The dogmatism promulgated by the advocates of natural selection deprives man of any say, of any decision, in their own (forthcoming) wellbeing. Such dogmatic approach must be, and always is, balanced by some other absolutes, which might offer man freedom and assure him hope of eventual liberation. No dogma is a good dogma. At best it might be a probability, never an absolute. In this sense the Darwinian biologists sin as much as the religionists. Perhaps they ought to stick to studying lower forms of life, and leave man alone. Even religionists claim that man has freewill—even though they, admittedly, subjugate it later to their own advantage. The Darwinians don’t even offer that.
The more I read Dawkins, the more I see that Darwin is god, Darwinianism is a religion, and Darwinian biologists are its high priests. And if you don’t fit into god’s plans and his priests’ dictates, then you simply don’t matter. You are excommunicated. Condemned to everlasting ignorance.
In a novel Close Call 1: Survival of the Fittist (sic), a gentleman by the name of Randi Hacker, gives an imaginative description of a post apocalyptic world, in which a group of people turn to strict Darwinian directives. Survival is all. The consequences are not pleasant.
I recommend it to all affirmed Darwinians.
PART TWO — PRESENT
I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. ...nobody knows how it can be like that.”
Richard Phillips Feynman (speaking about quantum theory)
American physicist (1918—1988) recipient of joint Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965.
Chapter 8
Fundamentalism in Religion and Science
Science is organized common sense—where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.
Thomas Henry Huxley
British biologist, defender of Darwin’s theory (1825—1895)
Sometime ago I read a book, which shook my faith in science. I have been attracted to it by its title: The Elegant Universe. It was written by a fairly well-known author of popular science books, whose ambition seems to have been to enlighten the reader, who heretofore was completely ignorant with most aspects of cosmology, physics, and particularly theoretical physics. For those who don’t know, theoretical physics is a lot like religion. The scientists make assumptions, and then hope against hope that, perhaps, one day someone somewhere might confirm their speculations with ‘scientific’ observations. Sometimes it might work. Usually it doesn’t. Just like with religions. Many religions.
Let me start by saying that I am in awe at Mr. Green’s attempt to cram virtually the sum-total of human scientific achievement, as pertaining to the world we live in, into a little more then four hundred pages. A noble aim—a near-impossible task. Dr. Leon Lederman in his The God Particle, probably had a similar problem though he managed to include an important quote attributed to the 1979 Nobel Prize recipient in physics, Steven Weinberg, who said that: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.”
So much for science?
But seriously, Brian Green put a lot of faith in his book. Regrettably, chapter after chapter, he went on to demolish the dogmas he’d presented in previous chapters. Yet, this seems to be the fate of all scientists. No sooner they establish new postulates than new discoveries demolish the previous ones. You never know where you stand. The only thing you can be fairly sure of is that all too soon someone, somewhere, will demolish whatever you’d just learned. Isn’t this what happened to Einstein’s dice which God was (not) rolling around the universe?
Below an excerpt from my review of The Elegant Universe which I posted on Amazon.com. I was really trying to be kind. Finally, I thought, finally I shall be up to date.
“I looked forward to reading this book with bated breath. At last someone who claims to know enough about Superstrings, hidden dimensions, and the final, or near-final Theory of Everything. Perhaps Feynman was wrong, after all. Perhaps Brian Green could, to use Feynman’s words, ‘…explain it (all) to the average person.’ Even if Feynman couldn’t although he has ‘been worth the Nobel Prize.’
I gave it a try.
The first part of the book is a fairly long-winded dissertation of the Einsteinian past. No matter, quantum mechanics would set it all right, Brian assures us. Well… it didn’t. What is more, each succeeding chapter, more or less, contradicted each previous one. I know that we are just a bunch of primitives who barely scratched the slate of knowledge, but is it really necessary to fill some 400 pages with all the things that we got wrong? Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed it. But I have been said to be prone to mental masochism…”
This has a lot to do with, what I call, scientific fundamentalism. Each time a scientist comes up with an new idea, with a new ‘observation’ through their albeit myopic lenses, at least for a while such becomes a dogma. Any young scientist who’d dare to oppose the newly-arrived-at status quo would be ‘excommunicated’ from the scientific fraternity. This, by the way, was pretty much what happened to Einstein. Actually, with Einstein it went further. The Germans threw him out because he was Jewish, the French because he wasn’t French, and the Americans, well, at the time, the Americans welcomed everybody, with possible exception of the Mexicans. But they came anyway.
Only later the definition of a scientific theory has changed to “a theory that has not as yet been disproven”. Just as well. And that brings us to Dr. Sergio Bertolucci. Soon after he said that, “it was vital not to fool around, given the staggering implications of the result,” he continues to fool around in his Laboratorio del Gran Sasso, again, with the velocity of light. Poor Albert. He lost on quantum mechanics and now…
Since his first announcement, Dr Sergio Bertolucci reported that in the second experiment neutrinos, once again, traveled through 732 kilometers of solid rock faster than light. Perhaps neutrinos know that rock is really empty space. Well, 99.999etc.etc% of it is empty space. Yet, even so, light only travels “at the speed of light” in a vacuum. On the other hand, according to Sir Arthur Eddington that seems to be virtually anywhere.
Maybe Weinberg was right.
But whatever the answer, we may be sure that other scientists will challenge it. Isn’t science fun?
On the other hand, what’s the point of having a theory for the sole purpose of disproving it? As Shakespeare might say, “Much ado about nothing?” Perhaps it keeps the unemployment figures down.
Nevertheless, the concept of “true until proven guilty”, to paraphrase the new definition of a scientific theory, was a marked improvement on the original dogmatic approach, which originally stemmed from priesthood having a foothold in science. All theories, like all things connected with priesthood, appear to have served to help control the minds of the ‘believers’, although, perhaps, the ‘ignoramuses’ would be a better word.
On the yet another hand, once we have the Theory of Everything, who’d need God? Einstein, had he been around, would no longer want to know Her thoughts. Or, for that matter, who’d need science? We’d already know everything. EVERYTHING!
At least, in theory.
Ah, yes. In theory. We all know what the new definition of scientific theory is. Much ado…
The theoreticians, particularly the astrophysicists and their colleagues dealing with the probabilities of quantum theory, appear to have lost touch with the experimental physicists. They continued to drown us with masses of dimensions, countless universes, improbable probabilities, ever pretending that they are following a scientific method of inquiry.
It seemed to me, that to most of us, ‘cosmos’ means the world. To the Greeks, kosmos represents order, harmony, and even an ornament. Hence the world is the embodiment of a harmonious, orderly system. A thing of beauty. An ornament. What a pity that, according to our religions, such order, such harmonious beauty must come to an end. The religions have the End of the World—the scientists, the Big Crunch. Aren’t they two of a kind? Why can’t t
hey both leave our world alone? And now astrophysicists are turning it upside down.
Around 1948, Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold, Hermann Bondi and a few others, proposed the Steady State theory, also known as the Infinite Universe and/or Continuous Creation theory. In Steady State, new matter is continuously created as the universe expands, so that the Perfect Cosmological Principle is adhered to. This Principle states that the Universe is homogenous and isotropic in space and time. Or that it looks the same everywhere, the same as it always has and always will; or that the properties of the universe are the same regardless where the observer finds herself. You get the idea.
Nice, elegant solution. Beautiful, eternal, infinite. An ornament. But… no big bang, no ultimate destruction, what would the Vatican say? The atheists, who apparently form the elite of the scientific fraternity, quickly dismissed the proposal.
Yet, beauty and elegance is not an intellectual property of man. It belongs in the emotional if not spiritual realm. Most unscientific.
I recall writing an essay, some years ago, on a similar subject, entitled Celestial and Other Bodies, in my collection of Essays Beyond Religion I. Here’s an excerpt.
“When an enigma occurs, the astronomers, the guys who spent all night watching the stars, defer to their colleagues, the theoretical physicists. Now these guys don’t watch anything much, they just run a hot bath, climb in, and start thinking. Seriously, the theoretical physicists don’t observe the world. They observe the observers and whenever the observers get stuck by observing or, as in this case, not observing what they were expecting to observe, the theoreticians start theorizing.”
“Their ideas derive from an intuition about the way nature behaves on its most fundamental level, the kind of ‘feeling’, or hunch––almost a personal aesthetic that is every bit as important for a good theorist as the ability to solve equations.”
This last observation, in italics, I borrowed from Adam Frank’s article Mystery of the Missing Star, in the December 1996 issue of the Discover Magazine.
So much, once again, for the scientific method. One almost hopes for a bit of fundamentalism. The other extremes seem just as banal.
Scientific fundamentalists call their dogmas theories, but if you don’t believe in them, you don’t get a teaching job. You don’t get to be called a professor, or become an expert on TV. On the other hand, the old adage states quite clearly that if you can’t do, you teach. The question is, will anyone listen? In its most secular form, fundamentalism is a disease that restricts one’s horizons. A fundamentalist tends to narrow his/her vision by looking at the world, even at pragmatic reality, solely through his or her lenses of expertise.
But one must be fair.
The church’s, the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church’s dogmas, with which I am more familiar, are also a matter of convenience. In my essay Myth and Reality (also in Beyond Religion I), I pointed out that the original Nicene Creed was a concise statement and included a declaration on the nature of Christ.
This Creed of the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 has been revised at the First Council of Constantinople in 381, to settle problems raised by Arianism.
Briefly, Arianism proposed a Son who was not equal with the Father. The dispute became political with whole groups of bishops being exiled by emperors. Thus then, even as now, most ‘truths’ stemmed from political expediency. And let us never forget that a politician is a man, or woman, who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you are looking forward to the trip. At least, to my knowledge, the bishops had not been excommunicated.
Much later, a 9th century addition by the Church stated that: ‘the Holy Ghost procedeth from the Father and the Son’. This led to antagonism with the Orthodox Eastern Church.
In the meantime, the battle against Arianism continued, and in the 6th century the Catholic Church adopted a new statement. This new creed is known as the Athanasian Creed, and reinforced the belief in the Trinity and the Incarnation, which is not to be confused with reincarnation, which remains a no-no.
Next we come to the so-called Apostles’ Creed, familiar to most conservative churches. While its origins date back to 2nd and 3rd centuries, its present form was reached in the 7th century. It is simpler than the Nicene Creed, but differs in two significant statements: it purport that Christ descended into hell, and it proposes a ‘resurrection of the body’, rather than the ‘resurrection of the dead’, avowed in the Nicene version. As Christ’s descent into hell is not to be found in earlier manuscripts, the idea was probably an interpolation from the fable of Bacchus and Hercules, and adopted as an article of Christian faith.
There are other dogmatic additions. First, the dogma of papal infallibility was added in the first Vatican Council in 1870. Some years later on November 1, 1950, Pope Pius XII added the dogma of ‘bodily taking up of the Virgin Mary into Heaven’, which became known as the dogma of Assumption of Mary.
As long as no one questions a convenient superstition, the Church leaves it alone. The moment it is questioned, the Church declares it a dogma. Common sense is strictly against the rules.
Thus, my dear scientists, you are not alone.
Furthermore, there is little point in having a faith, a religion, or a philosophy which, although perhaps enlightening and uplifting, has no other practical application. It may be good for hermits, perhaps for advanced mystics, for the philosophers, but of little use for the billions of people who, seemingly, are walking in circles in search of some guidelines, which would keep them happy, comfortable, and healthy. Thus any proposition that one should advance to the human race should, indeed must, meet the prerequisites defined by Pragmatic Realism.
And this brings me to some such propositions.
While I side with my hero (Dawkins) in rejecting Richard Swinbourne’s (Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at he University of Oxford) premise that the maintenance of similarity between countless trillions of electrons calls for divine intervention, one could raise the same argument regarding the long-sought-after “Theory of Everything.” Such a “Single Source” (dogma?) is normally assigned by theists to god; either that, or to covert collusion between god and theoretical physicists.
What Dawkins also fails to contemplate is that god of the Old and the New Testaments “judges no man”, and thus represents a completely neutral force that could be seen as the sub-fundamental particles (think of strings of energy) possessed of infinite ability to combine and adapt their vibrations.
I, for one, regard the universe (or universes, if each originated from its own black-hole), as an example of the infinite manifested creative force. The (universal) unconscious (mind) provides the impetus for the constant supply of infinite new ideas to come, or be drawn (by the conscious mind) into the phase of becoming in the ever-forming, evolving, fulminating universes. Even as “in the fullness of time”, galaxies are drawn into their individual black-holes, after whatever period of ‘apostasy’ (digestion, fermentation, cleansing, unwinding of complex relationship between fundamental particles, adaptation and sharing of new attributes gained over the billions of years of becoming, etc.,) the new universes come into being. Perhaps with bangs of different sizes, just to confuse the theoretical astrophysicists of the future.
Also, as mentioned in Chapter 4, I like to endow my universe with a superb if often surreptitious benevolence, rather like mentioned in the Tao Te Ching of Lau Tzu, or what Dawkins calls “friendly universe”. Why? Because it makes me feel good and, at least in my life, I witnessed countless manifestations of it.
Forever? Why not. Providing we accept that, once and for all time, no end entails not having a beginning either. That way you don’t need a god, and frankly the scientists are not of much use either. All we need is to live, and leave this, our world, our tiny ball of dust near the edge of a smallish galaxy, a better place than we found it.
That’s all.
Chapter 9
Where We Are
The greatest mystery is not that we have been flu
ng at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.
Andre Malraux
French novelist, adventurer, art historian 1901-1976.
It is of quite unparalleled indifference to me how the world came about. The vital thing is that it did. What matters much more to me is where are we now, and where it is going, but mostly where are we now.
Oops!
Recently, we came across another problem. Someone who didn’t like Albert Einstein invented Quantum Mechanics, better known as the (the already mentioned) quantum theory. While Einstein’s God didn’t like to play dice with the universe, the quantum physicists have no such qualms. Nothing was certain any more. The usual three dimensions, four if you count time, grew to eleven, and the single expanding or contracting universe grew to a multi-universe theory.
We may find it hard to accept, but we never lived in a universe as it really was, or is; after all, it is subject to continuous change at subatomic, atomic, planetary, galactic and, as of now, universal chance and turmoil. It, and our imaginary vision of it, must and does undergo constant change. Any scientist who claims to know what the universe really looks like is suffering from a subjective delusion, unless he’s a catholic, in which case he probably received a Revelation. Sorry, sarcasm is said to be the lowest form of wit, but they (the solons of the Vatican), shouldn’t have declared Fatima (read more on Fatima in Beyond Religion III) as physical reality.
DELUSIONS — Pragmatic Realism Page 6
