Quantum Non-Linearity: Bus to Nowhere

Monday, October 27, 2008

Bus to Nowhere

In this article in the Spectator, author Melanie Philips quotes Richard Dawkins saying “A serious case could be made for a deistic God”. Dawkins made this statement at the beginning of his second debate with Oxford Mathematics professor John Lennox. Reading between the lines it seems that this was a defensive reaction to the first debate (which I haven’t seen) where the uncompromising Dawkins came head to head with someone who has a strong grasp of philosophy and science and who would very likely expose the loopholes in absolute atheism. Not surprisingly in the second debate Dawkins was cagier about his absolute atheism and instead went on to attack the much more vulnerable specifics of faith. When faced with someone like John Lennox the turkey shoot is over for Richard Dawkins.

However, Dawkins statement sits well with the atheist bus poster campaign projected for the New Year which uses a slogan reading: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life". “Probably” no God? I read subtext as: “We might just possibly have got it wrong, but we don’t think there is a God”. The redneck fundamentalists, for whom the very certainty of belief and experience is the clinching exhibit-A evidence for God’s existence, will laugh that one to scorn! I almost feel sorry for the atheists who by definition can’t match the fundamentalists in convinced fervor! Zealous evangelism and atheism simply don't mix!They are not going to be able to take on the vehement believers by playing them at their own game: if anything this rather lame slogan campaign will play into the hands of those believers for whom uncompromising conviction is evidence of veracity. Even the relatively moderate Methodists are welcoming the atheist campaign as it least putting the concept of God on the agenda; once one entertains the God concept, even just as a remote possibility, one is half way to faith - all that remains is for the “God meme” to be switched on! These atheists haven't got the foggiest idea about how the religious mentality works, least of all that of the fundamentalists.

The trouble with atheism, or at least a fair minded and reasonable atheism, is that in the final analysis it is a self referencing conceptual object that doesn’t allow certainties including itself. It’s a bit like the ground state in quantum theory. Quantum mechanics prohibits the absolute emptiness of nothing: on either side of nothing there is cloud of matter and antimatter! For absolute atheism the only way is up. The tentativeness of human knowledge demands that one can’t declare that God doesn’t exist, only that he probably doesn’t exist. Absolute atheism has only one state: complete disbelief. Theism on the other hand has many states. If you are an absolute atheist there is nowhere else to go other than into one of the various states of belief … or perhaps a superposition of several states of belief!

No comments:

THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Monday, October 27, 2008

Bus to Nowhere

No comments:

My Other Blogs

Papers and Essays etc

About Me

Blog Archive

Labels

THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION