September 25, 2004

THE UNIVERSE

Smith, Huston

Why Religion Matters B The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief

(HarperSan Francisco, New York, N.Y.), 2001

TWO WORLDVIEWS*

Point

Contradiction

The Traditional (Religious)View

Human beginnings

to the 16^th century

The Scientific View

Modern (16^th Century - 1950)

Post-Modern (1950- Present)

Matter

Spirit is fundamental and matter derivative. Matter obtrudes in the sea of spirit only occasionally, like icebergs.

Science restricts consciousness (the closest that science gets to spirit) to attributes of biological organisms at some level of complexity. Science thus turns spirit into tiny rivulets on a single planet in a desert universe 26 billion light-years across.

Etiology of Humanity

Human being are the less who have derived from the more

Human beings are the more that have derived from the less. Darwinists (Darwin, 1809-1882) consider that novel qualities B life, sentience, and self-consciousness B can derive from the rearrangement of elements that themselves lack those qualities.

Meaning

The world is meaningful throughout. It flows from Perfection Alike a fountain ever on@ (Plotinus, 205-270 A.D.).

The world is intrinsically meaningless. Meaning is restricted to the earth=s biological organisms. AThe more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless@ (Steven Weinberg, 1933-).

The world is endowed with meaning only by individual actors, and the societies they construct, for their own ends.

Contradiction

The Traditional (Religious)View

The Scientific View

Sense of Belonging

People are made of the same stuff B sentience, values, meanings and purposes B of which the world is made. They feel at home, with a sense of belonging to their world. Bondedness is built into the fabric of things.

No sense of belonging can be derived from the scientific worldview. AIf I were a cat, I would belong to this world B this world to which I am opposed with the whole of my being@ (Albert Camus, 1913-1960).

Our own Experience

The universe of tradition is Aqualified@ (Lewis Mumford, 1895-1990). Its qualities include the sounds, smells and colors through which we experience the corporeal world.

Science measures only the quantifiable. It measures the qualities of objects (their Asecondary qualities@B sounds, smells and colors) in terms of their underpinnings. It does not speak to intrinsic values (Atertiary qualities@B hopes, fears, pleasures, pains, successes, disappointments).

The Ending

In the (historically-minded) Abrahamic religions, both individual souls and history end happily B in Judaism, the Messiah; in Christianity, the Second Coming of Christ; in Islam, the coming of al-Mahdi; in Hinduism, the possibility of escape from samsara (the world we now know, unredeemable) into Nirvana; in Buddhism, AThere is an unborn, an unbecome, an unmade, an uncompounded; therefore, there is an escape from the born, the become, the made, the compounded.@

A happy ending cannot be worked into the scientific worldview. Death is the grim reaper of individual lives.

Science says nothing about the end of things as a whole.

Knowledge/ Values

Knowledge and values stem from the same source. Quite apart from human existence, values are as deeply ingrained in the world as are the natural laws.

A basic cleavage exists between knowledge (of the material world) and values. Values are added to the world as an epiphenomenal gloss when life on the earth begins.

Contradiction

The Traditional (Religious)View

The Scientific View

Sources of Knowledge

Knowledge derives from science, religion (revelation), philosophy, art, common sense, intuitions and imaginations B all these sources coming to us distilled in the world=s great, enduring religions. The language of religion is the myth.

All genuine knowledge is contained within the boundaries of science. The language of science is numbers.

There is no whole relative to which human action makes sense (Robert Bellah, 1927-).

Purpose

[AFinal Causes,@ (Aristotle, 384-322 B.C.)]

There is an Aintelligent design.@ Phenomena can be interpreted in terms of final causes B Apurpose.@

Purposelessness reigns. Formal causes exist only in human minds. Knowledge cannot be obtained by interpreting phenomena in terms of final causes. The world is Aabsurd@ (Albert Camus).

Causation

Causation proceeds downward, from superior to inferior. There are Adegrees of finitude,@ or Adegrees of reality.@

The traditional view presents us with a hierarchical worldview in which the infinite (the Godhead) is more complete than God, who in turn is more important than the two halves of this world (the material and the sentient). The view sees less-deriving-from-more.

Causation proceeds upward, from simple to complex.

Science makes the assumption that something derives from nothing B a stream rises higher than its source. Life derives from non-life, sentience from insentience, intelligence from what lacks it. Science sees the more-deriving-from-less.

* Disputes between worldviews are unresolvable. Neither worldview can be proved to be truer than the other. The difference is one of perception. Science obviously has a better grasp of the calculable features of the physical universe, but whether those features comprise all that exists cannot be scientifically determined. Godel=s Incompleteness Theorem may possibly apply.

This Table is based on the following pages: Pp. 11-12, 30-31, 34-38, 41, 43, 50-51, 54-55, 64, 71, 85-86, 89, 97, 100, 146, 193, 218, 225-228, 232-233, 239 and 263. See definitions, page 9 of present document.

CONVERGENCE BETWEEN RELIGION AND SCIENCE*

Convergence

Tradition

Science

Physics

Light

God stands outside the matrices of space, time, and matter.

God creates

In Christianity, human beings are Afallen.@

God is omnipresent

God is pure consciousness and cannot be known directly, only through its contents (perceptions, sensations, dreams, memories, thoughts and feelings) that we consciously experience.

Light stands outside the matrices of space, time, and matter. The speed of light (186,000 miles a second) is an unvarying constant and everything else in the physical universe adjusts to it. At the speed of light, time stops, space disappears, and mass is infinite. There are no separated events.

Light creates matter (photosynthesis). Light is energy. Photons (or quanta) of light have no charge, are weightless, have no motion, and are outside time.

Electrons have rest-mass, charge and are subject to time. However, they have no definite position in space. Atoms are locked into both time and space. However, they freely absorb and release energy. Molecules are Afallen,@ in that they are almost completely imprisoned in the determinism of our inanimate macro-world.

The essence of every interaction in the universe is the exchange of quanta of energy.

Light cannot be known directly, only through images, through the photons that strike the optic nerve. We never see photons directly. We never see light in the form in which it pervades the objective world.

The quantum world is invisible to human eyes while determining what these eyes perceive.

Convergence

Tradition

Science

Subject/

Object

Dichotomy

Believing is seeing

Micro-physics experiments must include the observer. A particle is literally nowhere until (by collapsing its wave packet) an experiment gives it location. There is, therefore, an active component in knowing. Cognition is not a passive act. Believing is seeing.

Locality

God is non-local

The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment shows that the universe is non-local. Separated parts of the universe are simultaneously in touch with one another, the distance making no difference B for instance, from here to the rim of the universe (Einstein, 1879-1955). The fundamental process of Nature lies outside space-time, but generates events that can be located in space-time-matter.

Intelligent Design

There is an intelligent design.

If the mathematical ratios in nature had been different in the slightest (the force of gravity, the orbit of the earth, absence of the Andromeda Galaxy, etc...), life could not have evolved. The probability of this fine-tuning resulting from chance is of the order of 10⁴⁰.

Intelligence

Intelligence is present in microscopic entities at the very start of things. There is a Buddha in every grain of sand.

Physics admits indeterminacy. Heisenberg=s uncertainty principle states that laws are statistical averages of the way atoms decide to behave (Heisenberg, 1901-1976). Mind, as manifest by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom.

Biology

Evolution

Christianity affirms that human beings were created in the image of God

The fossil record shows that the major groups of animals appeared together, fully formed, with no evidence of common ancestry. Early vertebrate embryos are quite different from each other. (This is the exact opposite of Darwin=s claim that human beings are accidental by-products of an unguided natural process).

Convergence

Tradition

Science

Cognitive Psychology

The Mind/

Body

Problem

Humans are created in the image of God. God takes on a material form to relate to humans. In Christianity, AGod became man that man might become God.@

Every species seems to have comparatively distinctive ways of understanding the world and managing to relate to it. Human beings are the only living species that has the endowment for language (Chomsky, 1928-). A new worldview is required for solving the mind/body problem B a worldview which would see each part as reflecting the whole of which it is a part.

* This Table is based on the following pages: Pp. 31, 137-140, 147, 174, 176-177, 180-182, 185-186, 217, 225, 262 and 264-266. See definitions, page 9 of present document.

THE LIMITATIONS OF SCIENCE

1. Science can disclose only what is inferior to us: Science measures only what is inferior to us. The crux of science is the controlled experiment which winnows true from false hypotheses and thereby offers proof. However, we can intentionally control only what is inferior to us B inferior and superior as measured by criterions of worth, orders of existence. For instance, galaxies, earthquakes and buffalos are inferior to the intelligence, freedom and compassion that can be apparent in human beings.

Science, therefore, does not register things that exceed us in our distinctively human attributes. It can disclose only what is inferior to us. If beings superior to ourselves exist, they dance circles around us, not we, them. If there are beings more intelligent than ourselves, we have no idea how their minds work, and hence no way of aligning whatever variables would be needed to mount an experiment on them.

2. Science cannot measure:

Values: Science can measure instrumental or descriptive values but not intrinsic, normative values (for instance, what people should like).

Existential and global meanings: What is the meaning of life?, What is the meaning of it all?

Final causes B the why of things: Science separates the primary from the secondary qualities B that is, the quantitative features of nature from those that are qualitatively experienced.

Invisibles: Science can only deal with invisibles that can be logically inferred from observable effects. If there are invisibles that do not impact matter demonstrably, science gets no wind of them.

Quality: The qualitative ingredients in values, meanings, purposes and non-inferable invisibles are what gives them their power. Certain qualities (such as colors) are connected to quantitative substrates (light waves of given lengths) but the quality itself is not measurable (pp. 194-199).

SPIRITUAL PERSONALITY TYPES

The Atheist: There is no God. The world which the atheist inhabits houses nothing but matter and the subjective experiences of biological organisms. The larger worlds are seen as projections of the human imagination.

The atheist=s world contains very little value, for value is an aspect of experience, and, if organisms are its only seat, experience is in short supply in a universe that is 26 billion light-years across.

The Polytheist: There are many gods. Polytheists add spirits to the material world of the atheist. Gods, spirits and discarnates are taken for granted to be fully as real as the material world B angels, demons, patron saints, warlocks, witches, nymphs, goblins, ghosts, elves, etc... Discarnates are exempt from gross matter and the matrices of space, time, and matter which govern it. This is the realm of folk religion. The polytheist may assent to the idea of a single, all-accountable God, but it has little direct bearing on the life he actually lives.

The polytheist=s world teems with value, including value-opposites about evenly divided B pain, pleasure, evil, good, and the host of other dualities.

Ethics is absent from polytheism.

The Monotheist: There is one God. Monotheists place the world of the polytheist under the aegis of a supreme being who creates and orchestrates everything. The monotheist=s God is knowable and personal, and his relationship with Him is intimate. God is richly endowed with the finest qualities that human beings exemplify B wisdom, tenderness, mercy, compassion, creativity, love, etc...

The monotheist converts the polytheist=s spirits into angels and demons.

The monotheist=s world teems with values. Dualities remain, but good has the upper hand.

Ethics enters as a corollary of passionate love when it is directed to God the creator. God loves the creatures He creates as if they were His children, so if we love God, we will love them too.

The Mystic: There is only God. Mystics find God everywhere.

In the mystic=s world, evil drops from the picture and only good remains. There is only God (pp. 234-235, 238, 240, 247-248 and 250-251).

DEFINITIONS

Cosmology: The study of the physical universe, the Aworld of nature,@ as science conceives it. Cosmology is the domain of science (p. 12).

Godel=s Incompleteness Theorem: In a formal system satisfying certain precise conditions, there will always be at least one undecidable proposition B that is, a proposition such that neither it nor its negation is provable within the system (Kurt Godel, 1906-1978) (p. 89).

Materialism: The metaphysics which holds that only matter exists (p. 83).

Metaphysics: The study of all there is. AWorldview,@ ABig Picture,@ ABackground@ (pp. 12 and 25).

Naturalism: The metaphysics which holds that nature is all there is. In this worldview, metaphysics coincides with cosmology. AThe Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be@ (Carl Sagan, 1934-1996). Naturalism acknowledges that there are immaterial things, such as subjective experiences (thoughts and feelings) that are different from matter and cannot be reduced to it, but insists that these are totally dependent on matter (pp. 12, 20, and 83).

Science: The body of facts about the natural world that the scientific method has brought to light, the crux of that method being the controlled experiment with its capacity to winnow true from false hypotheses about the empirical world. Science has discovered nothing in the way of objective facts that counts against traditional metaphysics (pp. 59 and 231).

Scientism: Scientism adds to science two corollaries. (If one believes in the scientific worldview, these two corollaries are not seen to be opinions):

The scientific method is, if not the only reliable method of getting at truth, then at least the most reliable method.

The things with which science deals B material entities B are the most fundamental things that exist (pp. 59-60 and 64).

Quantum: The smallest packet of energy that can ever be exchanged (p. 139).