Posted on 11/30/2004 6:21:11 PM PST by betty boop
On Plato, the Early Church, and Modern Science: An Eclectic Meditation
By Jean F. Drew
God, purposing to make the universe most nearly like the every way perfect and fairest of intelligible beings, created one visible living being, containing within itself all living beings of the same natural order.
Thus does Plato (d. 347 B.C.) succinctly describe how all that exists is ultimately a single, living organism. At Timaeus20, he goes on to say:
“There exists: first, the unchanging form, uncreated and indestructible, admitting no modification and entering no combination … second, that which bears the same name as the form and resembles it … and third, space which is eternal and indestructible, which provides a position for everything that comes to be.”
And thus we find a description of the universe in which Being and Existence (Becoming) — the one God and the multiplicity of things — are bound together as a single living reality whose extension is mediated by Space (which for us moderns implies Time).
Our aim in this essay is to define these ideas and their relationships, and trace their historical development from the ancient world to the present. Taking a page from the late Eric Voegelin (1901–1985, philosopher of history specializing in the evolution of symbolization), we will follow a history-of-ideas approach to these issues. Along the way we will find that not only philosophy and cosmology, but also theology and even modern science can illuminate these seminal conceptions of Platonic thought. We must begin at the beginning, that is, with God — who is absolute Being in Plato’s speculation, of whom the cosmos itself is but the image (eikon) or reflection.
When Plato speaks of God (or when Aristotle does for that matter, as in e.g., Nicomachean Ethics), he is not referring to the Olympian gods, to Zeus, Hera, Athena, Poseidon, and the rest of the gang of “immortals.” For the Olympians are like man in that they are creatures of a creating God. Not only that, but they are a second generation of gods, the first having reigned in the antediluvian Age of Chronos; which is to say that the Olympians’ rule or law is not everlasting, but contingent. Thus they are not self-subsistent, but dependent (contingent) on a principle outside of themselves. We might say that the central difference between Plato’s God and the Olympians consists in the fact that the latter are “intracosmic” gods, and the former is “extracosmic,” that is, transcending all categories and conditions of space-time reality. In contrast, the intracosmic gods are subject to change, to contingency; and so, though they may truly be said to exist in some fashion, cannot be said to possess true Being. (More on these distinctions in a minute.)
It is clear that for Plato, God is the “Beyond” of the universe, or in other words, utterly transcendent, perfectly self-subsistent Being, the “uncaused cause” of all the multiplicity of existents in the universe. In yet other words we can say that, for Plato, the cosmos is a theophany, a manifestation or “presence” of the divine Idea — in Christian parlance, the Logos if I might draw that association — in the natural world.
As Wolfgang Smith notes, “Christian teaching is based upon the doctrine of the Logos, the Word of God, a term which in itself clearly suggests the idea of theophany. Moreover, what is implicit in the famous Prologue of St. John [“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (John 1:1–5)] is openly affirmed by St. Paul when he declares that “the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world have been clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His power and Godhead” (Rom. 1:20) … The indisputable fact is that at its deepest level Christianity perceives the cosmos as a self-revelation of God.” [Wolfgang Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence, 1984]
Being and Existence (Becoming)
Being is a concept so difficult that it comes close to eluding our grasp altogether. It is utterly beyond space and time; imperishable; entirely self-subsistent, needing nothing from outside itself in order to be complete; essential; immutable; and eternally perduring. Contrast this with the concept of existence, regarding which Plato asks “how can that which is never in the same state be anything?” And this is the clue to the profound difference between being and existence: The existing things of this world are mutable and transient.
We must in my opinion begin by distinguishing between that which always is and never becomes from that which is always becoming but never is. The one is apprehensible by intelligence with the aid of reasoning, being eternally the same, the other is the object of opinion and irrational sensation, coming to be and ceasing to be, but never fully real. In addition, everything that becomes or changes must do so owing to some cause; for nothing can come to be without a cause. [Timaeus, 3:28]
Smith writes of the existing or “becoming” things that
“… they come upon the scene, we know not from whence; they grow, change, and decay; and at last they disappear, to be seen no more. The physical cosmos itself, we are told, is a case in point: it, too, has made its appearance, perhaps some twenty billion years ago, and will eventually cease to exist [i.e., finally succumbing, we are told, to thermodynamic entropy or “heat death”]. What is more, even now, at this very moment, all things are passing away. ‘Dead is the man of yesterday,’ wrote Plutarch, ‘for he dies into the man of today: and the man of today is dying into the man of tomorrow.’ Indeed, ‘to be in time’ is a sure symptom of mortality. It is indicative, not of being, but of becoming, of ceaseless flux.”
All the multiplicity of existents in the universe are in a state of becoming and passing away. But Plato’s great insight is that all things in the state of becoming — that is, all existing things — are whatever they are because they are participations in Being. That is to say, “we perceive the trace of being in all that exists,” writes Smith, “and that is why we say, with reference to any particular thing, that it is.” Existence, in other words, is contingent on Being.
But we wonder: In what way is this possible? And if existents participate in being, what is that Being in which they participate?
In Exodus 3:14 Moses has experienced a theophany: While tending his flock on Mount Horeb, suddenly he hears the voice of God issuing from a burning bush: God is speaking to him! Reverentially, Moses inquires of God what is His name (meaning: what is His nature or character).
And God said unto Moses, I AM WHO AM: and He said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.
God has told Moses: that He is Being (“I AM”). And the strong implication is that there is no “other” being: “I alone AM.” For “I” is plainly singular in form.
Smith draws the crucial point, “God alone IS. But how are we to understand this? ‘It seems to me,’ writes St. Gregory of Nyssa, ‘that at the time the great Moses was instructed in the theophany he came to know that none of those things which are apprehended by sense perception and contemplated by the understanding really subsist, but that the transcendent essence and cause of the universe, on which everything depends, alone subsists.’ But why? Does not the world exist? Are there not myriads of stars and galaxies and particles of dust, each existing in its own right? And yet we are told that the transcendent essence alone subsists. ‘For even if the understanding looks upon any other existing things,’ the great theologian goes on to say, ‘reason observes in absolutely none of them the self-sufficiency by which they could exist without participating in true Being. On the other hand, that which is always the same, neither increasing nor diminishing, immutable to all change whether to better or to worse (for it is far removed from the inferior and has no superior), standing in need of nothing else, alone desirable, participated in by all but not lessened by their participation — this is truly real Being.’”
Smith continues: “In the words of St. Gregory, ‘that which is always the same, neither increasing nor diminishing, immutable to all change … is truly real being.’ As concerns ‘existing things,’ on the other hand, the teaching implies that these entities are always changing, always in a state of flux, so that their very existence is in a way a process of becoming, in which however nothing is actually produced. This has been said time and again, beginning with Heraclitus and the Buddhist philosophers. And there can be little doubt that it is true: even modern physics, as we can see, points to the same conclusion. Only there is another side to the coin which is not always recognized. Existent things — the very flux itself — presuppose what Gregory and the Platonists have termed ‘a participation in Being.’ The point is that relative or contingent existences cannot stand alone. They have not an independent existence, a being of their own. ‘In Him we live, and move, and have our being,’ says St. Paul….”
St. Augustine confirms the Platonic insight this way:
I beheld these others beneath Thee, and saw that they neither altogether are, nor altogether are not. An existence they have, because they are from Thee; and yet no existence, because they are not what Thou art. For only that really is, that remains unchangeably.
Space
Space is the third essential term of the Platonic cosmology: It is the matrix in which living things and all other existents participate in Being. Plato’s creation myth — the Myth of the Demiurge in Timaeus — elucidates the Platonic conception of Space.
For Plato, the God of the Beyond is so “beyond” that, when it came time for creating the Cosmos, he didn’t even do it himself. He sent an agent: the Demiurge, a mythical being endued by God to be in divine likeness of God’s own perfect love, truth, beauty, justice, and goodness. The embodiment of divine perfections, the Demiurge wishes to create creatures just as good and beautiful as himself, according to the standard of the divine Idea — a direct analog, it seems to me, of the Logos theory of the ancient Church. Indeed, Eric Voegelin sees in the Demiurge the symbol of Incarnation [Order and History Vol. 3: Plato and Aristotle, 1957]:
“The Demiurge is the symbol of Incarnation, understood not as the result of the process but as the process itself, as the permanent tension in reality between the taxis of form or idea and the ataxia of formlessness.”
Similarly to the Christian account, the Demiurge in a certain way creates ex nihilo — that is, out of Nothing. At first glance, Plato is seen specifying, not a pre-existing “material” but a universal field of pure possibility called Chora, “Space.” Perhaps we may find in this concept a strong analogy to Isaac Newton’s concept of Absolute Space (see below).
Chora seems to indicate the idea of an eternal, universal field of pure stochastic potentiality that needs to become “activated” in order to bring actual beings into existence. In itself, it is No-thing, i.e., “nothing.” This “activation” the Demiurge may not effect by fiat: He does not, for instance, “command” to “Let there be Light!” The main tool at his disposal is Peitho, “persuasion.”
And if Chora is not so persuaded, it will remain in a state of “nothingness.” It will remain unformed, in the condition of ataxia. Of itself it is “Nothing”; by itself, it can do nothing. It cannot generate anything out of itself, not even matter in primaeval form.
And thus Plato introduces the figure of the Demiurge into his creation myth, symbolizing form or idea — the principle of (formative) taxia that draws (formless) ataxia into existence. We moderns might be tempted to describe the Demiurge as constituting an “information set” together with an “energy source,” who “persuades” the pure stochastic potentiality of formless, absolute, empty space into actualized form, and thus existence. From the cosmic standpoint, he makes unity out of multiplicity, in harmony and geometrical proportion:
“The best bond is the one that effects the closest unity between itself and the terms it is combining; and this is best done by a continued geometrical proportion.” [Timaeus, 4]
Thus the Demiurge is a kind of “divine geometer,” producing the forms (or mathematical ideas) that Chora can be persuaded to conform to, and thus come into existence.
But the Demiurge does more than just get things started: As bearer of the divine Idea — as pure love and beauty and goodness and truth — he continues always persuading Chora to generate creatures as like himself as possible (i.e., reflecting his own divine qualities at whatever generic stage), throughout all eternity. Thus creation is a continuous process in space-time. Moreover, it is the source and driver of evolution as a universal natural process.
Through the ongoing activity of the Demiurge, men and the world are constantly being informed and renewed by the divine Idea; and thus a unified cosmic whole, a “One Cosmos,” a universal order comes into being at the intersection of time and timelessness, of immanent and transcendent reality, in the medium of Space (and Time).
Compare the Platonic creation myth with the philosophy of Dionysius the [Pseudo-]Areopagite, said to be the Greek converted by St. Paul in Acts, 17:34. For Dionyius, the “names of God” — the divine qualities — are goodness, being, life, wisdom, power, and justice. Joseph Stiglmayr writes [Cath. Encycl. at the entry for Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite], that for Dionysius, God is
“… the One Being (to hen), transcending all quality and predication, all affirmation and negation, and all intellectual conception, [Who] by the very force of His love and goodness gives to beings outside Himself their countless gradations, unites them in the closest bonds (proodos), keeps each by His care and direction in its appointed sphere, and draws them again in an ascending order to Himself (epistrophe) … all created things [proceed] from God by the exuberance of being in the Godhead (to hyperpleres), its outpouring and overflowing … and as a flashing forth from the sun of the Deity. Exactly according to their physical nature created things absorb more or less the radiated light, which, however, grows weaker the farther it descends. As the mighty root sends forth a multitude of plants which it sustains and controls, so created things owe their origin and conservation to the All-Ruling Deity…. Patterned upon the original of Divine love, righteousness, and peace, is the harmony that pervades the universe…. All things tend to God, and in Him are merged and completed, just as the circle returns into itself, as the radii are joined at the centre, or as the numbers are contained in unity.”
The Platonic resonances seem unmistakeable in these lines. It appears that both Platonic speculation and the Logos doctrine of the ancient Church as articulated by Dionysius are in agreement that Creator must be “beyond” Creation in order to resonate with it — which resonance is what makes the universe to be alive — i.e., a living universe.
C. A. Dubrey points out [Cath. Encycl. at the entry “Teleology”], that the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas makes it clear that, “Intrinsic finality [we are to think of this as a blend or merger of efficient and final causes in the Aristotelian sense] consists in the fact that every being has within itself a natural tendency whereby its activity is directed towards the perfection of its own nature…. St. Thomas does not hesitate to speak of ‘natural appetite,’ ‘natural inclination,’ and even ‘intention of nature,’ [we moderns might be tempted to add ‘instinct’ to this list] to mean that every being has within itself a directive principle of activity. Accordingly, God does not direct creatures to their ends from outside, but through their own nature…. The Divine plan of creation is carried out by the various beings themselves acting in conformity with their nature.
When, however, this finality is called immanent, this expression must not be understood in a pantheistic sense, as if the intelligence which the world manifests were to be identified with the world itself, but in the sense that the immediate principle of finality is immanent in every being…. Thus the unconscious finality in the world leads to the conclusion that there must be an intelligent cause of the world.” [Emphasis added.]
Aquinas’ insight, and also Plato’s, evokes a reconsideration of Isaac Newton’s concept of Absolute Space. Possibly this may be understood in the following terms. First, Absolute Space is “empty” space. Second, it is not a property of God, but an effect of His Presence; i.e., we advert to theophany again. The question then arises, in what “where” or “when” does this theophany take place? Perhaps Newton’s answer would be: In the beginning, and continuously thereafter. Second, it has been suggested that Newton intends us to understand Absolute Space as the sensorium Dei: “God constitutes space and time through his eternity and omnipresence” [ existendo semper et ubique, durationem et spatium consitutit: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 3d ed., 1726]. Wolfhart Pannenberg writes,
“Now there are a number of good reasons — suggested by both philosophical and scientific thought — to consider time and space as inseparable. Einstein’s field concept comprises space, time, and energy. It takes the form of a geometrical description, and this seems to amount to a spatialization of time. The totality of space, time, and energy or force are all properties of a cosmic field.
“Long before our own age a theological interpretation of this subject matter had been proposed, and it was Isaac Newton who offered this proposal. It too referred everything to space or, more precisely, to the correlation of force as in the case of a force like gravitation acting at a distance. Newton’s well-known conception of space as sensory of God (sensorium Dei) did not intend to ascribe to God an organ of sense perception, the like of which God does not need, according to Newton, because of divine omnipresence. Rather, Newton took space as the medium of God’s creative presence at the finite place of his creatures in creating them.” [Wolfhart Pannenberg, Toward a Theology of Nature, 1993]
Thus the infinite takes priority over every finite experience, including intellectual experience — a position decisively argued by Descartes, as Pannenberg avers, “in his thesis that the idea of God is a prior condition in the human mind for the possibility of any other idea, even that of the ego itself.”
* * * * * *
The Influence of Platonic Speculation on the Early History of the Church
D. Edmund Joaquin, an insightful and gracious Christian friend, writes, “We understand that the universe is created and sustained by the Word [the Logos], and not only that, but by the Word sounding. God sustains the universe consciously and actively. He has not gone away and left us. In fact, He reveals Himself to us, and His final revelation is in the person of Christ [the Logos]. Christ is not an abstract aspect of God, like wisdom. He is God. He is God incarnating in the world that He himself has made.”
Joaquin further observes that “[the Gospel of] John is written to the Greeks and put into words that they could understand.” It seems there’s a mystery buried in here somewhere. Consider: Socrates was the teacher of Plato, who was the teacher of Aristotle, who was the teacher of Alexander — and Alexander spread Greek culture throughout Eurasia, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. Add to this the fact that the great evangelist, St. Paul, had some difficulty converting the Jews to the Christian faith; but he converted the Greeks in droves. Not only St. John, but also St. Paul speaks in terms the Greek mind could readily grasp, as when he says God is He “in Whom we live and move and have our being.” These historical connections do not appear to be accidental, coincidental, nor incidental to the spread of the early Christian Church.
According to The Catholic Encyclopedia, the Greeks strongly responded to Christianity for its moral beauty as well as its truth. A case in point is St. Justin Martyr. He was a man of Greek culture, born in Palestinian Syria about the year 100 A.D, who converted to the faith around 130 A.D. Justin became one of Christianity’s earliest and most powerful apologists, and ended up condemned by the Roman authority for refusing to sacrifice to the pagan gods, for which offense he was summarily executed by the Imperium, along with several other of his “refusnik” co-religionists. The official record of their martyrdom is extant:
“The Prefect Rusticus says: Approach and sacrifice, all of you, to the gods. Justin says: No one in his right mind gives up piety for impiety. The Prefect Rusticus says: If you do not obey, you will be tortured without mercy. Justin replies: That is our desire, to be tortured for Our Lord Jesus, and so to be saved, for that will give us salvation and firm confidence at the more terrible universal tribunal of Our Lord and Saviour. And all the martyrs said: Do as you wish; for we are Christians, and we do not sacrifice to idols. The Prefect Rusticus read the sentence: Those who do not wish to sacrifice to the gods and to obey the emperor will be scourged and beheaded according to the laws. The holy martyrs glorifying God betook themselves to the customary place, where they were beheaded and consummated their martyrdom confessing their Saviour.”
Jules Lebreton writes (at the entry for St. Justin Martyr in Cath. Encycl.) “Justin tries to trace a real bond between philosophy and Christianity: according to him, both one and the other have a part in the Logos, partially disseminated among men and wholly manifest in Jesus Christ.”
Yet for all their apparent similarities and resemblances in many respects, there is a profound difference between Platonic insight and the Christian one: and this pertains to the relations between God and man.
Both Plato and Justin proclaim the transcendent God. Yet for Plato, God is so “beyond” as to be almost impossible of human grasp. Yet Plato felt the “divine pulls” in his own nature. These Plato thought could be accounted for and articulated by an act of pure unaided intellect, that is by nous, in a state of intense contemplation.
Contrast this position with Justin Martyr’s, who insisted that human wisdom was impossible without the testimony of the Prophets (whom God himself had informed and instructed) and the action of the Holy Spirit. For Plato, man’s relations with God consist of operations of the mind. For Justin, they are operations of the heart, of the Spirit. For Justin, God is not a mental abstraction: He is real Personality with whom one can have direct personal relations, in the Spirit.
A later writer, John Scotus Eriugina (ninth century) elaborates the Justinian position, in the process noting that there is a “downward tendency” of the soul towards the conditions of animal existence, and that this has only one remedy: Divine grace, the free gift of the Holy Spirit. “By means of this heavenly gift,” writes William Turner [at the entry for Scotus in the Catholic Encyclopedia], “man is enabled to rise superior to the needs of the sensuous body, to place the demands of reason above those of bodily appetite, and from reason to ascend through contemplation to ideas, and thence by intuition to God Himself.”
The pull of animal nature is an idea we also find in Plato, and also the countervailing pull from the divine Beyond. Man lives in the metaxy, in the “in-between reality” constituted by the two. Man’s task is to resolve this tension, and establish the proper balance that expresses the highest and best development of his human nature. But man must do this entirely by himself by means of nous or reason. There is no spiritual help “extra” to the human psyche available to facilitate this process.
In contrast, as Lebreton points out, Justin Martyr
“…admits that the soul can naturally comprehend what God is, just as it understands that virtue is beautiful … but he denies that the soul without the assistance of the Holy Ghost [Spirit] can see God or contemplate him directly through ecstasy, as the Platonic philosophers contended. And yet this knowledge of God is necessary for us: ‘We cannot know God as we know music, arithmetic, or astronomy’; it is necessary for us to know God not with an abstract knowledge but as we know any person with whom we have relations. The problem which it seems impossible to solve is settled by revelation; God has spoken directly to the Prophets, who in their turn have made Him known to us…. It is the first time in Christian theology that we find so concise an explanation of the difference that separates Christian revelation from human speculation.” [Emphasis added]
* * * * * *
Natural Law, Contingency, and the Scientific Method
The Platonic model encourages us to recognize that the universe is zoon empsychon ennoun, a living creature endowed with soul and intelligence. The myth of the Demiurge describes the world process as a type of incarnation, a dynamic relation of absolute being and contingent becoming evolving in space and time in a manner expressing a perduring taxia–ataxia relation. The Cosmos itself — the totality of all existing things — like its constituents, for example man and even the stars, is an eikon of being-in-becoming, a reflection or image of the divine Idea. Time itself is but a “moving image of eternity.” The life of the cosmos is wholly dependent, contingent on the Idea from which it manifests.
It is a lawful, orderly universe, yet one in which new occurrences are always arising. These new events are coming from, as it were, a “sea of contingency” analogous to Plato’s conception of Space, that is Chora — the infinite field of unformed, pure potentiality.
The immediately foregoing ideas, of course, are not scientific ones strictly speaking. Still, there are elements here that perhaps science would do well to consider, in order to maintain the integrity of its own method. For one thing, it seems science itself, in its disclosure of the regularities of nature, seems to have an in-built tendency to overlook contingency. We may define an event as contingent if a description of it is neither self-evident nor necessary, “if it could have happened differently,” as Ted Peters puts it in his Preface to Pannenberg’s Towards a Theology of Nature.
C. A. Dubray writes [“Teleology,” Cath. Encycl.], “The fact that the world is governed by laws, far from giving any support to the mechanistic conception, is rather opposed to it. A law is not a cause, but the expression of the constant manner in which causes produce their effects.” In other words, natural laws are expressions of observable regularities that occur in the world of existent phenomena in ordinary space-time reality. Thus, the laws themselves have no force as “causes”: they are descriptions.
Yet the focus on regularity inevitably masks the particularity and contingency of unique events. As Ted Peters notes, it is here that “we run into a problem of focus in the scientific community, because virtually all the theoretical attention is given to the regularity of nature’s laws, while the contingency of natural events slips into the nearly invisible background.” Peters continues:
“What researchers concentrate on are the uniformities that can be expressed in timeless equations. A dictionary of equations describing these uniformities allegedly constitutes scientific knowledge…. A closer examination, however, reveals that the applicability of these equations to concrete cases of natural processes requires certain initial and marginal conditions, conditions that in every case are contingent. Only when contingent conditions permit can we expect a natural law to operate as expected.”
To the extent that the scientific method of inquiry is premised on an “If/Then” logical construction — which seems ever to be the case — the method itself is an exercise in contingency, yet nonetheless one in which “Determinacy gets thematized, whereas contingency gets ignored.” Arguably this is a serious bias having epistemological implications; for e.g., “if the laws of classical dynamics are in principle temporally reversible, the actual course of natural events from which those laws have been abstracted is not. The reality of nature is first and foremost a historical reality.”
Pannenberg suggests a corrective for this “bias,” acknowledging: “That modern science so easily lends itself to abuse cannot be prevented in principle. It is one of the risks involved in the abstract study of regularities that either are inherent in nature itself or can be imposed on natural processes [e.g., as in ideological, technical, or engineering solutions]. This risk cannot be met on the level of scientific description itself but must be met first on the level of philosophical reflection on the work of science. It is on this level that the abstract form of scientific description must be considered with special attention to what it is “abstracted from” and what is methodically disregarded in the abstract formulas of science.”
And so contingent conditions — i.e, initial and boundary conditions — must be restored to their proper place in our deliberations, for they “are required for any formula of natural law to be applied. They are contingent at least in that they cannot be derived from the particular formula of law under consideration.… The mathematical formula of a natural law may be valid without regard to time. The physical regularity that is described by such a formula is not independent of time and temporal sequence. But it is only that physical regularity which makes the mathematical formula a law of nature. This suggests that the laws of nature are not eternal or atemporal because the fields of their application, the regularities of natural processes, originate in the course of time. Thus it also becomes understandable that new patterns of regularity emerging in the sequence of time constitute a field of application for a new set of natural laws….”
We may recognize that the total process of natural events presents itself to observation as a mesh of contingency and regularities. It is the task of science to pursue thematically the aspect of regularity. But, asks Pannenberg, can science “ever succeed in bringing into view the entirety of nature as determined in all details by a number of laws that are in any case not infinitely complex? This would mean at the same time that a stage of research is conceivable from which nothing more could be discovered. Many natural scientists have had this nightmare because of the successes of their own research. Fortunately it probably is not a truthful dream.”
For, says Pannenberg, “laws always uncover what is necessary superimposed on what is contingent. Given the undeniable contingency of occurrences in natural events, can we recognize in their special character as occurrences … [that] regularity as their own element in such a way that the presence of regularity can be thought together with the contingency of occurrences, not only under abstraction from the contingency of occurrences?” [Emphasis added]
Which is why Pannenberg advocates an opening up of new viewpoints in scientific research, “not because physical hypotheses or insights can be derived from them but because they open up and enlarge the intellectual space on which the formation of physical hypotheses depends…. In physics also, horizons of questioning have to be opened up first of all in order that hypotheses that arise in them can be examined by experiment and classified theoretically.”
Perhaps we need a greater appreciation of the “fitness” of the scientific method to engage the truly great questions of life, which ever seem to involve the relations of law and contingency. Leibniz propounds two great questions of perennial interest to the human mind: (1) Why are things the way they are and not some other way? (2) Why does anything exist at all?
Such questions, scientists will readily tell you, are beyond the purview of the scientific method. But does that mean such questions have no force or meaning such that they should not be asked at all?
Perhaps the incapability of the scientific method to answer such questions owes to the fact that all the great physical laws are acknowledged to be time-reversible; but we know that existence in space and time is not a time-reversible process. As Pannenberg states, it is a historical process. We might even say it is an evolutionary process.
Which suggests an analogy that might enlighten these questions, sharpen their meanings, and suggest additional questions: an analogy to direct human experience. Pannenberg writes of human beings, who do seem to live in a “time-irreversible,” that is “historical” process:
“Human beings never live only in the now. Rather, they experience their present as heirs of the past and as its active change. They anticipate the future in fear, hope, and planning; and in the light of such anticipation of the future they return to their present and the heritage of their past. The fact that we know of historical continuity is at least also conditioned by this peculiarity of human experience with time. If there is a new event, then it modifies the context of our consciousness of time which is already found present. It throws light back on earlier occurrences which have become a part of our experience already. In the same way, ideas that occur to us throw light on our previous expectations and plans in justifying, fulfilling, modifying, or disappointing and thwarting them. Thus the contingent event always enters already into a context of experience or tradition…. The future, beginning in the present happenings, is thus the origin of the perspective in which the past occurrences are put by every new experience.”
Worldviews and Paradigm Shifts
It is perhaps a truism that we tend to find what we’re looking for by screening out any and all potential elements which do not fit the pattern of our expectation. Arguably, the scientific method may be said inherently to suffer exposure to potential danger from this side, as suggested in the above remarks. Indeed, Schröedinger’s theory of wavefunction seems to predict this. Consider these remarks from Stephen M. Barr [Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, 2003]:
“In quantum theory, as traditionally formulated, there are ‘systems’ and ‘observers.’ Or rather, in any particular case, there is the system and the observer. The observer makes measurements of the system. As long as the system is undisturbed by external influences (that is, as long as it is ‘isolated’), its wavefunction — which is to say its probability amplitudes — will evolve in time by the Schröedinger equation…. However, when a measurement is made of the system the observer must obtain a definite outcome. Suddenly, the probability for the outcome that is actually obtained is no longer what the mathematics said it was just before the measurement, but jumps to 100 percent. And the probabilities for all the alternative outcomes, the ones that did not occur, fall to 0 percent.”
Thus we might say that the “reality” we humans experience ever involves “a moving goal-post.” And as the mover of this goal-post, the human agent is most indispensably involved in this process.
Faced with such “indeterminacy” regarding the foundations of experience, it is not surprising that people usually have recourse to mediating worldviews, or organized frames of ideational reality that constitute the conceptual space in which active experience is engaged and accordingly analyzed and interpreted. Certainly Plato has offered such a model. And so has Nobel laureate Jacques Monod [in Chance and Necessity, 1971]:
“Chance alone is the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, is at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution. The central concept of biology … is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one compatible with observed and tested fact. All forms of life are the product of chance….”
Needless to say, these two models are polar opposite conceptualizations. Yet having received each on “good authority,” which do we choose?
Such are not idle considerations; for as James Hannam points out [“The Development of Scientific and Religious Ideas,” 2003], “grand theories … often suffer death by detail where it is found that up close the situation is too complicated for the theory to handle…. [Yet] in the end, after it has changed the course of the river of enquiry, the theory can end up as a mortlake cut off from the general flow….”
Hannam cites historian Thomas Kuhn, who documents an historical process he terms “paradigm shift,” describing a situation in which the findings of authoritative science move “out of science and into practically every other field of human endeavor.” Once a given, albeit partial or even defective theory becomes “dominant,” writes Hannam, “far from being thrown out, a falsified theory is enhanced to deal with new information until such time as it finally collapses under the weight of anomalous results. Then, after a chaotic period, a new theory emerges that can deal with the anomalies and normal service resumes…. A paradigm refers to but one field, say classical mechanics or health policy whereas the ideology/worldview is the general background that underpins all the paradigms.”
The worldview (or ideology, if you prefer), for better or worse, implicitly shapes the background knowledge of thinking agents to which new experiences constantly are being conformed. Hannam says that worldview “is often so deeply embedded in the psyche that it is very rarely considered explicitly except by specialists,” but that nonetheless, “the worldview is seen as [a] self-confirming fact of life and hence it is not strictly rational…. The existence of a dominant worldview does not mean that a particular individual is unable to think outside the box but rather that his ideas are unlikely to fall on fertile ground. Unless new ideas can be stated in a language that makes them comprehensible to his peers, his intention in writing will not be met.”
Which is the not-too-subtle way to put the fact that every man has a worldview, without exception, whether articulate or inarticulate; and that somehow, for the “intention of writing to be met” — that is, for accurate and meaningful (i.e., successful) communication of ideas to take place — some deeper, common ground of shared truth must first be accessed, for the purpose of providing a more capacious intellectual space in which the human pursuit of knowledge and wisdom might unfold or evolve from its present point of attainment.
But where today in our modern world is such a common ground or field to be found? Hannam proposes the examination of the history of ideas as a possibly useful method in the search for common ground. He writes,
“To examine the history of ideas the only fair way to proceed would seem to place before ourselves the evidence and authority that the historical agents had before them and assume they acted rationally on that basis. Otherwise, there is no hope of ever tracing intellectual development because ‘cause and effect’ assumes some sort of logical causality that is impossible with non-rational agents. The best that could be hoped for would be a catalog of mental positions, with no way to say how one led to another except by being pushed by blind exterior forces. This might be precisely what determinists are advocating but they would have to give up any hope of finding causes and restrict themselves to explanations.”
Perhaps we moderns would do well to reconsider the common assumption that people living before our own time were somehow inferior in knowledge, experience, and observational powers as compared with our own status as enlightened individuals. Arguably, the ancient world produced some of the most powerful thinkers in the history of mankind, formulating ideas that were, in the words of Hannam, “the fruits of unfettered metaphysical speculation that inevitably hits on the right answer occasionally.”
Democritus, for example, proposed a theory predicting the atom as the ultimate constituent of matter, more than two-thousand years before the technical means existed to isolate atoms experimentally or, as Hannam notes, any “useful applications for them” could be found. Then it was discovered that the atom itself is an ordered constellation of even finer parts. There seems to be an historical progression of ideas here, the new building up on a framework originally laid up in the past, modifying it, improving on it in light of new insights and technical capabilities.
Hannam gives another example of more recent vintage: “Copernicus needed Nicole Oresme’s solution as to why we do not feel the movement of the Earth even though in Oresme’s time it was just a curiosity as no one thought the Earth actually was moving … each new idea, once accepted, shifts the boundaries of the worldview and makes it possible for further new ideas to be accepted into the pale.”
We can extend the examples even further. Reimann constructed a geometry, apparently because his mind could grasp the logic and beauty it revealed for its own sake. But at the time, it had no apparent “external referent” in the field of nature. It was a beautiful and glorious abstraction — until Einstein came along, and picked it up “off the shelf” as it were, to become the very language of relativity theory.
Thus it might be said that the evolution or “progress” of science depends on successive enlargements of the conceptual space it requires to do its work. In other words, science inherently is a participation in the historicity of the world.
Whatever our personal worldview, perhaps it would be well to recall that science is an historical process. Perhaps this understanding could open up additional, needed conceptual space that science itself requires in order to advance.
Are you saying I'm slow? I am so not speaking to you.
marron: And, as you point out, separate the parts from one another, or separate them from their control device, and whatever else they are, alive they are not.... Typically, also, cells that work in concert with other cells have a means of organizing themselves, which is to say communications, either with those adjacent cells, or with another higher control device, or probably both.
It seems to me that people over the ages understand a clear distinction between life and death. Historically, the dead bodies of human relatives are not left to decompose – but are dispatched with reverence. Usually, people don’t bury the living or set a place at the table for the dead at family gatherings.
Therefore, the denial of a bright line between life and death (or non-life) seems to me like taking a bazooka to biology whether one believes it or not - hence my bantering posts. There remains much to discuss regardless of the position of an advocate, but hopefully this little 100 post sidebar has revealed some of the consequences of the assertion.
On the one hand, when the advocate accepts there is no bright line, then the subject of life and death – or life and non-life - is outside the reach of science. It is theology, philosophy or metaphysics. Therefore, there can be no credible scientific theory of abiogenesis. And, applied to the geological record as the continuum, the fallacy of quantizing a continuum authenticates the position that the theory of evolution is capricious.
On the other hand, by accepting there is a bright line, then the difference as you say is information (Shannon: communication) – which is a phenomenon without a known origin in space/time. Some expect an origin will be found. Some will identify the information with harmonics in the universe, or perhaps a universal vacuum field or mathematical structures in parallel universes. Such positions do not broach metaphysics and are compatible with most Judeo/Christian theology and philosophy.
At the end of the day, it is revealing that a person’s answer concerning life and death is both part of his spiritual compass and also his compass for science. (1 Timothy 6:20)
No clearly defined boundary doesn't mean no distinction. Two (actually from real work) examples: one may have several (for example 3) sets of measurements with the result that:
The mean of set A is not significantly larger than that of B.
The mean of set B is not significantly larger than that of C.
The mean of set A is significantly larger than that of C
A second example is a table of "random" numbers (for example, bits). (It's not clear that such a thing exists, but the "A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates" from Rand was used successfully for years.) Again, I'm assuming the Abnormal Deviates were taken by Eyegor and given to Doktor Frankensteeeen. The question is, if one number is changed in a table of random numbers, is the table still random? The answer would seem to be yes. Of course still "yes" for two, or three changes; but what about changeing half or even all the numbers? At the exremes, the table appears either random or completely structured. It's not clear that there is a specific number of changes that make the difference.
I would like to (randomly?) amplify the stuff in post 665.
More effort is spent in reducting randomness or uncertainty than in amplifying it. (In general only for simulation or cryptography or sampling, etc. does one want more uncertainty.)
One obvious method to reduce uncertainty is to measure with more precise instruments.
A less obvious method (which can sometimes be used when the previous idea fails) is to average values. Under some technical conditions (finite variance or satisfyint the Lindeberg-Feller conditions, for example), an average is a better estimate of the "center" of a distribution of values than is any individual value. Bigger samples also yield smaller uncertainties which is why political pollsters try for big samples.
Good example: in a sample from a normal distribution (a "bell curve" for those with degrees in Education); the sample average is a better estimate for the center than any individual.
Borderline counterexample: in a sample from a Cauchy distribution (the distribution of brightness from a flashlight that shines on an wall), the sample average is no better than any single sample as an estimate of the center. This is a strange distribution with undefined mean and infinite variance.
Really ugly counterexample: take a sample from a normal distribution and for each item take its reciprocal. The sample average is much worse than any single sample value as an estimate of the center.
The point is, the "rules and procedures" for working with uncertainty are not always obvious or simple. Intuition must be developed. Trick question: what is the probability of gettin HH in a series of coin throws before getting TH?
I do appreciate what you are saying, but in this discussion of splitting rocks, it must be noted that there is no such thing as a table of random numbers – since all the numbers are the effect of a cause, whatever that might be – algorithm, tossing of die, your ingenuity, even Brownian motion. (based on Wolfram’s response to Chaitin’s Omega)
From the frog’s perspective (Tegmark) that observation makes no difference – the table of evidently random numbers could just appear in his timeline. But from the bird’s perspective, there is nothing random at all.
Yours is a tipping point example, much like Schrödinger’s cat with greater obscurity. Schrödinger gives us two choices, dead cat/live cat – but you suggest a tipping point in the eye of the beholder.
I counter that at the root, what is obscure or distinctive is a mathematical structure to the observer, i.e. the answer depends on whether the observer is a frog or a bird. The bird would see a distinctive tipping point which the frog could not see.
Nevertheless, frog or bird, I would suggest that the question the frog could ask is: what is the Kolmogorov complexity of the unaltered table? If it is a low complexity, then what he would observe to be a range of tipping possibilities is knowably false from his frogness view. If it is a high complexity, he’ll have to ask the bird.
Very interesting. I wonder if any dialogue can bring DS's last into the vicinity of yours. If I follow the outline, his enumerations suggests that naive experience is not sufficent for the determination of life non-life, that (according to one poster) we really ought to put such fallacious determinations out of the reach of science, but that perhaps intuition and precision of tools might still raise the certainty wherein lies the truth (according to another poster).
And, what consequence follows from accepting this big gap between certainty and naive experience. And, who has set for us the bar for certainty?
OK, "this big gap between certainty and naive experience" would then be the distance between said frog and bird.
25%
Thanks for your insight, as always!
Bingo. Of course the "seemingly" symetrical HT is 50%.
And to help the lurkers develop their intuition: divide a circle (circumference, not disk) in to two parts with two randomly chosen (in angle) points. A: what is the average length of the segments? B: what is the average length of the segment that contains the origin?
Among mathematicians the difference in worldview (Aristotle v Plato) is fundamental and in the eyes of many if not most, irreconcilable. Einstein and Gödel argued it, Penrose and Hawking argued it. Tegmark’s metaphor of the frog and the bird is helpful to understand the difference.
Even though many mathematicians aver to be Aristotlean (frogish) – in my view, they must be at least a little bit Platonist (birdish) to have made it through high school geometry. If r stands for radius – the equation is not going to work if one lets r also stand for circumference.
The bottom line in math then is whether the mathematical structures themselves actually exist (Platonist view). Did the mathematician discover pi or invent it?
Personally, I doubt that Riemann spent much time fretting whether his geometry was real, but along came Einstein. Ditto for mirror symmetry and dualities. This bizarre relationship between math and the physical world is a stunner to the likes of Max Tegmark, Cumrun Vafa, Roger Penrose and the bird. But to others like Hawking and the frog it either doesn't exist or it's a yawner.
Hopefully, as you say, others will come to the table. Count me in.
LOL! I’m probably not quite “ready for prime time” here, Alamo-Girl. But I have been doing a lot of thinking about js1138’s question lately – which essentially drives to the problem of life vs. non-life -- so will hazard a reply. It is not my aim to construct a doctrine, or even to propose a theory. I just want to continue in Alamo-Girl’s method, which is to try to gain consensus (or refutation) on relevant points and to build out from there.
It seems that to say there is no such thing as a non-living system in nature is to make a very bold claim. How to validate it? Unfortunately, it appears that, to do that, we must first engage in the struggle for a definition of life. And the only way to do that, it seems to me, is by specifying what basic attributes or features a living system must possess. For to “define” something is to reduce it to its essential, characteristic terms. Here is my proposal:
According to Ervin Bauer (Theoretical Biology, 1935/1967), living systems are characterized by the following:
(1) Living systems preeminently have the characteristic that they are never in thermodynamic equilibrium and, supported by a free energy reservoir, are able to continuously invest work against the realization of the equilibrium that would otherwise set in, given prevailing outer conditions on the basis of the physical and chemical laws. That is, they do not just radiate entropic entropy away into the environmental “sink”; they are able to store it for use to perform “work against the realization of the equilibrium.”
(2) Living systems are strongly spontaneous systems. Bauer writes, “It is typical for every living system that they show spontaneous changes in their states which are not elicited by causes [that are] external to the living system.” Thus they exemplify the quality of emergence.
(3) Living systems are strongly and sensitively responsive systems. That means they are not only able to recognize inputs streaming in from their external environments, but also inputs triggered by internal systemic changes – and can adjust/adapt their internal (and external) activity in ways that preserve themselves as far away from thermodynamic equilibrium (i.e., “heat death”) as possible.
(4) Living systems are “self-organizing systems,” regulated or “ordered” from the global level. Any “macroscopic” living system is composed of a great number and variety of other living systems – cells tissues, organs, etc. Global governance is required for the control, adaptation, regulation, and communication of the subsystems with each other, and also individually and collectively with the global system – all of which conduces to the organic unity and perdurance of the global system itself.
Given these criteria, it seems that Doc’s rocks “don’t make the cut.”
The criteria strongly suggest that living systems are “information processors,” that “successful communication” to and among all their internal states must take place instantaneously in order for (1) to (4) result. This suggests a couple of things in turn: (a) living systems are integrated by an EM or other type of field that can unify the global (macroscopic) collaborative effort required to preserve the living state; and (b) that even the most simple living system must possess at least an elementary form of consciousness – awareness or basic sentience. For the successful utilization of communicated biological information entails the ability to “learn” and “decide,” based on “the reduction of uncertainty in the receiver,” thus to choose or select the proper outcomes that facilitate (1) through (4).
Now (b) above is indeed speculative, and has ever been so. For from the ancient world we know that human beings have speculated about the relationship of being and consciousness; some have tended to identify the two. I know that cornelis is aware of the history of this question. I don’t know the answer myself, but do notice that there seems to be a necessary correlation of being (i.e, life) and consciousness that everywhere indicates the presence of a system that is “alive.”
Now the question whether everything that exists is alive in some fashion is another matter that has enjoyed a long history in human speculation. Generally, the question can be answered affirmatively on the supposition that the entire Cosmos is “alive.” Which brings us back to our earlier consideration of an “evolution of a population of one.” If the universe itself is a living system – that is, manifests the (1) to (4) criteria – then we might be able to say that all of its subsystems, organic and inorganic, are “alive” in some fashion – including Doc’s rocks.
But I think to say this is to lose some important distinctions about the nature of life. Let’s make a thought experiment and see whether we can clarify this assertion.
Let’s say we trundle up to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, with a 12-pound cannonball and a live albatross in hand, which we will throw over the side and then see what happens. We don’t know how much the albatross weighs; but as Galileo has already demonstrated, it doesn’t matter. If we toss the cannonball and the albatross over the side at exactly the same moment, then as Galileo has shown, both will hit the ground at exactly the same moment.
But in our thought experiment, this result does not occur. For once cast away, the albatross will sink, but then very soon it will make a “course correction” (e.g., by modifying its internal boundary conditions, such a the trim of flight feathers, and innumerable other fine-tunings a bird must do to be in a flight posture) and fly away: It will not hit the ground at all.
Of course, if it were a dead albatross, both the cannonball and the bird would hit the ground at the same time. But this is what we do not observe in the living case.
I guess the “moral of this story” is this: the 12-pound cannonball is a physical system whose state and outcomes are entirely dependent on the physical laws. There is something about the living albatross, however, that can act against the occurrence of the outcome predicted by the physical laws. And I would say that “something” is the very crux of the distinction between a living and a non-living system.
I propose the difference consists in the successful communication of biological information. There may well be such a thing as a “life principle,” which governs the application of the least action (i.e., conservation) principle of the physical laws in living systems, and living systems alone.
And this seems reasonable to expect; for if living systems are “information processors,” then we have to look at possible candidate sources for the information. From the standpoint of Kolmogorov complexity, the information content of the physical laws is very low. Further, calculations and estimates have been done that strongly suggest DNA itself is “too information poor” to be the source of biological information. So, where is the information source?
As Alamo-Girl has pointed out (and I certainly agree with her), there is no known source of biological information within the 4D spacetime block.
Must leave the problem there for now. Please share your thoughts with me?
ping
As you have well described, there is a readily apparent distinction between life and non-life within the universe. That thought extends to a readily apparent distinction between life and death. The cut is at the point of which governs a corporeal entity: physical laws, in particular thermodynamics - or successful communication (Shannon information).
The indicators include the mystery of the asymmetry between matter and anti-matter, the physical constants and physical laws.
In a big bang, both matter and anti-matter would be created equally and annihilate one another in a burst of gamma radiation. But the universe is full of matter. Science accounts for some of this by a difference in decay rates of b-Meson v anti-b-Mesons but the question remains whether that is sufficient to explain the asymmetry. Even if it were, the difference itself – as in the values of the physical constants – and the workings of the physical laws would have to be “just so” in order for biological life to emerge. Even the slightest variance, and there is no biological life. In many cases, a slight variance also means no universe at all.
This raises the question whether the universe have a will to live or if it is willed to live by its Creator, i.e. the uncaused cause of a beginning.
But if the universe is aggressively or willfully engaged in bringing forth and sustaining life we should also expect to see some evidence of information in the universe (self-organizing or self-contained) or at least a residue of communications having occurred, presuming that the will is God’s and not the creature’s. We actually do see evidence of sound waves in the early universe and vibrations of strings in string theory. Perhaps that is some of the evidence we seek.
But what we do not (yet) see is the full Shannon-Weaver information model in the universe that we do see in the biological, the molecular machinery: the reduction of uncertainty in the receiver, communications consisting of message, source, encoder, channel, decoder, receiver.
So if the universe is governed by a life principle, it is not exactly the same as biological life. The distinction between (biological) life and non-life, life and death remains.
BTW, I am thinking about posting a new thread to divert traffic concerning the ramifications of what we have been addressing here to the theory of evolution so this thread will not be inadvertently taken into a sidebar debate. What do you think?
I think I will happily follow your lead, Alamo-Girl!
Thank you for your splendid post! You suggest that the evolution of biological life must be considered within the framework of the evolution of the universe as a whole. And I think this an extraordinarily important insight. So if in your judgment a clearer focus on this problem can be gained in a separate, new thread, then I'm all for it.
Thank you ever so much for writing, dear Alamo-Girl.
I was thinking about any sidebars that might emerge over the validity of the theory of evolution itself with regard to our previous sidebar on the fallacy of quantizing the continuum. Evolution debates tend to consume threads and I'm hoping this discussion stays on target.
I'm thinking if anyone wishes to return to that topic, then I'll kick off a separate thread - as long as that's ok with you.
I'm essentially only lurking here, but I don't see the need for a whole new thread over that. The fallacy of quantizing the continuum can be applicable in difficult cases of classifying certain species, because the boundries get fuzzy due to [gasp!] common descent and incomplete speciation. But I don't think that needs to be much of a distraction. Just something to keep in mind.
If the fallacy may apply (or be mentioned) in borderline cases of distinguishing between something living and not living, it would be relevant to this thread.
Your definition of a living system would include a lot of mechanical and electronic devices. Certainly it would include the internet. In an attempt to be both abstract and bulletproof, something has been overlooked.
I have not tried to assert that matter is alive in any biological sense. I simply assert that there is no difference between living an non-living matter. Obviously the structure and behavior of biological systems will differ from non-biological things.
It seems to me it would be more fruitful to identify the specific processes associated with life and the required structures for engaging in those processes. The less abstract your list, the more useful for suggesting research.
If the fallacy is not asserted with regard to the theory of evolution on this thread then indeed, the thread is not at risk of being derailed.
The assertion of the fallacy with regard to abiogenesis has already killed further investigation of that theory.
I doubt if it will be raised in a discussion of the life principle - because the continuum is not being quantized here, at least not the way betty boop is approaching it. Which is to say, she is not looking for a specific tipping point of non-life to life or life to death but rather a description of the difference.
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