled over the horrifically cruel, cowardly serial killer William Edward Hickman. I remember reading excerpts from her diary, it was clear she loved the idea of murdering people and dreaming up psychotic philosophical horse shit to make it into some Nietzschean act of pure will, him into some powerful hero of the will. How that differs from the thinking of the Slender Man would-be killers, I can't see. But she's one of the dominant intellectual forces of the Republican-fascist party.
No comments:
Post a Comment