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.
I've debunked several of your bogus quotes already, although of course you haven't been forthright enough to acknowledge it. Whatever insane website you're getting that material from has obviously endeared itself to you, and that website's demonstrated distortions somehow have more legitimacy to your mind than the original texts from which those distorted quotes are taken, notwithstanding that the originals often say the opposite of what your out-of-context snippets claim. Play your games with someone else. This is just too tiresome.
It only fails with those who embrace Darwin's religios dogma like those named here
Intellectually honest people who don't embrace the blind-faith macroevolutionary religion, and don't worship at the altar of Darwin, and who have been noticing my interaction with you on these threads, know better. The opinions of the others don't count.
Are your comrades really as blind as all that? Have they seen your bogus quotes demolished here (post 466), and here (post 474), and here (post 486)? And still they "know better"? What is there to know, except that you post nonsense from nonsense websites? Oh yes, there is one more thing for them to know:
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If that's where we're going next, I'm on-board. :^) And will wait patiently to see what develops.
So glad to hear about the success of the Longhorns!!! Congratulations, Texas!!!
We folks in Boston have been so blessed in our (non-collegiate) sports teams of late. So I understand and am so glad for your happiness!
There's a mini-industry on the internet, trying to keep up with all the bogus quotes these people sling around:
Quotations and Misquotations.What Anti- evolutionists Quote is Not Valid Evidence Against Evolution
Online resources documenting anti- evolutionist misquotations. Dishonest, bogus, and out-of-context quotes.
The Quote Mine Project. Or, Lies, Damned Lies and Quote Mines.
The Revised Quote Book. Looking at how Creationists Quote Evolutionists.
I might save your link, I suppose I should, but I really don't have the time to spend on that stuff. Besides, they don't change their behavior, no matter how many times their lies are exposed.
I'm very glad you are in agreement for the next step in the research. At the moment the thread appears to be in a different discussion. So I shall sit back and wait to see if it returns to the prior project, i.e. there's little point in doing heavy research which might be lost in traffic.
But until next year I will be glad that Texas had a good showing in the Rose bowl.
Thank you for the encouragements!
StJacques: "You know, I really hate to use the kind of language I must now resort to in response to this claim. But I'm afraid I must. The quote italicized above is an outright lie." I will quote Tommy Huxley's refutation of Hank Hanegraaff's charge that Sagan supported recapitulation: .... [snip]"
Heeeeeeeeeers little Tommy Huxley LIVE on the air:
Excerpt:
Hank: Well let me give you Carl Sagan. Not long before ago before he died, he was on CNBC with another prodigious intellect, uh… Phil Donahue. And the two of them were talking about ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Right on the program!
Tommy: Yes.
Hank: As though it was some kind of proven fact! Even though it has been demonstrated to be a fatal hoax for years, yet they were on television extolling its virtues! And there you have the entire human evolutionary history being … ha, ha, ha … recapitulated over and over again with every single person as it starts in the, uh, womb, as a, uh, fish, and becomes a frog, and eventually becomes a, uh… a fetus!
Tommy: And Carl Sagan said this?
Hank: Yeah! Right on CNBC!
Tommy: Because I have his last book, Billions and Billions, which has a reprint of an article…
Hank: Well, the fact that he has cognitive disconnect shouldn't bother you in the least.
Tommy: Well, he had a rather long… he had a rather long thing to discuss about recapitulation. And he didn't seem to embrace it at all. In fact…
Hank: Well, you ought to get my book and look at the footnotes.
Tommy: Okay. For instance, in the article he said, "Our article offered not a word about recapitulation, as the reader may judge…" He's talking about embryology. "The comparisons of the human fetus with other adult animals are based on the appearance of the fetus (see accompanying illustrations). Its non-human form [or appearance], [says] nothing about its evolutionary history, is the…
Hank: Have you read his Dragons of Eden?
Tommy: No, I have not read that one…
Hank: You might want to take an opportunity to read Carl Sagan, in… in context!
Tommy: Okay.
Hank: And look at the footnotes of my book. That will help you out a lot as well.
Tommy: Okay, I'll…
Hank: I'm simply repeating what THEY say publicly and in writing. And, and… by the way, there should be no exoneration for anyone in an age of scientific enlightenment taking tired old theories that have been utterly demolished and communicating them as though they were truth to gullible children in school, as well as, unfortunately, to adults in universities.
Tommy: Well, I was kind of surprised that Carl Sagan would say that because if you've read any of his books, he places an enormous emphasis on the history of scientific…
Hank: Get the Dragons of Eden, and read it! If you know anything about Carl Sagan, you ought to read Dragons of Eden. He was very proud of it.
Tommy: Okay.
Hank: And go read it!
Tommy: I know that Stephen Jay Gould wrote a whole book in 1977 attacking recapitulation called…
Hank: That's right, I quote that, I quote him, and I quote that book substantially.
Tommy: Well, do you feel…
Hank: And that's why I, uh, not only exonerate him, but quote him as decrying the inherent evils of recapitulation.
Tommy: Are you a… that that's a common belief in the evolutionary scientific literature that recapitulation still takes place? Because every book I've looked at, again, when I go to the local bookstore, if they mention it at all, it's just to critique it and say that it was debunked in the 1920s.
Hank: Well, that's right, it has been debunked in the 1920s, but it's still taught in textbooks in the State of California, my friend. And not only that, but, uh, like I say, there are prodigious intellects like Sagan and Donahue, who are touting it on, uh, television, or the, um, scientifically illiterate. ..."
Tommy Debates the Bible Answer man By Tommy Huxley Posted on: 4/20/2002
Good guess. I suggest we just ignore the silly stuff and proceed with the adult conversation.
>>>>>StJacques: "Thanks for citing that source Matchett. It helps to make clear two recurring creationist tactics; deliberately restating scientific arguments incorrectly so as to create a "straw man," i.e. "misquoting" per Patrick's earlier post, and silencing expert opinion when it reveals fraudulent creationist logic. That's exactly what we see."<<<<<<
Thanks for citing a Huxley as your source StJacques. Your source seems to be carrying on in the great tradition of some of his ancesters and doesn't even appear to be embarrassed that several of his relatives / great-great-grandfathers said (tip of the iceberg) stuff like this:
"No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average Negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man... It is simply incredible [to think] that ... he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not bites." ~ Thomas Huxley Darwin's best student - and the man who coined the term "agnostic" and was the man most responsible for advancing macroevolution (Darwinianism)"
"In the evolutionary system of thought there is no longer any need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created; it evolved. So did all the animals and plants that inhabit it, including our human selves, mind and soul, as well as brain and body. So did religion. Evolutionary man can no longer take refuge from his loneliness by creeping for shelter into the arms of a divinized father figure whom he himself has created." ~ Sir Julian Huxley, great-grandson of Thomas Huxley.
"...I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed it had none, and was able without difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. ..For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. ..." ~ Aldous Huxley, brother of Sir Julian Huxley [Ends and Means]
And your source helps to make clear two recurring tactics of the Darwinian Religious Left; deliberately restating creationist arguments http://www.skepticfriends.org/forum/showquestion.asp?faq=4&fldAuto=63 incorrectly so as to create a "strawman", ie: "quoting-out-of-context" as Patrick does here - http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1310267/posts?page=196#196 - and silencing expert opinion when it reveals fraudulent macroevolutionist logic. That's exactly what we see.
>>>>>StJacques: "And to others on this thread who have approached these topics with the best of intentions and full intellectual honesty, rest assured that I do not view you in the same light as Matchett. I am guessing Patrick feels the same way." <<<<<
And to those on this thread who have approached these topics either full of ignorance and misinformation that comes from embracing the dogma of what mathematician Dr. David Berlinski called "the last of the great 19th century mystery religions", but with the best of intentions and full intellectual honesty --- or those with the worst of intentions, such as those espoused by the three Huxleys quoted above, I say: You know who you are, and you know into which catagory you fall.
Rest assured that how, or in what light anyone views you personally is immaterial to the issues under discussion. I don't have to guess that those who have the courage to face reality and truth will not care one whit how someone "feels" about it.
This axiom is true: "Ignorance is curable with education, but stupid is forever."
*
So leaving all the blind-faith dogma of Darwin's mystery religion aside, let's cut to the chase. You forgot to answer the question I asked you in post #399, to wit:
Since I can't scientifically prove it, is it rational for me to believe that others beside myself have minds and aren't just pre-programmed robots?
bttt
This corrects my link in #437 to Patrick's "out-of-context" quote. I should have linked you to #475 rather than #196 in that other thread. Here it is in its entirety [you will find the hot link beneath it] bttt:
Patrick Henry: "Ah, yes ... yet another out-of-context quote, a splendid example of creationoid "research."
M-PI: The Darwin quote I posted has everything to do with the subject I was addressing. Your red herring won't work.
And you embarrass yourself. The most outrageous "out-of-context" quote can be found on YOUR profile page where you attempt to prove that even "the pope" agrees with you and Darwin.
This is what you posted "out of context":
"The Pope's 1996 statement on evolution: Physical evolution is not in conflict with Christianity. Excerpts:"
"It is necessary to determine the proper sense of Scripture, while avoiding any unwarranted interpretations that make it say what it does not intend to say. In order to delineate the field of their own study, the exegete and the theologian must keep informed about the results achieved by the natural sciences."
"Today, almost half a century after the publication of the Encyclical, fresh knowledge has led to the recognition that evolution is more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favour of this theory."
*
Below are the quotes you left out that show the pope doesn't agree with yours and Darwin's atheistic ideas of natural selection and random chance.
Quoting the Pope: "....to tell the truth, rather than the theory of evolution, we should speak of several theories of evolution. On the one hand, this plurality has to do with the different explanations advanced for the mechanism of evolution, and on the other, with the various philosophies on which it is based. Hence the existence of materialist, reductionist and spiritualist interpretations. What is to be decided here is the true role of philosophy and, beyond it, of theology.
5. ...man... was created in the image and likeness of God (cf. Gn 1:27-29). ...
Consequently, theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. Nor are they able to ground the dignity of the person. ..."
HERE: http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/8712_message_from_the_pope_1996_1_3_2001.asp
And here's even more you won't like from 1986:
"....... Pope John Paul II, in a General Audience on 24 January 1986, addressed the issue and said that "The theory of natural evolution, understood in a sense that does not exclude divine causality, is not in principle opposed to the truth about the creation of the visible world, as presented in the Book of Genesis."
Conflicts between the truths of science and the truths of faith, in other words, are only apparent, never real, for both science and faith, the natural world accessible to reason, and the "world" of revelation accessible to faith, have the same author: God.
It makes no difference to faith what precise mechanisms the Creator chose to carry out his divine plan of creation. Being all powerful, and having created everything out of nothing, God could have literally and directly created man out of the slime of the earth, as Genesis describes, or he could have used evolutionary mechanisms which he himself had set in motion.
It makes no difference to faith whether or not man is descended from some apelike creature, so long as we understand that there had to be what Pope John Paul II calls an "ontological leap" between that creature and the first human person.
In other words, God, in the Pope's and the Church's teaching, would have to have intervened directly in the creation of man because each rational soul is created out of nothing. The soul of man could not have arisen from nature as an accident of evolutionary processes." February 23, 2003 Science and Faith
196 posted on 12/29/2004 4:16:56 PM EST by Matchett-PI
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1310267/posts?page=196#196
475 posted on 01/01/2005 4:36:04 PM EST by Matchett-PI
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1310267/posts?page=475#475
StJacques and I had just met on another thread and were exploring some things when I posted an article without knowing that the article had been disclaimed by its own publisher (and then later that disclaimer eschewed by its own editor as I recall).
After StJacques trumped my article, I then complained about this very situation where a thread gets caught up in a battle of authorities – my complaint added to the tension and predictably, patience grew thin. To make a long story short, we agreed to lay it down there and regroup at some time in the future (which is here and now on this thread) and first come to some understanding about the terms we are using before presenting our arguments.
The issue we had been discussing was raised again on this thread at post 253 and the challenge was renewed at post 267. The discussion has been going swimmingly well this time around!
I’d therefore like to suggest that all sides lay aside their hands, their rebuttals of authorities – and instead look underneath the rebuttals and argue the actual points here.
For instance, Matchett-PI has raised a new kind of “complexity” – specified complexity, in a link on post 386. That new kind of complexity could be quite relevant to this investigation. So rather than argue the authorities, how about we discuss what “specified complexity” is and whether it ought to be added to our list of complexities to discuss? The list so far consists of functional complexity, physical complexity, irreducible complexity, self-organizing complexity, Kolmogorov complexity.
In his recent book The Fifth Miracle, Paul Davies suggests that any laws capable of explaining the origin of life must be radically different from scientific laws known to date. The problem, as he sees it, with currently known scientific laws, like the laws of chemistry and physics, is that they are not up to explaining the key feature of life that needs to be explained. That feature is specified complexity. Life is both complex and specified. The basic intuition here is straightforward. A single letter of the alphabet is specified without being complex (i.e., it conforms to an independently given pattern but is simple). A long sequence of random letters is complex without being specified (i.e., it requires a complicated instruction-set to characterize but conforms to no independently given pattern). A Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified...
How does the scientific community explain specified complexity? Usually via an evolutionary algorithm. By an evolutionary algorithm I mean any algorithm that generates contingency via some chance process and then sifts the so-generated contingency via some law-like process. The Darwinian mutation-selection mechanism, neural nets, and genetic algorithms all fall within this broad definition of evolutionary algorithms. Now the problem with invoking evolutionary algorithms to explain specified complexity at the origin of life is absence of any identifiable evolutionary algorithm that might account for it. Once life has started and self-replication has begun, the Darwinian mechanism is usually invoked to explain the specified complexity of living things.
But what is the relevant evolutionary algorithm that drives chemical evolution? No convincing answer has been given to date. To be sure, one can hope that an evolutionary algorithm that generates specified complexity at the origin of life exists and remains to be discovered. Manfred Eigen, for instance, writes, "Our task is to find an algorithm, a natural law that leads to the origin of information," where by "information" I understand him to mean specified complexity. But if some evolutionary algorithm can be found to account for the origin of life, it would not be a radically new law in Davies's sense. Rather, it would be a special case of a known process.
Evidently, complexity is such a hot topic to Schneider (the NIH scientist who is applying Shannon-Weaver to cancer research) that he suggests to not even “go there” without first agreeing to a definition:
complexity: Poor Terminology! Like `specificity', the term `complexity' appears in many scientific papers, but it is not always well defined. (See however M. Li and P. Vitanyi, A Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications, second edition, Springer-Verlag, New York, ISBN 0-387-94868-6, 1997) When one comes across a proposed use in the literature one can unveil this difficulty by asking: How would I measure this complexity? What are the units of complexity? Recommendation: use Shannon's information measure or explain why Shannon's measure does not cover what you are interested in measuring. Then give a precise, practical definition.
To get the ball rolling, I assert these properties of the biological “message”.
is large
is corporeal, i.e. has space/time coordinates
is encoded
is the least description of the organism (DNA)
in an organism is autonomous to that organism although segments of the message may be transportable to other organisms
is capable of adaptation
is algorithmic (rules or set of rules which solve a problem)
may also contain a memory in components which are not evidently actively broadcast
Definition: The minimum number of bits into which a string can be compressed without losing information. This is defined with respect to a fixed, but universal decompression scheme, given by a universal Turing machine.
bit: A binary digit, or the amount of information required to distinguish between two equally likely possibilities or choices. If I tell you that a coin is 'heads' then you learn one bit of information. It's like a knife slice between the possibilities:
Likewise, if a protein picks one of the 4 bases, then it makes a two bit choice.
For 8 things it takes 3 bits. In simple cases the number of bits is the log base 2 of the number of choices or messages M: bits = log2M. Claude Shannon figured out how to compute the average information when the choices are not equally likely. The reason for using this measure is that when two communication systems are independent, the number of bits is additive. The log is the only mathematical measure that has this property! Both of the properties of averaging and additivity are important for sequence logos and sequence walkers. Even in the early days of computers and information theory people recognized that there were already two definitions of bit and that nothing could be done about it. The most common definition is 'binary digit', usually a 0 or a 1 in a computer. This definition allows only for two integer values. The definition that Shannon came up with is an average number of bits that describes an entire communication message (or, in molecular biology, a set of aligned protein sequences or nucleic-acid binding sites). This latter definition allows for real numbers. Fortunately the two definitions can be distinguished by context.
Nature volume 362 page 509 (1993) published a review by Professor Hermann Haken at the Institut fuer Theoretische Physik und Synergetik of the University of Stuttgart. Haken has no problem with the mathematics in Part I that prepare the reader for specific practical problems in molecular biology. When these results are applied Haken finds that I have committed heresy by pointing out the deficiencies of some popular beliefs in molecular biology and lese majesty by taking in vain "seminal work (sic) of Professor Manfred Eigen".
"In several places the author (Hubert P. Yockey) states that although molecular biology must be consistent with chemical and physical processes, biological principles cannot be derived from physics and chemistry alone. This statement holds still more for the relationship between mathematics and molecular biology (or any other branch of science)." Haken then makes a coy remark attempting to leave the impression that the Huns are assaulting the battlements of molecular biology: "But Yockey repeatedly conveys the impression that the laws of molecular biology can be derived from mathematics."
Haken's remark is non sense. What I actually stressed is that the laws of molecular biology lie in the axioms from which one reasons, specifically the sequence hypothesis and the genetic code. Mathematics is the highest form of human reasoning about the consequences of those axioms. Nevertheless, mathematics has limitations pointed out by Goedel and Turing that lead to undecidability. For example, it is impossible to determine whether a given computer program will halt.
Haken now makes an emotional accusation of heresy and lese majesty:x "So the author's polemic against the seminal work of Manfred Eigen, who clearly recognized and formulated the fundamental role of these dynamics, is not only unfounded but misleading."
As Haken wrote in his first paragraph: "Quite often the word 'information' is used with different meanings but from the very beginning he (Yockey) sticks to a single interpretation-Shannon information." So far well and good, but, rather subtlety, in his last paragraph, hoping the reader will not notice, Haken uses 'information' in the sense of 'meaning' or 'knowledge'. "Yockey makes wild extrapolations in a futile attempt to show how the classical concept of information theory can be applied to problems in generating information." Haken has missed Section 12.1.2 where my "wild extrapolations" are related to the well established concepts of Kolmogorov-Chaitin algorithmic entropy.
I asked Professor Haken for a list of his publications. He gracefully complied and proved to be an expert in lasers, quantum field theory of solids and synergetics. The only publication I found on his list pertaining to biology is: Entstehung von Biologischer Information und Ordnung von Haken und Haken-Krell, herausgegegen Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt (1989). In English: Origin of Biological Information and Order published by Scientific Book Company, Darmstadt (1989).
A quotation from Chapter 8 will support the point I wish to make: First in the original German; "Der Shannonische Informationbegriff sagt aber nichts aus darueber, ob eine Nachricht sinnvoll oder sinnlos, wertvoll oder wertlos ist, das heist, es geht ihm jeder Sinngehalt ab, oder, in anderen Worten, es fehlt ihm die Semantik. Gerade in biologischen Bereich kann dieses Fehlen ein wesentliches Manko bedeuten."
My English translation: "The Shannon information concept says nothing about whether the message is meaningful or meaningless, valuable or valueless, that is, it goes in every sense of the words, or in other words semantics is lacking. In the field of biology this fault means a substantial deficiency."
Early in the history of information theory, philosophers traded on the word information and thought they had a mathematical means for dealing with semantics, in spite of the Shannon's denial in the second paragraph of his 1948 paper. See Bar-Hillel (1955) Philosophy of Science vol.22 pp86-105 and Bar-Hillel and Carnap (1953) British Journal of the Philosophy of Scince volume 22 pp147-157. The reason this cannot be done is that there is no mathematical measure for 'value' or 'meaning'. The meaning of words depends on the language and the context. 'Meaning' cannot be measured. As I pointed out in my book if you send a package labeled Gift to Professors Eigen or Haken, you will violate German postal regulations. Gift means poison in German.
As R. V. L. Hartley pointed out in 1928: "What I hope to accomplish in this direction is to set up a quantitative measure whereby the capacities of various systems to transmit information may be compared." Bell System Technical Journal volume 7 pp535-563, (1928). Shannon carried Hartley's plan forward and found the fundamental theorems of information theory and coding theory and the quantitative measure in bits and bytes as we have it today.
My 'polemic against the seminal work of Manfred Eigen' exposes his confusion of philosophical notions of semantics and information measured in bits as well as a number of other basic faults. Eigen feels free to introduce conjectures cooked up ad hoc to suit each problem. One can solve (sic) any problem with enough ad hoc conjectures. To remedy what he sees as an inadequacy in "classical information theory" he calls for a purely empirical "value parameter" that is characteristic of "valued information". He states that this "valued information" is reflected by increased "order". On the contrary, it is well known in information theory that 'increased order' decreases the information content of a message.
Anyone who is computer literate knows that, in the context of computer technology, the word information does not mean knowledge. Along with many other authors, Eigen makes a play on words by using information in the sense of knowledge, meaning and specificity. For example, in Naturwissenschaften (1971) volume 58 465-523 (in English) he states with reference to sequences in DNA that: "Such sequences cannot yet contain any appreciable amount of information." He means knowledge or specificy. Eigen uses the word 'information' in two different senses in one sentence: "Information theory as we understand it today is more a communication theory. It deals with problems of processing information rather than of "generating" information."
Eigen purports to reinvent Shannon's Channel Capacity Theorem in order to deal with an "error catastrophe" He does this by dealing with the errors themselves rather than with information mutual entropy that Shannon proved to be the correct concept. Eigen and all the Goettingen school are also completely unaware of the Shannon-McMillan-Breiman theorem. Had anyone in the Goettingen school finished reading Shannon's 1948 paper they would have found both theorems.
Notice that Haken did not challenge my Chapter 10 on self-organization directly but appealed to emotional charges of heresy and lese majesty. When distinguished scientists are wrong they are just as wrong as the rest of us. The principle that the king can do no wrong does not apply in science. Idols have feet of clay.
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