Submitted by Terence Blackett
“Miracles, said my friend. Oh, come. Science has knocked the bottom out of all that.” – C. S. Lewis
Once again the ethics and philosophy behind science has become a front burner issue being raised by academics and scientists alike – men and women who frankly seem to have a lot of time on their hands to pursue frivolous and to some egalitarian ideals. Needless to say, they get paid shed loads of money to write a lot of twaddle in a sort of prevaricated way in order to air out the dusty cob-web within their matchbox brains.
Just recently, the OxBridge community of the learned and the old philosophical scientific chattering classes of the 1990’s were suddenly raising their heads above to parapet to throw some gasoline on the dwindling embers of this idea of the philosophy of science after Stephen Hawking’s revelations in his newest book “The Grand Design” purported rather loosely that this concept in and of itself had passed its sell-by-date; has not kept pace with the quantum discoveries in mathematical and theoretical physics and was frankly as he put it – “dead”. Pretty strong language indeed!
Hawking, with his literary and scientific sidekick (Mlodinow) – the “Batman & Robin” of what is being called “Model Dependent Realism” in a rather obsequious way uses the same fundamental plank of philosophy to underpin their recent book while yanking that said epistemological pillar of scientific philosophy from underneath a structure that goes all the way back to the days of Thomas Aquinas & Aristotle. To many in the scientific community this seems to be a contradiction of terms.
Well, I guess you can trust Hawking to piss in the wind (pardon my French) – and caused the “good fellows” at Jesus College, Oxford to surreptitiously reach for their mobile phones in a desperate panic to call 999, shouting – “the college is on fire”.
To leave to one side the light humour of the situation – the weightier matters of God v science rages on even in this discourse if one takes time to read what Hawking says. What Hawking did was to throw a “metallurgic” spanner in the alchemic works of those philosophers who still somehow want to try to marry the empirical nature of science to some quantum metaphysical entity which can be defined as “Intelligent Design” without the use of the word – GOD!
On the other hand, those of us who are adherents to Einsteinian philosophy understand that even when he said in the convergence of three realities – where he references music, the laws of nature and God (or THE MIND), Einstein had enough “reverence” to posit the notion that something more than just scientific laws were at work and he was willing to take a step back and allow for the metaphysical manifestations to unravel over time.
Therefore, it would be arbitrarily foolish and esoterically incongruous to try to prove the existence of God or to fan the flames in this short piece using philosophical science or any other measurable, empirically based equation or formulation. I will however let the arguments speak for themselves and the audience can decide intellectually or otherwise where they stand in the grand scheme of things. What is clear is that science in the last [50] years have done a great deal of disservice to the philosophy of science and to the cause of God while many brilliant philosophers have inadvertently gone to sleep at the wheel.
In quoting Hawking’s book, would elucidate this point well – although one would subsume that the Lucsian Professor Emeritus has been somehow growing old and weary as he realizes that in his long cosmic battle with the “Power of the Universe” that he has somehow finally thrown up a big “white-flag” as a form of surrender having not been able to disprove or approve on either end, the existence or denial of a CREATOR GOD*.
Hawking & Co; posits this idea that – “We seem to be at a critical point in the history of science, in which we must alter our conception of goals and of what makes a physical theory acceptable. It appears that the fundamental numbers, and even the form, of the apparent laws of nature are not demanded by logic or physical principle. The parameters are free to take on many values and the laws to take on any form that leads to a self-consistent mathematical theory, and they do take on different values and different forms in different universes.”
Was this the white flag we have been looking for? Was this a subtle admission of defeat? Or has Stephen Hawking finally turned the corner as Einstein did in his acceptance that something beyond the realm of conceivable, perceptible scientific law and endeavour must explain the intricacies of the universe and its causalities? You decide!
For the lay person, it would seem guys like Hawking have been reading C. S. Lewis and though he possesses a charismatic allure and for most scientists he remain the “godfather”, with an entire solar system of brain activity going on between his two earlobes – however, for myself and others, the down side in this debate is the fact that guys like Hawking, Nancy Cartwright, Richard Feynman, Addison Wesley, Roger Penrose, Abner Shimony, Ludwig Boltzmann and whole sleuth of other brilliant physicists have done precious little to advance the fundamental underpinning of philosophical science – moreover, they seek at every opportunity and crossroad to discredit any amorphous belief in any Intelligent Design outside of the notions of maybe some ill-informed quackery which hinges on the convergence of metaphysical phenomenon or some opaque hypothesis.
In our day and age, it’s rather simplistic to say that something is either “TRUE” or FALSE” without tested, empirical research. This notion of falsifiability or refutability – a rather analogous sociological concept unearthed by Karl Popper seeks to test the scientific veracity and the empirical purity of any hypothesis or claim. Popper’s contention and rightly so, is that if metaphysical phenomena cannot be falsifiably or verifiably examined or proved on a sliding scale – then there is room for scientific abandonment. According to Martyn Shuttleworth (2008) – “The advantage of Popper’s idea is that such truths can be falsified when more knowledge and resources are available. Even long accepted theories such as Gravity, Relativity and Evolution are increasingly challenged and adapted. The major disadvantage of falsifiability is that it is very strict in its definitions and does not take into account that many sciences are observational and descriptive. Pseudo sciences undertake research without an initial theory or hypothesis. On the other hand, theories such as ‘Intelligent Design’ would be classed as scientific, because they have a falsifiable hypothesis, however ‘weak’.”
As respectably imminent a scientist as Stephen Hawking is – it has become accepted consensus in publishing and in literary circles that in order to garner serious books sales on any scientific topic especially as fecund as theoretical physics or quantum mechanics – all one has to do is put GOD* in the equation.
Christopher Norris – Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University in Wales squares the circle well by saying this – “No doubt there is a fair amount of ill-informed, obtuse, or ideologically angled philosophy that either refuses or tries but fails to engage with the concerns of present-day science. One can understand Hawking’s impatience – or downright exasperation – with some of the half-baked notions put around by refuseniks and would-be engageniks alike. All the same he would do well to consider the historically attested and nowadays more vital than ever role of philosophy as a critical discipline. It continues to offer the sorts of argument that science requires in order to dispel not only the illusions of naïve sense-certainty or intuitive self-evidence but also the confusions that speculative thought runs into when decoupled from any restraining appeal to regulative principles such as that of inference to the best explanation. To adapt a quotation by Kant in a different though related context: philosophy of science without scientific input is empty, while science without philosophical guidance is blind. At any rate it is rendered perilously apt to mistake the seductions of pure hypothetical invention for the business of formulating rationally warranted, metaphysically coherent, and – if only in the fullness of time – empirically testable conjectures.”
So from Norris’ position, one can deduce that as the philosophy of science change, undoubtedly we too must change the ways in which we explain the scientific reasoning behind those rapid changes to the lay person in the street. Clearly this is where modern education falls on its face, for if we are to foster a 21st century generation of young men and women who are frankly clueless of even the most simple scientific principles – do we not expect that in the near future our scientific progress will suddenly grind to a halt?
Let me close by citing one of my favourite authors C. S. Lewis (which I am sure Hawking must have read at some point in his illustrious career) – on p. 144/5 of his book “Essay Collections & Other Short Pieces”, where he says this: “The laws of arithmetic can tell you what’ll find, with absolute certainty, provided that there’s no interference… The laws will tell you how a billiard ball will travel on a smooth surface if you hit it in a particular way – but only provided no one interfered. If after it is in motion, someone snatches up a cue and gives it a biff on the side – why, then, you won’t get then what the scientists predicted… Quite, and in the same way, if there’s anything outside nature, and if it interfered – then the events which the scientists expected wouldn’t follow. That would be what we call a miracle. In one sense it wouldn’t break the laws of nature. The laws tell you what will happen if nothing interfere. They can’t tell you whether something is going to interfere… It’ not the expert at arithmetic who can tell you how likely someone is to interfere with the pennies in the drawer; a detective would be more use. It isn’t the physicist who can tell you how likely I am to catch up a cue and spoil his experiment with the billiard ball; you’d better ask a psychologist. And it isn’t the scientist who can tell you how likely nature is to be interfered with from outside. You must go to the metaphysician.”
Hawking and others continue to wrestle with these truths hiding behind scientific paradigms which purport no real ABSOLUTES. However, what is fascinating is Lewis’ position on this whole question – where he states that since the Middle Ages Ptolemy’s Almagest (a standard astronomical handbook used back then) in Book 1, chapter 5 stated that “the earth in relation to the distance of the fixed stars, has no appreciable size and must be treated as a mathematical point!” This was known back then, exclaimed Lewis but none of the histories of science – none of the modern encyclopaedias ever mentions that fact.
Lewis’ contention is that something or someone was complicit in keeping this knowledge from the forefront of men’s mind for whatever the reasons. He concluded by saying unequivocally – “People usually think the problem is how to reconcile what we now know about the size of the universe with our traditional ideas of religion. That turns out not to be the problem at all. The real problem is this. The enormous size of the universe and the significance of earth were known for centuries, and no one ever dreamed that they had any bearing on the religious question. Then, less than a hundred years ago, they are suddenly trotted out as an argument against Christianity. And the people who trot them out carefully hush up the fact that they were known long ago. Don’t you think that all you atheists are strangely suspicious people?”
The question is – how do we answer C. S. Lewis? Maybe Hawking & Co; will tell us!
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