The Fright of Infinite Spaces

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

—Pascal, Pensées, 206

It's well known that the Milky Way in the Star Trek universe is surrounded by a barrier, as shown in the original series episodes "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and "By Any Other Name". But I recently learned that there is also a barrier around the far-away Star Wars galaxy too. But why? Why a galactic barrier?

Is this simply a storytelling trope, the modern version of Aristotle's prescription that drama have unity of place? Perhaps that's part of it, but it still seems somewhat gratuitous. Why is it hard to believe that the true barrier between galaxies is not a hard limit, but simply vast distance?

I suspect the real answer lies deep in the heart of man.

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The significance of vast distances struck me at last year's Thomistic Institute Science and Christianity conference (March 4–5, 2022 at the Harvard Museum of Natural History). Some of the talks juxtaposed our modern scientific picture of the universe with passages from Scripture on creation, not just the act of creation, but also the relationship of creation to its Creator.

In particular, the beginning of Fr. Thomas Davenport's talk alluded to the way God's activity is much more immediate in the picture presented by Scripture, in contrast to the picture presented by science, in which God's activity is mediated by long chains of secondary causes (13.8 billion years, etc). This tremendous distance seems to present something of a difficulty for belief: God's Providence seems distant.

In such a universe, a gnosticism of a sort might seem reasonable. Recall that in the ancient Gnostic religions, the Creator of the universe is not the true Divinity, who lies behind the universe. Man, conceived as originally and purely spirit, is thrown or imprisoned in the material world, not a natural part of it. Nature/creation is sundered from the true God, and man must reject nature to align himself with the real God and true goodness. In the 20th century, Hans Jonas discovered the hidden parallel between ancient Gnosticism and modern Existentialism/Nihilism, which might be called neo-gnosticism. The so-called scientific picture has no place for man, such human concepts as teleology (purposes) supposedly playing no part in nature. As in Gnostic religion, humans are sundered from nature.

Akin to this gnostic alienation from the universe is the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft, whose effect comes from the terror of the incomprehensible. But Lovecraft's universe is rather too malevolent (along with its denizens) to represent the apparent indifference lying in the vastness of the scientific universe. Perhaps that indifference was too horrible for even Lovecraft, though it might also be that the horror of the infinite empty quantity is simply so inarticulable that the closest neighbor is the quality of evil.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu")

At the very least, science by itself leaves us in a state of ambiguity: does nature bespeak God or not, and where do I belong in all this ambuguous vastness?¹ Pascal's Pensées elaborate:

205 When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me? Memoria hospitis unius diei prætereuntis [Wisdom 5:15, Latin vulgate: remembrance of a guest who tarried but a day].

229 This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there which revealed a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion; if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But, seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied; wherefore I have a hundred time wished that if a God maintains nature, she should testify to Him unequivocally, and that, if the signs she gives are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether; that she should say everything or nothing, that I might see which cause I ought to follow. Whereas in my present state, ignorant of what I am or of what I ought to do, I know neither my condition nor my duty. My heart inclines wholly to know where is the true good, in order to follow it; nothing would be too dear to me for eternity.

Pascal stood on the cusp of modernity and the modern rethinking of the universe. It might be healthy to look back to the ancient world and take a lesson from the psalmist in reflecting on our smallness and the world's vastness:

When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars which thou hast established;

what is man that thou art mindful of him,
and the son of man that thou dost care for him?

Yet thou hast made him little less than God,
and dost crown him with glory and honor.

Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands;
thou hast put all things under his feet...

(Psalm 8:3–6)

The reality is that in complaining about the size of creation, we're complaining about the size of the dominion given to us humans. The deeper problem is that we don't appreciate the goodness of the universe. There is an infinite distance between nothing and any finite reality. Maybe it's because the need to survive has wired us to always be so occupied with the next problem that we rarely take time to contemplate the tremendous good we have, that we've been given. It's a crisis of gratitude: we don't appreciate what we've been given, so we have little sense of God's continued presence and providence.²

Science as practiced today doesn't help matters. One big limitation of science is that it projects human knowing onto an unimaginably vast world. We only know the "scientific universe" in terms of experiments in the lab. This approach originated with Galileo's insight, which Newton completed: the unification of the sublunar and translunar realms. We describe the motions of stars and planets in terms of the motions of mechanical bodies on Earth, especially those we study under the controlled conditions of the lab.

We project our own emptiness and chaos on the vast world and then recoil on beholding our reflection.

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Notes

1. Collective Soul's 1993 song "Shine" asks this question, "Where do I belong and where do I find love?", poignantly.

2. A great book on this subject of God's providence and presence that I rejoice in having found though only recently is Providence by Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange.

The Greater Does Not Come from the Less

I've been reading Garrigou-Lagrange's Providence. Perhaps its most foundational principle, highlighted in the first paragraph:

The greater does not come from the less, the more perfect does not come from the less perfect, since the latter is incapable of producing the effect. [emphasis in original]

Now, Providence is a great book that I highly recommend. But if would be anyway it could now be improved, it is that it could tackle more squarely some of the more recent objections to Aristotle's and St. Thomas's thought about nature.

This principle in particular has been cast into doubt in the modern world most especially by the idea of the evolution of biological species following Darwin. (In the early 20th-century France in which the book was written, the significance of Darwinism may not have been fully felt.)

Many Darwinists even deny that evolution's tendency over time is to perfect species. Perhaps the need to deny a cosmological hierarchy originates in their materialist premises. But such ideological prejudices aside, most reasonable thinkers would admit that a human is greater than an ape, and an ape is greater than a fish. So the simple-minded conclusion from evolution is that the greater evolves from the less. How can we square this appearance with the principle of Garrigou-Lagrange's book?

What that mistaken conclusion ignores is that even from Darwinists principles, species don't evolve on their own. Of the two primciples of Darwinism, random mutation and natural selection, random mutation is essentially directionless. But the other principle, natural selection, strongly requires interaction with the environment, the larger universe. And the larger universe working out all its hidden potentialities is arguably more perfect than any non-rational species.

So if you look deeper, Garrigou-Lagrange's principle holds.

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Additionally, I'd like to point out that "random mutation" is like a large area rug that can hide lots of (to a materialist) unseemly dirt. Randomness basically means that we, from our limited knowledge, cannot trace back the relevant lines of causation from the effect, so we just sweep this happenstance of reality under the rug of "randomness." I'm no evolutionary biologist, but it seems fair to say that it's hard, if not impossible, to distinguish the perfecting effects of natural selection from any perfecting effects that might come from "random" mutation (whether in reality directly from God or mediated by some hidden natural cause). Actually, on further reflection, it might be possible to distinguish the two. But it would require somehow detecting that the mutations that have arisen have a preferential direction. I doubt our knowledge of the fossil record could be so comprehensive or that we could observe such a process at work today with the necessary completeness.

Ultimate and Penultimate Currencies

Note: I started writing this in January 2010, and apparently put it away for some time. The basic theorem is an idea that has stayed with me and that I think on not infrequently. I actually thought I had published it here already. Oops.

In reading Cardinal Ratzinger's Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life on the evolution through salvation history of the notion of our reward from our Creator, a point that I've been mulling for some time struck me powerfully. As everyone knows and as is well attested in the pages of Sacred Scripture, the earlier conception of our reward was long life and worldly prosperity. Many are the Patriarchs given their farewell encomium by cataloging the preternatural number of their years before their passing, their great worldly wealth, and their long and lasting memory in their many descendants.

The Single Penultimate Currency Theorem

As I mentioned in my previous post, our concern for ourselves, our well being centers primarily on our bodily existence. All other wealth (jobs, money, possessions, children; even to some extent honor or reputation and education) is wealth to the extent that it succors our bodily existence. Hence, all good boils down to a single "currency"—our lives.

Yet it is also apparent to those who take the time to reflect on life and its meaning, that this life is not everything. The most evident manifestation of this truth is that this life ends. What payment does one receive at the end of life? It is all the same. And when one is dead, how does a happy memory profit the deceased? He is clearly beyond caring. And to top it off, this condition last far longer than one's life.

People can use whatever evil means they can to acquire the wealth that enhances and preserves life. But is a dishonest life truly worth living? People with integrity, who are truly worthy of respect, will say "no." But what good can we cite that would be worth living and dying without the goods of this life as long as one keeps one's honesty? One doesn't have to name it to recognize it must exist if justice is to prevail and goodness and happiness go together (NB: for many ancient philosophers, virtue was its own reward, so it needn't be eternal life). So, there must be another currency, one that is more ultimate than our corporeal existence.

Life is a currency, but it is thus only the penultimate currency.

Two Antepenultimate Currencies

But there are more immediate currencies (goods that humans work for) that become evident when we reflect on the sterotypical differences between what motivates men and women. Men tend to work for outward recognition, things like status, honor, and money. Women tend to work for love and personal connection. It's almost as if the “masculine” world of “achievement” and the caregiving world were two independent economies. (I think this is the reason caregiving is so poorly remunerated: the true currency here is not money.)

They aren’t truly independent of course. In truth these two economies are interlocking, two sides of support for human existence. Traditionally the masculine economy is seen as bigger and more important: naively it seems to provide the context for the caring economy, but really the two provide the context for each other. It’s been the Christian genius to reveal how the caring economy is in many fundamental ways more important; it is closer to the ultimate currency (according to Christian lights), without being identical to it of course.

Sean Carroll and Emergentism

With excitement a Catholic physicist friend pointed me to a recent paper by Sean Carroll Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space. Carroll, as you may know, is a prominent atheist. My friend says Carroll's paper shows he is turning toward a more realistic metaphysics, and singles out this paragraph:

Nothing in this perspective implies that we should think of spacetime or quantum fields as illusory. They are emergent, but none the less real for that. As mentioned, we may not be forced to invoke these concepts within our most fundamental picture, but the fact that they play a role in an emergent description is highly non-trivial. (Most Hamiltonians admit no local decomposition, most factorizations admit no classical limit, etc.) It is precisely this non-generic characteristic of the specific features of the world of our experience that makes it possible to contemplate uniquely defining them in terms of the austere ingredients of the deeper theory. They should therefore be thought of as equally real as tables and chairs.

I haven't read the paper, but for my part, I'm rather cautious about reading too much into Carroll's claims. Feser has a concise paragraph that captures my general reservations about emergentism:

Second, the Aristotelian resists the language of “emergence” because, despite its anti-reductionism, it gives the impression of conceding to the reductionist the thesis that the micro-level is ontologically fundamental or privileged. It is as if the emergentist allows that the macrolevel is problematic in a way that the micro-level is not, so that we should concede the reality of macro-level phenomena only to the extent that we can make sense of them somehow “emerging” from the micro-level. As I have said, the Aristotelian rejects any such privileging of the micro-level. From an Aristotelian point of view, modern emergentist arguments, though salutary, are at best only partial rediscoveries of the correct, hylemorphist account of nature.

I may be misreading the paragraph, but it doesn't sound like Carroll concedes much, or anything really. I think he would do well to read the introduction of A.S. Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World.

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Edward Feser, Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science (Editiones Scholasticae, 2019), 337-8.

Hawking off the Reservation Again

The media have been aflurry with Hawking's latest pronouncement. The Wall Street Journal features an excerpt of his recently published book The Grand Design, written with Leonard Mlodinow. Here's an excerpt of that excerpt:

Newton believed that our strangely habitable solar system did not "arise out of chaos by the mere laws of nature." Instead, he maintained that the order in the universe was "created by God at first and conserved by him to this Day in the same state and condition." The discovery recently of the extreme fine-tuning of so many laws of nature could lead some back to the idea that this grand design is the work of some grand Designer. Yet the latest advances in cosmology explain why the laws of the universe seem tailor-made for humans, without the need for a benevolent creator.

(But why not a malevolent creator?)

Hawking then reviews the so-called anthropic coincidences—the apparent fine tuning of constants in our mathematical laws of physics—without which the human life, or even the continued existence of the universe itself would be impossible.

Many people would like us to use these [anthropic] coincidences as evidence of the work of God. The idea that the universe was designed to accommodate mankind appears in theologies and mythologies dating from thousands of years ago. In Western culture the Old Testament contains the idea of providential design, but the traditional Christian viewpoint was also greatly influenced by Aristotle, who believed "in an intelligent natural world that functions according to some deliberate design."

[If the universe weren't intelligent in some sense, then how could intelligence discover its rules?]

That is not the answer of modern science. As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation [!] is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws. That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine tuning. It is a consequence predicted by many theories in modern cosmology. If it is true it reduces the strong anthropic principle to the weak one, putting the fine tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat—now the entire observable universe—is just one of many.

Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states. Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense the lords of creation.

As soon as Hawking invokes the word "creation," he's departed physics for metaphysics. Physics of any kind can only study things that move. Creation is not a motion: something either exists or it doesn't. There is no motion between the two discrete states of being and non-being. Mathematical physics can't even handle the concept "nothing" (of course zero is not nothing).

How could nothing (really nothing) generate something? Hawking is using "nothing" equivocally. Perhaps this fuzzy mode of thinking descends from Newton's equivocal use of zero in calculus (at once and in the same expression the variable is zero in one instance, while in another it's non-zero). Or perhaps it's just another manifestation of perennial fuzzy thinking inspired by the consequentialism of the hypothetical-deductive model of science.

Hawking might ask himself how the multiverse exists. And on what basis does Hawking presume the laws of physics¹ are self-existent?

"Off the reservation" is a phrase that means "gone rogue." Stephen Hawking hasn't so much gone rogue as shown once again that he is unable to restrict himself to the territory of physics at which he is so adept. He insists on trespassing outside to a subject he shows no evidence of ever having studied seriously: philosophy. Without a serious study of this subject (or at least consulting real experts), Hawking can only pull his ideas from the winds of unreflective (pop) culture: a disappointing performance from a world-class intellect.

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Of course the whole controversy (like so many in the media) is a tempest in a tea-pot. Why should anyone care what Hawking says about any random (i.e., non-physics) subject? Xkcd pegs it in this insightful cartoon.

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Note

1. Hawking was much wiser when he wrote: "Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire in the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?"

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Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (Bantam, 2010).

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Update (2010-10-05): One can hardly do better than William E. Carroll in addressing the philosophical issues Hawking raises, as in this passage:

Creation is not primarily some distant event. Rather, it is the ongoing, complete causing of the existence of all that is. At this very moment, were God not causing all that is to exist, there would be nothing at all. Creation concerns the origin of the universe, not its temporal beginning. Indeed, it is important to recognize this distinction between origin and beginning. The former affirms the complete, continuing dependence of all that is on God as cause. It may very well be that the universe had a temporal beginning, but there is no contradiction in the notion of an eternal, created universe, for were the universe to be without a beginning it still would have an origin; it still would be created. This is precisely the position of Thomas Aquinas, who accepted as a matter of faith that the universe had a temporal beginning but also defended the intelligibility of a universe simultaneously created and eternal. ("Stephen Hawking’s Creation Confusion")

Ratzinger on Aquinas on Corporeality

I've read several of Pope Benedict/Cardinal Ratzinger's books, but I think the best I've encountered is the one I mentioned in the last post (on time). Lately I've been reflecting on how time and life go together like time and energy (in modern physics) and like time and money (in our financial lives). Clearly "to save time" means to escape the needless loss of a segment of our lives. The precariousness we attribute to the moment is really the precariousness of our biological lives. Hans Jonas realized this well:

Heidegger had talked about existence as care, but he did so from an exclusively intellectual perspective. There was no mention of the primary physical reason for having to care, which is our corporeality, by which we—ourselves a part of nature, needy and vulnerable—are indissolubly connected to our natural environment, most basically through metabolism, the prerequisite of all life. Human beings must eat. This natural law of the body is as cardinal as the mortality accompanying it. But in Being and Time the body had been omitted and nature shunted aside as something merely present.

...Perhaps my physical exposure to danger [as a soldier in the Second World War], a situation in which the precariousness of the body's fate becomes evident and fear of its mutilation becomes paramount, was responsible for my new reflections.

Anyway, enough transition from time to bodiliness! Among the many gems of Ratzinger's Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life is this extended passage on the Thomistic conception of human corporeality:

The crucial factor in reaching this solution was the entry of Aristotle into Christian thinking during the course of the thirteenth century. The Platonic heritage, in many ways so useful for taking up the intellectual challenge of the biblical message, has led to the dilemma between spiritualism and naturalism just described. Of itself, it was unable to clear a path through the thicket. With the help of Aristotle, however, a non-sensualist realism could be formulated and in this way a philosophical counterpart to the pneumatic realism of the Bible could be found. The decisive step was the new understanding of the soul which Thomas Aquinas achieved through his daring transformation of the Aristotelian anthropology. We saw above that the picture of the soul which developed in definitive fashion from Christianity implied at the same time a new view of the body. In Thomas' interpretation of the formula anima forma corporis [soul the form of body], both soul and body are realities only thanks to each other and oriented towards each other. Though they are not identical, they are nevertheless one; and as one, they constitute the single human being. As both expression and being-expressed they make up a dual unity of a quite special kind. For our purposes, this insight carries a twofold consequence of a remarkable sort. First, the soul can never completely leave behind its relationship to matter. Greshake's idea that the soul receives matter into itself as an "ecstatic aspect" of the realization of its freedom, while leaving it for ever to the clutches of the necessarily imperfectible precisely in its quality as matter, would be unthinkable for Thomas. If it belongs to the essence of the soul to be the form of the body then its ordination to matter would be inescapable. The only way to destroy this ordering would be to dissolve the soul itself. What is thus emerging is an anthropological logic which shows the resurrection to be a postulate of human existence. Secondly the material elements from our of which human physiology is constructed receive their character of being "body" only in virtue of being organized and formed by the expressive power of soul. Distinguishing between "physiological unit" and "bodiliness" now becomes possible. This is what Origen was getting at with his idea of the characteristic form, but the conceptual tools at his disposal did not allow him to formulate it. The individual atoms and molecules do not as such add up to the human being. The identity of the living body does not depend upon them, but upon the fact that matter is drawn into the soul's power of expression. Just as a soul is defined in terms of matter, so the living body is wholly defined by reference to the soul. The soul builds itself a living body, a self-identical living body, as its corporeal expression. And since the living body belongs so inseparably to the being of man, the identity of that body is defined not in terms of matter but in terms of soul.

The easy vividness of Ratzinger's summary of Aquinas's doctrine makes it easy to appreciate Ratzinger's resonance with Hans Jonas (a favorite of his)! Also note how he brings out the truth of Origen's apparently erroneous formulation.

In Thomas, these insights find their determinate expression through the Aristotelian understanding of prime matter and the role of form connected with this. Matter which does not belong with some form is materia prima [primary matter], pure potency. Only in virtue of form does this materia prima become matter in the physical sense [i.e., the modern sense]. If the soul be the only form of the body, then the ending of this form-relationship by death implies the return of matter to a condition of pure potency. This reversion should not, of course, be thought of as occupying a distinct moment in time: we are making an assertion in ontology. In point of fact, the place occupied by the old form is at once taken over by a new one, so that physical matter remains as it was. However, since this physical matter is not actualized by a different form, it is something fundamentally different from that which existed before when the soul was the form in question. Between the living body and the corpse there lies the chasm of prime matter. Consistently maintained, therefore, the Thomistic teaching cannot preserve the self-identity of the body before and after death.

Matter of itself (that is, without form) has no identity, no "individuation"; it is "pure potency," as Ratzinger says following the Aristotle Scholastics. Like modern bumper sticker slogans, the medieval maxim that "matter is the principle of individuation" is often invoked by superficial philosophers without real understanding.¹ Really it is form that individuates material things: the real meaning of the slogan is that matter is the principle by which a material thing's form modified. In other words, material things' forms can't change unless they have matter, the principle of change. Benedict Ashley drove this point home for me in a conversation some years ago.

This might seem to be an advantage in the case of the question of resurrection. Yet it has anthropological and ontological consequences which are strange, to say the least. For this reason, Aquinas' new anthropology, summed up in the formula anima unica forma corporis, called forth stiff opposition and ecclesiastical condemnations. At the philosophical level, it denied the identity of the corpse of Jesus with him who was crucified. Incidentally, if the body derives its identity in no way from matter but entirely from soul, which is not passed on by a man's parents, there would also be another problem here concerned with conception, with the genuineness of parenthood. This is why Thomas himself held back from embracing the consequences of his own theory and, in the question of the resurrection, fenced it in with additional considerations meant to supply for its deficiencies. Only Durandus of Sant Pourcain (c. 1275-1334) dared to accept all the consequences entailed in Aquinas' starting point, basing the identity of the risen body exclusively upon the identity of the soul. His remained a somewhat isolated voice in the medieval period. During the nineteenth century it was adopted by Billot, Michel, and Feuling.

Not quite sure what he means about the problem of the genuineness of parenthood. Except perhaps that if the immaterial soul is created (or infused) directly by God, then to what extent can one's parents be said to be the parent of that soul, which is the person himself? (Anyone know how this one is answered?)

(Also have to admire the translator's use of the English subjunctive: "If the soul be".)

Next Ratzinger turns in his brilliant way to discover the core concerns (behind the limitations) motivating the philosophical doctrines in order to do justice to them in a modern formulation.

In its original shape, the Aristotelian concept of matter and form underlying Durandus' thesis is no longer conceivable to us: the simple repristinization of a thoroughgoing Thomism is not the way we seek. The synthesis which Thomas formulated with such brilliance in the conditions of his century must be re-created in the present, in such a way that the authentic concerns of the great doctor are preserved. Thomas does not offer a recipe which can just be copied out time and again without further ado; nevertheless, his central idea remains as a signpost for us to follow. That idea consists in the notion of the unity of body and soul, a unity founded on the creative act and implying at once the abiding ordination of the soul to matter and the derivation of the identity of the body not from matter but from the person, the soul. The physiology becomes truly "body" through the heart of the personality. Bodiliness is something other than a summation of corpuscles.

Truly Ratzinger at his best!

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Notes

1. I suspect that this section would have been a good one for a couple Catholic philosohers to have read (and re-read and pondered thoroughly) in order to avoid the silly assertion that "we think the resurrection involves God's reassembling at least some of the numerically same particles that once were in our living bodies (us) when we were alive—and thus it is a true resurrection, that is, a re-arising." Invoking particles (modern matter) rightfully sets them in the cross hairs of physicist Steve Barr. If they simply meant "matter" in the Aristotelian sense, they would be equally wrong, because as we've seen matter as such has no identity. Modern, quantum-mechanical matter and Aristotelian matter coincide in this lack of individuation. The irony is that we have two Catholic philosophers defending the mechanistic conception of matter (in envisioning the resurrection, no less!), and a modern physicist (himself Catholic, but one who no openly admits of being no philosopher) effectively defending the traditional Aristotelian-Thomistic view. (Another example of how the story of modern physics has turned to support the tradition, but not one Barr documents.)

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Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, trans. Michael Waldstein (Washington, DC: Catholic Univ. of America Press, 1988), 178-181.

Hans Jonas, "Wissenschaft as Personal Experience," The Hastings Center Report 32: 4 (Jul.-Aug., 2002), pp. 27-35. (Quoted: 31-32)

Aristotelian Empiricism

A question that's been disputed here in the past is the existence of things not open to direct empirical verification, in the modern sense of the positive empirical sciences. One disputed reality is the existence of substances, which are not directly sensible, and which we only know through their "accidents" or sensible characteristics.

The book by Richard J. Connell I've been reading explains how metaphysical principles, such as substances, are known through their sensible, physical effects. As he writes on p. 175, "Undoubtedly, some people will be surprised to learn that, according to the Aristotelians, there is nothing in the intellect which was not originally in the senses in some manner."

Even the modern, empirical sciences infer the existence of non-sensible realities from their sensible effects:

Next, let us consider some examples from the experimental sciences. Magnetic fields are not directly observable; their existence is known through the medium of observable movements. Certainly, the observable motions are distinct from the magnetic fields and cannot be identified with them. These movements, which cannot be reduced to other, known attributes or realities, are the first things to be apprehended. The fact that they are not (notice the negation) accountable for by what is already known leads to the affirmation of another, unobservable attribute to explain the motion. The magnetic field is then conceived so as best to account for the observed effects. Indeed, the whole process of constructing an hypothesis on magnetic theory is measured by the demands of teh observed phenomena through which the very existence of the unobservable attribute is known.

An electric current is another illustration of the same kind of noetic procedure. The deflections of meter needles, the shocks that come from "hot" wires, etc.—surely none of these, either singly or collectively is the electric current. These phenomena lead to a knowledge of something else which is the current, but the phenomena themselves are not that current. (183-4)

So unless we want to dispose of the essences discovered by science, which are in themselves not sensible, there is no principled, non-arbitrary way to rule out inferences to metaphysical principles, even immaterial ones, so long as they have a basis in sensible reality.

The doctrine that has been outlined here can, I think, be interpreted to support the empiricists in their insistence upon the necessity of verifying the meaning of terms in sense experience, without, however, denying the reality of non-sensible substances and accidents; for, if their verification principle is understood as demanding that names signify either (1) things that are directly sensible, or (2) things that are not directly sensible but which are knowable through the medium of something that is, then the principle is true. On the other hand, the present doctrine, although insisting upon sense experience as the origin of intellectual knowledge, does not exclude true and meaningful metaphysical propositions, however difficult and infrequently attained the latter may be. To repeat, it does not, as a matter of principle, rule out all metaphysical statements, but only those which pretend to be prior and independent of experience—in other words, all rationalistic "metaphysics." (185)

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Richard J. Connell, Matter and Becoming (Chicago: The Priory Press, 1966).

Getting back to the Things: Business Management

How we carry ourselves and the way we live our lives have profound philosophical implications. Take for example the latest installment of Peter Day's BBC program Global Business:

This week’s programme explores an intriguing proposition: that craftspeople know better than most business people how organisations ought to be run. Peter Day explores the mystery of crafts and speaks to a big thinker, who believes that good craftsmanship – knowing the practicalities of the job – lies at the heart of good business. (Source: ZenCast)

Mr. Day interviewed sociologist Richard Sennett of London School of Economics and NYU about the value of craftsmanship. Sennett says,

I'm thinking about craftsmanship as trying to do a good job for its own sake.... rather than trying to find a niche in the market.... The last thing you want to do if you want to achieve quality in an organization: separate people with power from people with knowledge.... You can have a very profitable company and do very poor work in the short term. My argument is that in the long term, craftsmanship is quite economic.

Sennett cites W. Edwards Deming, who helped set up Toyota-Honda autoworks, as a predecessor in this approach.

As Mr. Day prompts, "There's something about the fingertips..., the touch...." even in management. Sennett picks up on this with an idea that has implications for how we approach nature (and life in general):

The point I'm making to you is a much larger one: it's that we don't think in the abstract. We think through instances, through particulars, through touching things, even if those things we touch are a particular person's character, a particular task they do, and so on.

He continues with the human application of this idea¹:

If you don't have a sense of the craft of focusing on other people and their needs and helping them focus, you're running a business where you're not doing everything yourself, your business will run down. You don't proceed by principle to particulars.... You start with a bit of wood or a particular problem in the office....

(Mr. Day likewise interviewed Richard Taylor in New Zealand, who did the effects for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Mr. Taylor's ideas are very similar to Prof. Sennett's.)

Sennett and Taylor's ideas run against professional management model around which businesses are organized today, presided over by an army of MBAs. An article in the Atlantic Monthly revealed the vacuousness of that degree. The article recounts how, at the last turn of the century, Frederick Winslow Taylor applied mathematics to managing workers and called it "scientific management." In a roundabout kind of way this was appropriate, because his ideas reinforce the prevailing philosophical climate that's grown in the shadow of science, but that actually have very little to do with real science:

At the same moment was born the notion that management is a distinct function best handled by a distinct group of people—people characterized by a particular kind of education, way of speaking, and fashion sensibility. Taylor, who favored a manly kind of prose, expressed it best in passages like this:

… the science of handling pig iron is so great and amounts to so much that it is impossible for the man who is best suited to this type of work to understand the principles of this science, or even to work in accordance with these principles, without the aid of a man better educated than he is.

From a metaphysical perspective, one could say that Taylor was a “dualist”: there is brain, there is brawn, and the two, he believed, very rarely meet.

So Sennett is essentially opposing a practical instance of philosophical dualism.

For decades, we've been laboring under the illusion that one needn't know anything about the particularities of business to manage it. So, when you really sit down to think about it, the resulting short-term thinking comes as no surprise. It's no wonder, for example, that management looks to the bottom line instead of employee loyalty: it's not as if the employee is a spiritual creature with intelligence and free will. Rather the employee is seen as an interchangeable unit of production, to be disposed of at management's pleasure. Never mind that quality of work diminishes when experienced employees move on.

The result is shoddy work, but more ominously people instrumentalizing other people. Can today's pitiful moral climate be any surprise?

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This interesting article discusses Professor Sennett's ideas on the design of cities.

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Notes

1. The ordering of Sennett's procedure here appears to be the reverse of that he is advocating. The difference is that he's doing so in explaining an idea, whereas his approach is about discovering the world.

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Peter Day, "Crafts," Global Business (08 Jan 08).

Matthew Stewart, "The Management Myth," Atlantic Monthly (June 2006). [subscription required for full-text access]

Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (Allen Lane, 2008).

Faith in Science

Paul Davies has an op-ed in today's New York Times on how today's science—cosmology in particular—involves a large dose of faith. He points out that the belief in ordered, rational laws governing the universe is a matter of faith. He rightly points out that this assumption originates in the Christian cultural matrix.

But from where do the laws themselves originate? The origin of physical law has a renewed salience because of the fine-tuning of the universe for life. The modern, secularist alternative to a Creator is a "multiverse" in which the laws of physics just happen to be suited to life in our part of the cosmos, but are different and inhospitable to life elsewhere. Davies rightly points out the problems in this "explanation":

The multiverse theory is increasingly popular, but it doesn’t so much explain the laws of physics as dodge the whole issue. There has to be a physical mechanism to make all those universes and bestow bylaws on them. This process will require its own laws, or meta-laws. Where do they come from? The problem has simply been shifted up a level from the laws of the universe to the meta-laws of the multiverse.

This comment is spot-on, but unfortunately he stops making sense near the end of the piece.

And just as Christians claim that the world depends utterly on God for its existence, while the converse is not the case, so physicists declare a similar asymmetry: the universe is governed by eternal laws (or meta-laws), but the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe.

It seems to me there is no hope of ever explaining why the physical universe is as it is so long as we are fixated on immutable laws or meta-laws that exist reasonlessly or are imposed by divine providence. The alternative is to regard the laws of physics and the universe they govern as part and parcel of a unitary system, and to be incorporated together within a common explanatory scheme.

In other words, the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.

The breakdown of Davies's argument shows that he is unaware of an additional level of faith inherent to science. As I've written here before, scientific knowledge is based on specialized experience; the rest of us take on faith what scientists report to us as the results of their experiments. Even scientists' "knowledge" requires faith in a web of others' results that no one could reproduce in a single lifetime. Philosophy on the other hand—natural philosophy especially—is (properly) based on experiences common to all healthy adults. We can go through the reasoning process ourselves based on our own experiences; there is no faith involved.¹ Philosophy is the "missing link" that should bridge the gap between science and religion.

Philosophy should provide the common language in the "science-religion" dialog, of which Davies is a noted participant. Until there is a common language, the only possible results are, on the one hand, shouting matches, such as Richard Dawkins inspires, and, on the other hand, religion servilely submitting to science's demonstrable domination of the sensible world. The latter is the form that this so-called dialog typically takes these days.

Were Davies philosophically educated, he would realize the nonsense of expecting physical laws to have an explanation within the universe. Nothing in the universe explains its own existence—this is a matter not of faith, but of philosophy; it requires no faith.

Furthermore he would realize that since the object of modern physics is the quantifiable aspect of natural, moving things, physics itself can never rise to the level of answering "why does anything exist?".² This and like questions are metaphysical; metaphysics properly rests on natural philosophy but transcends it to speak of immaterial things, things that do not change.

We can all eagerly hope that Davies takes some time to learn a little philosophy. But until he does, we can at least applaud Davies's assault on the "faithless" pretensions of scientists.

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Notes

1. Davies says in the opening paragraph, "In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue." Davies's piece rejects the notion that science requires no faith, but it is not clear that he sees any reason in religion, which would itself be a problem in his worldview. The idea that faith and reason stand in opposition is a caricature of the Protestant Christian conception of the relationship of revelation and reason.

2. Nothing becoming something is not a motion (motion involves already existing things), and is thus unquantifiable (not even zero or null captures "nothing", since those two concepts imply the possibility of something, and absolute "nothing" includes not even possibilities). Anything that exists necessarily is for that reason eternal and the eternal is outside the purview of modern science, as it cannot be experienced by finite beings like ourselves, either directly or with instruments.

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Paul Davies, "Taking Science on Faith," New York Times (November 24, 2007).

The Peril of "Beauty"

Lately I've been reading The New Story of Science by Robert Augros and George Stanciu. It's an excellent book so far—the second chapter on "Mind" is enough for me to HIGHLY recommend the whole book—but the third chapter mightily aggravates a pet peeve of mine.

The idea of the chapter is that beauty has re-entered our picture of the universe through developments of modern science. While Augros and Stanciu are writing from the realist tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas, the situation of the discussion in the shifting sands of mathematical physics lures them into an over-abstracted account of beauty insufficiently grounded in objective reality. The error in which Augros and Stanciu find themselves mired is rather subtle, but for that reason especially important to recognize.

Before I get started, let me note the worthwhile truth at the core of Augros and Stanciu's praise of beauty: we moderns have a nasty tendency to deny the truth in beauty and to revel in the ugly as if it were the mark of truth. We get wrapped in our own wills and our power to create that we forget that goodness is largely something that we receive from a world much bigger than ourselves.

To return to the over-abstracted notion of beauty, the authors write, "In physics, beauty reigns supreme. Experiment often errs, beauty seldom" (41). It would better read "experiments often err": while individual experiments can err, experiment in the universal sense is the touchstone of modern science, including theory. In 1919, when his assistant asked Einstein about the possibility that experiment had not supported general relativity, Einstein reportedly said, "Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord. The theory is correct anyway." Einstein's statement was probably justified in regard to a single experiment or perhaps even a small number of experiments, but not for a large number of well-conducted experiments. Real science ultimately has to be grounded in objective reality. Forgetting this fact is the basic error of the chapter.

As we all know, beauty in general is no sure-fire window on truth and goodness. Although one can always pick out the protagonist of a movie by looks, real life is not so simple. Famous are the fables of the femme fatale. Even more apparent these days is the divergence between beauty and goodness evident in the lives of modern celebrities. Should I emulate Liz Taylor or Britney or Paris just because she is attractive? So much for the evidential power of beauty.

Even otherwise solid philosophers are not immune from the mania for beauty, albeit to a lesser extent. Many of them have an unreflective tendency to elevate beauty to stand among the "big three" transcendental perfections synonymous with Being: the True, the Good, and the One—sometimes displacing the last, Oneness or Unity.¹ As Fr. Ashley points out, beauty is only "a particular goodness of truth": "truth as we desire its contemplation" (174, 328). And all too often its essential relation to the (imperfect) knower makes it but an apparent goodness. It is perilous to exalt "beauty" with insufficiently context.

Augros and Stanciu educe from the words of many prominent physicists that beauty comprises "simplicity, harmony, and brilliance" (42). Similarly Aquinas speaks of beauty as the splendor of truth or of form thusly in the Summa:

For beauty includes three conditions, "integrity" or "perfection," since those things which are impaired are by the very fact ugly; due "proportion" or "harmony"; and lastly, "brightness" or "clarity," whence things are called beautiful which have a bright color. (ST I, Q 39, a 8)

So according to Aquinas, harmony is synonymous with proportion, and brilliance (or brightness) with clarity. But equating simplicity with integrity or perfection is a bit harder to understand. Augros and Stanciu write, "The principle of simplicity implies two things—completeness and economy.... A theory beautiful by this standard must take into account all the facts and must include only what is necessary" (42-43)— in other words, it must possess a wholeness validly described as integrity or perfection. Harmony, the authors write, requires not only that a theory harmonize with previously established theories, but also implies symmetry. Augros and Stanciu are manifestly writing in the Thomistic tradition.

Unfortunately any discussion of mathematical physics necessarily tends toward mathematical abstraction, which is a human construct, a human creation.² The slippery sand sneaks in through the mathematical notions of completeness and simplicity (along with symmetry). Abstracted from actually existing reality, "completeness" takes on arbitrary boundaries. Modern scientific theories necessarily omit parts of that reality. Newton's Laws of Motion, for example, leave out the fact that bodies are composed of parts which interact separately; you could never come up with the laws of thermodynamics purely from Newton's Laws. Mathematical abstraction methodologically ignores some facts: Newton's law of inertia ignores the fact that no body exists untouched by outside forces. Theoretical completeness in modern science contains a large dose of arbitrariness (for lack of a better word).

Taken with the arbitrariness of completeness, "simplicity" in the context of mathematical abstraction becomes a weird perfection: the more complicated a thing becomes or the more parameters it requires for its description, the less of the perfection of simplicity (economy) it apparently possesses. (Symmetry is similar in that it increases simplicity.) One atom is simple, but a molecule is comparatively complicated. Life, and in particular human life, is a messy affair, very unsimple. Apparently unbeautiful too. But there's little doubt that a human has more being and goodness than an atom. What could be simpler than a perfect, sterile sphere? The world itself is messy. While the laws of nature have a symmetrical generality, applying "always" and "everywhere" the same, there's no avoiding the asymmetry of the particular, the scandal of the concrete reality in front of you: why does this exist and not something else?³ The unfortunate side-effect of elevating simplicity in this context is a tendency to see all existence is a wart on the perfect symmetry of Nothing.

These days what we call good or beautiful follows the lead of physics in consisting simply in what is easy or useful, or conveniently meets our purposes, and in willfully shutting out the less pleasant bits. The world would be more beautiful (simple) if no children were born with birth defects, but not every way of achieving that end is good. The world would certainly be more democratic (symmetrical) and simpler if there were no moral absolutes, since everyone regardless of behavior would have an equal claim to goodness, but its apparent simplicity doesn't make such an idiotic idea true. Likewise, the history of mathematical physics is littered with the remains of theories that appealed to their authors as beautiful, but which turned out to have zero bearing on physical reality.⁴ Truth is a correspondence between the mind and (extra-mental) reality; in place of truth, the modern world settles for consistency, e.g., harmony with preceding theory.

Conversely truth and goodness are often ugly, or at least appear under the guise of the ugly. Sometimes the good that the truth requires is repellent, like sacrificing ourselves for family or country. Francis of Assisi is a saint because he was able to find the beauty in a leper. Teresa of Avila is a saint because she was able to find God in the emptiness of spiritual purgation. What could be more horrifying than a crucified man? What could be more asymmetrical than a people who lay unique, historical claim to the Absolute?

The problem with the modern world is not our lack of attraction to beauty, but our failure to recognize what is truly beautiful. Just as everyone desires the good, everyone finds beauty attractive. The controversy is the content to attribute to the perfection (beauty, goodness), and the challenge is how to know it.⁵

The world has forgotten true beauty, so there's great value in its exaltation, Augros and Stanciu are writing for that worthy end, and its difficult to blame them for missing the subtle error to which they fall prey in this single chapter of an otherwise excellent book. Examining the results of mathematical physics can broaden our minds to recognize the beauty of the world. Unfortunately, taking the example of mathematical physics as a guide for discovering beauty only more firmly shuts us up within our uneducated tastes. The way out of our morbid fascination with the ugly is not so much allowing whatever chances within our tortured definition of beauty to guide us, as in training our hearts to recognize what is truly good and beautiful. What our hearts perceive as beautiful, they inevitably follow.

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Notes

1. Fr. Dubay's The Evidential Power of Beauty merely elevates beauty without displacing unity (p. 45-7), apparently based on the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Dubay doesn't seem to clearly distinguish goodness and utility (a common modern confusion), at least on p. 46. Goodness, unlike unity and truth, has no entry in Dubay's index.

2. Cf. "The expressions ‘the order of nature’ and ‘the biological order’ must not be confused or regarded as identical; the ‘biological order’ does indeed mean the same as the order of nature but only insofar as this is accessible to the methods of empirical and descriptive natural science.... The ‘biological order’, as a product of the human intellect which abstracts its elements from a larger reality, has man for its immediate author." (Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, pp. 56–57)

3. The scandal of the particular is the source (philosophically speaking) of the need for probability in quantum mechanics, the so-called collapse of the wave-function in some versions of the Copenhagen interpretation, as well as the alternative "many worlds" interpretation.

4. Contrary to Augros and Stanciu's claim that "If occasionally a supremely elegant theory does not fit one group of facts, it inevitably finds application elsewhere" (41). But I suppose the wiggle room is in the word "supremely."

5. That naive acknowledgment of lovely appearance was easier in pagan times, before the centrality of the Cross laid bare the inner contrariety of our created existence. Maybe the Misfit was right: "Jesus thrown everything off balance." More likely Jesus exposed what had always been lying behind the "beautiful" face of the world, and what we ignored to our own destruction.

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Robert M. Augros and George N. Stanciu, The New Story of Science (New York: Bantam Books, 1986).

Benedict Ashley, The Way Toward Wisdom: An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame Press, 2006).

No-Zombie Theorem

In this Easter-octave Sunday it is appropriate to reflect on the need for "resurrection from the dead" to have a benevolent supernatural Source. I am not here proving or even basing this discussion on the reality of the resurrection of anyone from the dead, but simply using it as an illustration. In fact the basis of my argument is purely natural.

This theorem is called "No-Zombie"¹ because it explains why there are no evil "undead" beings, and their existence is, if not impossible, at least highly unlikely. This principle is in some sense the flip side of the principle of Super-Natural Selection. It is important to note that I'm not positing this principle as an iron-clad, mathematically inviolate law, but as a general rule that helps us make sense of the world.

The fundamental point to consider is the existence, or rather non-existence, of evil. While we might intuitively believe that evil exists, in fact it does not. What we call evil is in fact lack of a due good or due order.

For example, a man missing a limb is the subject of a physical evil: he lacks the arm or leg proper to a human being; but the man himself is not evil. The lesson to take is that physical evil has no existence in itself, but only exists in a subsistent thing; evil is parasitic.

Similarly with regard to human actions: evil acts are not ordered to man's ultimate good (i.e., the happiness of life as a whole), though they are ordered to inferior goods. Take bank robbery for instance: taking what belongs to others is clearly wrong; it does not conform to the good of society, and ultimately to the good of the thieves themselves. But notice that the thieves don't just out-of-the-blue choose evil for its own sake: they seek a good (gaining wealth), but their means are inconsistent with the overarching good of the just² ordering of society, not to mention the just ordering of their wills. A more mundane example: a person may, despite being on a diet for health reasons, choose to devour a whole pint of ice cream: he is not positively choosing to violate his diet, but rather ignoring his diet to choose the more immediate good of ice cream. He has set aside the greater good of his health for momentary gratification: a disordered choice not consistent with the greater happiness of his life.

There are in fact a hierarchy of goods. Extrinsic goods, like monetary wealth, are at the bottom. Instrinsic physical goods, like health, are just above them, because one cannot gain or maintain wealth without health. Above these are spiritual goods, which are more integral to the human person and thus less easily lost; examples include education, good habits (i.e., virtues). (Notice that I mean spiritual in a purely natural sense.) These spiritual goods are what enable one to gain and maintain the inferior goods; for example, education in proper hygiene is necessary to maintain health; a people's habit of settling disputes peacefully is necessary to gain and maintain a wealthy society.

Despite our modern tendency to absolutize ideas and ideals by investing them in actual flesh-and-blood people (e.g., American Presidents are popular subjects for this), no human being (in fact no being) is fully evil.³ Bill Clinton or George Bush (or your favorite whipping-boy) may for you epitomize all that is wrong with the world, but he is not the incarnation of evil (nor for that matter is he the incarnation of good). To incarnate evil would be to incarnate all disorder: and the ways to be disordered are infinite. If whosie-bob incarnated evil, he would be unable even to get out of bed in the morning; he would lack the will-power to organize meetings, or even to maintain his own health. And clearly, for a man to achieve high public office, he has to possess some virtues (and for that matter it also seems he must have done something wrong).

Though it often happens that people use whatever good they posses (wealth, strength, discipline) to commit evil acts, such acts undermine their agents and make any power they possess fleeting.⁴ Evil has its moment; God has His eternity.

The bottom line is that evil, since it has no existence of its own, ultimately kills its host and neutralizes itself.

That is why there are no zombies, and rising from the dead (and especially in a glorified body) can only be the fruit of the power of the Creator.

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Notes

1. Not to be confused with the "No Zombie" property of computer science.

2. A short definition of justice: giving each man his due.

3. The Devil is not completely evil: recall that he was once an angel, but turned against his Creator. Even now he still possesses some good: the existence he owes to God.

4. Only naively is this equivalent to "might makes right," or rather "right makes might". One must expand one's hosizon to long-range "might" to make the latter true.

Nothing Comes from Nothing

While I was hunting down that Hawking quotation for my previous post, I ran across a book review of Kitty Ferguson's The Fire in the Equations. The author of the review is an excellent writer Stephen M. Barr, University of Delaware physicist.

As I might have expected... Barr very clearly (more clearly that I have) untangles the muddle of something and nothing that befuddles scientific atheists.

Another class of ideas involve explaining the Big Bang as a quantum event. In quantum mechanics one can have particles being "created out of the vacuum." That is, there can be transitions from a state with no particles to a state with one or more particles. By analogy it has been suggested that spontaneous transitions can occur from a state with "no universes" to a state with one (or more) universes.

Whether this makes sense as physics is not yet clear. But if it does, will it give us creation ex nihilo without God? Only if one equivocates about what "nothing" and "universe" mean. A quantum state without any particles or even without any "universes" is not nothing-it is a quantum state.

Perhaps the distinction can be illustrated with an analogy. There is a difference (if not a spendable one) between a bank account with no dollars in it and no bank account at all. To have a bank account, even one with a momentarily zero (or negative) balance, requires having a bank, an agreement with that bank, a monetary system, a currency, and banking laws. Similarly, to talk about states with various numbers of "universes" requires having a quantum system with different possible "states," and laws determining the character of those states and governing the transitions among them. The term "the universe" should really be applied to this whole system with its laws, and not, as is misleadingly done in such discussions, to "space-times" that are coming into and going out of existence.

Hawking had it right: having equations that describe a "universe" (or anything else) coming into being does not mean that these equations must be describing anything real. Having a story about fairies does not mean there are fairies.

Barr concludes with a classic quotation:

The Latin apologist Minucius Felix, writing around 200 a.d., said, "If upon entering some home you saw that everything there was well-tended, neat, and decorative, you would believe that some master was in charge of it, and that he himself was superior to those good things. So too in the home of this world, when you see providence, order, and law in the heavens and on earth, believe there is a Lord and Author of the universe, more beautiful than the stars themselves and the various parts of the whole world." The greatest contribution of science to the "search of God" has been to bring into fuller view the grandeur of this providence, order, and law.

This is just common sense: you can't get something from nothing. Or, as that soulful street-sage Billy Preston sings,

Nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin'
You gotta have somethin'
If you wanna be with me

This ain't rocket science....

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Stephen M. Barr, "The Gods of the Physicists," First Things 65 (August/September 1996): 54-57.

Kitty Ferguson, The Fire in the Equations: Science, Religion, and the Search for God (Grand Rapids Michigan: Eerdmans, 1994).

Minucius Felix, Octavius, chapter 18. [The ancients were masters at rheortic, weren't they?]

Billy Preston (and Bruce Fisher), "Nothing from Nothing," Kids and Me (1974).

Stephen M. Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003). [In case you're interested in reading more by Barr, this book is great!]

The Null Solution

Perhaps you have been following the Terri Schiavo case lately, in which her husband, claiming she is a vegetable, seeks to kill her by having her feeding tube removed. The U.S. Senate recently debated the issue:

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, the Senate is now addressing probably the most gut-wrenching decision that an American family can ever face. Without even a single hearing, without any debate whatever, the Senate is tackling an extraordinarily sensitive concern that involves morals and ethics and religious principles, and this troubles me greatly. (Congressional Record, March 17, 2005)

The life of a woman unable to speak for herself has become a "decision" instead of an inalienable right.

The idea of death as a solution has gained wide acceptance in our self-indulgent culture that finds no meaning to life outside momentary enjoyment. Michael Medved wrote a great column in USA Today last week, in which he asks "Has suicide become the pop culture flavor of the month?" and enumerates recent instances of the zeitgeist's promotion of suicide as "brave."

The idea of "solving" life's problems by refusing to live reminded me of the most underrated field of mathematics, linear algebra. (The name is boring, you say. I know: "linear" sounds soporifically straightforward and "algebra" reminds you of your nightmare high-school class.) Trust me: next to geometry, this is the most insightful field of mathematics requiring only limited mathematical abstraction.

There are a number of useful insights in linear algebra that provide a wonderful basis for better understanding how the world works. (I'll leave a neat example to the comments and get back to the point of this post.)

There is a common solution for every* set of linear equations, called The Null Solution, which consists of setting every parameter to zero. The Null Solution is also known as the trivial solution because it is uninteresting: any moron can slap it down.

Death is the Null Solution to all of life's problems. What is the one sure way to rid the world of hunger, poverty, illiteracy, anxiety, terrorism and bad manners and bad breath? Global suicide.

A professor will very rightly flunk a student who enters the null solution for every problem of an exam. As in linear algebra, life's null solution is "trivial" and no solution at all.

Choosing death is not brave. It's cynical and selfish.

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*Homogeneous equations, the most common form.

Wholes and Parts

Why can't I construct a sentient machine? What is it that separates a human being from a mere mechanism?

Several months ago I considered this very interesting question with a philosophy professor. If you'll bear with my waning memory, I'll summarize the discussion and continue with some of my later realizations.

As usual, I took the devil's advocate role. I maintained that it was possible to construct a human; my "trump card" was the concept of the Star Trek transporter. I assumed that as on the Enterprise it should be possible to pull a person's atoms apart and reassemble them in a remote location. Likewise it should be possible to store that "image" of the person in the transporter and make duplicate people. One could even tweak the image and make "new" people. For that matter, one could make two new people, say, in the middle of a philosophical debate about the impossibility of making new people.

We ended our lunch without converging on any unique conclusion, though I thought I had the better of the discussion.

My argument depended on the possibility of a transporter-type device. But what if it weren't possible? It occurred me that the quantum mechanical Heisenburg uncertainty principle (HUP) would make such a thing impossible in principle. In a future post, I'll consider more fully the relationship between quantum mechanics and holism, but for the present purpose, it will suffice for you to know the HUP says that on a microscopic scale, it is impossible to measure the position and velocity of a particle with infinite precision at the same time. (To be more exact, the HUP says that the product of uncertainty in position and uncertainty in momentum must be more than a very small number known as Plank's constant.)

Pursing the obvious, I turned to The Physics of Star Trek. Chapter five of this book consists of very clear explanations of the myriad difficulties in building a working transporter device. Among these is the HUP that I've just mentioned (pp. 79-81).

You may know the author, Lawrence M. Krauss, from the news. He is a physicist at Case Western who testified before the Ohio State Board of Education to exclude the teaching of any theory but Darwinism in public schools. The irony is that the Darwinian worldview is precisely the sort of materialism that Krauss's discussion of the HUP helps to diffuse.

Reductionism

In the past few weeks, I came across Richard Hassing's very good article "Animals Versus the Laws of Inertia," in which he describes the philosophical assumption implicit in my counter-argument:

[R]eductionism, ...the presupposition that, regardless of technical details, physics has simply shown that parts are always prior to wholes.

Interestingly Hassing's paper contrasts the law of inertia as formulated by Descartes with that of Newton. He finds that Descartes's version requires reductionism, while Newton's is "causally neutral" and perfectly "compatible with irreducibly internal, or holistic causes of motion" because of Newton's addition of his third law (action-reaction).

An holistic (I prefer "integral") view puts the whole before the parts of which it is composed. The parts of, for example, a dog, are only what they are in terms of the whole they compose. Aristotle says, "[parts] cannot exist if separated from the whole; for it is a finger of an animal not in any manner whatsoever, since it is equivocally called 'a finger' if it is dead" (Metaphysics 7.10, 1035b23-25). In other words your finger is not really a finger unless it is a living part of the rest of you. For an organism, the whole is prior to the parts.

In contrast, a machine part is the same whether incorporated into a larger mechanism or not. An automotive fan belt is essentially the same inside the car as on the store shelf. For machines, the parts are prior to the whole.

But (to return to our original topic) what does this have to do with putting together a human being? Why can't one create a person by assembling parts?

All organisms, including human beings, grow from a very small origin (seed, embryo, etc.).** The whole gradually accumulates bits of matter that it incorporates into itself by forming them into its constituent parts. There is some sort of principle within the nascent organism that organizes the matter and must therefore exist (in some sense) before the organism. The perenniel philosophical term for this inner principle that makes a thing what it is is substantial form.

So the whole comes before the parts, not just in our reason but also in time. There is a wholness about humans that no machine possesses. Assembling parts into a "thinking" machine is conceivable, but it would seem that those parts would lack the intrinsic inter-relation to work together in the integrated wholeness of a person.

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** The universe also grew from a very small size, though I doubt it could be called an organism, except metaphorically.

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Lawrence M. Krauss, The Physics of Star Trek (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

R.F. Hassing, "Animals Versus the Laws of Inertia," Review of Metaphysics 46 (September 1992): 29-61.