De Novo

For [Daniel] Dennett, religions are efforts at doing something science does better – they are rudimentary or abortive theories, or else nonsense. “The proposition that God exists,” he writes severely, “is not even a theory.” But religions do not consist of propositions struggling to become theories….  It is only some western Christian traditions, under the influence of Greek philosophy, which have tried to turn religion into an explanatory theory….From a Darwinian standpoint, the crucial role Dawkins gives to education is puzzling. Human biology has not changed greatly over recorded history, and if religion is hardwired in the species, it is difficult to see how a different kind of education could alter this.

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Religion has not gone away. Repressing it is like repressing sex, a self-defeating enterprise.

– John Gray (the British one, not the American), writing for the Guardian

Our present theories are of only limited validity, still tentative and incomplete.  But behind them now and then we catch glimpses of a final theory, one that would be of unlimited validity and entirely satisfying in its completeness and consistency.  We search for universal truths about nature, and, when we find them, we attempt to explain them by showing how they can be deduced from deeper truths.  Think of the space of scientific principles as being filled with arrows, pointing toward each principle and away from the others by which is is explained.  These arrows of explanation have already revealed a remarkable pattern:  they do not form separate disconnected clumps, representing independent sciences, and they do not wander aimlessly — rather they are all connected, and if followed backward they all seem to flow from a common starting point.  This starting point, to which all explanations may be traced, is what I mean by a final theory.

– Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg (emphasis mine), in Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist’s Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional. An irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution.

– Michael Behe (of the Discovery Institute), in Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, via

The philosophy Weinberg is advocating is called reductionism: We understand nature best by breaking it down into its fundamental parts and actions. Biology is chemistry, chemistry is physics, physics is elementary particle physics, and elementary particle physics is (for the time being) the bottom of the ladder….

In 1993, I wrote: “By the end of the next century we might look back on reductionist theories of physics as hopelessly naive. And if we do, we shall certainly remark upon the hubris of 20th century physicists who thought a final theory was within our grasp.”

Well, a little hubris may not be a bad thing for a scientist. Anyone who would attempt to explain the universe must possess some measure of arrogance. The important thing is to not let hubris get out of control. Here’s my scientific “religion,” which like Weinberg’s is a matter of faith: No theory conceived by the human mind will ever be final. The universe is vast, marvelous, and deep beyond our wildest imagining — its horizons will forever recede before our advance. All dreams of finality are futile. Period.

– Chet Raymo

For me, these three viewpoints represent the three ways modern Westerners react to the fundamental mystery of the universe; for brevity, let’s call that mystery a “black box”.

1. Weinberg believes that we will one day open the black box and discover a well-oiled machine that explains everything:  The human search for understanding the mechanisms of the universe will one day have a conclusive end, and this end will be a complete, consistent theory of everything.
2. Behe believes we never will (and never can) open the black box; there are some mysteries that will remain forever locked away from human understanding; there is a point beyond which we can proceed no further.  This view, apparently, is oblivious to the fact that, unlike literalist dogma, scientific knowledge has always been incomplete and has grown incrementally only by asking questions about stuff we don’t already know.  The real goal of the I.D. crowd – in method, if not in rhetoric – is to stop scientific inquiry dead in its tracks.
3. Raymo believes that we can open the box, and inside we will find, possibly nestled among further machinery, another black box, which contains another black box, and so on like so many nested Russian dolls to infinity.

Weinberg finds himself in the precise position maintained by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead nearly 100 years ago, in their monumental treatise on logic and mathematics, Principia Mathematica (PM).  Russell and Whitehead started with the assumption that all of mathematical truth might be contained within a meticulously constructed formal system starting with a handful of atomic axioms taken to be self-evident.  They believed that one might arrive at a formal system which was both consistent (never proved a falsehood) and complete (able to prove any theory expressed in that formal system in terms of its fundamental axioms).  Famously, a young upstart Austrian named Kurt Gödel shattered their dream with his famous “incompleteness theorem”, which demonstrated by means of some clever logic that, while PM was indeed consistent, it was not complete: he constructed a true theorem in the system which could not be deduced given the axioms of PM, thereby rendering PM unable to prove the veracity of this statement and incomplete.  He later demonstrated this to hold true from any similar formal system that attempts to build a complete set of true theorems from a limited number of axioms.

Gödel’s theorem is now famous, being well-documented in Douglas Hofstadter’s highly popular and accessible Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (among other places); however, its implications for the possibility of procedural science to ever have a final theory of everything that is both complete and consistent have apparently been lost on Weinberg.

I’ll let Stephen Hawking have the final word on the subject.  Apparently, it really is turtles all the way down.

At the Guardian, Charlie Brooker reviews Richard Dawkins’ latest film, Enemies of Reason. As in his last film, The Root of All Evil, Dawkins takes apart straw men of all shapes and sizes, all of which personify a variety of human foolishness he lumps together as “superstition”. To his credit, Dawkins correctly perceives a threat to human progress, and he gets close to the root cause of this evil – but ultimately, blinded by outdated semantics, he misses his true target.

As we’ve all learned in our high-school history classes, over the last 600 years, Western society has advanced in great strides, made possible by the birth of rationality through the liberation of progressive minds from the shackles of orthodox correctness. This brought about the Renaissance – the first major revival of state-sponsored secular progress in the West since antiquity – and later, the Enlightenment, an embrace and codification of rationality and a renewed interest in studying mankind’s place in the universe as hitherto accepted notions of divine origins were discarded.

However, in our current time, we can observe the tendency to drag humanity back into the dark ages – to resist scientific ideas which disagree with an outdated worldview, and attack those value rationality over fealty to frozen, self-righteous dogma.

Apparently, those are our only choices.

Brooker attacks those who harbor fondness for “outmoded” worldviews:

“Spirituality” is what cretins have in place of imagination. If you’ve ever described yourself as “quite spiritual”, do civilisation a favour and punch yourself in the throat until you’re incapable of speaking aloud ever again. Why should your outmoded codswallop be treated with anything other than the contemptuous mockery it deserves?

Really? Does this image ring a bell?

Fundamentalist christianity is a child of the enlightenment, the ugly twin of reason.  And both sides get it wrong.

Prior to Gutenberg and widespread literacy, the Bible was largely a secret, an ancient tome in dead language read and digested by clergy, who fed it in soundbites to the masses.  As ugly as the Catholic church was in the Dark Ages, the cosmology and creation stories of the Bible were not read as literal truths, but rather as allegories, codifications of eternal recurring stories handed down from culture to culture, early Greek and Roman Christians working Mithras and Apollo into an appropriated Hebrew mythology, itself brought out of Egypt (hello, Moses?) and adapted through trials and competition with Sumerians and Phoenecians (aka Canaanites), worked in with the ancient proto-Indo-European archetypes which also found their way into Hinduism.  (Go read Joseph Campbell.)

The Church, for its part, was concerned with secular authority and denounced those who fought against that authority.  It had no particular stake in this or that creation story; what it feared most were the implications that its right to determine truth was being challenged.  Hence heresy, excommunication, burning at the stake.

After the Renaissance, empiricism made its debut, and faith responded by breaking away from organizational rigor: after Martin Luther, Christians began fighting amongst themselves, which took the heat off science and reason.

After the Enlightenment, science proceeded about its business of chipping away at the authority of religious institutions in the 18th and 19th centuries; after the Protestant reformation (and correspondingly, literacy) began to take hold, the individual was given a “personal relationship” with Christ.

Literacy taught naivety.  It gave theology over to the untrained, undisciplined layman.  The theology of Protestant churches (and, yes, for the most part, mosques and synagogues) had to compete with science for mindshare.  On all fronts, including the Creation story and the afterlife, it demands to be taken just as seriously as science, seeking to answer the same questions (where do we come from? where are we going?) with the exact certainty and specificity of scientific inquiry.  It starts with a different premise (that the Bible/Koran/Torah is the literal word of God), but uses the same means (or at least a mockery of those means) to analyze and dissect its subject.

Fundamentalism is essentially a reaction against science and modernism.  It is the equal and opposite force that resists change.

But Brooker and Dawkins and the “New Scientists” don’t realize what’s at fault here.  It’s not spirituality per se, it’s the very means developed by science that have brought about the fallacies of Modern America.  Look in the mirror to point your finger: the resoluteness of belief, at any time anywhere, is responsible.

Science and faith get along much better when we all acknowledge that nobody has the complete picture of truth.  We’re all seekers here, with two halves of the same picture.  Science, the extension of our senses, establishes what is known to be repeatable.  Faith translates the information of our senses into the language of our animal brain.  We’re made of both things and we need them both.

UPDATE:

Emily proposes that all Dawkins needs is a good peak experience.  So does John Horgan.