I've been watching an interesting documentary/discussion put together by Harvard professor and practicing psychiatrist Dr. Armand Nicholi called The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life. The documentary parallels the lives of Lewis and Freud with periodic breaks during which a couple of Nicholi's colleagues, along with an investment banker, a Jungian analyst, a Wall Streeter, an author on spirituality, a documentary filmmaker and the publisher of Skeptic magazine discuss such topics as science or revelation, the human condition and moral law.
First, I have to comment on the inclusion of the publisher of Skeptic magazine in the discussion group. Skeptic magazine is devoted to the fanatically religious maintenance of empirical science. I have read it for years and can affirm it's simple message is, anything that isn't accepted as dogma by the religion of empirical science is an open object of ridicule. Shermer was incredibly smug, self-satisfied, arrogant and dismissive of other's opinions. However, what I was most impressed about him was, I could tell what was going to come out of his mouth before he opened it. The skeptics that are the gatekeepers of empirical science read from a prepared script. They are like robots without minds, people who simply repeat dogma and the made-up arguments defending that dogma against any rational discussion whatsoever.
Getting back to Lewis and Freud, the design of the program was to take an atheist, Lewis, who became a fanatical believer and contrast him with Freud, who's concept of the unconscious has come to rule the world and support the secular empirical scientific vision, the idea that the universe is operated by laws that had no author. Freud, a drug addict, dreamed up the notion that the mind was formed by youthful parental relationships which then controlled the entire thought process and life of the person for all time. L. Ron Hubbard, in the early fifties, came up with the notion that the mind is programmed while it is in the womb and can be deprogrammed at about the same expense Freud claimed we could overcome our unfortunately early attachments.
Which raises the latest controversy over actor Tom Cruise who used his latest movie to argue Hubbard's Scientology and it's objection to the pill-pushing society that is replacing Freud's notion that lying on a couch and talking out early experiences could cure mental discomfort. Cruise's claim that Ritalin, an opium-like drug freely prescribed to children, should be taken off the market was met with universal ridicule.
What ties all this together?
I have pointed out in many columns that empirical science is a construct that was created by people who hated religion. It is a religion that proposed no religion, a dogma that accepts its basic tenants on belief while claiming that its basic tenants are absolutely proven scientific facts, beliefs that are total nonsense, matter can neither be created nor destroyed, the universe started with a big bang, planets move without current force, objects drop because it is a property for them to drop, the stupidities go on and on and on.
If anyone thinks the empirical scientific community is unaware of the fact that everything it professes is absurd, let's just quote an empirical scientist of some note, writing, of course, for his fellow believers. Harvard's current Darwinist guru, Richard Lewontin, is very forthright. He states "Our" and by our he means empirical scientists, "Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to understanding the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for the unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment to materialism."
Now listen to his wrap up: "Materialism is absolute for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door."
Lewontin not only has a divine foot in the door, he's got it stuck up his nose blinding his mind. My views on religion are well documented. If it doesn't deal with the production of technology, it's religion and not science. When someone like Lewontin becomes so fanatical about something, he's willing to deny reality, he's dealing with religion because the only reality is technology. There's no two ways about it.
The program, contrasting science with religion, missed the point entirely. The mind operates by comparing reality with recall. When we see a tree, our mind recalls a tree and we recognize what we are seeing as a tree. The mind evolved to deal with physical reality, to keep the organism to which it is attached from falling off cliffs, running into trees, getting eaten by other organisms in the environment.
It's quite a simple process. Reality travels up our optic nerve (column 34-05) and enters the mind with a specific electrical charge. That charge travels throughout the neuronic storage bins seeking out memory units stored at the same charge. When we see a tree, the electrical charge of the mind is not looking for a dog, it is looking for a tree. If it finds a memory unit of a tree stored in the neuronic storage bins, then it recalls that memory unit for comparison with what we are seeing from reality and we understand what we are seeing, a tree.
This is all less sentient animate matter has to do to accomplish its task of moving through the environment. But, and this is simply my thesis, the universe doesn't exist simply to exist, it exists to produce life and the life it produces evolves to understand the universe. Therefore, at some point in the development of animate matter, the mind obtains the ability to hold a picture of reality that does not agree with reality. This is not easy to do because the mind evolved to warn us of changes in reality, and that warning is a shock to our system. When we expect reality to be one way and it's another way, when we start to cross the street and find ourselves in the path of a speeding car, our mind warns our body to react in a manner that will save us.
Conflicting pictures are painful because it is the pain that warns us about the changes in reality we have to know about to survive. But somehow we evolved the ability to hold a picture of reality that didn't exist in reality and not react with the panic we might act with when we find ourselves almost falling off a cliff. As soon as we evolved this ability, the ability to create pictures from recall that didn't agree with reality and still hold them in recall, we evolved the ability to change reality.
This gave us the ability to produce technology. Technology, whether it involves building houses instead of living in caves, or shooting rockets into comets, is the tool we have to increase our survivability in the universe. As I've pointed out before, simple animate matter that forms around the telluric currents in the Earth is dependent on those telluric currents. The animate matter such as trees and my favorite example, the morning glory, matter that reaches to the sky as a result of the exchanges of electrons between the ground and the atmosphere, has increased the range of survivability of animate matter simply by seeding. The evolution of ambulatory animate matter, the beasts that can flee the forest fire instead of being consumed by it, and the resulting evolution of the mind needed to sense the environment through which ambulatory animate matter moves, is a further extension, and sentience, the ability to hold pictures of reality that don't exist in reality produce the technology that might allow us to escape the fate of the planet altogether, to survive, as the particular life that evolved on this planet, forever in the universe.
The entire scientific project should therefore be one directed at expanding our technology, dealing with the questions that can result in extending our range of survivability in the universe. However, going back to the operation of the mind, when we can hold pictures of reality in our minds when reality is not present, we notice certain things missing from reality. The most obvious, of course, is us, where we came from and how we got here. Another, equally obvious, is, we can see objects fall but we can't see what is making them fall.
When we see something in reality for which we have no recall, and reality provides us with no recall, we have something in reality for which we have no recall.
What do we have to do to understand?
We have to make something up.
When we come to the questions of origins, where the universe came from and where we came from, we are dealing in an area that has no relationship whatsoever to technology and thus, no relationship to science. If it can't improve our technology, then it is not the subject of science.
However, when it comes to the question of what makes an object fall, the answers we produce have an enormous impact on our technology. If we treat the question the same way we treat questions that belong in the sphere of religion and philosophy, if we just make up some mumbo jumbo, Aristotle's objects fall because the Earth is at the center of the universe or Newton's mindless gravity is a property of the matter which produces the gravity, then the impact on our technology is going to be devastating. We are going to think, as we do today, that gravity is a given that has to be dealt with rather than a dynamic force that can be manipulated by technology to our benefit.
We are not doing our jobs, folks.
Instead of probing actual reality, we have Dr. Armand Nicholi, a Harvard University professor and practicing psychiatrist, Jeremy Fraiberg, a practicing attorney and former student and research assistant to Dr. Nicholi, Winifred Gallagher, an author on spirituality, Douglas Holladay, a general partner at an equity firm, Margaret Klenck, a practicing Jungian analyst, Frederick Lee, a practicing physician and former teaching associate of Dr. Nicholi, Louis Massiah, an independent documentary filmmaker and journalist and the ever ridiculous Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic Magazine, using hours of public television time and heaven knows how much tax money, sitting around talking about inanities.
Job one is reality, and when it comes to reality, we don't want to mix it up with religion. Instead, we have an empirical science religion where another Harvard professor, Lewontin, professes: "Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to understanding the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for the unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment to materialism. Materialism is absolute for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door."
If you don't think we are in trouble, then you'd better hope heaven is just above the clouds empirical science has no explanation for (see column 37-05).
Postscript: A reader emailed me and said I took Lewontin out of context. He gave me the full context and I think it only bolsters my point. This is the full context (I could probably write an entire column refuting this):
With great perception, Sagan sees that there is an impediment to the popular credibility of scientific claims about the world, an impediment that is almost invisible to most scientists. Many of the most fundamental claims of science are against common sense and seem absurd on their face. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them? Astronomers tell us without apparent embarrassment that they can see stellar events that occurred millions of years ago, whereas we all know that we see things as they happen. When, at the time of the moon landing, a woman in rural Texas was interviewed about the event, she very sensibly refused to believe that the television pictures she had seen had come all the way from the moon, on the grounds that with her antenna she couldn't even get Dallas. What seems absurd depends on one's prejudice. Carl Sagan accepts, as I do, the duality of light, which is at the same time wave and particle, but he thinks that the consubstantiality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost puts the mystery of the Holy Trinity "in deep trouble." Two's company, but three's a crowd.
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.
The mutual exclusion of the material and the demonic has not been true of all cultures and all times. In the great Chinese epic Journey to the West, demons are an alternative form of life, responsible to certain deities, devoted to making trouble for ordinary people, but severely limited. They can be captured, imprisoned, and even killed by someone with superior magic.6 In our own intellectual history, the definitive displacement of divine powers by purely material causes has been a relatively recent changeover, and that icon of modern science, Newton, was at the cusp. It is a cliché of intellectual history that Newton attempted to accommodate God by postulating Him as the Prime Mover Who, having established the mechanical laws and set the whole universe in motion, withdrew from further intervention, leaving it to people like Newton to reveal His plan. But what we might call "Newton's Ploy" did not really get him off the hook. He understood that a defect of his system of mechanics was the lack of any equilibrating force that would return the solar system to its regular set of orbits if there were any slight perturbation. He was therefore forced, although reluctantly, to assume that God intervened from time to time to set things right again. It remained for Laplace, a century later, to produce a mechanics that predicted the stability of the planetary orbits, allowing him the hauteur of his famous reply to Napoleon. When the Emperor observed that there was, in the whole of the Mécanique Céleste, no mention of the author of the universe, he replied, "Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis." One can almost hear a stress on the "I."
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com