We Only Have Reasonable Grounds - Absolute Proof Is A Fraudulent Delusion - Chapter 4 Continued

I had been told that Euclid proved things, and was much disappointed that he started with axioms.  At first I refused to accept them unless my brother could offer me some reason for doing so, but he said,  "If you don't accept them we cannot go on",  and I wished to go on,  I reluctantly admitted them pro tem.  The doubt as to the premises of mathematics which I felt at that moment remained with me, and determined the course of my subsequent work.

Bertrand Russell:   Autobiography, volume 1 page 32

There is the other possibility; that we die into an absolute reality wich we call God, because we still have no better name for it.   This alternative too cannot be proved  nor of course can it be refuted.   Here every human being is faced with a decision that no one can take away.  We have no rational proof for eternal life.  But - as I have already said - we do have reasonable grounds.  

I'm breaking into this paragraph to dispose of the illusion of absolute proof, something which atheist-materialist most extraordinarily of all, devotees of scientism inevitably demand of all religious statements.   

I say it is most extraordinary in those who express a belief in scientism, the claim that only those things demonstrated by science are admissible as knowledge and, especially, in the extreme cases from the stupidest of sci-ranger comment thread trolls to eminent scientists holding enormous public repute, university positions, are members of National Academies of Science and are given medals and cash awards by the awards giving establishment.  To start with, and as I've noted before, their own claim is not a statement of science or demonstrable by science, so it is one of a long series of self-contradicting holdings of that most widely held of atheist faiths.

What is extraordinary about them demanding absolute proof or absolute rejection of statements is that, as one of their most illustrious figures, Bertrand Russell should have faced the fact that no such thing as absolute proof exists in even that most exacting of sciences in which something approaching absolute proof can be attained, mathematics.   His adult work with his teacher, the far more admirable thinker to my thinking,  Alfred North Whitehead sought to find such absolute proof of the universally held findings of mathematics only to have their enormous effort made somewhat moot by reviewers of it, most notably in the famous incompleteness theorem of Kurt Godel, which was confirmed and extended by some of the most eminent younger mathematicians in the 20th century. 

In the physical sciences, especially in the two most successful of those, physics and chemistry, the practical consequences of the non-existence of absolute proof has characterized their entire history.  The 19th century gradually showed the limits of the proofs of the greatest of all physicists, so far, Newton and the successors of that framing of physical reality, have demonstrated that though they might get very good at predicting things, their knowledge about even the very simplest seeming of objects is never absolute.  That has not kept them from making the most ridiculous statements about coming up with a "theory of everything" and closing the system of physics, something which the experience of mathematicians dealing with a far simpler and more precisely defined universe in the 20th century should have clued them in is an absurd quest  and an even more ridiculous claim to still be making.  

There are still many crucial aspects of chemistry which are not knowable, I was reading about the form new compounds will crystallize into a while back and why those cannot be predicted.

As the sciences deal with far more complex entities and events the unattainable goal of absolute proof grows ever more distant until it disappears EXCEPT IN THE DISHONEST PRESENTATION OF EVEN ENTIRELY UNGROUNDED SPECULATION IN THE SAME LANGUAGE THAT NEWTONIAN PHYSICS MIGHT HAVE BEEN BY A MATERIALIST OF THE MID-19TH CENTURY.  What you often hear announced on NPR as scientific knowledge any given morning is as likely as not to have a status far more like 19th century phrenology than it does modestly stated and much more reliable physics. 

But that is something that scientists should have known before they were credentialed by the colleges and universities that gave them their BS degree.  It is something which an atheist, Joseph Weizenbaum said as well as I've ever seen it said:


The man in the street surely believes such scientific facts to be as well-established, as well-proven, as his own existence.  His certitude is an illusion.  Nor is the scientist himself immune to the same illusion.  In his praxis, he must, after all, suspend disbelief in order to do or think anything at all.  He is rather like a theatergoer who, in order to participate in and understand what is happening on the stage, must for a time pretend to himself that he is witnessing real events.  The scientist must believe his working hypothesis, together with its vast underlying structure of theories and assumptions, even if only for the sake of the argument.   Often the "argument" extends over his entire lifetime.  Gradually he becomes what he at first merely pretended to be; a true believer.  I choose the word "argument" thoughtfully, for scientific demonstrations, even mathematical proofs, are fundamentally acts of persuasion.  

Scientific statements can never be certain; they can only be more or less credible.  And credibility is a term in individual psychology, i.e.. a term that has meaning only with respect to an individual observer.  To say that some proposition is credible is, after all to say that it is believed by an agent who is free not to believe it,  that is, by an observer who, after exercising judgement and (possibly) intuition, chooses to accept the proposition as worthy of his believing it.  How then can science, which itself surely and ultimately rests on vast arrays of human value judgments  demonstrate that human value judgments are illusory?  It cannot do so without forfeiting its own status as the single legitimate path to understanding man and his world.

To which I say, Amen, until the last sentence.  Science cannot honestly assume that status, even Weizenbaum in his radical modesty over-reached.  There are facts of history which are far more reliably known to be absolutely true than even very reliable science can achieve.*  Even Weizenbaum as he was disproving the pretenses of scientism couldn't keep himself from asserting that superstition.  The status that scientists love and even demand is, itself, an illusion.

There is no choice in even dealing with the physical realm but to rely on something other than proof, not less than because absolute proof is not something we can even know is possible except as an imaginary goal.  "Reasonable grounds" is, actually, what we really depend on in life and, as Weizenbaum notes, that is, itself, dependent on the choice to believe.  

Hans Kung continues.  

We can commit ourselves to this in enlightened reasonable trust.  Truly, not to console ourselves with the promise of an afterlife,  but to set ourselves all the more decisively in the here and now, in this life, in this present-day society.  And that we do not die into nothingness but into God seems to me to be more reasonable;  it seems more reasonable under any circumstances.  Think;  if God really exists and if he really is God, he cannot be merely the God of the beginning, but must be the God of the end.  Then he is our Finisher as well as our Creator.  And it is he alone, the Creator and Preserver of the cosmos and of human beings, who can be expected to have one more word to say, even in dying and at death, beyond the frontiers of all that has hitherto been experienced;  to have the lat word, just as he had the first.  If I seriously believe in an eternal, living God, I believe also in God's eternal life, in m own eternal life.  So if I begin my profession of faith with belief in "God the almighty, the creator" I may very well finish it with belief in "life everlasting".  

As I said yesterday, my primary focus in this commentary is political, in how to get the most people to treat others as they would want to be treated, even when they would rather not treat them in such equality.  So my interest in discussing the belief in the afterlife is related to the character of that future in light of it's tendency to produce good works.  I do believe that history shows that there is all the difference in the world to a society where many people believe and put the commandments of Jesus, the teachings of the Prophets into effect in their lives and the laws of their countries.  Where people became convinced that The Bible, especially the "golden rule" mandated that people not be held in slavery, that led to abolition, even having that influence on secularists who could find no basis for that in the science they were coming to consider an absolute authority.  Where people didn't accept that as an absolute moral requirement - EVEN WHEN THEY DIDN'T WANT TO TREAT SOME PEOPLE AS THEY WOULD WANT TO BE TREATED - slavery persisted and expanded.  I think in variations limitless, almost all problems of government, politics, law, are inevitably related to that commandment and its implementation.   If everyone always did it, the law, even governments would be superfluous.  However, we do not live in such a world.  Jesus said he didn't have a kingdom of this Earth. 

This statement by Kung contains the central conviction that I base a belief in an afterlife on, 

Then he is our Finisher as well as our Creator.  And it is he alone, the Creator and Preserver of the cosmos and of human being.

I think the afterlife is too much separated in our imagination from the present life.  Modern cosmology holds that our being here, put in terms of mathematical probability of a myriad of physical constants and conditions being precisely tuned to allow for intelligent life, is exhaustively improbable, requiring an enormous exponent of 10 to be expressed as a ratio of one.   The afterlife's seeming improbability would seem to be matched with a similarly large improbability of present life.  But we're here and so we don't think of that in the same way. 

I suspect that our lack of understanding of our present life and its relation to God is far greater than we suspect, as well.  Every atheist argument of that, from comparing us to the myriads of microorganisms too the vast and innumerably starred universe matches a scale of human understanding of all of it out of human limitations and imagining that all of reality exists on that anthropomorphic scale.  Making man the measure of all thing is the ultimate sort of conceit that atheists accuse religion of, especially the monotheistic traditions derived from the far more modestly and carefully expressed Hebrew Scriptures.  Those scriptures, despite being told in human experience, never to my knowledge make man the measure of all things, it explicitly cuts us down to size as compared to God, even as it asserts that God regards us and, even, that God regards all of life, even noting the fall of a sparrow.  

When someone asked Marilynne Robinson what she expected heaven to be like, she broke the dead silence that fell over the auditorium after a few seconds by saying,  "I expect to be impressed."   I expect to be surprised.  If I'm wrong, I don't think I'm going to have to get over the disappointment for long. 


*  I think the pretense of the attainability of absolute knowledge having in peoples' experience been serially thwarted by such things as news reporting of the absurd claims made by credentialed scientists, most glaringly and ridiculously in the fields of nutrition and health, has certainly contributed to such things as anti-vaccination mania.  It has also contributed to such things as climate change denial, though in that case the manipulation of people through lies freely broadcast in the libertarian mass media is more important to consider.  The denial of reality of the Trumpian kind is more related to that though the impossibility of achieving the golden fleece of absolute proof plays a part in that, as well.