Argumentum ad Nauseam

Looking back over my posts here the past few years, I see I’ve devoted what some people might view as an inordinate amount of verbiage to what is popularly (and inaccurately) referred to as the “conflict between science and religion” (or vice versa).

One reason I’ve focused (or maybe obsessed) on this “debate” is because, as a student of Philosophy, I’m looking at the discussion from somewhere in the middle, seeing merits and demerits on both sides. Another is that from my perspective, the debate appears to be defined – in the popular media at least – by the extremists on both sides: Christian fundamentalists on the one hand and hard-core atheist-materialists on the other.

As is the case any time extremists get involved in a discussion, sober and rational examination of the issues gets shouted down by sophistry and propaganda and the basest kind of appeals to emotion. We are all invited to choose sides, but then we’re presented with loads of overheated rhetoric and logical fallacies as a basis for making that choice.

Much of the problem, as I’m sure I’ve said before, is that the current debate or conflict is not between Science as such and Religion as such but between certain narrow, and to some degree disingenuous, constructions of the two. The atheist-materialists represent that their worldview is synonymous with science, though it is not, and attack Fundamentalism as a straw-man proxy for all religion. And the fundamentalists are all too happy to concur that their own idiosyncratic approach to religion is, indeed, the only valid one.

It’s important to keep in mind when evaluating the claims of the self-styled advocates of Science that what they’re advocating is never science alone. Science is not, in itself, a comprehensive understanding of reality; it is simply a tool, a way of investigating reality, and nowadays of investigating only one aspect of reality, the physical/material. The claim that physical/material reality is the only reality is, of course, not a scientific statement, but a philosophical assumption. In other words, the promoters of Science over Religion are in fact promoting Science plus an unacknowledged and largely unargued philosophical stance.

Recognizing this, we ought really to regard the debate as not between science and religion but between naturalism and supernaturalism or between physicalism and metaphysicalism (if there is such a word). But of course that would put the debate into the realm of philosophy, and it’s blindingly obvious that the people who are participating the most energetically in the science-vs.-religion debate are woefully unequipped for a real philosophical discussion.

It’s all very unfortunate indeed, I think, because I’m convinced that a wholesale rejection of either science or religion is a serious mistake, with serious consequences not only for each individual but for society and the world at large.

In my day job as a journalist, I regularly see what I firmly believe are the destructive consequences in individual lives and in society of the absence of a middle ground on these issues. On the one hand, we have an ethical vacuum in which materialism encourages us to believe that physical security, well-being and especially pleasure are the only goods toward which we can realistically aspire. On the other hand, we have a chorus of doubtfully trustworthy men and women (but mostly men) hectoring us to believe that if we don’t adhere to an archaic and fossilized set of externally imposed laws, of which they are the sole reliable interpreters, we will be consigned to eternal torture.

As a result, I see people almost daily who have made astonishingly bad choices because on the one hand they are driven to satisfy their physical desires – whether for money, pleasure, command of other people, social success, adulation, etc. etc. etc. – and on the other, they affiliate with a form of religion that encourages them to make a verbal profession of faith without supplying them any means of making that faith a real part of their lives, or, indeed, of suggesting that they really need to.

To put it bluntly, every day of the week, “good Christians” are being put on trial for crimes of all sorts, not to exclude rape and murder. I’m not suggesting that they commit these crimes because they are Christians (even fundamentalist Christians) but rather that the readily available forms of Christianity in many communities don’t give them sufficient reason not to commit them.

And nor does the prevailing “intellectual” paradigm, as is evident from the ease with which, for example, the titans of Wall Street justify to themselves, and to our lawmakers, the plunder of their clients and the pillage of the national treasury. In fact, prevailing economic theories based on “rational agents seeking to maximize their personal good” are nothing more than a pretext for financial predators to excuse their predations.

It may be arguable whether the polarized and largely fraudulent debate over “science vs. religion” is a cause or an effect relative to our increasingly fragmented and angry society. But it certainly isn’t helping. A reframed, more realistic, more sincere discussion of these issues might draw us together as humans instead of dividing us, and help heal some of our social and personal ills. I won’t be holding my breath waiting for that to happen.

Forget Darwin

My last post took a pretty hard swipe at science, so in the interests of balance I want to take hold now of the other horn of the contemporary culture-wars bull.

The term “fundamentalist” was invented by conservative Christians in the late 19th century as a self-description intended to identify themselves as the true bearers of the real principles of the uniquely true religion. Part of their self-conception was the claim that they were merely carrying forward ideas that were “fundamental” to Christianity from its beginning.

This claim is false, of course, because they were parsing their scriptural sources in an anachronistic way to come up with answers to the challenges raised in their own times. The concerns of the people who wrote the Bible were not the same as the concerns of late-19th-century Christian pastors, who were mainly appalled by the then-new doctrine of “Darwinism.”

What the original fundamentalists were responding to, however, was not just Darwinism but “modernism” in general, including especially the text-critical and historical-critical approaches to Bible scholarship. Studies in these disciplines had severely undermined a naïve belief in the Bible as “the Word of God,” and in many ways this was a more exigent challenge to faith than the findings of physical science.

Darwin’s theory, however, hit people on a more emotional level than arguments about source-texts and exogenous influences. On a gut level, many people just didn’t like the idea that they were cousins of chimpanzees. And we are still dealing with that reaction.

Scientists and their groupies are of course endlessly exasperated by all this. As far as they’re concerned, the theory of the origin of species through natural selection is “settled science,” and everyone should just accept it and get over it. And they’re probably right, though some of them seem inclined to extend this hypothesis to cover matters far beyond the biological where its applicability seems very dubious, as in the logically and morally questionable doctrines of Social Darwinism.

However, the ongoing argument over Darwin vs. the Bible or Darwin vs. God, though it seems to provide people on both sides with some sort of pleasure, is ultimately misconceived.

Even the most fundamentalistically inclined televangelist makes use every day of the theories and discoveries of physics: Their pleas for money are beamed to homes around the world by way of radio waves to satellites in Earth orbit and back again to the TV receivers of their fans. And every step of the way, their broadcasts rely on the laws of motion and electromagnetism and relativity and so on that were discovered and described by science.

For anyone with the slightest intellectual integrity, there’s a hair-raising degree of self-contradiction in this: Fundamentalist preachers are taking advantage of the discoveries of physics to broadcast the message that physics is a lie.

All the quibbling about how to interpret the age of bones and why there are seashells on top of the Alps pales into insignificance when someone asks why we’re able to see stars and galaxies that are millions or billions of light-years away.

From Newton to today, science has discovered the laws of motion and gravity, the values of universal constants like the speed of light, the ways in which bits of matter and energy interact, and so on and so on. Even if science hasn’t come up with a convincing explanation of why all these things are what they are, it’s undeniable that it has come up with stuff that works. Any quibbles one might have about the details of quantum theory seem largely irrelevant if you’re talking with a resident of Hiroshima.

Fundamentalists need to forget Darwin and worry instead about Newton and Faraday and Einstein and Niels Bohr and the rest. They need to explain how the very same science that enables them to generate electromagnetic signals and put satellites into Earth orbit and draw electricity from nuclear generators is wrong about the size and age of the universe.

After all, we can see objects in the sky that, based on measurements using the same physics that enable them to broadcast their appeals for money, are millions or billions of light-years away, when, according to their supposedly Bible-based belief, the universe is only several thousand years old.

This leaves us with only two options: One is that every object in the sky is within 6,000 to around 10,000 light years of Earth, and only appears falsely to be farther away. But this means that all the matter in the universe is contained within a space with a radius of roughly 10,000 light years; based on the laws of physics, it all should have collapsed into a black hole long ago.

The other option, and the one that fundamentalists tend to fall back on whenever challenged, is that it’s all a “test of faith.” God created the universe on that fateful day in October of 4004 B.C. (or some other day, but within the past tens of thousands of years), and when he did, he scattered the stars and galaxies across the sky in such a way as to make us believe that they were farther away and older than they really are.

This is the one that really bothers me, because it says that God is a liar and the whole fabric of the universe is a deception. It says that no one who is not a human being on this one planet, Earth, can ever know the truth about existence, because it’s only here that we have this book, this Bible, that explains the hidden truth behind the falsehood that is the universe.

That is the real “fundamental” idea: Challenged by serious and thoughtful investigators of life, the universe and everything, a certain group of Christian pastors decided that the answer was to declare the Bible unarguably true and everything that contradicted it false.

But before conservative Christians invented fundamentalism, even before there was such a thing as Christianity, there were many who understood that the universe was much more “the Word of God” than anything written down in ink. We talk about trees being chopped down to make paper for books; one living tree tells as much truth as all the books ever written.

The Amoral and the Immoral

One night recently, I was watching “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and was introduced to a writer named Sam Harris who was plugging his new book, The Moral Landscape. The discussion indicated that the topic of the book is Mr. Harris’ claim that science can be used to produce or discover moral facts or principles, and should replace or supersede religion as a source of moral understanding.

My immediate response was, “Bunkum!” or some less nice words to that effect.

I haven’t read the book, nor have I read any of Mr. Harris’ previous works, though I have learned by visiting his website that he is one of those people who believe religion is bad, science is good, and the two are opposed, and that he has received praise from, among others, Richard Dawkins.

From what I read on Mr. Harris’ site, it appears that he agrees with Dr. Dawkins that religion is an unnecessary excresence on human history and we would all be much better off if it would just go away. (Dawkins, of course, has expressed the opinion (in The God Delusion) that religious belief only persists because of bad parenting, and if “we” could just stop people from propagating these erroneous beliefs, religion would indeed just go away, and we could all go forward with an ideal life in a science-ruled world. More about that later.)

I also learned from a column that Mr. Harris wrote for the Huffington Post that he is dismayed by his observation that many scientists agree with many religious believers (including me) in concluding that science simply is not equipped to deal with moral principles: It can study what people say and do about morality, but it can’t say what is or is not truly moral.

This is in fact the most serious roadblock that the pro-science crowd has found to its agenda of eliminating religious belief and basing all social, political and personal life on scientific principles. My impression – and I must reiterate that it’s based on the one interview and a fairly speedy reading of the online sources – is that Mr. Harris has written his new book precisely in order to try to knock down this obstacle and clear the way for the Golden Age of Scientific Rule.

I don’t plan to read the book itself because I think I have better things to do with my time than waste it reading something I already know is an exercise in futility. That may sound narrow-minded, but in fact it’s based on a thoroughly rational appraisal of the prospects. As it happens, there’s an airtight and surprisingly simple argument:

1. “Nature,” by which I mean the aggregate of physical data that modern science restricts itself to studying, is inherently amoral. There is no moral good or bad in the physical cause-and-effect processes that materialist scientists insist are the sum total of what the universe is. Ultimately, it’s all random.

2. “Rationality,” by which I mean in this instance the use of more-or-less-formal logic, is also inherently amoral. Logical analysis says nothing about whether a conclusion is morally good or bad, only whether that conclusion is based on a valid argument.

3. “Science,” then, if defined as the application of rationality to natural phenomena, is inherently amoral: Its objects of study and its manner of study offer neither moral content nor moral analysis  (AIAO: Amorality In, Amorality Out).

Thus, if a scientist is proposing moral principles or advocating a course of action as morally positive, he or she must be basing this proposition or advocacy on something other than science. In practice, of course, the moral principle generally is inserted into the discourse at the beginning as an assumption. (Harris seems to be assuming that a scientific morality would somehow be “more moral” than one based on religion, because science is better than religion as an understanding of reality.)

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has addressed these issues in considerable detail in Sources of the Self and has shown that the adherents of the atheistic/materialistic/secular-humanistic worldview(s) are unable to account, using their own logic, for the moral principles they espouse. Their moral imperatives exist as part of our Western cultural legacy, having entered the cultural stream from religious sources, but are treated as “self-evident” because the proponents of this view can't allow themselves to acknowledge the original religious source.

In general, what the atheist/secularist crowd espouses are the “Enlightenment” values of individual liberty and humanitarianism. And certainly there’s nothing wrong with them as values. But based on their own materialist-rationalist principles, the atheists-secularists can’t explain why these things are worth valuing.

Absent such an explanation, it becomes easy for some people to conclude that they aren’t truly worth valuing. This then allows them to proceed to behave with disregard for others’ liberty or well-being, as in Social Darwinism, Objectivism, Straussianism, etc.

Harris’ approach apparently relies at least in part on “human flourishing” as a yardstick of value, but Taylor has already shown the inadequacy — indeed, the danger — of that standard.

Obviously, how one defines “flourishing” has a major effect on what one wants to propose as a moral good. If “flourishing” means mere physical well-being, for instance, the argument must tend toward the kind of hedonistic, consumeristic society we already live in, and which so many of us find objectionable on various levels, including the environmental and the spiritual.

Which raises another objection: Obviously, if one automatically rejects religion as a moral source, one is rejecting spirituality as a moral value. So any moral system one constructs on that basis will offer no satisfaction for anyone who believes in the reality of spiritual rewards. And it will automatically denigrate any system or society that does accord value to spirituality, while overrating a system or society that ignores spiritual value or meaning and looks instead at physical well-being as a standard.

Of course, the pro-science crowd delights in detailing the many abuses that have been committed in the name of religion, and there certainly is no denying that terrible abuses have occurred, and continue to occur. But the advocates of science as a standard are far less inclined to take note of the rather unencouraging track record of science and scientists on moral issues in the relatively short time they’ve had the upper hand.

Individuals pursuing an amorally conceived science have, notoriously, placed their work at the disposal of morally dubious governments such as those of Nazi Germany and the USSR. (And one might note that the USSR was ruled according to an atheistic-materialistic ideology, which didn’t prevent it from killing as many as 60 million people (Solzhenitsyn’s estimate) in programs of collectivization, forced migration and forced labor.)

Then there are the morally dubious projects of governments regarded in the West as more legitimate, such as the recently revealed deliberate infection of 696 men and women in Guatemala with syphilis by U.S. researchers in the 1940s. Add that one to the Tuskegee experiments, the eugenics projects in which women were sterilized based upon their race and class, the CIA experiments in mind control using LSD and God knows what else, and let us not forget the atomic bomb, poison gas and biological warfare.

None of these things could have proceeded without the willing participation of scientists. What it all ultimately demonstrates is the obvious fact that the amoral includes the immoral.

No doubt, the researchers in all these projects argued that their work helped save American lives, thus serving a “greater good.” This is precisely why utilitarianism is worthless as a moral source: In the pursuit of the “greatest good for the greatest number,” everything depends on who decides what the “greatest good” is and how they decide it, and how much evil they’re willing to inflict on the lesser number. A less "scientific" view of morality might propose that inflicting horrible suffering on even one person is wrong.

Scientists go where the funding is, of course. When the funding is provided by the government, they do the work the government wants, such as creating weapons of mass destruction. Today, of course, they mostly are placing their work at the disposal of profit-seeking corporations, sometimes because that’s where the government funding (i.e., yours and my tax dollars) is being funneled. That’s one reason why the pharmaceutical industry has grown so huge.

And here is an example of amorality serving amorality. The “science” of economics — according to some of its practitioners, generally those who are viewed most favorably by large corporations — informs us that one reason governments must not try to regulate business is because doing so injects moral considerations into markets that will “flourish” best by operating unimpededly according to “nature.”

As Taylor’s work shows, modern science and the worldviews it has most strongly influenced are geared toward the control and exploitation of Nature, including human nature. And there have been many people in the past couple of centuries who sincerely believed they were part of a movement toward the overall improvement of human life through that type of manipulation. And improvements obviously have been made by some measurements, though there also have been obvious losses.

But for every selfless philanthropist or courageous existentialist (a la Camus’ Dr. Rieux, admittedly a fictional character), there have been multitudes of social-Darwinist, para-Nietzschean scoundrels and bullies whose only interest in science is determining how it can help them increase their wealth and power.

Time and again, the resistance to such people and their bogus ideologies has come from people motivated by religious belief — because it’s only because of such belief that we can arrive at a point of view that sees something better or higher than the things of this physical world.

I don’t believe religion, or religious aspiration, can be eradicated. Unlike Dr. Dawkins, I don’t think it’s a purely cultural-educational phenomenon. I think it’s a basic constituent of human nature, because the divine is a basic formative and ordering principle of reality.

But it does worry me that there are people who believe it can and ought to be eradicated, people who are involved in creating drugs and machines that can do great harm to our minds and souls, and who have considerable clout with our lawmakers and sociocultural opinion-shapers.

In the latter days of the Soviet Union, the authorities found it expedient to classify dissidents as psychologically aberrant rather than politically unorthodox, and to confine them in mental hospitals instead of labor camps. It seems to me that the biggest difference between here and there, now and then, is that in the United States we’re letting ourselves be persuaded into self-medicating ourselves into irrelevance, into letting “the system” decide what’s best for everyone.

When we live in a world where resistance to abuse or stupidity can be “diagnosed” as “oppositional defiant disorder,” we really need to think carefully about what we value and how we can know what is truly good or evil.

Control Thyself

I don’t know if it has always been this way (I suspect it has), but people today do seem to have a tendency to want to control the world around them by dictating what other people should do.

I’ve spent a lot of time driving, possibly more than average, and I’ve observed myself and others while doing this. We aren’t just driving, we’re also judging every other driver we encounter. Ultimately, each of us is thinking, “Why can’t everyone just drive the way I drive?” But the sad fact of the matter is that they are driving the way we drive; they’re driving along thinking, “Why can’t everyone just drive the way I drive?”

We bring the same attitude, the same self-justified view of things, to life in general: “Why can’t everyone just live the way I live?” And the problem is the same: Everyone does live the way we live: self-absorbed and thinking we know better than everyone else.

The philosophical attitude is of course somewhat different: We should examine ourselves first, and only when we’re sure we’ve gotten it all figured out (which of course, philosophically speaking, is never) should we turn our attention to telling other people what to do.

This approach tends to strike people as unrealistic, impractical, other-worldly. And those criticisms are true. The truly philosophical life contributes nothing to the growth of the economy, the advance of science and technology, the expansion of human domination over nature. On the contrary, it tends to heap scorn on the pursuit of such things, to call attention to the impermanence, and thus the emptiness, of all achievements along these lines.

This leaves philosophers open to the criticism of being anti-humanistic: Science and medicine and so on have improved the human condition immeasurably over the centuries, and surely no one can claim that there’s no value in this improvement. There’s a certain amount of exaggeration in this claim of progress, but there’s also a certain amount of truth: People do live significantly longer today than they did even a century ago, and anyone who wants to argue that this isn’t an improvement is going to have a hard time convincing anyone.

At the same time, however, we seem to have paid, and are continuing to pay, a steep price: in consumption of the Earth’s resources, destruction of the environment and deterioration in our social, political and spiritual circumstances.

There are lots of rhythms in life. In human life in particular, there’s an upbeat, an inhalation, a rising tide in our youth as we grow and go out into the world to make our mark, raise families, change the institutions and situations into which we’re born. And there’s a downbeat, an exhalation, an ebbing tide in our later years as we seek to preserve and conserve what we’ve learned and what we’ve found worthy of valuing, and to protect what we’ve acquired.

There will always be a tension between these movements, and likely a swinging of the pendulum between one and the other. What seems likely to be most harmful, most likely to render us unable to keep our social world going, is the belief that we can freeze the pendulum at some point in its swing, to believe we can say, “This much freedom, this much exploration, and no more.” And that applies to the carved-in-stone principles of science as much as it does to the conventions of bourgeois society or the commandments of religion.

It’s precisely at the point when we think we have it all figured out that the stuff we don’t know comes up behind us and clubs us on the back of the head.

The Vast Unknown

As we know, there are known knowns: There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.

- Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, news briefing, Feb. 12, 2002

Some people in the media ridiculed the above statement when "Rummy" said it back in 2002. And as a response to questions about the Iraq War, it certainly had some inadequacies. But from a purely epistemological point of view, it's not entirely lacking in merit. Certainly, "we know there are some things we do not know," and I would add that there are some things we cannot know.

I mean this in a strictly rational, scientific sense (at least for now): There are some things that are inherently unknowable. Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty (or indeterminacy) provides a famous example: In quantum physics, it's impossible to know simultaneously the position of a particle and its velocity; the more precisely you measure one property, the less you know about the other. And Werner Heisenberg, the physicist who first formulated this principle, called attention to the fact that this uncertainty isn't just a result of insufficiently precise measuring tools or processes, it's a fundamental property of quantum systems; that is, of matter as such.

Equally fundamental, and possibly even more so, are Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Without going into great detail (partly because trying to do so would probably give me a severe headache), these theorems prove that many formal logical systems cannot prove all of their own possible axioms and/or cannot prove their own consistency. One reading of the implications is that if the result of a formal logical proof is something we can label as "knowledge," Gödel's theorems show that there must remain some things that are "unknowable" in this sense.

These examples may seem somewhat nitpicky or irrelevant: Surely it doesn't matter much in the larger scheme of things if we can't precisely locate every particle of matter/energy in the universe or if we can't absolutely prove or disprove every possible statement.

But what if one of the inherently unknowable things is the largest scheme of things itself - the universe? In other words, what if there's an inherent unknowability at the smallest scale, the microcosmic, and also at the largest, the cosmic, and an unprovability about any guesses we might make as a substitute for direct knowing?

Within my limited and decidedly math-impaired understanding, this does appear to be precisely the case.

When we look up at the sky on a clear night, we can see millions of glowing objects in the sky - and not one of them is actually located where it appears to be. The reason, of course, is that it takes time for light to travel through space, and during the time the light is traveling from its source (a star, galaxy or planet, for instance) to our eyes, we and that source are moving. Even our nearest neighbors in space are far away enough for there to be a time lag, and thus a displacement, between their emission of light and our reception of it: It takes light about 9 minutes to travel from the sun to the Earth. And obviously, the farther away the emitter is, the longer the time lag and the larger the spatial displacement become.

What this means is that the picture our perceptions (even as we extend them through technology such as telescopes) give us of the universe is inevitably geocentric. We can adjust the picture to some extent, in effect creating a mental or conceptual map of the real current locations of celestial bodies, and this procedure obviously works well enough for us to send space probes to the Moon, Mars and so on. But as the distance involved increases, so must the uncertainty of our conceptual map.

In other words, any model we propose for the structure of the universe in its entirety will always have a major theoretical component. It's likely that we are safe in supposing that the natural physical laws that operate within our zone of certainty will also operate outside that zone, so it's fairly safe to hypothesize that the most distant regions of the universe will be like ours in a general, qualitative sense. But we cannot know the precise structure or appearance of those regions, or of the universe as a whole, in "real time," that is, as they are at any one moment.

One implication of this unknowability is that we (and by "we" I mean all intelligent beings who happen not to be blessed with supernatural omniscience) may ultimately have to accept multiple, and possibly mutually contradictory, models of the universe. As long as a conceptual model doesn't conflict with natural universal laws, insofar as we can understand those, and does account as much as possible for the phenomena that we can observe directly, we probably must accept that it's "true," even if there exist one or more alternative models with equal claims to be "true."

In some sense, we already do live with multiple universes - that is, with multiple explanations of the structure and origin of the cosmos - though there's considerable argument about which, if any, are true. And maybe a realistic understanding of the limits of certainty should prompt us to be a bit less fiercely argumentative about our varying understandings.

Perhaps to add fuel to the fire, or perhaps to help diffuse it, I'll be writing next time about an alternative model that as far as I know - and obviously, that can't be very far - hasn't previously been proposed and is very unlikely to be provable.

Darwin vs. Darwinism

One of the many things I find exasperating about our culture is the so-called conflict between science and religion. I think the conflict is only between one restrictive, narrow-minded vision of science and one equally (and similarly) restrictive, narrow-minded vision of religion. I consider the partisans on both sides of this divide equally fundamentalist, and I would very much like to see more of us who hold more moderate positions gain attention in our public discourse (i.e., the media). But as it is now, only the extremists get air time.

I’ve done a little chipping away in this blog at the fixed positions on both sides of this polarized debate, and while I’m not interested in a frontal assault on either position (I was raised literally in the middle of a Civil War battlefield, so I know the futility of that tactic, even if I hadn’t read Sun Tzu), I want to step up the opposition to the hijacking of our intellectual life by extremists.

So here’s the first barrage:

One of the great crises of spirituality in the Western world was precipitated by the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s book “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” The spritual crisis was precipitated by the fact that because this work seemed to imply that a literal interpretation of Judeo-Christian scripture was erroneous, there was a widespread belief that “Darwin has disproven the Bible.” As a result, some people abandoned their Christian faith and others hardened theirs. (This was, in fact, what gave birth to the fundamentalist movement, which originated among a group of Baptist ministers who decided that the best answer to the challenge of science to the scriptures was to declare the scriptures right and science wrong.)

Interestingly, the word “evolution” doesn’t appear anywhere in the first edition of Darwin’s book. In fact, the only place in it where any form of the word “evolve” can be found is at the end, the final word of the final sentence of the book:

“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

In the sixth edition, published in 1872, “evolution” is much more prominent, mainly in describing Darwin’s supporters and his responses to his critics. For example: “It is admitted by most evolutionists that mammals are descended from a marsupial form; and if so, the mammary glands will have been at first developed within the marsupial sack.”

In short, during the 13 years since the publication of the first edition of “Origin of Species,” Darwin has shifted from making observations of nature and drawing conclusions from them to defending his theories against the onslaughts of his many critics – mainly the religious establishment – and aligning himself with partisans who support him.

Given that there were so many who believed that “Darwin has disproved the Bible” and more generally that “Science has disproved God,” it’s interesting that Darwin made only one small change to that final paragraph reproduced above. Here it is again, with the one small change highlighted:

“It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”

Loose Morals

So far in this blog, I’ve done a lot of ranting about the role of randomness in the prevailing Western worldview and the resulting lack of “focus,” as defined in my first posting here. As I’ve indicated, I think it’s a wrong view of things, an inaccurate description, account or narrative.

But what difference does it make? What does it matter if scientists and economists and so on are working from a faulty conception of the overall cause and meaning of the cosmos? As long as they get the lower-level details right, and the electricity still makes my lights work and I can still click a link and look at stuff on the Internet, is there any reason to care about overarching theoretical stuff that may not be provable anyway?

Well, certainly in the case of economics, we’re seeing what happens when a wrong theory holds sway: Vast sums of money vanish in the blink of an eye, people lose their jobs, and political consequences follow.

In physics, there’s apparently some possibility that we might see even more disastrous results in a few months, when the big new CERN supercollider is fired up again, after it blew a fuse on the first try several weeks ago. Some physicists have expressed concerns that when their colleagues start smashing tiny bits of matter together, it might possibly cause the end of the world. Others scoff at that idea, though; I guess we’ll find out who’s right eventually.

However, I think we’re already living every day with almost equally disastrous results from this materialist-atomist worldview, because it leaves us with no “higher good,” no center-of-the-universe, no focus. What we’re left with is an absurdist value-neutral universe in which every action is pretty much as valid as any other. If, as Nietzsche proclaimed, “God is dead,” then by what standard do we judge our own or others’ words and actions?

The answer for Nietzsche and many others: the individual will, or what a lot of people might prefer to call the personal ego. From that perspective, “good” is what’s good for me, “bad” is what’s bad for me.

Amazingly enough, this position is in fact the stance of orthodox economics, though in that discipline the concept is sugar-coated with the notion of “rational agency,” which in essence claims that people (or at least those who make economic decisions such as whether to buy or sell stuff) act out of what some refer to as “enlightened self-interest.” Meaning that people are generally aware that the effect of their decisions on other people is something they need to keep in mind; for example, if you’re stealing food from others, you need to leave them enough so they don’t starve to death, if you want to be able to keep stealing from them.

But as we’ve seen in the banking industry, some people don’t get that part of the theory; instead, in their egotistical greed, they’re willing to burn their own house down to keep the fires lit. “Rationality” wouldn’t seem to have much to do with it, except in the sense that some of them were able to find plausible-sounding rationalizations for what they were doing.

Now, I’m not aligning with those upholders of religious orthodoxy who decry “situational ethics” and “moral relativism.” I think any ethics that doesn’t vary somewhat depending on the situation is too limited to be valid, and I think all morality is relative – relative to the true, final good.

I don’t agree, either, with those who claim it’s possible to establish a valid ethical system on a purely materialistic-scientistic basis. Any moral system that posits the “highest good” as some physical thing – prosperity, social order, the pursuit of scientific knowledge – will lead eventually to immoral results. For example, if you suppose that the highest human good is social order, you’ll inevitably end up making utilitarian compromises, seeking “the greatest good for the greatest number,” which means some “lesser number” will be hauled off to prison whenever it’s convenient, without violating your moral rules.

As for “scientific knowledge” as a “highest good,” it sounds nice and noble, but of course in the real world, research gets done when someone – the Pentagon, the pharmaceutical companies, the cigarette makers, etc. etc. – is willing to fund it.

So is there a way to find the true “highest good,” and to do so objectively, without recourse to traditional authority, such as religious dogma? I believe there is, and I’ll go into detail in a posting in the next few days.

Right now, I’d like to make a brief comment about reader comments. I’m delighted anytime anyone wants to leave a comment here. I’ve set it up so you don’t have to register or anything like that. I do say things from time to time that I think are fairly provocative, and I don’t mind anyone disagreeing or criticizing or challenging any of it. However, I won’t allow obscenity, libel or hate speech. So please feel free to critique, but please be grown-up about it.

Focus

We’re all familiar with the use of the word “focus” as a sort of psychological term; for example, “You need to stop worrying and focus on getting the job done.” I suspect most people probably understand this usage as a borrowing from photography, which would give “to focus” a meaning something like “to direct one’s attention toward a specific object so as to make that object stand out clearly from all others.”

However, the use of “focus” in photography is itself a borrowing. The word is Latin in origin and originally meant “hearth.” Thus, it referred to the center of the home, around which the life of the family revolved, the source of warmth, of nourishment and, most importantly, of light. On that basis, the term has clear symbolic ramifications; Pythagoras is held to have taught that at the center of the universe is a kind of metaphysical fire which he called Hestia, which of course is the name of the Greek goddess of the hearth.

Pythagoras also was believed by some ancient writers to have been the first person to use the word “kosmos” as a name for the universe. Our modern word “cosmos,” as a term that simply means “the physical universe,” is not at all equivalent to the ancient Greek word, which carries implications of orderliness and beauty (hence the English word “cosmetic”). Thus, some recent translators of ancient Greek writings have taken to using the phrase “world-order” to translate “kosmos.”

The idea that there might be some sort of overall order in the universe has become quite alien over the past couple of centuries as advances in physical science have been interpreted as somehow disproving traditional beliefs about God, creation and the meaning of it all. In the extreme view, we live in a universe of randomness in which any meaning that exists is what we ourselves create by the heroic exercise of individual will.

I think that view is untrue. I also think it’s unscientific. And some scientists these days are starting to recognize at least that it’s inadequate, because if you look around the universe, you find that there is in fact quite a bit of orderliness. So there’s a fair amount of studying going on of “self-organizing systems” and “emergent order.” You can even find reputable scientists discussing our “order-producing universe” – which might be another way of translating “kosmos.”

Still, after decades of repetition by the intellectual elite, the idea of an essentially random, meaningless existence has had a pervasive influence on Western culture. Following Darwin and Nietzsche, and even more after Einstein and Heisenberg and their colleagues, we’ve learned that we live in a universe that has no center, no order, no purpose – the product of an inexplicable cataclysm, and fated merely to collapse back into nothingness or fizzle away into a tepid and inert miasma.

In a kind of parallel development, the centering-point in our lives has gradually disappeared. The hearth gave way first to the radio, then the television, though both could still provide a “focus” for family life. But then we needed personal TVs in every bedroom, and 200 channels to watch instead of just three. Then it was a computer wired to the Intenet, and now a cell phone, an iPhone, a BlackBerry or a PDA. And while the techie fans of such things may claim they’re more “connected” now, it really all tends toward disconnectedness, a decrease in shared experience and an increase in isolation – in other words, a more random and meaningless existence, but self-inflicted.

What I plan to do in this blog is find opportunities to call attention to how the underlying order of reality is reflected even in the seemingly messy and disorderly details of life in today’s world. I’ll probably make fairly frequent reference to the economy and financial markets, because I have professional expertise in those areas and they’re especially interesting these days to a lot of people. But there’s nothing I’ll rule out as a topic of discussion, because everything is connected, nothing in this universe is explainable without reference to everything else, the history of each thing is the history of us all. Or as Tennyson put it:

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower; but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.