A friend lent me an interesting book called The Wisdom of
Ancient Cosmology: Contemporary Science in Light of Tradition by
Wolfgang Smith. The book is difficult to summarize: while it contains
many startlingly significant insights, it also contains an
embarrassing admixture of error.
These errors may in fact be relatively minor (and they are compared to
what "Enlightened" people spout these days), but they seem so
sophomoric as to impair the objectivity of my review. But if you,
dear reader, keep this caveat in mind, I will give my best shot at
objectivity. (Some of these ideas are rather complicated and I'm not sure I've explained them adequately; please let me know if anything is unclear.)
The great aim of the book is return to the titled "wisdom of
ancient cosmology." Smith sees the entire science-inspired
contemporary worldview as radically hostile to ancient wisdom. He
defends the perennial (Thomistic-Aristotelian) philosophy, and furthermore the traditional cosmology in which it grew.
Part of Smith's self-appointed task is to refute the error in
modern thinking that he calls "bifurcationism"—what is generally
called dualism (mind/body or subject/object)—that has plagued human
thinking explicitly since Descartes. The quality of his thought on
this subject is wildly uneven; containing much truth, the book is
unable to fully exorcise the Cartesian-Kantian demons in the end.
Intelligent Design
The best part of the book is chapter X's explanation of intelligent
design (ID). The subject of evolution is one on which the author has
written before in Teilhardism and the New Religion. Here he
likewise rejects Darwinism, and more generally, the theory of common
descent.
I can't claim to have more than general notions of ID, but Smith's
prose made a lot of sense to me. He distinguishes complex information
(e.g., the positions of all the rocks that make up a mountain) from
complex specified information or CSI (e.g., the arrangement
of rocks in the form of the words "Welcome to Boulder"). CSI, as
William Dembski has shown, cannot come about randomly, at least
not fast enough to generate in the lifetime of the universe even the simplest creature's DNA.
Smith's idea of "vertical causality" is an interesting (and I think
helpful) reconception of intelligent causation. The terminology
highlights the fact that, unlike purely material causes that are unable
to create CSI, intelligence acts "above time," i.e., outside the
stream of deterministic, temporal causality. (I would add that
intelligence acts with a telos or end in mind, and I wonder how
this fits into the scheme. Does purpose transcend material time?)
Quantum Mechanics
Smith does not fare so well in his treatment of physics and modern
scientific cosmology. I suspect his training in mathematics1 is the
main hindrance.
The treatment of quantum mechanics is well intentioned, but naive.
He fails to grasp the point of the famous Schoedinger's cat
paradox. Recall that the cat paradox goes something like this: imagine a box
containing a live cat along with a poison-releasing mechanism. The
mechanism is connected to a radioactive particle whose half-life is
one hour, which means it has a 50% chance of decaying in an hour.
Should the particle decay, the mechanism will release the poison,
killing the cat.
According to the standard Copenhagen interpretation of quantum
mechanics, at the end of an hour, the cat will be both half-dead and
half-alive until someone opens the box and observes the cat, at which
time the "wavefunction" of the cat "collapses" from 50-50 dead-alive
to 100% either dead or alive. (Physics terminology: the Schroedinger
equation of quantum dynamics gives a "wavefunction," i.e., a range of
possible values each with a probability of occuring. According to the
Copenhagen interpretation, on measurement the range of possibilities
coalesces or "collapses" to the actual measured value, which then has a
probability of one. This coalescence is known as "wavefunction
collapse.") Common sense tells us that a cat can only be dead or
alive: there is no half-and-half.
Schroedinger devised the paradox to show the absurdity of the
Copenhagen idea that a particle has no definite position, for example,
until it is measured. (In a nutshell, the Copenhagen school mistakes
epistemology for ontology.)
On top of this problem, Copenhagen also creates an arbitrary
boundary between observer and observed (subject/object dualism).
Think about the cat paradox: why should the wavefunction collapse when
a scientist opens the box? What's so special about observation by a
person? Would the scientist need to be observed by another scientist
before his wavefunction collapses (and this process could be carried
ad infinitum)? Or perhaps the cat's "observation" of itself causes the
collapse?
The underlying problem is the arbitrary distinction of physical
interactions that are part of a measurement from "ordinary"
interactions. If one assumes such a dualist distinction, it is no
surprise that one gets dualism in the result.
Smith follows Eddington's distinction of the "corporeal" realm in
which we live from the "physical" world that is the subject of
mathematical physics. "The credo of bifurcation thus entails a
reduction of the corporeal to the physical," Smith observes rightly.
Unfortunately the writing in this section is somewhat unclear about
the actual relationship between the two, so that the reader can easily
misunderstand Smith to solve the confusion of the two by imposing an
absolute distinction between them. For example, Smith writes,
...the Schrodinger evolution operates within the physical domain, whereas the projection has to do with a transit out of the physical and into the corporeal.
Statements like this seem to imply that the physical and corporeal are
exclusive of each other. Such a division merely substitutes one form
of dualism for another. In actuality, the quantitative, physical
world, must be an intrinsic subset of the real, corporeal world. (For more on the relationship between form and matter, see Schindler's "
The Problem of Mechanism," about which I've written
here.) Later in the book Smith's belief in this truth does come out (e.g.,
222), but the initial lack of clarity is confusing, especially for beginners.
Modern Cosmology
Oskar Milosz's observed: "Unless a man's concept of the physical
universe accords with reality, his spiritual life will be crippled at
its roots" (170). Smith tries to remedy this spiritual void by
justifying ancient cosmology, specifically by addressing two of its
inadequacies: (1) the distinction between terrestrial and celestial
matter, and (2) geocentrism.
In chapter VII, Smith attempts to revive the ancient idea that
celestial matter, unlike matter on earth, is incorruptible. To do so,
he has to ignore the expansion of human knowledge since the middle
ages, such as the observed changeability of the heavens (e.g.,
supernovae, movement of stars, comets) and human space exploration.
He does in fact allude to the moon-landings, but he explains the
apparent mundaness of lunar matter by waiving away the ability of our
senses to properly perceive them as anything but terrestrial (143)—an
argument that undercuts his defence of the perennial philosophy's
insistence on the primacy of sense knowledge. (Pierre Duhem and Stanley Jaki maintain the scientific "democratization" of matter that Smith abhors is the product of the Christian belief that Jesus Christ, instead of the universe, is the Only-begotten of God.)
In chapter VIII, Smith charges at the windmill of heliocentrism.
This is Tychonian, not Ptolemaic geocentrism he defends. Tycho
Brahe's model is simply the Copernican system, but with a stationary
Earth: the planets orbit the Sun, and the Sun and Moon orbit the
Earth. He tries to show that this view is compatible with Newtonian
physics via Einstein: "Relativity implies that the hypothesis of a
static Earth is not incompatible with the laws of physics and cannot
be experimentally disproved" (159). There is some truth in this
claim: Einstein's theory tells us that we can't distinguish free-fall
(as the Earth does as it orbits the Sun) from uniform motion or even
from rest. But to claim the Earth is motionless necessarily negates
its daily rotation in favor of the Sun's movement, and this
motion can be measured. In fact, if you've ever seen a Foucault
pendulum in a science museum, you've seen the empirical evidence: a
motionless Earth cannot explain the strange precession of the
pendulum; if Newtonian physics is at all applicable to terrestrial matter (and it certainly is as a limit to Einstein's theory), the Earth rotates and the stars are fixed. It's not a big jump to "discover" that the Sun is (relatively) stationary in the center of the solar system.
Smith also rejects stellar parallax as evidence of the Earth's
motion: "The logic here is once again of the ponendo ponens
variety, which is to say that the hypotheses in question are judged or
validated by their success in 'explaining' observable phenomenon"
(159, cf. 118). Could anyone but a mathematician mistake
reasoning by observation and induction for begging the question?
(Such mathematical apriorism is, I believe, also behind Smith's
advocacy of "Fisher information" theory (50): that laws of physics can be
deduced from the process of measurement—as if our intellects aren't primarily recipients and not creators of sensory information; this is a basic tenet of the perennial philosophy that Smith is ostensibly defending.)
Other notable ideas
A interesting insight in the quantum mechanics section. After
observing that transcendence is the mark of objectivity, he writes,
How can somthing that is defined mathematically exhibit such a mark
[of transcendence]? Here again Nature contrives to outwit our simple
logic: the probabilities of physics manifest transcendence precisely
when they "collapse" into objective fact; it is at that moment that
they suddenly and unexpectedly, as it were, reveal their objective
side by violating the Schrodinger wave equation, which up to that
point they had strictly obeyed. (66)
I'm not sure of the value of this statement Smith quotes from Eddington (p. 53), but it is thought-provoking nonetheless:
The new conception is not merely that the whole is analysable into a complete set of parts, but that it is analysable into parts which resemble one another... I will go farther, and say that the aim of the analysis employed in physics is to resolve the universe into structural units which are precisely like one another.
From chapter IV on "Bell's Theorem and the Perennial Ontology":
The astrounding fact is that in the form of Bell's theorem physics has declared its own boundedness, its own incapacity to deal with the deeper strata of cosmic reality....
What physics can prove, and what it has indeed established beyond a reasonable doubt, is that external reality, and thus the cosmos as such, cannot be confined within the bounds of Einsteinian space-time: for if it could thus be confined, it would satisfy the Einsteinian condition of locality, which in fact it does not obey.
(74, 77)
In discussing anthropic "coincidences":
If you break a clay pot, you will find that the resultant shards fit
together perfectly so as to consitute the pot in question; and
obviously this 'fine tuning'—which seems quote miraculous so long as
one does not know the true provenance of the shards—is the result
neither of chance nor of design. In short, the physical universe is
fine tuned because the corporeal world demands as much. (222)
I would add that the wholeness of the universe is summed up in man
(cf. St. Maximus the Confessor).
What both the Darwinians and most creationists have failed to grasp is that the corporeal universe in its entirety constitutes no more than the outer shell of the integral cosmos.... So long as one thinks tha the origin of a plant or an animal can be conceived as a spatio-temporal event, one has entirely missed the point. (80)
Summary
The friend who lent me the book called it "eclectic." This description is apt on multiple levels. No only does he mix Eastern philosophical terms into his Western traditional philosophy, but also Kantian and Cartesian dualism.
Smith's aims are noble, his methods unorthodox. I certainly sympathize with his abhorrence of modern errors, but a blanket rejection that excludes even genuine developments in human knowledge is not just scandalous, but foolish.
The book contains
unique insights, but unfortunately the mutiplicity of mistakes compromises its
value. The tragedy is compounded by the fact that many of
these mistakes could have been easily avoided by allowing a working
physicist1 to review the book, or even by simply taking to heart the perennial philosophy's foundation in the reliability of the senses.
Smith's attempt to forge a unified view of the world is so reactionary that it ironically ends up incorporating the modern ambiance that it set out to exclude.
1. Though Dr. Smith received one of his undergraduate degrees in
physics and a masters in theoretical (a.k.a., mathematical) physics, his
doctorate is in mathematics, as was another of his (three) bachelors
degrees, it seems fair to say that he is more of a
mathematician than a physicist.
Wolfgang Smith, The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology:
Contemporary Science in Light of Tradition, (Oakton, VA:
Foundation for Traditional Studies, 2002).
David L. Schindler, "The Problem of Mechanism," Beyond Mechanism: The Universe in Recent Physics and Catholic Thought (Lanham, New York: University Press of America, 1986).
Stanley L. Jaki, Science and Creation (Lanham, New York: University Press of America, 1990).
