Chapter 18:  What We Have

• Destruction of the biosphere, the essential context of human life. • Two words: “desecrate” and “degrade” and their meanings. • Pope Benedict XVI and our imagined “right” to exploit nature. • Increasingly, we must protect ourselves against the everyday. • Our lives already shaped and dictated by our machines. • Umberto Ecco: our assumptions increasingly imposed from outside. • More “freedom” in a world where standards are seen as relative, rules as repressive? • Inadequacy of fundamentalist (religious or humanist/scientific/atheist) systems of belief. • Vaclev Havel’s plea for a “revolution in human consciousness”? • William Morris and the need for work that is worth doing. Today’s ideal consumer. • The mechanistic worldview and its aridity. • Richard Dawkins' New Atheists. • Science as the arbiter of what is real, and a substitute for religion. • Darwinism, and the belief that atheism is the logical next step. • Reason, Logic and Confirmation Theory. What constitutes Proof? • 96% of the universe is… who knows what? • Science is what it does. • Quantum mechanics and energy patterns. • Living generates order. Machines, in functioning, add to the entropic chaos of the universe. • Metaphoric thinking: animistic or mechanistic. • Machines are not creative, and we are not machines. • “Yes” or “No,” “On” or “Off,” and Paradox as the actual.

Assume that the most common malady of contemporary life (in the "developed" world, at least) is the sensation that the self is stolen away on a daily basis, that we are always struggling to win it back and, with it, to bring back the perspective whereby the quotidian may be experienced in its fullness.
                                          [John Burnside, Into the Quotidian, Harper's magazine, May 2006 p 34-5]
 
Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed, whether it be ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization, will be unavoidable.
   We still don’t know how to put morality ahead of politics, science and economics. 
                 [Vaclev Havel, in a speech to the US Congress, (John Robinson in the Boston Globe, 1989)]
 
The world…has set for itself goals totally different from those of Båsho.[[1]] His Way of Haiku can hardly be said to exist now, for almost nobody walks on it.… Its desuetude is a monument to the stupidity, vulgarity, sentimentality, and unpoeticality of human beings. It makes us view their possible total destruction with equanimity.
                                                                                    [R.H. Blyth, A History of Haiku, Vol I, p 7]
 
     These fragments are chosen from among a multitude of contemporary examples; we are aware of our situation. Yes yes, there are doomsday predictions in every age, but never before have we seen, looking forward, the inescapable view of the possible and even probable desecration and destruction of the essential context of human life—of the biosphere of planet Earth, with which we co-evolved, so that every aspect of our being is attuned to and depends upon its subtleties. Until recently, when we’d destroyed one piece of Earth’s surface we could move on to another. The idea that this is still the case lives on in such fantasies as the moving-to-Mars scenario—though as some of those who endorse it know, Mars is uninhabitable, even for machines, and a human trip there is necessarily one way. Such “solutions” are simply more junk comfort-food.
     In the context of our biosphere the words “desecrate” and “degrade” make an interesting pair. To desecrate is “to treat (a sacred place or thing) with violent disrespect, to violate.” A thesaurus offers “violate, profane, defile, debase, degrade, dishonor; vandalize, damage, destroy, deface” as possible substitutions, and all of them together pretty much describe what we have done, are doing, will do. The companion word “degrade” means “to treat with contempt or disrespect.” Suggested alternatives are “debase, cheapen, devalue, mortify, dishonor, brutalize.”
     If Nature is not sacred, of course, it is logical to assume that it is there to be “developed,” that it is ours to exploit and destroy for our own profit. Many Judaeo-Christians understand the Old Testament as God’s Word saying that license to do these things is our sacred right. However the former Pope, Benedict XVI, appeared to take a different position. Here are short excerpts from his message to the Celebration of the World Day of Peace on January 1st, 2010.[2] First, I’ll quote what he says of the text in Genesis on which claims of our “right” to exploit nature for our own gain are based:
 
The harmony between the Creator, mankind and the created world, as described by Sacred Scripture, was disrupted by the sin of Adam and Eve, by man and woman, who wanted to take the place of God and refused to acknowledge that they were his creatures. As a result, the work of “exercising dominion” over the earth, “tilling it and keeping it”, was also disrupted, and conflict arose within and between mankind and the rest of creation (cf. Gen 3:17-19). Human beings let themselves be mastered by selfishness; they misunderstood the meaning of God’s command and exploited creation out of a desire to exercise absolute domination over it. But the true meaning of God’s original command, as the Book of Genesis clearly shows, was not a simple conferral of authority, but rather a summons to responsibility.
 
More generally he says,
 
Respect for creation is of immense consequence, not least because “creation is the beginning and the foundation of all God’s works,” and its preservation has now become essential for the pacific coexistence of mankind.
   …The environment must be seen as God’s gift to all people, and the use we make of it entails a shared responsibility for all humanity….
 
   Man’s inhumanity to man has given rise to numerous threats to peace and to authentic and integral human development – wars, international and regional conflicts, acts of terrorism, and violations of human rights. Yet no less troubling are the threats arising from the neglect – if not downright misuse – of the earth and the natural goods that God has given us. For this reason, it is imperative that mankind renew and strengthen “that covenant between human beings and the environment, which should mirror the creative love of God, from whom we come and towards whom we are journeying.”
               [Benedictus PP. XVI, “If You Want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation,” w2.vatican.va (1/23/18]
 
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     British poet John Burnside describes our malady in the “developed” world as “the sensation that the self is stolen away on a daily basis, that we are always struggling to win it back….” It is old news that when the Devil barters for our souls, he offers something profoundly tempting in exchange. We depend upon our conveniences and comforts, and cherish them, but has any age been as deprived of spontaneous and un-self-conscious improvisation and liveliness, and in the same moment of a life-giving and life-restorative order, as is our own? Our feast-days and processions and ritual foods, few as they are, are almost entirely commercialized. Hallowe’en has been destroyed. An avalanche of advertising tells us that Christmas is for buying and getting, Thanksgiving is for gluttony and sick jokes about turkeys, Easter is for bunnies and candy. All is programmed, stale, more lifeless each year—and few seem to object.
     Increasingly, we must in fact protect ourselves against the everyday, the quotidian, in our common, human-made life. We avoid any full experience of it, moving across even short distances enclosed in the air-conditioned exoskeletons of our automobiles, walking along city streets with earphones attached to various electronic devices as we make our way home to the dependable cold glow of computer and television screens. The sound of every band, the voice of every singer, must be grotesquely amplified, no matter their quality. What is left of the countryside—woods and lakes, farm and pasture land, even the air above us—is exploited and degraded for profit, and for fast travel and transport in loud machines. We are subjected to ever-increasing noise pollution, air pollution, light pollution, visual pollution, both day and night.
     The only way to endure what we have made is to close down the senses, to live only in the way that machines are sometimes said to be “alive.” Like robots we move about, react to gross stimuli, do and say what we are programmed to do and say. We seek a sense of self among the manufactured products that we crave or buy, the flaunting labels on our badly-made clothes, the sports teams and recorded films and music we depend upon but have no real part in, the details of our “private” lives that we broadcast to a vast audience of strangers online, the addictions that allow us an escape from daily reality. Media and sports celebrities are our glamorous alter-egos, our imaginary neighbors, our heroines and heroes as well as objects for our envy. Most of us make nothing for ourselves or for others; many don’t even cook. Our children are medicated to keep them from being a nuisance when they aren’t being electronically stimulated or sedated by machine-generated adventures.
     It is said that we have progressed from the Machine Age into the Information Age. In fact, of course, the latter is entirely dependent on the former, on machines of many sizes and kinds. The context in which we live—streets, buildings, roads, shopping areas, even the landscape—is relentlessly shaped for the accommodation of automobiles and computers, and for us as consumers of manufactured products, not as human beings. Huge robotic machines work the fields where our food is grown on poisoned soil from genetically modified seed; with such machines, corporate agriculture can exploit and inevitably devastate hundreds of thousands of acres of agricultural land, employing few human beings in the process.
     Writing in the 1980s, Umberto Ecco observed:
 
…[T]he crisis of contemporary bourgeois civilization is partly due to the fact that the average man has been unable to elude the systems of assumption that are imposed on him from the outside, and to the fact that he has not formed himself through a direct exploration of reality. Well-known social illnesses such as conformism, unidirectionism, gregariousness [that is, crowd-following], and mass thinking result from a passive acquisition of those standards of understanding and judgement that are often identified with the "right form" in ethics as well as in politics, in nutrition as well as in fashion, in matters of taste as well as in pedagogical questions.
                                            [Umberto Ecco, The Poetics of the Open Work, p 83]
 
Professor Ecco blames our situation on our ignorance of the real world coupled with a passive acceptance of received standards of understanding and behavior. However he suggests a possible “path to salvation” for modern man. He wonders whether contemporary art,
 
…by accustoming us to continual violations of patterns and schemes—indeed, alleging as a pattern and a scheme the very perishability of all patterns and all schemes, and the need to change them not only from one work to the next but within the same work—isn't in fact fulfilling a precise pedagogical function, a liberating role. If this were the case…it would come to represent modern man's path to salvation, toward the reconquest of his lost autonomy at the level of both perception and intelligence.
                                                                                                                                       [Ibid., p 83]
 
That is, if we would but apply the anarchic practices of contemporary art, underwritten and validated as they are by the commercial and intellectual “Artworld,” we could hope to regain our lost intellectual independence? No, I don’t think so.
     In the decades since Professor Ecco’s well known treatise was written, we have indeed become accustomed to continual violations of patterns and schemes. The idea that patterns and schemes were once repressive and can now be carelessly dispensed with—in private, political, and business ethics, in the other arts as well as in painting—is widely accepted, pretty much as he prescribes. But is life in fact better, do we have more “freedom” in a world where we know that all standards are relative, and changeable at our, or anyone’s, convenience? In the twenty-first century, the United States—and much of the world—has been given a strong dose of the political and economic realities born of such thinking. International treaties are scrapped; the torture of prisoners and the denial of habeas corpus rights are defended in all seriousness, and are disguised in the vestments of a pious and patriotic legality at the highest levels of government—all in the name of “freedom.” What in fact are “truths that are self-evident” in an entirely materialistic and fragmented society?
     The fundamentalist (whether religious or humanist/scientific/atheist) solutions to all this are both retrograde and inadequate. In each case they aspire to a dogmatically dictated orderliness, an inviolable purity of thought, whether operating in the name of God or of Reason. Such ideal orders allow no room for spontaneity or inexplicable accident, for inspiration and play, and especially no room for doubt. Orders of this kind are founded on the inviolate Word, or on Reason and Mathematics; they are certain, perfect, and secure. Scientific/humanistic fundamentalists hold to certainties that are hundreds rather than many thousands of years old, and are therefore called “modern.” But it has become clear in the past 100 years or so, in quantum physics, mathematics, and biology, that their experiments and theories may bring them at last, and in some areas have already brought them, to the great wall of the inexplicable.     
     Should we hope for Vaclev Havel’s global revolution in human consciousness, in which we would come to give morality priority over economics, politics, and science? And if there were such a “global revolution,” and you and I were in a position to assign the next steps forward, what would we recommend? Many now believe that even if a change in consciousness is possible, it will take a great disaster or series of such disasters to effect such a change, to bring us to our senses as a species.
 
     The great physicist Erwin Schrødinger believed in the evolutionary effect and cumulative power of small individual actions, in what each one of us does every day:
 
It is true that a single day of one’s life, nay even any individual’s life as a whole, is but a minute blow of the chisel at the ever unfinished statue. But the whole enormous evolution we have gone through in the past, it too has been brought about by myriads of such minute chisel blows.
   …[A]t every step, on every day of our life, as it were, something of the shape that we possessed until then has to change, to be overcome, to be depleted and replaced by something new. The resistance of our primitive will is the psychical correlate of the resistance of the existing shape to the transforming chisel. For we ourselves are chisel and statue, conquerors and conquered at the same time —it is a true continued ‘self-conquering’….
                                                       [Erwin Schrodinger, What is Life? and Mind and Matter, p 106, 107]
 
However all efforts at such conquest of the self require self-discipline:
 
At all epochs and with all peoples the background of every ethical code…to be taken seriously has been, and is, self-denial….The teaching of ethics always assumes the form of a demand, a challenge, of a ‘thou shalt,’ that is in some way opposed to our primitive will.…
                                                                                        [Ibid.]
 
Even then, in 1944, Dr. Schrodinger noted that any claim that we must suppress our primitive appetites is mocked as absurd, the mocker convinced that “all the shalls that oppose me in this [self-indulgence of some kind] are nonsense…priests’ fraud.…” Yet he said that scientific insights demonstrate that the “becoming…of the [human] organism,” our development as a species, must necessarily be a continued fight against what we see as our self-interest in the short term. We know, but as a species, we don’t do.
 
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     Schools routinely assure us that they will teach our children to think for themselves. To do so would in fact be to undermine the political and economic structures under which we all really live, as teachers and school administrators now and then attest. Like two eyes, a nose, prehensile thumbs, upright stature, and the capacity for speech, the ability to think for oneself is an innate human attribute and birthright. But it must be practised; it can be weakened or even lost through laziness or lack of courage, or given up in order to feel safe and secure within the herd. Again, Dr. Schrødinger:
 
I believe that the increasing mechanization and ‘stupidization’ of most manufacturing processes involve the serious danger of a general degeneration of our organ of intelligence. The more the chances in life of the clever and the unresponsive worker are equalled out by the repression of handicraft, and the spread of tedious and boring work on the assembly line, the more will a good brain, clever hands and a sharp eye become superfluous. Indeed the unintelligent man, who naturally finds it easier to submit to the boring toil, will be favoured; he is likely to find it easier to thrive, to settle down, and to beget offspring. The result may easily amount even to a negative selection as regards talents and gifts.
                                                                                                                     [Ibid., p 124]
 
This was written more than 75 years ago; nineteenth century figures like Henry David Thoreau, John Ruskin, William Morris and others were aware of the danger well before that. William Morris believed that human beings ought to have work that was worth doing:
 
Think what a change that would make in the world! I tell you I feel dazed at the thought of the immensity of work undertaken in the making of useless things. It would be an instructive day’s work to walk through two or three of the principal streets of London on a weekday, and take accurate note of everything in the shop windows which is embarrassing or superfluous to the the daily life of a serious man. Nay, the most of these things no one, serious or unserious, wants at all; only a foolish habit makes even the lightest–minded of us suppose that he wants them, and to many people, even of those who buy them, they are obvious encumbrances to real work, thought, and pleasure.
                                                       [William Morris, quoted in Arthur Clutton-Brock, William Morris, p 222]
 
     Here is a companion piece to Morris’s statement, written in 2008 by Rick Broderick. It describes the flowering in our culture of the trends Morris warned against:
 
Unlike the ideal citizen, the ideal consumer is impulsive, demanding instant gratification no matter what the long term consequences, financial or otherwise.…The only engagement demanded of the ideal consumer is that which is required to shop in-person or on-line. The rest of the time, the ideal consumer seeks either distraction or pleasure, preferably by interacting with the content available through the all-pervasive media grid.…
   …Whatever lipservice is paid by the corporate media to the virtues of citizenship, it is to be consumers that we are called, insistently, day and night, everywhere we turn, at the behest of a massive propaganda program underwritten directly by the more than $250 billion spent annually in the U.S. on advertising, and indirectly by the hundreds of billions poured annually into production of media content, both “news” and entertainment.
                                                                         [Rick Broderick, Twin Cities Daily Planet, 6/19/08]
 
And an even more recent observation, by the novelist Jonathan Franzen:
 
“The Custom of the Country” [by Edith Wharton] is the earliest novel to portray an America I recognize as fully modern….The nexus of money and media and celebrity, which dominates our world today, appears in the opening chapter….
[The heroine] anticipates two other hallmarks of modern American society, the obliteration of all social distinctions by money and the hedonic treadmill of materialism…. [E]verything can be bought, and none of it will ever be enough.
                                 [Jonathan Franzen, “A Rooting Interest,” The New Yorker, February 13 and 20, 2012, p 64]
 
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     Today our mechanistic worldview results in the belief that the cosmos is—as a matter of inescapable “scientific” fact—mechanical and meaningless. But to accept such an idea in any way that involves all one’s faculties of mind and heart—even to give real conscious attention to it—is to feel a bleak sense of disconnection and alienation, combined with a kind of claustrophobia. When such conceptions are presented to us as “scientific” and therefore unassailable, day after day, by expert after expert—when an opposing view is rarely heard, and ridiculed as being sentimental and/or illogical or superstitious when it is offered—the effect is profoundly destructive of our vitality. Now and then we are provided with a gentler version of this reduced “reality,” a conception in which religion and the arts and spirituality exist in a kind of imagined capsule, separate and protected from, and entirely other than, science and “the facts.” Descartes, Kant, and in the late 1990s the physicist Stephen Jay Gould, have all proffered such a solution to the conflict between the aridity of our beliefs and the occasional richness of our actual experience.
     Some stoutly refuse any such avoidance of the problem. I have already quoted theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg, writing in 1994:
 
It would be wonderful to find in the laws of nature a plan prepared by a concerned creator in which human beings played some special role. I find sadness in doubting that we will…. And it does not seem to me to be helpful to identify the laws of nature as Einstein did with some sort of remote and disinterested God. The more we refine our understanding of God to make the concept plausible [by mathematical proof], the more it seems pointless.
                        [Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, pp 253, 256]
 
It appears that the only God acceptable to Dr. Weinberg would be a “personal” God, who gives human beings a starring role in His grand scheme, and keeps a sharp eye on their individual day to day activities. To preserve a “sane world” in the absence of such a God, he suggests, “we may need to rely on the influence of science:”
 
It is not the certainty of science that fits it for this role, but its uncertainty. Seeing scientists change their minds again and again about matters that can be studied directly in laboratory experiments, how can one take seriously the claims of religious tradition or sacred writings to certain knowledge about matters beyond human experience?
                                       [Ibid., p 259]
 
This seems odd reasoning. Why should the sight of scientists changing their conclusions again and again, as they and their followers herald new scientific “truths,” cause us to dismiss philosophical or theological thinking about matters that science is incapable of measuring and categorizing? Almost any scientist will tell you that such things as morality and ethics and the life of the spirit are outside the area of investigation—and, importantly, not in any way the responsibility—of science. Surely to accept any claim to “certain knowledge” without serious skepticism is an abdication of our responsibility as human beings? And what if all we can really know of an undefinable God is best represented in words by metaphor, as in Empedocles’ beautiful “The nature of God is a circle whose center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.”
 
     In recent years, a militant group of scientists has been crusading to rid the world of all the nonsensical talk of anything beyond the material, once and for all. The effort is embodied in a movement calling itself the “New Atheism.” Its most vociferous advocates, authors of a number of best-selling books, are respected scientists and academics. Gary Wolf, writing in Wired magazine in 2006, reported that they were evangelically antagonistic to religion and to all such “credulity, superstition, and magical thinking.” For them religion is both unnecessary and evil. People who agree with them are categorized as “bright,” others, ranging from religious fundamentalists to agnostics, are not. “Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists,” proclaimed Richard Dawkins, scientist, best-selling author, and Oxford professor—a PWK as ever was! “Science,” he asserted, “can explain just about everything, but not quite.”[3] As we saw earlier, Dawkins has written that the “feeling of awed wonder that science can give us” is “one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.”[4] Science is one of the ways in which we observe the universe, and our wonder and gratitude in the experience of that universe has been and is the primary motivation for religion and for all the arts and sciences. It is indeed one of our most profound experiences. Science has increased its scope at the expense of distancing us from its own discoveries—how can we begin to imagine the physical reality of a newly discovered Monster Black Hole, 12 billion times more massive than our sun, and 12.8 billion light-years from Earth?[5] Certainly we are impressed by the facts, by the number symbols. Wow! Huge! Far away!
 
 
     New Atheists assure us that an enlightened effort to renounce every “supernatural crutch” can begin anywhere—with an intellectual argument, for instance, or a “visceral rejection” of Islamic or Christian fundamentalism—and continue on by following “relentless and logical steps.”[6] Atheism is an ancient doctrine, but the New Atheists are not hoping to convert religious believers. Their prey is the multitude of wavering non-believers or quasi-believers and agnostics, whom they see as likely to be closeted New Atheists, however timid and irresponsible. The organizer of the London “Brights” meetings claims that such agnostic wafflers tolerantly make room for fundamentalist views, and by doing so give extremists a power base.
     Professor Dawkins, recognizing 20th century discoveries in complexity and quantum mechanics, points out that science deals in probabilities (which are based on statistical averages of data recorded by its sophisticated machines for measuring the physical). “The probability of God,” he says, “while not zero, is vanishingly small.”[7] For him, a fervently evangelistic atheism is a moral imperative, given the harm done by religions. More harm than is done by greed for power or wealth or by an unthinking patriotism, one wonders? Or by everyday selfish egotism? Or accident? Or plain stupidity, out of touch with reality and unmitigated by morality? When we claim that God is on our side as we slaughter others, or that God “gives” us this or that area of the Earth’s surface and its resources, is that religion—or something other?
     New Atheist Sam Harris is confident that “At some point, there’s going to be enough pressure that it is just going to be too embarrassing to believe in God.”[8] This situation has long been reached in many circles, and Gary Wolf points out that not only scientists and their followers, but even many defenders of faith implicitly accept science as the arbiter of what is real. The fact is that we all accept it to some degree. Such acceptance functions as a possible substitute for religion in a world where uncertainty and chaos are fundamental realities. However as Voltaire pointed out, “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”
     The overall argument is often framed in terms of Darwinism, as though, if we accept Darwinian theory, atheism is the next logical step. Oxford professor of science and religion John Hedley Brook asserts that this is false logic, since Darwin moved away from his own religious faith not because of his understanding of evolution, but in response to his moral criticism of 19th-century Christian doctrine and to the death of his beloved young daughter. Gary Wolf, who describes himself as a “lax agnostic,” asserts that “in the context of a real struggle with the claims of atheism, an accurate history of Darwin’s loss of faith counts for little more than celebrity gossip.”
 
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     Science is founded in Reason and Logic, which provide both its method and its justification. Logic is “the general science of inference,” the study of what can rightly be inferred from given data. What inferences are valid, given the evidence? And today, what evidence is acceptable in the logic of science?
 
The motions of galaxies don't make sense unless we infer the existence of dark matter. The brightness of supernovae doesn't make sense unless we infer the existence of dark energy. It's not that inference can't be a powerful tool: an apple falls to the ground, and we infer gravity. But it can also be an incomplete tool: gravity is ... ?[[9]]
                                         [Richard Panek,“Dark Matter/Energy,” New York Times Magazine, March 11, 2007]
 
     This brings us back to what is known as “confirmation theory.” An acceptable confirmation theory would allow an investigator to ascertain how much confidence in a theory is reasonable in view of the evidence available. The problem with this is that evidence can cover only a finite range of data, while any hypothesis might cover an infinite range. At the same time, scientific judgement depends not only on reason and logic but on many intangible and unmeasurable and even undetectable considerations, such as the difficulties besetting rival theories, or the strongly-held beliefs and expectations of the researcher. Beyond this, the degree of plausibility can vary with the language used to present the evidence—and what appears plausible in one period may not seem so in another.[10] In other words, scientific certainty is the shining goal, not the dependable product, of scientific investigation.[11] Like Buddhist Enlightenment or Christian Perfection, it is unlikely that we can ever fully attain it. Of course only verbal and mathematical logic are recognized here, and I would contend that there are various other, non-symbolic kinds of logic, of reasonableness—visual logic certainly, and I imagine aural and kinetic logics as well, but they are unmeasurable, inexpressible, and too complex for attainment except by insight, by what we call “instinct.”
     There have been various serious efforts to circumvent the pitfalls associated with scientific confirmation. In 1921, the economist John Maynard Keynes developed a theoretical “principle of limited variety,” which he hoped would be a way of determining to what extent the likelihood of a proposition increases as evidence supporting it accumulates. However Keynes himself could see that his principle was metaphysical and therefore unverifiable.[12] In 1924, as we have already seen, the group of Austrian intellectuals calling themselves The Vienna Circle began to meet regularly.[13] They hoped to unify the sciences, first by means of  a precise definition and delineation of the scientific method, and then by a definitive analysis of the necessary structure of scientific theory and language—certainly laudable aims. Like today’s New Atheists, they intended to rid the world once and for all of claims for any reality beyond the physical—that is, for the troublesome metaphysical. Beliefs and theories such as those of the Vienna Circle are variously known as “logical positivism,” “logical empiricism,” or “scientific empiricism.”
     The group met regularly for twelve years, until its members were scattered in the period just before the second World War, most of them going to the United States. Their project had failed; they had been unable find a convincing theory of the degree to which given evidence supports a given scientific statement. And as the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy points out, without such a theory “the central concept of verification by empirical evidence itself remains distressingly unscientific.” Today, the essential question—“How are we to know for certain which elements of our experience of the world are valid as sources of knowledge?”—remains unanswered.
     Many contemporary scientists—and most of the rest of us, in fact—think and behave as if the project of the logical positivists has been a success; as if somehow, when we talk about scientific certainty, intention is equivalent to accomplishment.[14] Assumptions of near-omnipotent certainty, like those of Professor Dawkins, may do as much damage as various other kinds of nonsense: important decisions are made, and important actions taken, as if what constitutes “scientific proof” were clearly known and agreed upon.
     Because it is so often demonstrated that such proof is not infallible, and may be susceptible to outside influence, “confirmation” begins to be seen as a matter of opinion, and we may feel justified in believing whatever it suits us to believe about the physical world. This has been starkly evident in the case of global warming; many people chose to doubt its reality until a critical number of scientific experts made a formal statement as to its human sources and its profound dangers—and some few scientists and many citizens and the politicians they elect still claim to be unconvinced.[15] The authority of science has been undermined by claims of certainty later debunked, and by general awareness of its dependence on corporate and military financing of research. Nonetheless, in many instances the scientific data is the only dependable information we have—it is not certainty, but it is our best bet, and absolutely essential.
     To complicate the picture further, scientists exploring the outer reaches of theoretical physics, such as cosmologists, are compelled to leave behind requirements for empirical validation, although of course such validation is always sought and may someday be found. At the same time, the lack of a confirmation theory has meant that philosophers of science have had to accept the fact that, as the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy puts it, “a more holistic and less formal relationship exist[s] between theoretical sentences and the observations supporting them,” between a premise and permissible evidence for it.[16] I assume that by a “more holistic and less formal relationship” a somewhat less reductively logical relationship is meant. This opens the door to intuition and insight. The same authority reports that despite this fundamental adjustment in thinking, “the influence of logical positivism persists in the widespread mistrust of statements for which there are no criteria or assertability conditions.”[17] In my view, this is as it should be…but—again paradoxically—not always.
 
     In the twenty-first century we have begun to accept the fact that the universe is vastly more complicated than was formerly believed. Writing in the New York Times in 2007, Richard Panek described the earlier view:
 
Since the invention of the telescope four centuries ago, astronomers have been able to figure out the workings of the universe simply by observing the heavens and applying some math, and vice versa. Take the discovery of moons, planets, stars and galaxies, apply Newton's laws and you have a universe that runs like clockwork. Take Einstein's modifications of Newton, apply the discovery of an expanding universe and you get the big bang.
 
At the University of California at Berkeley, Mr. Panek talked with cosmologists George Smoot and Saul Perlmutter about earlier discoveries in their field:
 
''Time and time again,'' Smoot shouted, ''the universe has turned out to be really simple.''
   Perlmutter nodded eagerly. ''It's like, why are we able to understand the universe at our level?''
   ''Right. Exactly. It's a universe for beginners! 'The Universe for Dummies'!''
 
Mr. Panek asks:
 
But is our luck about to run out? Smoot's and Perlmutter's work is part of a revolution that has forced their colleagues to confront a universe wholly unlike any they have ever known, one that is made of only 4 percent of the kind of matter we have always assumed it to be—the material that makes up you and me and this magazine and all the planets and stars in our galaxy and in all 125 billion galaxies beyond. The rest —96 percent of the universe—is …who knows?
 
     We want to believe in the infallible authority and dependability of science—except when, as in the case of global warming theory, it threatens our commercial and other interests as well as our comfort. Science is by far, thus far, humanity’s best technique for the systematic categorization and measurement of the physical facts of the universe. Which is only to say that science is what it does: it identifies, it categorizes, it investigates by observing and measuring and then theorizing, inferring logically from its premises, making predictions—and it expresses itself mathematically, thereby avoiding the gloriously nuanced imprecision of verbal language. It is free of such immeasurable considerations as right and wrong, wisdom and recklessness. It is also free of poetry and artfulness, eloquence and musicality; to read a series of mathematical equations aloud, with passionate expression, could be funny and would necessarily be ridiculous.
     Science is not some priestly entity and activity, august and separate from us. It is one of the things human beings do, and it is fallible. Brazilian historian of science Olival Friere Jr. has written of the controversy arising among various groups of physicists over the correct interpretation of both the “impeccable formalism” and the experimental results of quantum theory:
 
[Q]uantum controversy…has opposed, on philosophical grounds, such giants of 20th century physics as Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein, [who?] melded science, philosophy, and ideology in different degrees, according to the people, time, and places involved….Marxism’s influence on that story was as legitimate as were other philosophical views. One cannot establish in the quantum case a sharp distinction between science and ideology.
         [Olival Freire Jr., “Marxism and Quantum Controversy: Responding to Max Jammer’s Question,” p 11 http://anikov.myweb.uga.edu/intel/freire.pdf. (10/17/13)]
 
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     In 1893, at Harvard University, the chairman of the physics department informed students that new PhDs in physics were probably no longer needed, since “science has established that the Universe is a “matter machine,” a machine made up of physical atoms fully obeying the laws of Newtonian mechanics. The only work left for physicists, therefore, was to make their measurements more and more precise.[18] But by 1910—that is, twenty years later—belief in a Newtonian, clockwork universe, where matter was suspended in empty space, had to be radically modified. This was in response to the astonishing results of laboratory experiments exploring the sub-atomic world, the realm of quantum mechanics, results that seemed to demonstrate that light exists either as particles or as waves, depending on how it is measured. Further, as we have seen, physical atoms are made up of vortices of energy which spin and vibrate constantly, each atom like a “wobbly” spinning top that radiates energy.[19]
 
Because each atom has its own specific energy signature (wobble) assemblies of atoms (molecules) collectively radiate their own identifying energy patterns. So every material structure in the universe, including you and me, radiates a unique energy signature.
                                                           [Bruce Lipton, The Biology of Belief, pp 95, 100]  
 
     The “unique energy signature” of every material structure in the universe—surely that could be called its “way of being”? And surely I can reasonably propose that such a way of being can be: 1) inharmonious, or 2) harmonious in some way that can be analyzed and predicted, or 3) “at the shimmering edge,” harmoniously regular and at the same time harmoniously irregular, a paradox. Perhaps this last situation is the state of dynamic balance which characterizes being alive. That is, a structure could be, through time, generally harmonious but in a mysteriously lively and spontaneous way—as are the rhythms in action of living creatures of every kind, in the human heart and brain, and in human art. Then—in the terms I have been using here—healthy living being is in a state of < >´, whether it is your being or mine, or a beech tree’s, or the being which is Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony in performance, or an accidently remarkable tea bowl discovered by a Zen Master in a bin of the cheapest mass-produced pottery.
 
     Living being generates order. A machine is something profoundly different—and different in the most fundamental ways. No matter how impressively complex it may be, the machine is an inert conglomeration of inert matter until it is energized from some exterior source, and it adds to universal disorder. Even then, it can do only what it has been designed and programmed to do; what it does is predictable, and its operation adds to the overall inert entropic chaos of the universe. Inert entropy is an absence of all life, order, and even form, the “ultimate stage reached in the degradation of the matter and energy of the universe.” The Second Law of Thermodynamics predicts that all systems— other than living systems—tend toward this deathly condition or state; the time involved in that process of degradation is known as “pessimistic time” by chaos scientists. [20]
     Since it is a machine, the computer is of course a non-living system, inescapably unlike every living being.
 
[In a computer] the memory has passed from a disordered state to an ordered one. However, in order to make sure that the memory is in the right state, it is necessary to use a certain amount of energy….This energy is dissipated as heat, and increases the amount of disorder in the universe. One can show that this increase in disorder is always greater than the increase in the order of the memory itself. Thus the heat expelled by the computer's cooling fan means that when a computer records an item in memory, the total amount of disorder in the universe goes up.
                                                             [Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p 147]
 
No machine is in any way creative. Everything the computer does is both pre-programmed and reductive; data must be abstracted and simplified to render it acceptable to the computer. Every machine is primitively simple compared to any living organism; we make or buy them to do work for us. To describe ourselves and other creatures as machines, that is to take the machine metaphor literally, is profoundly trivializing and disabling. We are given daily evidence that such thinking has been, and is, and will be, criminally destructive of the biosphere, and of countless species—which must at last include our own.
 
We cannot help thinking in terms of metaphors, analogies, models, and images; they are embedded in our language and in the very structure of our thought. Both animistic and mechanistic thinking are metaphoric. But whereas mythic and animistic thinking depends on organic metaphors drawn from the processes of life, mechanistic thinking depends on metaphors drawn from man-made machinery.    
                                                                     [Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature, pg 11]
 
     A living being is not merely an organization of matter: it continually creates order, as we have seen.[21] It maintains its own being, and its actions create order: photosynthesis in plants, birds’ nests, the astonishing metamorphosis of the butterfly, human art, music, buildings, bridges, scientific theories. It is self-renewing, and highly autonomous. It constantly renews its separate identity, but at the same time, and paradoxically, it is inseparably united with and lodged in its environment. And though living beings have definite boundaries such as semi-permeable membranes, these boundaries are open and serve to connect the being to the world around it “with almost unimaginable complexity.”[22]  
     We are regularly told that computers “think,” but even the most sophisticated computer operates in terms of patterns of “on” and “off,” of 1) and 0). It performs more and more complex combinations of yes and no...but never both, never somewhere-in-between. This “thought” is exactly how reductive logic works, and therefore such “classical” human logic can be checked by a computer. What we are able to imagine of the logic or Logos of God is and always has been far more than this, though encompassing it. The portion which human beings have been able to describe in symbols is the part George Smoot, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, has referred to as “the Universe for Dummies.”
 
     Paradox is anathema—an outrage, an abhorrence—to classical logic; it is both “yes” and “no,” both 1) and 0). Human beings can incorporate paradox into their thinking: (“Because a and b are true, c is unwise. But at the same time x and y are also true, and c somehow feels right. I’ll do c.”) Computers cannot do anything like that.[23] Human intuition and insight are based in, and often more coherent with, the actual, always complex, situation in the moment. One reason for abandoning the grammatical subjunctive mood (as found in the song “If I were a rich man, fa-la-la-la-la-la...”) —as many academic linguists recommend—may be that a computer can’t deal with doubt of any kind without using a mechanical process known as “fuzzy” logic.
 
The digital computer is simply a device that processes discrete information by performing sequences of logical operations on…information and on its own program. By discrete information is meant strings of “status” symbols: zeros and ones or Ts and Fs (for true and false) or “ons” and “offs”—in short, any symbolization of two distinguishable physical states.
   By a logical operation is meant those modes of statement composition such as “not,” “and,” “either/or,” “if /then,” “if and only if,” by which compound statements are built up from primitive statements.
                                                     [Philip J. Davis and Rueben Hersh, Descartes’ Dream, p 141]
 
     The real world is seldom as simple as “yes” or “no.” In 1965 L.A. Zadeh found a way whereby digital computers could begin to acknowledge something of that world’s complexity and indeterminacy—by approximating a degree of adaptability. This is “fuzzy logic,” in which a proposition and its negation share a “quantity of merit” (represented by 1). If the proposition is pretty much true, or more true than not, (degree 1-n) then its negation is pretty much false (degree n). In this way, systems that control real events can be designed to respond to changes of degree detected in important features.[24] New ways of making computers more “intelligent” are constantly being discovered, and each advance renders these machines more useful to us, inevitably rendering us more dependent on them.
 
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     Whichever side one leans toward in an imagined conflict between religion and science, the universe is not a “matter-machine,” and neither are we. The machine metaphor is simplistic and misleading, and it can do great harm. The choices we make concerning our relationship with our machines can be of profound importance. It is not a game of “Machines against Nature,” in which we perform as loftily objective arbiters; we are Nature. To favor machines over this Whole, which is people-in-Nature-and-as-Nature—whether in economic theory and planning, in corporate strategy, or in the design of the built environment—is self-destructive in the long term. To favor the bulldozer over the ecosystem, the digital avatar’s reality over our own, corporations over people, is to favor inert entropy (which is death) over life.
     Machines are not our pets; we are in danger of becoming theirs. This is not because they are or will be “smarter” than we are, but because in order to use their reductive, mechanical intelligence we simplify and abstract what we experience of reality into data they can manage, and then regard their conclusions and solutions as truth. We live increasingly docile lives, more and more shaped and determined by machines. This is bound to limit and distort our ability to think—a process already well underway. Though we all experience the resulting problems, we do not resist, entranced as we are by our gadgets. Machines are sinister in the way that corporations are sinister: they have become our intimates, but they have no sense of responsibility or decency or empathy: they have no souls. Their inescapable limitations limit their potential usefulness at the same time that we lose the ordinary human skills they are designed to replace.
     Are we to become, in our own minds, simply machines competing with other machines—machines which, since they are not alive, don’t need to “make a living,” don’t need “employee benefits,” don’t need sleep? Advocates of “Strong A-I”(“strong artificial intelligence”) refer to living beings as “carbon-based life,” as distinct from the “beings” they design and manufacture, the pet computers and robots which some of their human managers and keepers insist are, or soon will be, “alive” in all the ways their handlers deem important. Though “artificially” intelligent, they will, it is claimed, inevitably develop to be more intelligent than human beings. Even at their current stage of development, they make the rich richer by making the grabbing of money and goods easier and more efficient, without the complications of human temperament, human ethics, human labor unions, human political power, human fallibility.
     Some years ago, Public Television offered a special program called Science and the City. It proposed a rosy technological future for Boston, Massachusetts, in which the city’s population would eventually consist of an elite class of scientists and technologists, functioning as both innovators and entrepeneurs and aided by their machines. The rest of the citizenry would be employed in serving and servicing the technocrats and the machines in a variety of menial ways, and of course in buying the products produced by the machines. Not one of the experts consulted voiced any concerns about the possible psychological and social impact of such a situation. If challenged they might say that nobody asked them, or that they had expressed reservations and concerns which had been edited out. Communicating with the populace by machine has this great advantage: propaganda can be simple and clear—nuance, or shades of opinion, can be deleted in advance.
 
     Given current realities and trends, can sane people hope for the “global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness” which Vaclev Havel said we need in order to avoid the various kinds of disaster easily visible ahead? Perhaps we could come to see the flowing wholeness of the world as more than our playground and opportunity for profit, even perhaps come to recognize that its healthy functioning is literally and figuratively the true ground of our physical and spiritual well-being as individuals and as a species, and that it is now our responsibility. But is that likely? Is it even possible? No one knows, but it seems improbable. What we have now is the beginning of a realization of the actual situation of our species, requiring a radical change in our understanding. Any reasonable conversation, beginning with any subject in the contemporary world, leads here.
 
[1]  “…a religious naturalism and profound simplicity.” R.H. Blyth, A History of Haiku, Vol I, p v
[2] http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/peace/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20091208_xliii-world-day-peace_en.html. 3/13/12
[3] Gary Wolf, “The Church of the Non-believers,” Wired magazine November 2006
[4] Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and The Appetite for Wonder, p x, quoted here on p 284.
[5] The Guardian online, 2/25/15
[6] Gary Wolf, op. cit.
[7] Science deals in statistical probabilities, but many scientists don’t mention that when holding forth to the laity they talk in certainties, out of almost-all-knowingness. A physicist friend justifies this to me by saying, “In theory you can walk through that glass door, but I don’t advise you to try it.”
[8] Gary Wolf, op. cit.
[9] We don’t know what gravity is, any more than we know what dark matter and dark energy are. The idea that Dark Matter belongs in Physics rather than in Metaphysics is pure assumption, thus far—although, we must assume, it is an assumption safely grounded in mathematics. It is empirically unproven; ideas of the Holy Spirit are at least based in experience. Conceptions like Ygdrassil, the great Tree at the center of the Earth, and the True Cross are not primitive; they are symbolic of elements experienced as part of our real situation.
[10] For a succinct discussion of the difficulties encountered by confirmation theory see The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, p 75
[11] Ever-greater financial incentives in the search for the “right” answer have inevitably exacerbated this situation.
[12] Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, p 207
[13] See chapters 7 and 8, pp 80, 96.
[14] In the Artworld this belief is known as Conceptualism.
[15] We now know that this is in part the product of a systematic campaign of “disinformation” financed by oil companies.
562 Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, p 224
[17] Ibid.
[18] Bruce Lipton, The Biology of Belief, p 95, 100
[19] See Chapter 17, p 302.
[20] See chapter 8, “Order and Chaos,” p 108.
[21] See p 23 here.
[22] John Briggs and David F. Peat, Turbulent Mirror, p 154
[23] “Analog” computers use continuously variable physical quantities, such as electrical potential, fluid pressure, or mechanical motion to (analogously) represent the quantities in the problem under consideration. They are thus more useful than digital computers in the simulation of dynamic systems like chemical reactions and nuclear power plants. [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/analog+computer?show=0&t=1382027082 10/12/13]
[24] The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, p 151