So wondered physicist Lawrence Krauss, who has "fretted," “I worry whether we’ve come to the limits of empirical science.”
Interesting article by Regis Nicoll, an author of Why There Is a God: And Why It Matters, who is a retired nuclear engineer -- and who of course is religious, and
an atheist or agnostic is going to know where this essay is going -- so
therefore wouldn't read it.
That would be a mistake.
It's
not exactly rare to find a scientists who is a religious believer, but
rare enough in terms of also being writers willing to raise the
theological implications that science can so easily conjure up. Usually,
confronted by these implications, scientists, even an inspired one, a
gifted artist of a scientist, (and most of them are anything but), for example, like the great Richard Feynman, would whistle up the "God of the Gaps" as Feynman did here:
- God was always invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time — life and death — stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.
- interview published in Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? (1988) edited by Paul C. W. Davies and Julian R. Brown, p. 208-209 ISBN 0521354625
What I find so interesting is how the "latest science"
easily feels so dated, and so soon, when the great metaphysical
arguments are so timeless, so transcending time and place.
In
that regard, one wonders what Feynman would say now, 31 after his death,years of
fancy, in-depth science (such as the recent coming online of the Large
Hadron Collider that Nicoll, the author of this piece, refers to). Would
Feynman be amazed at how much they've advanced human knowledge or
disappointed? Eager for more of where the research seems to be headed or
shocked at how fantasy novel-like -- or even medieval -- that direction
seems?
Of course, Richard Feynman -- born in 1918 and died in 1988 -- was an atheist. Of course
he was. It would be surprising if he weren't. And he didn't have much
use for philosophers. “Philosophers say a great deal about what is
absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can
see, rather naive, and probably wrong.” Maybe so. He would certainly
dismiss the great metaphysical arguments for the existence of God as
God-in-the-gaps wannabees. But I think something is telling: notice he
was referring to philosophy in terms of its relationship to empirical
science. It no doubt was completely uninteresting to him otherwise.
Basically,
when empirical science broke away from philosophy and focused so
closely on the nature world, it gained a tremendous amount of
nature-knowledge, and, coupled with bankers who wanted to maximize their
profits by investing in discoveries that opened new fields of energy
and manufacturing, they created the modern electronic world. It's a
godsend, to coin a phrase, feeding seven billion and employing many of
them, and so on. However, it also concurrently lost the ability to "see
the big picture" and ask the big questions. Descartes or Newton were not
atheists for a reason. Similarly, an economist who delves so far deep
into the various economic questions and issues that he misses the result
of it all -- yes, a materialistically and food-rich world but also an
economically relentless go-go materialist culture, ever more humanly
shallow as it becomes ever more competitive; a culture that is fast
burning people out (the main reason people turn to drugs is the
overbearing weight of being a consumer and economic cog in the modern
world's merciless machine).
It is so easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees.
Meanwhile,
the one essential non-empirical science, Metaphysics, was the Rub' al
Khali to Feynman, as it is to so many others. Empirical scientists
usually operate on metaphysical principles they don't know exist;
they've not consciously reviewed, reflected on, and debated, like actors
on a stage who never regard the stage itself, or the reality of the
script they're reading. Even tell them Metaphysics, and philosophy in
general, is a science (a body of knowledge with its own rules, reviews,
and standards of research), and they'll laugh at you.
Like
the Rub', empirical scientists fly over it all, or go around it. To
them, only a madman or a metaphysician would actually enter what is to
them a trackless waste (hence the Rub' al Khali ref) and ask questions
like Why do we assume our mental abilities are NOT fevered dreams? Why
do we assume we really are conscious and not just the fevered dreams of
someone else? How do we know we can grasp reality in any way?
Metaphysicians
(maybe not all of them, of course, but by far the most) have always
known the limits of empirical western science that Kraus is pondering,
because such questions are what Metaphysicians work on. The notion of
Scientism, the idea that empirical science is the only knowledge out there worth knowing, or the only form of knowledge by which anything that can be known
-- by which anyone can know anything "real" -- is an assumption based
on a metaphysics they just assume to be true, or don't even know they're
standing on.
They assume it is true
because, as Chesterton said about the modern West, they're living off
their Catholic capital, the sanity built up in the Middle Ages. It was
because Christianity took Jewish revelation and applied it to Greek
philosophy that we ended up with the basis for the modern world: the
intrinsic value of human beings, their right to property (intellectual
and physical), on one side, and that the nature world can indeed be
studied because God created it as an objective reality and wants us to
study it. (Learning more of its beauty and wonder is delving deeper into
God Himself.) We know reality isn't psychotic "projection" and is solid
reality because we hold the necessary prior belief that God made it and
established a Covenant with it (First Covenant when God blessed the
Seventh Day, etc.)
Empirical science did
not arise in other lands for a reason: Islam believes God created
existence but also that it is inherently unstable, mirage-like, because
Allah remakes it every second, and could change it fundamentally at any
time; also Islam believes it is blasphemy and damnation to actually
study nature! (Yet another way Islam is the antithesis of Christianity.)
Buddhism and the Eastern "religions" teach that reality is not real,
it's either imaginary from our own evanescent consciousness or a dream of some divinity.
Richard
Feynman is dead. Many of the scientists who developed "the latest"
ideas in physics are passing away. No "TOE" exists, no Theory of
Everything. In fact, everything seems to be getting more and more arcane
all the time! And thus the scientist, Regis Nicoll, who wrote this
article based it on the "limits" empirical science seems to be reaching
has something to say that is more than just a "God of the gaps" trope.
So maybe, maybe,
things might be changing. The current generation of Scientism bigshots
would have to pass away entirely, of course. And Western Civilization is
running a race as to whether it is destroyed by heartless Scientism
mated to an equally heartless economics on the one hand, in a myriad of
ways it can provide (nuclear war, white plagues, AI, hopeless hedonism,
and the mass embrace of a drugged state, etc.) and Islam, the great
Know-Nothing Party of history, doing its best to bring everything
crashing down so the survivors of the Western Götterdämmerung can live in a perpetual Seventh Century world.
Who wins that race is currently a toss up.
An Préachán
