Posted on 10/28/2010 10:49:08 AM PDT by betty boop
An Open Letter to My Physicist Friend RE: Darwinism and the Problem of Free Will
By Jean F. Drew
Dear A —
Regarding the discussion of “free will” at www.naturalism.org, you wrote: “I am surprised to find a ‘scientific naturalism’ so similar to the utmost banality, shallowness and false superficiality of the ‘scientific materialism’ that I [had] to learn in … school [during] the communist regime.”
I think this is a very striking statement; and I understand what you mean. I read in your Book of the Living Universe long ago that you were aware of the problem of “tampering” with human consciousness, by people and institutions with social and/or political agendas to be carried out, usually without consideration of what is good and true in the real world of human experience.
Once upon a time, the natural sciences were understood to be above all else engaged in the search for the truth of reality. Nowadays, it seems people don’t want to do such searches anymore, they just want to protect and defend their personal investments in this or that ideological orthodoxy….
Speaking of a powerful orthodoxy, it seems pretty clear to me that Darwin’s theory, as it has come to be widely understood and accepted, is entirely premised on the doctrine of “scientific materialism.” As such, I regard it as an epistemological and ontological nightmare!!!
Moreover, the account of “free will” at naturalism.org can be true only if Darwin’s theory is true. But I believe it is not. For it holds that everything in biology “supervenes on the physical”; everything that happens is “determined” on the basis of Newtonian mechanics. There is only matter in the universe, nothing else; only that which is directly observed/measured is real. [Already such a view casts doubt on the reality of the universal laws of nature, which are never directly observed: They are “non-phenomenal,” intangible, immaterial. Not to mention that so is all of mathematics, logic, reasoning.] And this non-living, dumb matter, via an evolutionary process driven by random mutation and natural selection, somehow manages to become alive and — more — to develop some form of psyche.
But HOW does one get to this result by means of a random process??? In only ~14 or so billion years?
How does low algorithmic complexity (i.e., of the physical laws) generate the astonishing complexity of living systems, not to mention of the universe at large? My “trial” answer: It doesn’t; and can’t.
Darwinism, moreover, doesn’t even have an explanation of what life IS. All of it is, to me, a “just-so” story, a myth. It is riddled with self-contradictions. Not a word of its fundamental tenets can be tested by means of real-world investigations/experiments, let alone “proved.” It is an “historical” science, like archeology, not a “hard” science, like physics. It seeks to tell us what life does, but cannot tell us what life is.
But how can we be sure that our impressions of what life does are truthful, if we don’t know what life is? Don’t we have to understand what life is, first — before we can produce a reliable understanding of the how and why of its behavior? It’s like saying, “Birds fly” without bothering to elucidate what a bird is….
But the “Cartesian split” is manifestly being defended by most Darwinists nowadays. To them, the “purity” of science somehow depends on its sticking to the “objective” physical, material, phenomenal. Thus they prohibit any discussion of, for instance, final causes in nature — even though the very term “survival of the fittest” necessarily implies a final cause: “fitness” for survival! (As do all biological functions, by the way.) Yet the Darwinist says “survival of the fittest” is the very goal and purpose of evolution! But you cannot “call a spade a spade” and say that this is a final cause; it’s just an illusion…. It only “looks like” a final cause, but it isn’t really one. Such equivocation is, to me, indefensible.
But let’s look at what the article at naturalism.org has to say. “As strictly physical beings, we don’t exist as immaterial selves, either mental or spiritual, that control behavior. Thought, desires, intentions, feelings, and actions all arise on their own without the benefit of a supervisory self, and they are all the products of a physical system, the brain and the body. The self is constituted by more or less consistent sets of personal characteristics, beliefs, and actions; it doesn’t exist apart from those complex physical processes that make up the individual. It may strongly seem as if there is a self sitting behind experience, witnessing it, and behind behavior, controlling it, but this impression is strongly disconfirmed by a scientific understanding of human behavior.”
What “scientific understanding of human behavior???” I don’t see any understanding here at all! Just the deliberate elimination of certain kinds of intractable, non-conforming evidence….
If “science can’t address the problem, then there is no problem” seems to be the motto of the day.
In short, the “self” must be a fiction; it is really only an epiphenomenon of physical processes proceeding more or less in a random, linear, irreversible (past to present to future) manner that itself has no “objective” reality (or purpose of goal) and thus cannot serve as a cause of anything in the physical world. That is, the self has zero ontological status: It is simply defined away as not really existing.
Instead, we find that the cause of human willing is simply what “arises out of the interaction between individuals and their environment, not from a freely willing self that produces behavior independently of causal connections…. Therefore individuals don’t bear ultimate originative responsibility for their actions, in the sense of being their first cause. Given the circumstances both inside and outside the body, they couldn’t have done other than what they did.” [So human beings just can’t help what they do; their behavior is utterly determined. I.e., they are programmable robots and nothing more.]
So it seems rather cruel (and unjust) that under this set of circumstances, “Nevertheless, we must still hold individuals responsible, in the sense of applying rewards and sanctions, so that their behavior stays more or less within the range of what we deem acceptable. This is, partially, how people learn to act ethically.”
Question: Who is this “we” in the above statement?
Another question: If individuals don’t bear “ultimate originative responsibility for their actions,” then what is the cause of suicide? Does brain function and/or the “environment” cause this ultimate act of self-destruction? If so, then why aren’t there more suicides? Or how about acts of heroism, where a person puts his own physical survival at risk to come to the aid of another person in danger? What is the “naturalist” explanation of a man who throws his body onto a live grenade, so to spare his fellow soldiers from being blown to smithereens, well knowing that his own death would be the likely price of his decision? Did not his self-sacrifice “cause” (or at least permit) his mates to continue living, when otherwise they may likely all have been killed?
Then there is this pièce de résistence [with my comments in brackets]:
The source of value: Because naturalism doubts the existence of ultimate purposes either inherent in nature or imposed by a creator [final causes either way], values derive from human needs and desires [oh, for instance the desire to kill one’s self, which desire must arise in nature/environment according to Darwinist theory, as in the above?], not supernatural absolutes. Basic human values are widely shared by virtue of being rooted in our common evolved nature. [That wipes out all individuality right there.] We need not appeal to a supernatural standard of ethical conduct to know that in general it’s wrong to lie, cheat, steal, rape, murder, torture, or otherwise treat people in ways we’d rather not be treated [Oh? HOW do we know this? As I said earlier, Darwinist orthodoxy is an epistemological nightmare!]. Our naturally endowed empathetic concern for others [as alleged —in face of the fact that people frequently choose to conduct themselves evilly towards others — and if that is not “naturally endowed,” then where did that come from?] and our hard-wired penchant for cooperation and reciprocity [how did that get to be “hard-wired???”] get us what we most want as social creatures: to flourish as individuals within a community. [Tell that to the person who intends to commit suicide! He could care less for “flourishing as an individual,” let alone in a community]. Naturalism may show the ultimate contingency of some values, in that human nature might have evolved differently and human societies and political arrangements might have turned out otherwise. [Well they might have; but what’s the point? Reality is what we have. All else is pure speculation.] But, given who and what we are as natural creatures [please define “natural creatures” — the statement seems oxymoronic to me], we necessarily [???] find ourselves with shared basic values [??? — which ones? And tell me how did they become “shared” when Darwinist theory itself is premised on conflict and competition for the available finite environmental resources necessary for survival?] which serve as the criteria for assessing moral dilemmas, even if these assessments are sometimes fiercely contested and in some cases never quite resolved. [The very fact that there can be conflict, contestation, suggests that the uniformity of “natural creatures” that we would expect to see on Darwin’s theory is a total fiction, something simply not borne out by the facts on the ground of real experience, as contrasted with the reductionist abstractions of naturalistic evolution theory.]
It seems to me that Darwinist orthodoxy really doesn’t explain very much. The problem seems to be its utter rejection, in principle, of any immaterial component of reality. Although might I point out that a “principle” is itself “immaterial?” Even the concept of Reality is immaterial. These people routinely, blithely shoot themselves in the foot; and then blithely pretend that it didn’t happen.
In any case, we’re NOT supposed to notice this. Indeed, to notice this is “forbidden.”
Shades of Karl Marx here — and also I imagine your school experience back in the day of Soviet domination of your country. Marx absolutely forbade all questions about his “system.” You either bought it whole cloth, or you didn’t. What you couldn’t do was question it in any way. But if you didn’t buy it, then you were probably some kind of “enemy”….
Is seems to me the biological sciences need a restoration of sanity! Today, all the truly interesting work on life problems is being done by physicists (like you, dear friend!) and mathematicians….
The other day I came across some highly interesting passages in The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library [by Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie, David Fideler, editor; 1987, Phanes Press] that go straight to the point of what I believe is needed for science to renew itself, to rededicate itself to its ancient mission, the quest for Truth. What is principally involved is the “healing” of the artificial and unnatural “Cartesian split”:
Pythagoras, no doubt, would have disapproved of the radical split which occurred between the sciences and philosophy during the 17th century “enlightenment” and which haunts the intellectual and social fabric of Western civilization to this day. In retrospect perhaps we can see that man is most happily at home in the universe as long as he can relate his experiences to both the universal and the particular, the eternal and temporal levels of being.
Natural science takes an Aristotelian approach to the universe, delighting in the multiplicity of the phenomenal web. It is concerned with the individual parts as opposed to the whole, and its method is one of particularizing the universal. Natural science attempts to quantify the universal, through the reduction of living form and qualitative relations to mathematical and statistical formulations based on the classification of material artifacts.
By contrast, natural philosophy is primarily Platonic in that it is concerned with the whole as opposed to the part. Realizing that all things are essentially related to certain eternal forms and principles, the approach of the natural philosopher strives to understand the relation that the particular has with the universal. Through the language of natural philosophy, and through the Pythagorean approach to whole systems, it is possible to relate the temporal with the eternal and to know the organic relation between multiplicity and unity.
If the scientific spirit is seen as a desire to study the universe in its totality, it will be seen that both approaches are complementary and necessary in scientific inquiry, for an inclusive cosmology must be equally at home in dealing with the part or the whole. The great scientists of Western civilization — Kepler, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, and those before and after — were able to combine both approaches in a valuable and fruitful way.
It is interesting that the split between science and philosophy coincides roughly with the industrial revolution — for once freed from the philosophical element, which anchors scientific inquiry to the whole of life and human values, science ceases to be science in a traditional sense, and is transformed into a servile nursemaid of technology, the development and employment of mechanization. Now machines are quite useful as long as they are subservient to human good, in all the ramifications of that word — but as it turned out, the industrial revolution also coincided with a mechanistic conceptualization of the natural order, which sought to increase material profit at the expense of the human spirit….
Today, in many circles, to a large part fueled by the desire for economic reward, science has nearly become confused with and subservient to technology, and from this perspective it might be said that the ideal of a universal or inclusive science has been lost…. [p. 43f]
Still I know that you have not lost this ideal! Yours is an “integrative science” approach, integrating not only the natural sciences themselves, but also integrating them with the natural philosophy approach; i.e., of whole systems.
You wrote:
“I realized the importance of our mail exchange about God and the Universe. Indeed, … free will is not explained by present day science, not by physics, of course. As far as I understand it, it is not explained by the mechanical application of the biological principle. It requires more: a deeper understanding of the biological principle, and even more, a deeper understanding of the Universe as a whole. I wrote you that even the laws and principles of Nature can have a ‘soul-like’, animate aspect. Ultimately, our free will dwells in ‘the Universe as a whole’, and as such, [is] omnipresent, as far as I understand it. If so, the question of free will is a deep question, going beyond the present conceptual framework of science. Free will is rooted in the animate and animating biological principle, in [the] eternal Life of the Universe.”
Oh, A — I so agree!!!
And I’m so looking forward to reading your new article, “The Logic of Reality: a model-independent approach towards the self-contained logic of the Universe”!
May God ever bless you, dear friend, and your labors!
©2010 by Jean F. Drew.
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I read your last this morning. Sorry not to have replied by now. But today, I went to my hometown to bring my elderly parents to the polls. My 93-year-old Mom (who just recently got her driver's license renewed!!!) was quite ill when I got there. So I took her to the emergency room. She was treated and released.
I am now about to devote myself to the "traditional" election-day vigil. I do this every election day, whether the election is general or midterm. Mainly I watch Fox News, but there's a good deal of channel surfing, too.
In short, I wonder how much "truth" I'm going to get tonight — or rather in the wee hours of the morning....
But your question — what is Truth? — is very much alive with me, and I'll reply tomorrow OldNavyVet!
p.s.: My mother is an "old Navy vet," too: She served in the South Pacific, in WWII. And is still going strong....
Praise God!
Title of article
WHAT HAPPENED TO DOWNTIME? THE EXTINCTION OF DEEP THINKING & SACRED SPACE
THX for the link.
Thank you for your expressions of concern — and especially for your prayers!
And thank you for the update. Prayers continue...
So sorry to hear of your mother’s illness, and I hope she’s up to making it into triple-digit years in happiness and peace.
Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum.
It would be interesting to know how you define truth. The best definition I’ve heard is that truth is the recognition of reality.
That’s true as far as it goes. But the maxim begs the questions of what is the “reality” that is capable of being “recognized” (Being)? And how it is recognized (Knowing)?
For me to be able to “define” Truth, I would have to be able somehow to stand “outside” of it. And if I were capable of doing that, then you would have no reason to trust anything I had to say….
But I am not capable of doing that; i.e., of standing outside Truth; for I believe that it constitutes the fundamental structure of Reality that includes me “as part and participant.”
All I have to go on are insights and observations direct and indirect of what Truth IS. Though I can’t “define” it, I can describe it. My list of descriptions would include the following:
Truth is One, unchanging, and eternal. That is, it is timeless and spaceless. It has universal reach, from first to last, from least to greatest. Nothing in the phenomenal or moral worlds is outside of its domain.Possibly I could expand on this list. But there’s enough there already I think I’ll just stop.Truth is at once transcendent to and immanent in the world of human knowing. It is transcendent in that it did not arise in the world of human knowing; it wasn’t “created there.” Rather, the entire phenomenal world and the world of human knowing are its products. This is to recognize the way Natural Law theory expresses Truth.
Truth is immanent in these worlds (phenomenal and conscious) as what we might call the paradigm or specification of the universal order of the universe in its evolution over time. It accounts for the fact that though there is astonishing diversity in the world of Nature, still the fundamental oneness and identity of Nature is never disrupted by its diversity, but persists over time as the manifold of this diversity.
For the great classical philosophers, Truth is the eternal act of Divine Nous (Mind). With Plato (and I daresay Aristotle too), Truth is so closely associated with Goodness, Beauty, and Justice, that one is led to conclude that these are but different manifestations of one Substance — Truth — viewed under different aspects. And the entire Cosmos (universe) is the manifestation, or “image” (eikon), of this eternal act viewed under the conditions of space and time. But the “eternal actor” is not in time, nor in space. He/It is the God Beyond (i.e., transcending) the Cosmos, the Source of its truthful order in space and time.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Truth is the Word of God “in the Beginning,” i.e., at the divinely-willed inception event of all that there is or ever will be — the Creation. Christianity makes explicit the unity of God and Truth in St. John’s Gospel:
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 anything made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. — John, 1–4The Word of God, the Logos, was made manifest in the Incarnation of Christ. Christ is at once the Logos of creation and the Son of God. Another divine Name for Him is Alpha and Omega, “First to Last” (i.e., first cause and last cause, incorporating immanent cause in the evolutionary flow of space and time in between). Thus does Christianity acknowledge the absolute universality of Truth as Creator and Lord of Life.
As for the human relation to Truth, I find St. Anselm’s observation answers very well for me. In the Proslogion XV, he wrote:
Oh Lord, you are not only that than which a greater cannot be conceived, but you are also greater than what can be conceived.Which is why I said earlier that I can’t “define” truth, only describe it. For how can I — or any other human being — “define” the unconceivable?
Substitute the word “Truth” for “Lord” here — which is an entirely legitimate operation from both the classical Greek and Christian points of view — and we recognize how dependent we humans are on an eternal criterion that we did not specify, but which is operating in the world of human experience. And the challenge it poses: It clearly puts the divine and human into two entirely different orders or “categories” (or “dimensions”) altogether. Truth is the only bridge between them.
From the scientific standpoint, Truth is the foundation of the universal physical and moral laws.
And Truth is the one single standard by which questions of true or false can be answered.
In the end, Scripture is instructive on this point:
Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. — Colossians 2:8 [KJV]Another translation of the same verse:
See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. [? — help!!!]Colossians 2:8 is clearly stating that divine Truth — the Logos, Christ — is the “measure” that prevents us from being deluded into false propositions. Left unaided by Truth, philosophical doctrines are equally as bad as bad science, and thus equally deleterious to human well-being.
Must leave it there for now, dear OldNavyVet. Thank you ever so much for writing!
She is an amazing person, so strong and "with it" even at advanced age. I'm so proud of her accomplishments in "this life"....
May the peace of God be with you always too, dear man!
Which is why I said earlier that I can’t “define” truth, only describe it. For how can I — or any other human being — “define” the unconceivable?
Amen. "Truth" is the mind of God. We can perceive it all around us, but we can never understand it completely.
Your observation about the observer problem I think is apt. A fish doesn't know he is wet. Yet we live in a world of truth and lies, life and death, ugliness and beauty.
The truly transcendent things are almost undefinable. What is beauty? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder I suppose, and sometimes in the eye of the beer holder.
;)
Thanks for the post dearest sister in Christ.
My Mom is 92, betty boop! She worked in DC in the Army Map Service. They generated the up-to-date maps used for battlefield planning, European theatre, and Island hopping in the Pacific. The photographic work even back then was astonishing. She said once they were scanning maps of a particular Island and had pictures of a particular little antelope animal giving birth! It was important to locate the cave entrances on the various Islands. Glad to hear your Mother is doing well now. Sadly, my Mother doesn’t even know who I am when I visit her now, but I know who she is.
Well put, as usual.
Thx Thx.
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