Paper: Gravity from Quantum Non-Linearity

The above paper can be downloaded in PDF format from here.

Some years ago, quite by accident, I found myself making a foray into the arcane world of quantum gravity. At the time I had no grandiose intention of looking into this problem; the whole thing seemed well beyond me. I could not, however, avoid circumstances that conspired to ping into my head some ideas that looked to me as though they were worth pursuing and I just couldn’t resist following them into the unknown! I ended up writing this self-published book about my explorations [published Nov 2004]. I saw little point in my wasting a lot of emotional effort and time trying to get the book published by unwilling established publishers. I wanted to get the project off my desk and clear that desk for my next project. Print On Demand provided the solution. Thanks to AuthorsOnline I got my ISBN number at break neck speed  and now my ideas are well and truly committed to the one way street of history. 

The story of just how all this came about can be found in an essay I posted as one of my very first posts of this blog. 

The paper I have linked to above is a much shorter rendition of the book. In 2011 I revisited the arguments in the book and found a cleaner and more direct approach to the subject. The paper is only 18 pages long – about 8300 words, as opposed to the book’s 48,000 words and 300 equations. (However, the book does contain many insights that I was unable to incorporate into a short paper.)

I have no connections with academia and have little familiarity with the paths they are treading. I’m an independent hobbyist with enough time on his hands to escape the humdrum exigencies of existence by exploring some fascinating trails into the unknown. Understandably, academia can be affronted and even hostile toward  independents outside of their culture who have the audacity to dabble in their very own subject.  After all there are, as we well know, many anti-establishment cranks and conspiracy theorists out there on whom academia should not be wasting its precious time. Consequently, I've kept my contact with them to a bare minimum. But as I remember Fred Hoyle once putting it so well: Some people regard a domain of knowledge as their personal property! That kind of all too human fault can be found on all sides and even academia has its own eccentricities 

It is unlikely that I’ve “solved the problem”, so to speak. I'm sure there are professional academics out there who could tell me why my proposed "solution" doesn't work. In the meantime ignorance is bliss; I have to admit that I still find the basic ideas I stumbled upon neat and compelling (I suppose I would say that!). No new gravitational particle has to be invented: Gravity is a fairly natural outcome of relativistic quantum mechanics. The quantum waves of matter naturally affect one another via a nonlinearity that modifies the space-time metric. I was even inexorably lead into the subject of dark matter and and dark energy. I touch upon these subjects in the paper, thus blazing a trail (or a garden path more like) from the micro world of quantum theory to the macro world of the cosmos!

Note: The picture published above comes from http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18357-ghost-galaxies-may-haunt-the-milky-way.html

Planet Narnia: Part 2

 As we saw in the first part of this series the primary theme of Michael Ward’s book (“Planet Narnia”) is to show that C. S. Lewis’s Seven Chronicles of Narnia were intended to recreate the touch and feel of the mediaeval seven planet astrological cosmos. In this second part I want to trace a secondary theme found in Ward’s book: That is, with the coming of the Copernican revolution there followed a sense of disenchantment and apparent demystification of the once sacred cosmos. Let Ward set the scene: 

Looking up at the heavens now, Lewis argues, is a very different experience from what it was in the Middle Ages. Now we sense that we are looking out into a trackless vacuity, pitch-black and dead cold. Then we would have felt as if we were looking into a vast lighted concavity P23.

 For obvious reasons Lewis refers to the Ptolemaic astrological cosmos as a “Discarded image”: Lewis revelled in this image says Ward: 

Lewis makes no effort to hide the pleasure he derives from this view of the cosmos. He remarks the human imagination has seldom entertained an object so sublimely ordered; the medieval universe was ‘tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine’. P24 

And it was because he thought it beautiful that Lewis so revelled in the pre-Copernican cosmos. P27 

In a quote taken from Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy Ward conveys to us the contrast in mood invoked by the old and new cosmologies respectively: In the following passage we find Lewis putting his thoughts about these cosmologies into the head of his main character, Ransom: 

A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science was falling off him. He had read of ‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now – now that the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it ‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life has come? He had thought it barren; he now saw that it was the womb of worlds whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the Earth with so many eyes – and here, with how many more. No: space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens – the heavens which declared the glory – the “Happy chimes that ly. Where day never shuts his eye. Up in the broad fields of the sky.” He quoted Milton’s words to himself lovingly, at this time and often. P25 

Lewis is telling us here that our understanding of the meaning of the modern cosmological picture is deficient of much needed emotional vitamins; that understanding fails to fully satisfy our appetite for majesty and mystery and, I suspect, above all, it apparently fails to give humanity that centrality of purpose and position which is implicit in the Ptolemaic universe. But, in my view, modern science is beginning to offer a new kind of empyrean that acts as the hook for our deep seated need for the harmony and purpose that stirs our passions. “Space”, so called, is filled with the quantum ferment of possibility and pervaded by the high temperature medium of gravity; “Space” is the forge in which worlds are formed. (See my posts here for my efforts at trying to make human sense of the cosmic perspective) 

According to Ward, Lewis’s writing of the Ransom trilogy was motivated in part by a desire to address the problem of the disconsolate reaction to the modern cosmological model: 

Following the Copernican revolution, astronomy and astrology became gradually distinct and the former prospered while the latter fell on hard times. P 29 

Milton straddled the old and new views of the cosmos; he marked the transition to the new disenchanted model of the universe from the traditional one which stretched back in time immemorial. The Ransom trilogy… is in large part an attempt to rehabilitate that traditional conception. P26 

There has been no delight (of that sort) in “nature” since the old cosmology was rejected. No one can respond in just the same way to the Einsteinian, or even the Newtonian, universe. P235 

There is still, of course, delight and wonder in nature, but according to Lewis, (according to Ward) that delight is no longer supplemented by an overarching sense of a sublime purpose or belief that the cosmos is  a wonderful magical and mystery show and as such part of a higher context that imbues it with meaning. Ward quotes Lewis as follows: 

By reducing Nature to her mathematical elements it substituted a mechanical for a genial or animistic conception of the universe. The world was emptied, first of her indwelling spirits, then of her occult sympathies, finally of her colours, smells and tastes (Kepler at the beginning of his career explained the motion of the planets by their anima motrices; before he died, he explained it mechanically) The result was dualism rather than materialism. The mind, on whose ideal constructions the whole method depended stood over against its object in ever sharper dissimilarity. Man with his new powers became rich like Midas but all that he touched had gone dead and cold. This process, slowly working, ensured during the next century the loss of the old mythical imagination; the conceit, and later the personified abstraction, takes its place. Later still, as a desperate attempt to bridge the gulf which begins to be found intolerable, we have the Nature poetry of the Romantics. Page 241 

Very telling I think is Lewis suggestion here that dualism is a product of the mind’s alienation and estrangement from its cosmic setting; this is something I myself have been aware of. And when it is not dualism it is an out and out materialism. As Ward himself adds: 

The seeing eye that has stared through the Telescopes in the post-Copernican period has typically been an eye with ‘single vision’, one which notices matter and mechanism and little or nothing else. P243 

Much of the material I have quoted from Ward I find very reminiscent of William Irwin Thompson’s reaction to modern science. Thompson’s reaction can be gauged in the two posts I did on his two books “At the Edge of History” and Passages about Earth. If Lewis calls for the rehabilitation of the medieval mystical regard for the Cosmos (although not for the mediaeval cosmological model itself) then Thompson looks for the re-establishment of a “Pythagorean” science: 

We somehow have to outflank the ignorant armies of the Left and Right to find the space and time to convert our industrial technology to new kind of Pythagorean science. (At the Edge of History P75) 

As we have seen in the quotes above Lewis talks about the relation between the loss of the old mythological imagination and man’s resulting sense of alienation from his home in the cosmos, and this in turn leads to a dualistic philosophy of spirit vs. matter. (Either that or a monistic philosophy of materialism). Thompson’s views resonate with Lewis here: 

There is indeed a “mythopeic mentality”, but it is not restricted to precivilised man, but is to be found in geniuses as different as Boehme, Kepler, Blake, Yeats, Wagner, Heisenberg, and that student of Boehme’s theory of action and reaction, Isaac Newton. Myth is not an early level of human development, but an imaginative description of reality in which the known is related to the unknown……(At the Edge of History P170) 

Birth and death are ultimately confusing; to make sense of them we will have to make our peace with myth…. At the edge of history, history itself can no longer help us and only myth remains equal to reality. ……(At the Edge of History P205) 

A mythos vs. logos tension is chronic in our culture today; when this tension doesn’t end with a sense of emptiness and meaningless attempts are made to resolve it with pathological religious responses such as the gnosticism of the Jesus swoon-ins or the corrupted and caricatured science of the young earth creationists. In their dissonance and inconsonance Christian fundamentalists are returning to geocentrism in order to make human sense of the cosmos: From Gerardus Bouw, through John Byle to Answers in Genesis, we have here fundamentalists whose perverse science of cosmology is leading to some kind of geocentricsm – very directly sense in the case of Bouw and indirectly in the case of other YECs who inexorably move toward geocentric cosmologies. (As a result of geocentrism being implicit in their handling of time) The intellectually pathological state of fundamentalist Christianity as it thrashes over failed cosmological models, has, I propose, a lot to do with the difficulty in coping with the disconsolate feelings invoked by the symmetries that science is uncovering.

...to be continued...

***

Some posts  where I have touched on material relevant to the above can be found using these links :

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/hemisphere-short-of-brain.html
http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/symbolism-at-blickling-hall.html
http://norwichcentralbaptistchurch.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/christmas-1939.html
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/2001-spaced-out-odyssey.html
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/luddites-and-evolution-machine.html
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2008/09/heres-interesting-book-cloudspotters.html
http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2007/09/blickling-hall.html
http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/why-dualism.html

Jason Lisle Replies?

I have just had an anonymous reply to my critique of Jason Lisle's attempt to solve the Star Light problem. The point made by "anonymous" is in error and perhaps I will deal with it in detail in due course.

If you're out there Jason can you first claim the responsibility for your post and your error? (Or who ever it is). Frankly, it is time ill spent explaining in detail  to every anonymous YEC who comes along and who has convinced themselves of an error just where they have gone wrong. If you want a proper discussion unveil yourself. If not the clue is: "Think cones" and you will begin to see where you have badly erred. And next time, can you do me the curtsey of reading my post properly rather jumping to an erroneous conclusion? I find your righteous tones hard to take given that you can't even be bothered to engage with the material properly and instead furtively lurk unidentified..

Goodbye. 

PS See the link below for the new comment, which as a working hypothesis I'm going to assume is from Jason Lisle.

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/answers-in-genesis-screw-up-again.html

PPS If I am are dealing with Jason Lisle here I bear in mind one thing: He has a heck of lot to lose in terms of his YEC standing. So if it is him who has replied that may be why he wishes to remain anonymous. I don't want to pander to that kind of social vanity.


28/05/12: Latest Bulletin: I have had a second reply from the person signed in as anonymous (Follow link above). The person claims not to be Jason Lisle. That may be good news: The person signing on was clearly unaware of the gravitational field that Jason's "ASC" model generates. Thus, it is still possible that for Jason the realisation has dawned, although he is not broadcasting it if it has! I have advised the person concerned to take the problems back to Jason himself. 

Six Feet Above Contradiction

I recently got an alert that "Quantum Non-Linearity" had been linked to from a site named “Jasonlisle.com”, the blog of none other than Jason Lisle the author of one of the latest attempts to solve the Young Earth Creationist starlight problem. The link from Lisle's blog was to my critique of Lisle’s theory and was made in the comments section of a blog entry entitled “Research at ICR” dated April 20^th. The person making the link is an astrophysics student named Jacob Harper who generally criticizes YEC, but includes the starlight problem in his criticism:

“The Starlight Problem” is your biggest problem. I’ve looked into it, and you claim to propose a solution. You infer a *changing* speed of light over time.

I’m not much of a physicist as of yet and even I can see the problems with such a baseless assertion. Just by googling this, I found quite the eloquent response:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/10/answers-in-genesis-screw-up-again.html

Yes, I think Jacob is right in saying that this is their biggest problem, but my guess is that he seems to have confused my reference to “metric differentials” with a changing speed of light. One of Lisle's admirers who signs on as “Nick L”, does Lisle’s job for him and attacks Jacob’s points. In particular he defends Lisle on the starlight problem:

The supposed problem involving distant starlight is really not the ‘problem’ it is often presented to be by secular scientists. You said that you’ve researched Dr. Lisle’s stance on this subject, but you mistakenly attribute to him the theory of a change in the speed of light. If you’re interested in a more plausible explanation that Dr. Lisle has written on in depth, I recommend looking up his article on Anisotropic Synchrony Convention in the Answers Research Journal. I think you will find the ARJ more instructive on this particular point than Google.

Lisle backs up his supporter:

Nick – that was an excellent reply. Thanks for chiming in. Jacob apparently hasn’t read much on this issue or given it much thought, and you gave some great starting points for him to begin to study it.

Clearly Lisle isn’t going to enlighten Nick L as to the weaknesses of his starlight “solution” thus helping to perpetuate the general impression amongst YECs that the problem has been ameliorated.  At the end of my original article I wrote:

In the YEC community the scientific quality of its papers is less crucial than the role they serve in the wider YEC culture. The average fundagelical supporter who doesn’t understand science can, if challenged on the issue of Star light travel time, simply point to papers such as Lisle’s with the misplaced confidence that the matter is in hand. From his perspective this paper comes out of the stable that runs the impressive Ken Ham Creation Museum, a museum where no expense has been spared and whose lavish (if tacky*) exhibits must stun and awe the average Christian fundamentalist. When one is immersed in such a heady patriarchal culture it must feel that it just can’t be wrong. Any challenge to such an awe inspiring source must look as though its coming from somewhere near the gates of hell and need not be engaged; after all, it’s in the hands of people like Jason Lisle and his AiG reviewers – what better authority and assurance can one ask for? Thus, whether right or wrong, Lisle's work serves to act as an important community myth.

We therefore see the very process I have described in action: Nick L remains profoundly ignorant as long as his faith in Lisle remains steadfast. Nick L believes he has no need to consider the starlight problem because he is so sure Lisle has it sorted or at least ameliorated. And Lisle connives with this false impression by his failure to disabuse Nick L of his faith.

Jason Lisle has since left AiG and joined the Institute of Creation Research. His original blog space on AiG now has just this terse message:  “This user has elected to delete their account and the content is no longer available”. As there appeared to be no fond farewells accompanying this career move by Lisle it looks quite likely that some kind of acrimonious bust-up occurred; not an uncommon occurrence amongst fundamentalists who, on all sides, are so sure they know the voice of God and are in His Will. The gloss given this matter, as with the starlight problem, is all part of the general field of blarney and sophistry that surrounds and permeates YEC culture, attracting the ignorant and keeping them in their place.

* "Kitschy" may be a better description.

Atheist Theology

The Blank Slate Atheist is a rarity, even in the secular West.

I've been following with interest the atheist testimonies that PZ Myers has been publishing on his blog. Some of these testimonies, in a strange inverted sort of way, parallel the confessions of many Christians; there is a period of inconsonance and angst running up to a crisis that is ultimately resolved by some kind of final realization, peace of mind and sense of freedom. In fact if one swapped a few terms one might be able to pass off some of these atheist conversion experiences as Christian conversions. 

Recently, one of PZ’s testimonies caught my eye because it was a good example of what I refer to as Hunter’s Maxim (See the end of this post ): 

It is perhaps one of the great enigmas in religious thought that one can profess to be an agnostic, skeptic, or even atheist regarding belief in God yet still hold strong opinions about God. 

Below I publish some extracts from a confession found on PZ’s blog, dated 28th April 12. My main point is that this testimony is loaded with theology in Hunter’s sense; that is, it evidences a great deal of presumed knowledge about God. I don’t intend to give any quality responses to the theology expressed here; I’ll leave that to the theologians; it suffices to point out an example of Hunter’s maxim. 

However, there is one other point I would like to make. It is ironic that the question of God’s existence is a through and through empirical issue and the atheist confession below is a fine example of this: For it is plain that an implicit concept of God is being juxtaposed with the observed world in order to facilitate judgment on whether or not the God concept provides a framework which makes sense of that world. Now, we must not be naive enough to think that God is empirical in the formally testable sense that the elementary and low level objects of the physical sciences are; rather, the empirical “test” for God revolves around the question of whether God is the background narrative that connects the samples of one’s experience into a coherent frame work; from an epistemic angle God has always been a far more a-priori explanatory object than an inductive a-posteriori object. 

Atheists have a choice of either:

a) Accepting they have a sufficient conception of God to use this concept abductively against the empirical world in order to decide whether or not the “God narrative” makes sense of experience. 

or: 

b) Using a purely inductive approach which declares “God” to be an unintelligible idea until such a time that “he” can be constructed a-posterior from observation. 

Some atheists may find themselves between a rock and a hard place on this one: Either they have to accept Hunter’s maxim or they are thrown back onto the philosophically flawed practice of constructing narratives about the world purely inductively. Many atheists are instinctively drawn toward b) simply because they are very wary of getting into theological arguments they don't understand; they much prefer the idea that induction from observation rules OK; an approach that, generally speaking, is an epistemic non-starter. 

The author of the atheist testimony in question seems to be in category a) above; that is, one of having a lot of knowledge about God, but finding this knowledge fails to make sense of her perception of the world. Below are some excerpts from this correspondent interleaved with my own comments: 

 Because the universe and everything in it, and everything we know about how it works, makes much more sense if there is no god than if there is one. 

My Comment: Well, there you go! Ergo this person is working to some a-priori conception of God. This comment immediately draws the person into questions about the nature of God and his relationship with the cosmos. 

Because there is not and never has been any argument or “proof” of the existence of god(s), etc. that stood up to ANY honest, thorough, logical scrutiny. EVER. Not. Even. One. (And it’s not as if believers haven’t had *thousands* of years to come up with one, either.) 

My Comment: I don’t think anyone can expect to prove God’s existence any more than one expects to provide “proof” of evolution, say. The latter, for example, is a complex object entailing a history that is a highly disordered pattern of twists and turns (albeit under the constraint of fundamental laws). We are only ever likely to have a limited set of observational samples derived from this history. Evaluating the truth of evolution has much more to do with weight of evidence than proof. Moreover, much of evolution’s appeal is down to its retrospective interpretive success; many will claim that it makes sense of the diversity of species. Moreover, witness evolutionary psychology which majors on post-facto sense making narratives and is accordingly highly controversial. The same, but only more so, goes for the idea of God. But having made this comparison I must add that Theism, which deals with an even higher level object than evolution, is a lot less formally testable than the latter and proportionately a lot more controversial. 

Because of all the good things that religion does, *not one* requires religion or belief in god in order to happen. I don’t believe, yet I treat people ethically, I give to charity, I’m kind to animals. But there’s plenty of evil things that religion does that are either a direct result of religion, or are justified or made worse by it: misogyny, homophobia, racism, war, etc. 

My Comment: Here an observation to do with people’s ability to behave morally is being compared with expectations about what religion should entail. 

 Because “throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be NOT MAGIC.” (Thank you, Tim Minchin.) 

My Comment: Well, yes by definition! If we understand something it no longer looks like magic! Magic could be defined as “what you don’t understand”! 

Because the whole notion of the universe being created by a perfect being is nonsensical and self-contradictory. Perfection means no lack of anything, ergo no reason to create anything. And supposing such a being *did* create a universe and us, how did it manage to screw up so royally on so many things? I mean, putting our airway and esophagus right next to each other with just a little valve to stop food going down the wrong way? Really? That’s the best it can do? (True fact: I once damn near choked to death on an M&M. Not even a whole M&M, a fucking half-chewed fragment of an M&M. Tell me that’s not a design flaw.) 

My Comment: A highly theological argument! In fact the first part of it is pure theology in the sense that it concerns the internal consistency of the notion of God. Notice also how those observations on the configurations of life have a very important bearing on the assumed nature of God; the implicit concept of God being worked to here appears to be that of humunclus intelligent design.

Because, also supposing a perfect being created the universe and us, why would that supposedly perfect being give a flying fuck what we thought of it, or what we wanted? Ooh, what’s that? It loves us? Then why doesn’t it regrow amputated limbs? Why do kids die of cancer, etc.? Because their parents didn’t grovel just right? Why is my best friend a prisoner of crippling pain leaving her barely able to walk while evil assholes get to run around completely healthy all their lives? 

My Comment: The problem of pain and suffering! Highly theological and yet highly empirical at the same time! (Empirical in the sense that it revolves around the significance of those observations of seemingly pointless suffering) 

Because no one can agree on what this perfect creator being is, or what it looks like, or how it behaves, or what it wants. No one has seen it or heard it, so no one knows, and therefore they’re all just guessing. Billy Graham is just guessing. The Pope is just guessing. Imams and ayatollahs are just guessing. Rabbis are just guessing. And they’re all guessing based on their own culture and prejudices, not evidence. 

My Comment: This opens up the deep subject of divine revelation and grace; is religion just a guessing game or has it been aided by the revelation from a God who cares? If so where is that revelation? Presumably this person feels that nothing measures up to what would classify as a revelation.

Because “I feel it in my heart” sucks as an argument. 

My Comment: “feelings” are part of the pattern of observations one makes which are incorporated into one's world view narrative. But as an attempt at a gnostic killer argument based on a resort to inner light I would agree; it does suck as an argument!

Because “if you believe and you’re wrong you lose nothing, but if you don’t believe and you’re wrong you’ll go to hell” sucks as an argument. 

My Comment: Rather caricatured so I’ll have to agree. (Pascal's wager was a caricature as far as I'm concerned)

Because “god moves in mysterious ways/it’s not for us to question/it’s all for the best, we just can’t see it yet” all suck as arguments. 

My Comment: I agree. This evasion of challenging observations can be very frustrating to deal with.

Because if I tortured someone forever for not worshipping me — or actually for ANY reason — I’d be rightly considered a monster, a bully, an evil sick fuck… anything BUT a loving parent.

My Comment: I’ll concede that the attempts I have seen to justify the concept of a universal eternal hell are rubbish (Universal hell: the view that all but a small religious remnant who assent to a finicky system of beliefs and/or inner enlightenment will go to hell) 

Because if any set of beliefs demands that you NEVER question it under ANY circumstances, that is a *huge* red flag that it is a shitty belief system that you should get away from as fast as you can. 

My Comment: Although it would be wrong to charge all theists with such an accusation there are Christian sects out there who, to vary degrees of approximation, can be justifiably caricatured with the foregoing.

****

I've touched on the subject of atheists with a theology (or "atheology") in several posts - See below. In particular Larry Moran has been one of may favourites targets. In fact in the last of the posts linked to below I was honoured that he made an appearance in person!

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/larry-morans-atheology.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/god-theology-evidence-and-observation.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/myth-of-god-incarnate.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/atheology.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/atheist-atheology.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/atheist-theology.html

Planet Narnia: Part 1

A couple of years ago I read Michael Ward’s book “Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis”. I never got round to doing a blog post on it; I was in fact reminded to do so as a result of recently reading William Thompson’s dual volume “At the Edge of History/Passages about Earth”. Ward, Lewis and Thompson all tread the mystical realm of mythology and their works have significant points of contact, points of contact I wish to explore in a series of posts.

The main thesis of Ward’s book is that C. S. Lewis wrote the seven Chronicles of Narnia as way of capturing the touch and feel of the medieval seven planet astrology. It seems that the secretive Lewis never let on that this was one of his purposes in writing the Chronicles and this is why, according to Ward, the superficial reader perceives them as a weird assortment of scenes, characters and plots, apparently unconnected by any coherent underlying idea. That was basically my perception of the Narniad and one reason why, hitherto, I’ve not been interested in them. But Ward claims to have rumbled the hidden code that pervades the pages of these books.

I’m not very familiar with Lewis or the literary world in which he was immersed. I’ve read some of his books and watched a couple of productions taken from his Chronicles. Ward, needless to say, is steeped in Lewis. Not surprisingly then my rather cursory acquaintance with Lewis handicapped my reading of Ward’s book: My lack of familiarity with its many literary allusions and authors made it heavy going in parts. However, I ploughed on through it determined to get to the end of it especially as I sensed that this book impinged upon my interest in the modern paradigm changes that have left the mediaeval world well behind, its sea of faith long since departed, leaving many of Christianity’s modern manifestations high, dry and floundering.

Ward has had to work against a very natural and understandable bias against the kind of thing he is doing: The field of revealing hidden meanings and cracking secret codes has an unfortunate history of being the stamping ground of cranks, conspiracy theorists and extremists. Nevertheless, in my rather inexpert opinion Ward presents a very convincing case for medieval astrology being the underlying and hitherto hidden theme that makes sense of Lewis’s work. In medieval times each planet had associated with it its own particular range of motifs and ideas such as colour, metals and general ambiance. These motifs, in due course, make their appearance in their respective book of the Chronicles. For example, according to Ward Prince Caspian is associated with the planet Mars and Martian motifs can be found scattered throughout the book such as “perpendicularity” which is “a manifestations of Mars's masculinity” (pp 80-81), and also a military regard for orderliness (p92). Mars's metal is “iron”, a metal which, given its history, goes together well with a warlike and mechanistic disregard for painful effects (p79) and this metal makes an important appearance in Prince Caspian. (p92)

Given that this kind of thing is repeated for all seven books it all seems too much of coincidence for it to have happened by chance, especially as it is well known that Lewis was awestruck by the mystery of mediaeval astrology and he wrote much about it.

It was in large part through his love of Dante that Lewis grew to be so enchanted by the Ptolemaic universe (p41)

As for astrology, the foregoing chapters have shown that Lewis’s imaginative fascination with it was life-long and deep. (p247)

After reading Ward’s book the only mystery left seems to be why this underlying theme wasn’t spotted long ago given the proliferation of clues to be found in the Chronicles, starting with the number of books; seven. In fact Ward himself wonders why he has been privileged to make this discovery when so many others have spent so long mulling over the enigma and occasion of Lewis seemingly incoherent Narniad. Ward puts some of this down to the modern attitude to astrology:

And the final reason is that those critics who were looking for a third level may not have been open to the subject of astrology as his work really requires, for as I have pointed out, astrology, a subject disdained by academics, tends to be given a doubly wide berth by Christian academics. Since most Lewis scholars have been Christian or well-disposed to the Christian tradition, there was an in-built improbability that researchers would fully understand his most successful work. (p245)….. His status as a Christian too often causes Pavlovian reactions of approval among his co-religionist readership; his interest in astrology gets overlooked in the rush to lionize him. (p246)

In this connection it is worth noting that Lewis also had a high regard for pagan religions:

But a much more substantial reason for Lewis’s love of the Ptolemaic cosmos, despite its factual inadequacy, has to do with some of his most deeply held religious beliefs. As a boy he had been told by his schoolmasters that Christianity was 100 percent correct and every other religion, including the pagan myths of ancient Greece and Rome, was 100 percent wrong. He found that this statement, rather than bolstering the Christian claim undermined it and he abandoned his childhood faith ‘largely under the influence of classical education’. It was to this experience that he owed his ‘firm conviction that the only possible basis for Christian apologetics is a proper respect for Paganism.’ Therefore Lewis was not troubled by the similarities between, for instance, the pagan Jupiter and the Hebrew Yahweh. He takes pleasure in pointing out,  in ‘Miracles’, that ‘God is supposed to have had a “Son”, just as if God were a mythological deity like Jupiter' . The resemblance ought to be present, given that God works through human myths as well as through His own true myth, the historical story of Jesus Christ. Since God is the Father of lights, even the dim and guttering lights of paganism could be ascribed ultimately to Him. Christians should feel no obligations to quench the smouldering flax burning in pagan myths: on the contrary they should do their best to fan it in to flame. Lewis, with Spencer, believed that 'Divine Wisdom spoke not only on the Mount of Olives, but also on Parnassus' Of course, the Parnassian wisdom was not as complete or as sufficient as that offered in Christ, but it should be honoured as far as it went. (p28)


Lewis’s religion was not a upas tree in whose shadow nothing else could grow. If paganism could be shown to have something in common with Christianity, Lewis concluded ‘so much better for paganism’ not ‘so much the worse for Christianity’ (p28)

Lewis had a high view of the pagan gods (234)

Interestingly, I got a very unfavorable reaction when I quoted the pieces above to a conservative Christian. The reaction was entirely emotional, irrational and final: It was clear that no further thought was going to be expended on Ward’s careful nuancing and instead a mindless knee jerk response was deemed sufficient to deal with the matter; even though on many issues Lewis is quoted favorably by conservative Christians. It all rather bears Ward out. It is an irony that conservative reaction so often resembles the superstitious dread of the pagan religionist toward that which is deemed to be ritually unclean. This reaction betrays the downside of pagan religious attitudes that still very much suffuse conservative Christianity (Compare Romans 14:14 and context).

In order to handle Lewis’s work Ward develops a significant concept that probably embraces much of Lewis’s thinking. Ward coins the term “Donegality” (after Donegal in Ireland; see p16 and p75) to act as the seed for the crystallization of an idea that Lewis himself refers to as the “kappa element” (“Kappa” for the first letter of the Greek word for ‘hidden’ or ‘cryptic’; p15) in literature; that is, the mood and atmosphere a literary piece conjures up:

He (Lewis) thought that literary images, like musical motifs, should be richly expressive of mood, existing ‘in every possible relation of contrast, mutual support, development, variation, half echo and the like’ (p74)

Terms that Lewis himself used to express the kappa element were ‘flavour or atmosphere’, ‘smell or taste’, ‘mood’ and ‘quiddity’ (p16). My understanding of “Donegality” is that it is not an intrinsic property found in the articulated description of the connection itself – that is, in its logos, but rather it is an extrinsic reactive property resulting of the mood feelings it evokes in us – basically, its mythos. I suspect that this has much to do with how our moods and feelings map to the mixes of chemical concentrations in the brain which, like many smells, are all but unique to a stimulus situation. Lewis objective then is to create the Donegality of the mediaeval astrology. The touch and feel of this astrology can’t be experienced by simply describing it but only by immersing oneself in its ambiance and this ambiance is recreated by replicating the general motifs of the ethos and mores that stimulate it.

According to Ward (and he has convinced me) medieval Ptolemaic Donegality is the single most important concept needed to understand Lewis’s chronicles of Narnia, a concept that many have missed:

It is not as though the Chronicles were utterly incomprehensible without this donegalitarian key, and many readers were content to accept that the septet’s apparent lack of homogeneity was evidence of hasty writing, not a sign of an unidentified inner meaning. (p245)

The donegalitarian interpretation seems to me to account for so many things that I would even dare to suggest that the burden of proof now rests with those who would dispute it. (p215)


...to be continued

Some Light Relief

Caution: You are entering Poe's Law zone.

I haven’t had much time for blogging recently and so I thought we’d have some light relief and here it is. Accordingly, this post concerns the Young Earth Creationist treatment of carnivorous adaptations. I have commented briefly on this subject before in the following posts:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/removing-teeth-in-face-of-evidence.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/to-fly-in-teeth-of-evidence-ii.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/flying-in-teeth-of-evidence.html

Interestingly, in the second of those posts Arni Zachariassen commented as follows:

I hate defending creationists, (Strictly speaking, Arni, most Christians classify as “Creationists”, including myself; but I know what you mean) but the central claim of the video can quite easily be evaded. You don't have to say that special creation requires that sabre tooth tigers were created with sabre teeth. You can say, pointing to the story of the fall where both humans underwent physical change and became mortal and the earth and plants changed too, that all animals who gave up vegetarianism grew their teeth. Surely that's not as big a physical change as going from immortality to mortality. It's reading in to the text, yes, but that's not something creationists have anything against doing.

In reply to Arni I had to admit that I didn’t know what the current “Answers in Genesis” theory was as to the origin of the ostensive carnivorous features of many phenotypes: Does AiG claim these features were “created” on day six or, after the fashion of Henry Morris, propose that they “evolved” rapidly post-fall? Well, it now seems that evidence relevant to this question has been provided by courtesy of “Fatlip” at Leo Weekly (which I found via PZ Myers – Myers is a good man to go to if you want to get news on fundamentalism). Anyway, Fatlip kindly shares with us some illustrations from a Children’s book in his possession written by Ken Ham. (See below). It’s laughable and yet it isn't: Children are being asked to engage in acts of gross cognitive indecency by someone who is intellectually perverted. Given the heady self-belief and self-congratulatory atmosphere amongst a well heeled YEC culture, these children don’t stand a chance.

The following pictures have the touch and feel of a spoof, but incredibly they really do seem to be a genuine fundamentalist item intended to be taken seriously!

How does Ceratosaurus grind up leaf after leaf with those teeth, no cheeks and the strong musculature for a snapping jaw? (note the difficulty with which cats "chew" blades of grass) I wonder what Deinonychus uses those terrible claws for? To climb trees? Can't imagine how he handles lemons with that mouth!

Domesticated dinos!  Ham can't be serious! Oh yes he is!  But it's not exactly the kind of scene that the Bible conjures up for me!

It's a bunch of bananas! Says it all really!

The guy on the right and his dino reminds me of the snow scenes at the start of "The Empire Strikes Back".

"We've got to kill this, stuff it, and then saddle it up for the creation museum!"

Note:

In an AiG article I have linked to in the 3rd of my blog post URLs above we find an admission that humans are not found buried with prolific dinosaur group:

There are many possible reasons for humans and dinosaurs not to be buried together:  

The reasons given are weak but persuasive enough for the ignoramus' who follow YEC. Also, that humans are not found under dinosaur strata is not considered.

William Irwin Thompson II: Passages about Earth

Here is my second batch of William Thompson quotes, this time from the book Passages about Earth (bound together in one volume with At the Edge of History, a book I looked at in this post ). The reason why I quote Thompson at length is not only because  I find him a very quotable author but I am also currently working toward a post on C. S. Lewis scholar Michael Ward’s book Planet Narnia. There are definitely resonances between Thompson, Ward and Lewis. The following doesn't claim to be a rounded sample of Thompson’s thought, as he engages on long theoretical passages which are difficult to do justice to by sampling alone; one really needs to read his book.

P6: Again: Logic vs. Feeling, Masculine vs. Feminine, Logos vs. Mythos: As it had in the agricultural revolution, so in the Industrial Revolution did technology separate itself from the old religious world view. The world was split in two: the hard, masculine, and objective world of machines; and the soft, feminine, and subjective world of emotions

P29: Religion, science and heresy: And just as once there was no appeal from the power of the church without risking damnation, so now there is no appeal from the power of science without risking a charge of irrationality or insanity.

P46: Mythos reaction against industrialisation: After the first wave of the Industrial Revolution from 1770 to 1851, England itself seemed to be in mood for consolidation; and in “The medieval Court” designed by Pugin for the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851, it took a nostalgic look at the European civilization it helped destroy. With Pugin, William Morris, Matthew Arnold, and Cardinal Newman, medievalism became one of the first countercultures of industrialism.

P52: Truth is found in the dialectic: Though ideologues may try to lock all human values into one party, revolutionary or established, human culture is a complex field in which a value is defined and achieved in conflict with its opposite. Truth is not found in either conservative or revolutionary; truth is the magnetic field that surrounds those two poles.

P67: Thompson is sarcastically realistic about the chances of “renewal colonies” built around scholarly elites: In this perfect renewal colony there will be no conflict, no politics, no problems that cannot be solved by the problem solvers; all will agree on the good, all will see the good in the same way, and all will choose to act for the good with the same methods. Like B. F. Skinner, Wagar feels that if only greedy businessmen, ambitious politicians and redneck constituents can be gotten out of the way, enlightened men of science will rule wisely and well. ….one would think that academics who have lived in universities and observed the wisdom, goodness, and high ideals of their colleagues in the storied halls of learning would know better. ….Wagar’s colony is not so much a place as a pastoral, an imaginary realm free of conflict that one dreams about while he is suffering from all the agonies of the permanent contradictions of human nature.

P67: Thompson really has his head screwed on well. He realizes that all human solutions and communities are conceived in sin: No political movement can save us from the human condition that values are achieved in conflict with their opposites. The politics of the renewal colony will be no different from the politics of the university or the church. (He goes on to criticize the so called “renewal colony”. Much of what he says can also be used as the basis of a critique of crassly optimistic Christian restorationism and revivalism.)

P73: Thompson has no illusions about human nature and the failure of doctrinal fundamentalism of all types: How will we deal with conflict between different renewal colonies, each absolutely convinced that it holds the true answer to the predicament of mankind, if we no longer have the traditions of constitutional law to protect science and religion from one another? Perhaps we should remember that America started out as a renewal colony.

P96 and 97: The need for Pythagorean Science (Here, Thompson writes about his meeting with Heisenberg): Heisenberg answered that there was no question that the East had a knowledge we needed, that this knowledge was stronger than the West’s feeble attempt to reduce consciousness to electronics and information theory, but he still felt that the new directions would appear in the West. He was a western man; as musician and a scientist, he was more a follower of Pythagoras than of Patanjali……Certainly the science of Skinner bears the same relation to the scientific tradition as the inquisition does to Christianity….If subatomic particles are more mathematical forms than discrete pieces of material, and if the modes of perceiving these forms through laboratory instruments and mathematics alter the material itself, then, as Heisenberg would say, we no longer have a science of nature, but a science of the mind’s knowledge about nature.

P98 and 99: The irreducibility of consciousness and the demise of the “objective vs. subjective” distinction: If mathematical form becomes more basic than matter itself, then it follows that science, the cultural process in which the mind develops modes for the knowing of forms, is an inseparable part of nature. The subjective-objective distinction collapses. It does little good, then, to talk confidently of “facts” when you do not understand the structure of consciousness through which one can entertain the content of facts. The difficulty always arises when one confidently thinks in terms of a subjective “inside” and an objective “outside” world. We are not standing outside nature and observing it through a window. We ourselves are a part of the nature we seek to describe, and through what Whitehead calls “the withness of the body” we can discover the correspondence between neurons and neutrinos……it is not the case that consciousness is created out of behavior; behavior is a construct built up out of consciousness.

P111: A very general template for mythology: All mythologies are mythologies of love and death, Eros and Thanatos

P126: Scientific “priesthoods” are likely to be as authoritarian as religious priesthoods: Such a priesthood of science would use its disciplinary powers to preserve tradition against innovation, and another Galileo would be brought to his knees, another Bruno brought to the stake. (Thompson has human nature taped)

P130 and131: The mytho-poetic mentality is more in tune with the social trends: If you went around in England in the 1790’s asking how it felt to be living in an age of industrial revolution, most people would not know what you were talking about….Events that are too large to be perceived in immediate history register in the unconscious in the collective form of myth, and since artists and visionaries possess strongly mythopoeic imaginations, they can express in the microcosm of their works what is going on in the macrocosm of mankind.

P132: Fascinating snippet on the Neoclassical vs. Romantic: No one blew a whistle in Europe and said “Stop thinking neoclassically; start thinking romantically in terms of the primitives and nature”. And yet the whole age did shift dramatically. Because we do not understand this process we either ignore it of use terms like “spirit of the age”. Hegel would call it Zeitgeist. …(Thompson develops the theme of the collective unconscious and the role of mythology around these kinds of observations.)

P139:Logos vs. Mythos tension: Computer scientists and linguistic philosophers have an instinctive distaste for the ambiguity that makes their lives difficult. They continually try to translate life into a notation that is clear, precise, and capable of a single meaning for all observers. It is obvious that God is intelligent enough to be bored by such an automatic and repetitive universe, for He has designed one with a much more fascinating set of relationships between the unique and the universal. More fascinating and more poetic, for if one thinks in terms of, say, romantic poetry, one can see that there is not One Message that is romanticism; rather there are Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley and Keats.

P149: The consolations of mythos: The internal disciplines of the great mystical traditions seem to offer the only means by which man can feel at home in a universe so vast that, without the self-mastery and centering functions of meditation , he would go insane instantly.

P152: The over production of knowledge overloads human rationality: The professors produce one million scientific papers a year, so many that no one can process information rationally any more.

P156: Generalised fundamentalism: As the technologist becomes increasingly alienated from the realities of contemporary culture, he will refuse to accept the disconfirmation of his vision of man’s control of nature and will hysterically try to reassert his power. Social scientists who have studied occultists have shown that “when prophecy fails”, the prophets refuse to accept the evidence, but instead try even harder to prove the validity of their views by seeking the affirmation of converts. (This is consistent with my own observations in religious circles)

P165: Mythos vs. Logos tension in Christianity: If you wish to go back to the point at which Christianity took the wrong turn, so that you can find the other road at the fork, you must go back to Lindisfarne to see the clash between the esoteric Christianity of Jesus and John and the ecclesiastical Christianity about Jesus but of Peter and Paul.

P191: New Age authoritarians. Once again Thompson shows that he has no illusions about human nature: We do not need a new civic religion of the world state run by Initiates of Kundalini Yoga; we need to protect spirituality from religion in a secular culture of law in which devotees are protected from the zealous excesses of one another. It is utterly naïve to think that in the near future men will have outgrown the playpen of the American Constitution and will lovingly trust one another. The gurus are tolerant and merely condescending now because they have no political power; but even without power they show full evidence of human frailty and vanity and tend to think that their own yoga is bigger and better than the other guru’s. And what is often only a case of mild condescension in the guru becomes in the disciples a fever of zealotry. (This comment applies to Christian "gurus" and their followers as much as it does to New Age gurus and their followers).

…..Coming soon: Planet Narnia, by Michael Ward.

Gentleman's Disagreement

Going on Arni Zachariassen's report here of the debate between Rowan Williams and Richard Dawkins it sounds as though it was a very civilised affair indeed. This is a breath of fresh air.

In contrast, I can't help feeling that the politicisation, polarisation and primitive savagery we see nowadays on both sides of the debate is in good part down to the growth of fundamentalism; and Christian fundamentalism has its fair share of the blame here: Disagreement with particular Christian fundamentalist "jot and tittle" doctrines provokes charges of compromise, heresy, paganism, apostasy, siding with a conspiracy and even of being an emissary of Satan.  Posts where I have touched on fundamentalist extremism can be found here:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/07/evidence-of-hams-religious-extremism.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/07/faith-test.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/06/cloistered-academics-vs-punks.html

Trying to sum up my thinking here: It seems to me that the paranoiac and hysterical Christian fundamentalist overreaction that we are seeing today has its roots in the sixties when Christianity started to face some fundamental challenges and was quasi-disestablished.

William Irwin Thompson: At the Edge of History

In the late sixties William Irwin Thompson was professor of humanities at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It seems that MIT’s image makers wanted a tame humanities department to act as window dressing that would help humanize and soften the stark lines of their “Hard Science” modernism. But in Thompson they got more than they bargained for: This was a man who was acutely aware of the deep existential angst that so often accompanies the science and technology driven industrialised West, an angst that in good part is down to the world view paradigms that are too easily assumed to go together with a technoscience based society. Using some first rate wordsmithing Thompson turned on his employers with very biting criticisms. But then what did MIT expect? As a cultural historian Thompson’s area of expertise, by definition, is criticism and so MIT got what they paid for; they employed a cultural critic and they got a cultural critic – with a vengeance. They could hardly expect Thompson to respond with a belly-up acquiescence to the epistemic exclusivism that is the habit of mind of many an aficionado of the hard sciences.

At the beginning of the 1970s Thomson published At The Edge of History, a book I have recently read. It is the story of Thompson's reaction to his experiences at MIT. Much of the material in At the Edge of History deals with the subtle existential difficulties many Westerners have in coming to terms with technological society and the crisis of meaning that the revelations science bring; this is subject matter that is very much a theme of my blogs. Thompson is one of those thinkers who takes in the whole of sweep of reality and paints a breath taking broad brush picture of the vista he sees. It’s a sobering the fact that Thompson was writing this kind of stuff when I was only just out of shorts and still thought that science was all about space travel.

Perhaps I find Thompson just a bit too New Agey to connect with his aspirations and tastes, but he is so perceptive and expresses things so well that I found myself underlining much of what he had written. Below are some passages that stood out for me, particularly passages to do with that pervasive theme of my blogs: Technoscientific angst.

Page 63: The new paradigm alienates: In the seventeenth century we took a turn into what Alfred North Whitehead calls “scientific materialism” and introduced a whole new readjustment of the mind’s relationship with nature; now the effects of that readjustment are becoming visible, tragically visible.

Page 65: Feeling vs. Mechanism: When men are trained to strive for power over their environment [via science and technology], they are socially constrained to achieve that success through suppression of consciousness in which ambiguity, complexity, feeling, intuition and imagination are dismissed as irrelevant distractions….. And this is what “the aerospace syndrome” is all about. Operating with a strictly logical and mechanistic model of self, MIT training reduces the self’s truly complex nature to a few relatively standard industrial functions.

Page 70: Phallic science rapes nature: And what the adolescent engineer rehearses in miniature in his fantasied relations with women, he is even freer to do at large with nature, for the instinctive play of our technology is the exploitation of passive, female nature in a celebration of power and phallic dominance. In keeping with this sexual mythology of rational male dominance over irrational female nature we have constructed an ideology of progress that places our industrial culture at the pinnacle of human civilization.

Page 75: Mystical “Pythagorean science” is Thompson’s ideal: We somehow have to outflank the ignorant armies of the Left and Right to find the space and time to convert out industrial technology to new kind of Pythagorean science.

Page 79: Our humanity is reasserted and expressed through the overtly palpable and sensual: In the face of the machine, man now affirms his humanity in nudity, sexuality, and the polymorphous sensuousness of Esalen.

Page 84: Modern science’s mechanistic reductionist hegemony: If at MIT biology is molecular, psychology is the physiology of the brain, and political science is computer generated biostatistics, then it follows that if the humanities and arts can show imaginative ways of giving up their atavistic inclinations, funds will be found to turn philosophy into information theory, history into the comparative modernization of the Third World, and literature into linguistics.

Page 128: Freak out as luddites or become initiates who unite mythos and logos: When information is so immense that man cannot keep up with it and still be purely rational, he has a choice: he can freak out and become tribal again to attack the old naïve rational values in the guise of a Luddite-student; or he can effect a quantum leap in consciousness to re-vision the universe….re-vision the universe in the mystical, mathematical, and scientific foms of the new Pythagoreanism….

Page 132: Thompson’s New Age Drift: But at the beginning of Phase IV it is all the triumph of the Pythagorean, the Scientist-Shaman of the Aquarian Age….

Page 144: On Fundies vs. Liberals: The liberal feels that liberal values will become increasingly triumphant; the powerless fundamentalist feels that apocalypse will tumble the proud and mighty into the dust, and that he will be found living in the truth.

Page 145. Industry vs. Romanticism, Logos, vs. Mythos: Seventeen hundred and seventy saw the beginning of the industrial revolution, but it also saw the beginning of the movement of Romanticism, which as a movement in European culture, had a fairly profound effect on human history, artistic and political.

Page 147: Techno-liberalism is totalitarian:….one can make a much stronger case that it is the Technological society that is totalitarian, for it reduces all cultures to mere ideological impediments to the advance of “rationalization”. Technology is “total” because it sees everything other than itself as reactionary, irrational, and primitive.

Page 159: Lewis and Tolkien attack technology: Lewis’ and Tolkien’s Oxford attack on the modern machine age is not novel, but it is subtle and clever. By saying in effect, “Of course, all this is rubbish and nonsense, but it is entertaining,” they can sneak unnoticed into the iron palace of technology.

Page 165. Thompson and Evolution. Prior to this page Thompson discusses some “heretical” theories like Atlantis and catastrophism and then we read this: I remember how startled I was in 1967 when Professor Robert Ockne told me he did not accept the theory of human evolution as proved because he thought it was an enormous overgeneralization on very fragmentary data…..I was very surprised because I always thought, without question, that only ignorant hicks from the south or Jehovah’s Witnesses questioned the theory, and since I saw myself as definitely on the side of science against orthodox religion, I positioned myself in the matter without a thought for what was really only a matter of snobbery.

Page 169: On Imagination vs. Reason: Had the mystical and Pythagorean nature of pure science not been vigorously suppressed in favor of a scientized political ideology, men like Tennyson might not have had to tear themselves apart over the supposed conflict between visionary experience and reason.

Page 170: On Mythology: There is indeed a “mythopeic mentality”, but it is not restricted to precivilised man, but is to be found in geniuses as different as Boehme, Kepler, Blake, Yeats, Wagner, Heisenberg, and that student of Boehme’s theory of action and reaction, Isaac Newton. Myth is not an early level of human development, but an imaginative description of reality in which the known is related to the unknown……{then follows a definition of myth}

Page 182 Balancing criticism and imagination: Between the cracked-open minds of the enthusiasts of lost tribes, lost continents, and flying saucers and the firmly shut minds of the scholars, it is a very difficult to find a healthy way of using one’s head. ….The double-bind was as true of scholarship as of politics: one purchased imagination at a cost of discipline; a disciplined imagination was a contradiction of terms.

Page 189: Thompson and Maverick science: Thompson is favourably disposed toward alternative “Atlantean” histories and thinks we may be due for a paradigm shift here: All in all, when one takes into account the problems that are not honestly faced and questioned in our notions of evolution, primitive culture, and archeology, one can see that the specialists of what T.S. Kuhn would call “normal science” are retreating from the “anomalies” and burrowing more deeply into the security of the minutiae. If one lifts one’s gaze to take in the whole historical horizon of man, as now only an amateur or a non-specialist can, one can see that once again we are entering an era of scientific revolution with its sudden shift in paradigms. [or perhaps not yet – that was written about 40 years ago]

Page 189: Monsters from the id: The liberal humanists dread the collapse of their world structure with some reason, for if progress and materialism have made technology possible by ignoring all the other subtle forces in nature, then the death of materialism will open man up to beasts and demons he has not feared since the middle ages. …..Already the hippie dropouts from the universities and high schools are becoming caught up in black magic, sorcery, and the crudest forms of occultism…Charles Manson….

Page 200 The “cargo cult” is a universal template: The universal cargo cult takes in the multitudes, from Oxford professors like Lewis waiting for Christ to invade, through [Arthur C] Clarke and his followers, to Mixtec Indians, looking for Apollo II and remembering their Ancient gods from the sky. And even the Russians have held conferences on extraterrestrial civilizations and begun to wait, with Mick Jagger, "for something to come out of somewhere".

Page 201 The angst of the Cosmic perspective: The film [2001 space odyssey] itself is the perfect American irony: a gadget-filled, special effects ode to technology is at once a requiem to all technology. The very movie [2001 space odyssey] that dazzles us with all its tricks is the movie that shows how trivial all these toys are when set upon the cosmic scale.

Page 205: Myth is the/a paradigm of the impending New Age: Birth and death are ultimately confusing; to make sense of them we will have to make our peace with myth…. At the edge of history, history itself can no longer help us and only myth remains equal to reality.

****

The following are links to blog posts of mine relevant to Thompson’s subject matter:
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/11/science-and-imagination.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/10/self-referencing-nature-of.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/07/study-in-cognitive-dissonance.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/06/2001-spaced-out-odyssey.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/03/fate-of-man-by-william-shakespeare.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/07/what-is-consciousness.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2008/09/heres-interesting-book-cloudspotters.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.com/2011/08/cosmic-perspective-part-1.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.com/2011/08/cosmic-perspective.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.com/2011/08/cosmic-perspective-part-3.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2007/02/time-travel.html