Science in decline

Ideas vs things, logic vs the senses, grammar vs words, objective vs subjective- this is how we make sense of the world into which we are ushered at birth. Sounds pretty dualistic, doesn't it? Much of the history of Western thought and culture is the story of what we think about these dilemmas. At the moment we are sliding down a slope, though not many know it yet. Science is a faith as much as Catholicism, with which it shares a few basic assumptions, mainly that the universe follows laws accessible to reason. Catholic thought asserts that the creation we observe is a Great Thought emanating from the mind of a Supreme Creator. Where is the evidence, the Scientific Atheist asks?

The faith scientists have in objective truth reached its high point in the 19th century. I won't go to any trouble trying to fix this point, but I would say Karl Marx and the behaviourist psychologists marked the apogee, and World War One marked the beginning of the slide. One of the articles of faith of humanists and other varieties of scientific atheist was that Reason and Objective Truth would lead to a better, saner world. With superstition vanquished, religious wars and persecutions would end. Enlightened savants would lead us to a paradise on earth. Somehow, it didn't work out. Marxism was the political wing of Scientific Atheism and it has been the most lethal political system men have yet devised. Figures are hard to calculate because many of the perpetrators, or their successors, are still in power. Without counting related damage, the number of human beings killed by their own socialist, atheistic governments in the twentieth century approaches one hundred million. I repeat 100,000,000, over three times the population of Canada. And yet atheistic socialism does not lack for enthusiastic apologists, many in places of influence, especially in schools, the media. They are especially well established in the bureaucracies of all nations, and the United Nations. How they are able to justify themselves I have no idea.

Nevertheless, their influence over the mentality of the world's societies is on the wane, as is the materialistic dogma that inspired it. And so the pendulum has begun to swing back the other way.

The most obvious example is the environmental ideology. With one foot in the materialist camp, it regards itself as scientifically based. On the other hand, it has another foot in a far more ancient world view: Pantheism. Pantheism believes that the things and forces in nature are themselves divine. The classical mythology we know from Ovid is a very beautiful version of Pantheism. But whether they know it or not- and most of them don't- scientists and especially Darwinists, are also Pantheists. They would deny it of course, replying that Pantheists believe all things have soul, and they don't believe in the soul. Actually, they have just changed the words. Instead of Proserpine and Minerva, they invoke Natural Selection and Random Mutation. Scientists don't put faces on these forces to be sure, but that may be coming as the powers of prediction they have depended on begin to wane. At that point pseudo science comes along, like the climate change hysteria. Lacking proof of the desired result, climate 'scientists' had no compunctions about falsifying the data. We'll be seeing a lot more of that. What is actually happening is a loss of faith in the possibility of being objective. This loss of faith is so severe that it is a commonplace of modern philosophy that we can't know anything, that there is no such thing as truth. This is a school of philosophy known as postmodernism and it has confused many a mediocre mind. The More confusing the better!

Although I have emphasized the problems of materialism, I don't mean to say that it is wrong and the idealist view is right. What I think is wrong is the belief that for one to be right the other has to be wrong. That's where my discussion of words and grammar in language and logic and the senses in everyday experience comes in. I have tried to show that they work in tandem. Without a grammar for a word to act upon language could not exist. It would be an impossibility. Likewise, the scientific method is sound. An idea is proposed, a hypothesis. To prove or disprove it, an experiment is devised and carried out. The idea acts on the felt world to produce a predicted result- or not. Either way the experiment is successful, as eliminating bad ideas is just as important as finding good ideas. It's a way of eliminating the noise, of separating the wheat from the chaff.

It's a very good system, but I think it there are many more implications. But it is rather dualistic and philosophers have the same attitude toward dualism as Miss Muffet had to spiders. Calm down, fellows, and take a deep breath. It's going to get a lot worse.

Beauty

Up until now I have been trying to establish the importance of reason, which is the human ability to perceive the non-material but very real logical structures of the universe we inhabit. It occurs to me to ask if those logical structures exist before they are thought of. For instance, did language exist before there was a language? Certainly there was a potential for language as living creatures very early on learned to vocalize. Birds sing, cattle bellow, elk trumpet. Hadrosaurs were a very successful and diverse type of herbivorous dinosaur. In their variety they were notable for the strange shapes of their heads which are now thought to have been echo chambers for amplifying their vocalizations. We might imagine that without cars, trucks, jet planes, leaf blowers and ghetto blasters that the cretaceous would have been a peaceful and serene time. Apparently not, with herds of gigantic dinosaurs calling to one another from miles apart. Again take note- once a behaviour is learned the behaviour influences physical change. Although they may not have had language in the sense that humans do, nevertheless the vocalizations had meanings intelligible to all members of the included group. Obviously, no hadrosaur coffee klatsch ever convened with the idea of starting down the road toward evolving a language, so we can't really say that the thought created language. But why did the hadrosaurs make such a big deal about bellowing, whistling, shrieking, for each others delectation, if that's what they did?

An evolutionist would try to explain these anatomic and behavioural features in terms of DNA, an incredibly complex molecular structure that transcribes proteins of unbelievable subtlety. The difficulty is explaining how such complexity came to be. The evolutionist has in his quiver two arrows. Random mutation and natural selection. Random mutation means that code errors will occur from time to time. Most of these will be detrimental, but a few will be beneficial. Natural selection means that the good ones will persist into the future and the poor host with the detrimental mutation will perish. Not mere death, but extinction. Cruel nature selects. Stick out your neck with some wild and crazy idea and you'll get it chopped off, chop chop.

But I have another theory. The theme of these posts is largely, how do we know what we know? And I have followed Plato in theorizing that not only do we have our usual five senses, of sight, hearing, etc, we also are able to know things through our minds, which can 'see' by the light of pure reason. I would like to propose we have another way of knowing things, and it's a way that Plato didn't particularly like. The poets raised his ire, who he accused of being liars and twisters of the truth. Many poets do distort the truth, as do many philosophers. Even nature fools us. For instance, our senses tell us unequivocally that the earth we stand on is solid and immovable, while the sun and moon are smallish objects which rise on one horizon and set on the opposite. So our eyes tell us. Similarly, the stars and planets are mere pinpricks of light that roam the night skies. Truly, human beings have venerated these celestial presences as far back as we have been human. But it took reason to demonstrate, and a long, arduous process of reasoning, that the earth is not only moving, but that it is but a tiny fragment of moist rock orbiting a star which is itself only one of billions upon billions of suns. The geometers of Plato's era started us down that road when they calculated the circumference of the earth, and Plato, a geometer, was probably contemptuous of the myths telling of gods cavorting in the sky.

What poets and artists and musicians deal with- at least they did until the twentieth century when they came unhinged- is beauty. Art isn't exactly based on reason, even though all arts are built on a highly rigorous logic, and it isn't exactly based on the senses, even though each art works through one or more of the senses. In this way, beauty is a lot like logic. It manifests itself through matter, but matter itself is not beauty. But it is unlike logic in that we perceive beauty directly. When we see a blazing sunset we don't need mathematical calculations to tell us we are witnessing something beautiful. It doesn't matter to our appreciation of the sunset that the earth revolves around the sun. We don't have to know about nuclear fusion to enjoy the sight of the sunset. When we hear a beautiful piece of music we don't need to know anything about sound waves or decibels. Perhaps knowing something about key signatures enhances our appreciation but only to the composer is that sort of knowledge essential.

This kind of beauty gives us pleasure, but not the kind of pleasure that comes from eating a tasty meal or copulating with a lover. Aesthetic pleasure is experienced through the mind more than the body. Our stomachs are soon filled, our debaucheries soon leave us depleted. Attempts to extend those pleasures much beyond their natural uses leads to a diminishing sense of fulfillment. The glutton grows fat and diabetic, the roue needs more and more perverse stimulations to achieve arousal. Those unable to attain the desired pleasurable feelings through food, sex, or other means often turn to chemicals. For these people the mind becomes the enemy. It craves satisfactions they are unable to gratify and so it must be destroyed. Drugs that deaden the pain or conversely deliver ecstatic feelings become a necessity.

But the pleasure we derive from observing a beautiful sunset never diminishes but enhances us. We feel drawn toward something. We may not know precisely what it is we are drawn to, but we know it is a good thing, that we are better for it. We also know that someone who can't appreciate the beauty of a sunset lacks some essential element needed to be fully human.

Western thought of the last few centuries has lost faith in the value of our capacity to perceive beauty. It is a train of thought that denies even the existence of anything other than material objects, and therefore every explanation for the observed world must refer to those material objects.

For the next few posts I will try to refute that view.