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

Of Funnels, Pandeism, Simulations and Grace.

The Thin End of the Cosmic Funnel***

(Picture from the Wikipedia page on the Big Bang)

In this post I want to reply to “Anonymous” who left a comment on my blog entry here. My blog is a pretty quiet backwater of the www, so when someone comes along with some intelligent comments it’s a big deal on this part of web and so worth showcasing. I actually think of my blogs more as a kind of “get-it-off-my-chest” quasi-private diary of thoughts and reactions to life. But if fair minded people stumble upon them and comment intelligently they’re more than welcome. It’s a bonus!

Anyway, let me first publish (again) Anonymous’ comment:

Tinkering, interruptions, call them what you will, but at the end of the day the question remains, has the deity of your conception sufficient power, intellect, and rationality to set forth a Universe which from its initial state unfolds in accordance with the laws of physics thus established to bring about complexity, life, ultimately intelligent life, without need for any 'interruptions' of any kind? And let me raise the stakes a bit, is able to set forth a Universe in this manner which in its unfolding ends up exactly as the Universe we perceive today, in every particular? For this is precisely the capacity asserted to be that of the Creator in Pandeism.

But I would not wish to leave an incomplete sense of what Pandeism proposes. So here it is.

Pandeism proposes that prior to the existence of our Universe (or, in some sense 'outside' the existence of our Universe, for those who would limit the existence of linear time to being within such existence) there was an entity of, as supposed above, sufficient power, intellect, and rationality to set forth a Universe of the scope and operation of our own. This entity had some rational motivation compelling it to set forth a Universe, perhaps because as a unitary being it could only learn the lessons of dichotomy by experiencing the existence of limited beings interacting with one another. And so, it set forth laws of physics designed to bring about the complexity which would ultimately create these beings, and it poured its energy into that which is now the energy of which our Universe is ultimately made. The laws of physics point to an end but are not determinative. Imagine a large funnel into which many small rubber balls are thrown against the wall; the balls may bounce randomly, unpredictably, but will ultimately end up going down then hole at the narrow end of the funnel. Just so, our laws of physics. No telling when or where exactly intelligent life will develop, or what form it will take, but the brilliantly constructed governing dynamics of our Universe make it highly likely that it will happen at some times and places.

And where is the Creator in all this? Well, it has become our Universe, so it's everywhere; it's power continually sustains all things in being, but it has not the need to 'interrupt' the obedience of every particle of energy in existence to the laws of physics which were well-enough made in the first place to bring about everything required to fulfill its initial motivation. Indeed, it would have an overriding incentive to not interrupt the natural development of things, which would be to not interrupt the natural development of things, and instead see how things unfold, how the true randoms play out, absent any intervention at all.

And what of man's millions of competing revelations and prophecies, visions, scriptures, oracles, miracles, spiritual emotions, supernatural feelings, ghosts, answered prayers, egrigores, and like beliefs? These are after all a constant across all cultures, even those whose take from them is completely opposite to their neighbors, suggesting either a deity doing a rather sloppy job of trying to communicate a single truth, or man doing a rather sloppy (and often self-serving) job of interpreting the unconscious manifestations of the mind of a deity not trying to communicate anything at all. For if, after all, our Creator became the Creation, then we are all fragments of it, and some talented few of us may in our own minds touch some small portion of the incomprehensibly vast and complex mind which underlies all things for however long our Universe is set to bounce around before it ends up down the funnel.

Hi Mr. Anonymous (Or Ms. Anonymous?)

I like your metaphor of a funnel: It gives us a good picture of the blend of law and disorder* that constitutes our physical regime as we understand it. However, we really need to turn the funnel round to get a closer approximation to our Cosmos where the Second Law of Thermodynamics rules OK. In effect the universe is coming out of a funnel and not being pushed into it; but in its “early” stages it is still in the narrow neck of the funnel where there are relatively (and I stress “relatively”) few states available to it. This inverted funnel metaphor gives us one way of picturing why the second law is consistent with self organization: The “neck” of the funnel may be constrictive enough to ensure that of the states available in the constriction the class of life bearing states is proportionately large enough to give them a realistic probability of making a showing. Although I’m actually equivocal about this possibility, the inverted funnel metaphor is one way of picturing why, in spite of the claims of those who should know better such as Granville Sewell, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is, in and of itself, not inconsistent with evolution. But I digress from the real thrust of your comment.

OK, so let’s assume that living structures have a realistic probability of forming given our Cosmic law and disorder regime. That is, expressed mathematically Prob(Life|Physics) has a significant value for realistic Cosmic times. But given these circumstances what I don’t see is why pandeism follows from this; after all, as I have expressed many times before on this blog the law and disorder logic implicit in expressions like Prob(life|Physics) really only amounts to sophisticated descriptive statements from which one infers the likely patterns of cosmic behavior. It is conceivable that the Cosmos could have other patterns of behavior such as the inclusion of many irregular one-off exception events (= “the miraculous”?) making it intractable to the epistemology of law and disorder science, a science whose efficacy depends very much on a strict coherence. Why then should a Cosmos rich in irregularity be any less subject to a pandeist interpretation than the intelligible cosmos we are used to? What difference does the mathematical category of the cosmic behavioral patterns make?

But then again I think I can see where you are coming from. When anyone talks about Deity, particularly transcendent Deity, and its relation to the Cosmos, they have little choice but to talk about it using imaginative metaphorical models that have their origins in this-world-experience. In this connection I can see from the way you write that you intuitively invest far more in the notion of physical law than just a device of mathematical description. Viz:

“….of physics designed to bring about the complexity which would ultimately create these beings, and it poured its energy into that which is now the energy of which our Universe is ultimately made” …. And …….. the obedience of every particle of energy in existence to the laws of physics which were well-enough made in the first place to bring about everything required to fulfill its initial motivation."

You have made an intuitive leap here from physical laws as descriptive devices (which is about as far as the physicist can or should go) to physical laws as some kind of quasi-divine dynamic that is truly creative. Well, may be; who knows how Deity can delegate its energies, but we can’t make much progress on this theology using empirical science: The mathematical category of the patterns of cosmic behavior doesn’t in and of itself reveal much about an ex nihilo creative dynamic. In fact I would go as far as to say that the laws of physics are meaningless unless reified on some kind of ontological substrate, a substrate upon which observation and test can be made; that is, “physical law” is secondary to the primary matrix on which it is reified. Using a Marxist turn of phrase: Physical Law is the secondary mathematical superstructure raised upon a primary ontological foundation.

The “prescriptive” (as opposed to the merely “descriptive”) notion of physical law as a proactive creative dynamic is a very metaphysical, exotic and debatable notion that resides deep in the psyche of Western man. In fact it is intriguing to note that some atheists take it for granted that physical law constitutes a creative dynamic of quasi-divine status transcending the ontology which it appears to “control”. For example Stephen Hawking is somewhat overawed by the apparent “something for nothing” properties of gravity. But as the joke goes, when Hawking claimed that all he needed was gravity and no God, the Almighty said in reply “Go and get your own gravity Hawking!”

What then is at the bottom of this crypto-deist intuition that physical law is autonomous to such an extent that it is itself some kind of self-managing creative/controlling dynamic? I would suggest that this belief has its source in metaphors taken from the world of our everyday experience; I have given more detail in this post. I would therefore put it to you Mr. Anonymous that the pandeism you have expressed and which through physical law finds such a compelling reason to equate deity and the Cosmos, is based on this-world-metaphors.

However, having said that Mr. Anonymous, let me say that the first set of comments you left me gave me an issue I’m still very much chewing over. I was struck by your suggestion that perhaps Deity has the motive of creating a universal simulation because the outcome is unknown; after all, if Deity is pure Mind then perhaps like ourselves it passes from states of unknowing to knowing as it thinks through and explores the implications of certain problems in algorithmic logic. A corollary of this seems to be that the Cosmos is in some sense Deity – or at least the thoughts of Deity and therefore we have here a hint of pandesim.

But even if we take that latter suggestion on board it is still far too strong an identification to equate the Cosmos with Deity and Deity with the cosmos. By way of illustration let’s use the metaphor of a computer running a software simulation, a metaphor of which you said in the comments section here you liked. Let us note the paradox inherent in computer simulations: The simulation is in one sense part of the computer and yet in another sense it is very much other than the computer; the computer has a deeper and “firmer” reality than the simulation and significantly the simulation at no time has a life of its own; the software can’t run itself – the computer must be always there sustaining the simulation. Moreover the computer has the power to interrupt the flow of “normalcy” at anytime either through a hardware or system software interrupt. (Hence my preference for the notion of “interruptions” rather than “interventions”). Also it is possible for the computer to hold meta-information about the simulation it is running, information that may not exist in the simulation itself.

This computer simulation, like much talk about God, is, after all, a metaphor and therefore likely to only capture a facet of the nature of Deity and its relation to creation. However I like this particular metaphor for two reasons: Firstly because it conveys the sheer contingency of the cosmos; no simulation has a logical necessity to exist; the internal logic of the simulation is descriptive of the simulation but it in no way delivers aseity or self explanation. And secondly I like it because the simulation metaphor conveys something of the paradox of the simultaneous eminence and immanence of the Godhead that seems to have been recognized in Acts 17:27-28.

I also quite like the author-book metaphor as it has some features in its favour. But I do take your point that this metaphor has the failing of leading to a problematical dichotomy between God’s vision and a separate created world. I have always been in favour of employing multiple metaphors about God in order to bring facets of His nature to the fore and I try to avoid the over interpretation and over selling of any particular metaphor.

You refer to the “The deity of my conception”. My guess is that the majority of people have a conception of deity somewhere in the corner of their minds. In fact there are probably nearly as many conceptions of God as there are people, although those conceptions will likely have a lot of overlap with one another. Exclusive use of proprietary pet metaphors in trying to express our ideas about God can lead to much grief. For example attempts to put the doctrine of the Trinity on a clearer footing by over interpreting and overselling a particular metaphor such as “modalism”, for example, quickly leads to shouts of “heresy” from others**. But in the face of human cognitive infirmity we really need to bear in mind some of the other attributes God might have. You talk about God setting up a cosmic simulation motivated by an experimental curiosity. But if we are to hazard such an anthropomorphic motive why not hazard other motives such as love of the objects created? In fact this affective attribute of God is largely the concern of the New Testament; such a Deity may well be gracious toward our cognitive infirmity as we attempt to conceive His nature. He may look upon our attempts to describe Him as might a Parent who sees His child drawing a stickman depiction of Him. The offspring of the Almighty may abuse one another over the state of their respective stick-man depictions of deity, but I suspect God Himself has a very different point of view of those attempts.

Thanks again Mr. Anonymous for turning up. In these days when brain dead bigotry and block-headed religiosity gets such an airing it’s nice to see some fair minded intelligence being applied. I’ve really benefitted from your input.

A Note on Science

What is the scientific status of the speculative ideas I have discussed above? Scientific testability comes in degrees: Roughly speaking the higher the level and the more significant the conjectured ontology becomes the less tractable it is to an elementary hypothesis testing epistemology. This leaves little choice but to proceed with a “post-facto interpolation method”; that is, joining the dots of experience with imaginative background sense making structures. See here for more details.

Foot notes: 

*  Law and Disorder is my short hand for patterns described by a combination of algorithms (or "functions") and statistics.

** Here are some so-called Christian “heresies” (re: the Godhead) as listed by Reachout Trust, Ministry to the Cults: Aphthartodocetism, Monophysitism, Apollinarianism, Alogi, Arianism, Docetism, Ebionitism, Encratite, Eutychainism, Gnosticism, Marcionism, Monarchianism, Monophysitism, Monothelitism, Montanism, Nestorianism, Pelagianism, Sebellianism. The criterion used to identify these attempts at grappling with the nature of God as “heresy” sometimes involves a splitting of hairs that would probably make most of us “heretics”. God help us!

*** The funnel like shape of space-time diagram here is only meant to be symbolic of the funnel like shape of  the  disorder vs. time graph. 

On God Concepts

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

I have remarked before on the fact that many Westerners hold in their minds a conception of God regardless of whether or not they actually believe in God. This is really no surprise given that ideas about God float around in the conceptual ether of our social interactions. In spite of secularization in Western society it is all but impossible not to pick up “God concepts”. As Cornelius Hunter has very succinctly and effectively put it:

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.

This phenomenon is particularly pertinent to atheism; so often the atheist mind set clearly demonstrates that belief in God is something different from beliefs about God. Now it is possible, I suppose, to declare that God is such an incoherent concept that  the statement “God exists” is meaningless – this is what one might call “intelligibility atheism”. However, it is not often one comes across intelligibility atheists; as a rule the rank and file atheist zealout is uncomfortable with “intelligibility atheism” because it’s likely to be too philosophical a gambit for the aficionado of scientism. It is more likely that one will cross the path of the “evidential atheist”; that is, the atheist who declares “There is no evidence for God”; from which it follows that such atheists presumably hold in their minds beliefs about God with sufficient clarity for them to make a comparison between their experience and their theoretic notion of God and on that empirical basis declare God’s existence to be unlikely. Theology, then, is in principle both the domain of the atheist and the theist. In fact I have touched on this subject in the following posts:

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

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/09/crypto-deism.html

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

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/02/atheology.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/10/mr-deism-speaks-out.html

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

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

Anyway, in this connection I was fascinated by the comment of someone signing in as “Anonymous” in the comment thread of this post of mine. I have to say that I’m not at all clear where “Anonymous” is coming from and in spite of a request to clarify his position he has not obliged me. Is he promoting pandeism, the subject of his post? Is he an anti-evolutionist? Is he an atheist? Or is he simply non-committal? I don’t know! But it doesn’t matter. What he has written is necessarily so concept laden that there is far and away enough there for me to get a secure purchase on his comment in my next post. Crypto-deism here we come. Watch this space....

Here’s the comment from Anonymous:

Tinkering, interruptions, call them what you will, but at the end of the day the question remains, has the deity of your conception sufficient power, intellect, and rationality to set forth a Universe which from its initial state unfolds in accordance with the laws of physics thus established to bring about complexity, life, ultimately intelligent life, without need for any 'interruptions' of any kind? And let me raise the stakes a bit, is able to set forth a Universe in this manner which in its unfolding ends up exactly as the Universe we perceive today, in every particular? For this is precisely the capacity asserted to be that of the Creator in Pandeism.

But I would not wish to leave an incomplete sense of what Pandeism proposes. So here it is.

Pandeism proposes that prior to the existence of our Universe (or, in some sense 'outside' the existence of our Universe, for those who would limit the existence of linear time to being within such existence) there was an entity of, as supposed above, sufficient power, intellect, and rationality to set forth a Universe of the scope and operation of our own. This entity had some rational motivation compelling it to set forth a Universe, perhaps because as a unitary being it could only learn the lessons of dichotomy by experiencing the existence of limited beings interacting with one another. And so, it set forth laws of physics designed to bring about the complexity which would ultimately create these beings, and it poured its energy into that which is now the energy of which our Universe is ultimately made. The laws of physics point to an end but are not determinative. Imagine a large funnel into which many small rubber balls are thrown against the wall; the balls may bounce randomly, unpredictably, but will ultimately end up going down then hole at the narrow end of the funnel. Just so, our laws of physics. No telling when or where exactly intelligent life will develop, or what form it will take, but the brilliantly constructed governing dynamics of our Universe make it highly likely that it will happen at some times and places.

And where is the Creator in all this? Well, it has become our Universe, so it's everywhere; it's power continually sustains all things in being, but it has not the need to 'interrupt' the obedience of every particle of energy in existence to the laws of physics which were well-enough made in the first place to bring about everything required to fulfill its initial motivation. Indeed, it would have an overriding incentive to not interrupt the natural development of things, which would be to not interrupt the natural development of things, and instead see how things unfold, how the true randoms play out, absent any intervention at all.

And what of man's millions of competing revelations and prophecies, visions, scriptures, oracles, miracles, spiritual emotions, supernatural feelings, ghosts, answered prayers, egrigores, and like beliefs? These are after all a constant across all cultures, even those whose take from them is completely opposite to their neighbors, suggesting either a deity doing a rather sloppy job of trying to communicate a single truth, or man doing a rather sloppy (and often self-serving) job of interpreting the unconscious manifestations of the mind of a deity not trying to communicate anything at all. For if, after all, our Creator became the Creation, then we are all fragments of it, and some talented few of us may in our own minds touch some small portion of the incomprehensibly vast and complex mind which underlies all things for however long our Universe is set to bounce around before it ends up down the funnel.

Watchman, What is Left of the Night?

Here is another song by Francesco Guccini with translation from the Italian (interleaved) supplied by my brother-in-law Jonathan Benison.

Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell
Watchman, what is left of the night?
Watchman, why you don't answer my questions?
Watchman, why am I lost in a silent, red, stony desert?
Watchman, why the darkness is only broken by the lightening of my rage?
Watchman, why you don't let me in?
Don't you know that I can only hear weak echoes from the past?
Watchman, do you really know when the day will break?
Watchman, is your answer too big for my heart?
[based on Isaiah 21:11-12]

La notte è quieta senza rumore, c'è solo il suono che fa il silenzio
e l' aria calda porta il sapore di stelle e assenzio,
le dita sfiorano le pietre calme calde d' un sole, memoria o mito,
il buio ha preso con se le palme, sembra che il giorno non sia esistito...

The night is quiet without a noise, there is only the sound of silence
and the warm air brings the taste of stars and wormwood,
the fingers skim over the calm stones warmed by a sun, memory or myth,
the darkness took with it the palms, looks like the day has never existed...

Io, la vedetta, l'illuminato, guardiano eterno di non so cosa
cerco, innocente o perchè ho peccato, la luna ombrosa
e aspetto immobile che si spanda l'onda di tuono che seguirà
al lampo secco di una domanda, la voce d'uomo che chiederà:
Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell ...

I, the watchman, the enlightened, eternal warden of something I do not know,
I seek, innocent or because I sinned, the shady moon
and I wait immobile for the thunder wave to spread in the wake
of a lightning sharp question, the voice of a man who will ask:

Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell...

Watchman, what is left of the night?

Sono da secoli o da un momento fermo in un vuoto in cui tutto tace,
non so più dire da quanto sento angoscia o pace,
coi sensi tesi fuori dal tempo, fuori dal mondo sto ad aspettare
che in un sussurro di voci o vento qualcuno venga per domandare...

I have been standing for centuries or for just a moment in an emptiness where everything is still,
I cannot say since when I feel anguish or peace,
with my senses on edge, out of time, out of the world, I keep waiting in case
within a whisper of voices or of the wind, somebody will come to ask...

(Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell ...)
e li avverto, radi come le dita, ma sento voci, sento un brusìo
e sento d' essere l' infinita eco di Dio
e dopo, innumeri come sabbia, ansiosa e anonima oscurità,
ma voce sola di fede o rabbia, notturno grido che chiederà:

and I am aware of them, sparse like fingers, but I hear voices, I hear a buzz
and I feel I am the infinite echo of God
and afterwards, uncountable like grains of sand, anxious and anonymous darkness,
but only a voice of faith or rage, a cry in the night asking:

Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell...

Watchman, what is left of the night?

La notte, udite, sta per finire, ma il giorno ancora non è arrivato,
sembra che il tempo nel suo fluire resti inchiodato...
Ma io veglio sempre, perciò insistete, voi lo potete, ridomandate,
tornate ancora se lo volete, non vi stancate...

Listen, the night is about to finish, but the day is still not here,
it’s as if time flowed no more but had become stuck ...
But I’m always on the lookout, so you must insist, you can do it, ask again,
come back again if you want, do not tire of it ...

Cadranno i secoli, gli dei e le dee, cadranno torri, cadranno regni
e resteranno di uomini e di idee, polvere e segni,
ma ora capisco il mio non capire, che una risposta non ci sarà,
che la risposta sull'avvenire è in una voce che chiederà:

Centuries will fall, the gods and the goddesses, towers will fall down, kingdoms will fall
and the remains of men and ideas will be dust and signs,
but now I understand my non understanding, that there will be no answer,
that the answer to the future is in a voice that will ask:

Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell...

Watchman, what is left of the night?
Francesco Guccini

With thanks to Marco Zuliani in California for the translation (modified here)
http://marcozuliani.blogspot.com/2008/07/shomr-ma-mi-llailah-shomr-ma-mi-lell.html

From the album “GUCCINI” (1983)

Unintelligent Design

Chemist Professor John C Walton **(above) may believe in Homunculus Intelligent Design and Seventh Day Adventism ….but at least he doesn't believe in Yogic flying unlike physicist Professor John Hagelin (below)....

….so things can't be as bad as all that.

I recently reviewed a video on this post at Uncommon Descent. It is a lecture by Professor John C Walton, a Research Chemist at St Andrews University (Scotland’s first university founded 1413). The video is entitled “56 minutes that may change your life”. However, it follows a pattern I’m all too familiar with.

Much is made, too much in fact, of the improbability of the spontaneous appearance of life’s essential biopolymers; the figures Prof Walton shows us might leave the heads of the scientifically illiterate spinning, but few scientists, as the good professor well knows, seriously suggest that abiogenesis was resourced by such extremely improbable events. Putting it mathematically, most evolutionists realize that the probability we are interested in is a conditional probability like Prob(Life|R) where R is a given physical regime, conjectured pre-conditions that favour life’s generation in a realistic time. (True R, may not exist physically or even exist mathematically; in which case the version of Intelligent Design promulgated at UD should be at least given some space.)

In response to these improbabilities Prof Walton goes on to tell us that there is active research in the area of self organization Viz a) Attempts have or are being made to discover “laws of chemical affinity” which predispose matter toward the formation of certain amino acid configurations b) Computer simulations are being constructed which attempt to simulate models of abiogenesis. Regarding research of this kind the professor rightly emphasizes that it is necessarily resourced by human intelligence in order to a) contrive suitable chemical environments or b) contrive the algorithms controlling the patterns of bits and bytes needed to simulate something that at least looks just a little bit like abiogenesis. In both cases preconditions are being diligently sought for that have a realistic chance of generating the required configurations and structures.

Well, as I have already said this sort of stuff is all too familiar to me and I can only respond by banging on about the same old thing: The selection of a physical regime that has a realistic probability of generating life (if indeed such has a mathematical existence) is very likely to be a task that is computationally complex in the extreme; i.e. finding such a regime amongst all the possible spurious cases is no small search. Even if we assume that a life generating physical regime has actually already been found for us in the form of our own Cosmos we may then face yet another problem: The generation of life using our cosmic regime could conceivably be a computationally irreducible task; that is, the only way of checking that our Cosmos has a realistic chance of creating life is to run the whole damn show, right down to the last atom in order to verify that it does what we think it does; there may be no shorter algorithmic way of performing the task. If so then this task, too, is well beyond our current technology and we are thrown back onto the fossil record which, needless to say, may be too incomplete to be unequivocal in its testimony.

Unfortunately Prof Walton doesn’t explore these crucial issues in any depth; this may be because he is either unaware of them, or he understands that this is the hard problem where little progress has been made. However, given his religious background I suspect that it is more likely that the good professor is driven by an unstated conclusion; namely, the conclusion that life was created with what I refer to as the Homunculus Intelligent Design model ; that is, that God an intelligent agent descended upon the Earth at some point(s) in the past and tinkered with molecular configurations, thus directly imposing Divine fiat the agent's will on matter like some super-human molecular engineer. Like many in the de facto “Intelligent Design” community I suspect the good professor may well have signed up as one of the patrons of anti-evolutionism. Many theists see homunculus ID as the only option because the only other theistic position they can conceive is deism.

Nevertheless Prof Walton does hold out one interesting idea that I’m taking away with me. He provided evidence that the Earth’s atmosphere has always been an oxidizing one, especially during the early OOL stages – an environment that is very unlikely to favour the delicate chemistry that the formation of biopolymers requires. If this idea was developed it would certainly cut across the notion that life was generated on Earth in small incremental stages: A highly oxidizing environment is likely to tear apart biopolymers nearly as surely as would the interior of the Sun; that is, at least with life as we know it.

However, I’ll keep my options open, as this sort of argument could be subject to revision. Even so, as a “prepared to take the risk” theist, I can myself can live with the concept that somehow the configurations of life have been very directly imposed on matter by God by some intelligent agent; after all the alternative of selecting the right life generating physical regime looks to be at least equally as computationally complex (in fact, perhaps a lot more computationally complex). So if I’m asked to accept that the right life generating physical regime is a given then perhaps I can just as easily accept highly improbable molecular configurations as a given. However, there is one stickler of a aside effect in homunculus ID that is unfortunate; we have to kiss goodbye to much epistemological tractability and with it much of the coherent rational readability of our cosmos, especially in relation to natural history. There is also an irony here. If life is a consequence of the selection of the right physical regime then this would likely represent the solution of a computational problem requiring a level of intelligence well in advance of what is needed to carry out Homunculus ID. In fact, in comparison Homunculus ID looks distinctly  “Unintelligent" in design”!

As for UD poster V J Torley’s 56 minutes that may change your life I think we can forget it. Unfortunately for me the video has done precisely the opposite: It has simply meant that I have had to cover the same old ground for the umpteenth time and express the same old gripes I have with the Homunculus ID community.

Notes.
According to the British Centre for Science Education John Walton shared a platform with extreme fundamentalist John Mackay in Oct 2007. (See here http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/index.php/Main/JohnWalton) As for some of the rather unsavory accounts surrounding John Mackay see here http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/index.php/Main/JohnMackay and here http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/index.php/Main/MargaretBuchanan.

31/1/12:  The articles from BCSE linked to above are worth perusing. John MacKay is one of those persons whose religion marches worryingly close to some kind of mental illness of the ego and yet whose air of brazenness and utter confidence in his own pronouncements succeeds in confidence tricking the gullible. MacKay was Ken Ham's business partner in the early days of Ken's foray into the "Creation" trade, and MacKay is implicated in an acrimonious dispute between Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International (apparently settled in 2009). Overall, as I'm "in religion" the whole thing gives me the creeps; this may be because I have to confess to having actually witnessed something of this sort first hand more than once, at least in embryo. I would certainly not want to meet MacKay in a dark alley, or even Ken Ham for that matter. They both come over as rather muculant characters whose chief strength is the conviction of their tongues. I trust that Professor Walton was unaware who he was hobnobbing with.

Footnote
** Oops! Sorry folks, he doesn't have a wiki page!