We should be very careful in how we reason from even the best of facts by way of the most sincere respect for empirical reality even if we have proper respect for plausibly conjectured abstract realms of being. We all carry in our heads and hearts and even in our ways of behavior something that could be labeled a `framework’ of interpretation or, in a more complete form, a worldview which gives overall meaning to what we consider to be `reality’. That worldview or framework might be a full-blown narrative which makes senses of our empirical knowledge within a context of an overarching theological creed as I hold in the form of traditional, Catholic faith or it might be a fairly simple, nearly pantheistic, faith in reason as Einstein held.
I was reading Bishop Butler’s The Analogy of Religion and found that a man reputed to have a great share of common sense did, in fact, understand our dependence upon our senses for what we know—though he didn’t seem nearly so clear about the issue as Aquinas who had lived about four centuries earlier and before Galileo. What’s remarkable to modern sensibilities is the way Butler was able to argue from a sense-based understanding of human knowledge to idealistic and dualistic conclusions.
A particular example comes from the observation that tools, even a walking stick used for probing ground, can become a true extension of our arm. From this observation, knowing about how the brain builds a map of my body and its interaction with tools and other creatures, I conclude—originally following Michael Polanyi’s analyses of his own experiences as a surgeon—that an oft-used tool can become as if a part of our body. Not knowing that our bodily sense, and the various aspects of our selves, arise as the brain builds such a map, and probably thinking of the brain as being a static entity in its structure, Bishop Burton goes the other way from me and concludes my own body is only nominally and by custom a part of `me’: the true `me’ is immaterial, residing inside the brain, but in the way of a ghost residing inside a house. Rather than seeing the self as something which can expand into the material world, he restricts my self to an immaterial entity somehow located inside my head.
Why such radically different conclusions from two thinkers, Bishop Butler in the 17th century and Loyd Fueston in the 21st century, who both accept that we know by way of our senses, by way of eye and ear and nose and so on? Butler was born after Galileo and Newton had done their scientific work and perhaps knew of the growing trend to think in terms of a universe of concrete being and not in terms of a place in which I could travel, in principle, with Dante and Virgil from Hell to Purgatory to Heaven, a place in which “matter” from Earth and “spirit” from Heaven met in some never-explained way. There’s a strangeness about the human adjustment to these sorts of changes in our worldviews and this can be seen in the fact that some cosmological speculations would allow universes with radically different properties in different regions but nearly all physicists and philosophers working on cosmological problems would reject the idea of radically different regions in the same universe, more or less by definition, equally because of belief in uniform mathematical models. (This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to have a pasted-together universe under current understandings of concrete, contingent being, only that it lies outside nearly all `scientific’ worldviews in the post-Einsteinian world, with some interesting exceptions one of which I’ll discuss below.)
Butler lived in a transitional phase during which philosophers as well as scientists were also moving more strongly toward the analysis of physical systems in terms of mathematically describable cause-and-effect relationships rather than the more anthropomorphic `tendencies’, almost `desires’, which were assumed by Aristotle and some other thinkers of the ancient world. This belief in cause-and-effect was tightly connected with the faith in certain modes of mathematical thinking advocated by Galileo; Newton made possible a more consistent mathematical way of thinking about reality which imposed assumptions, usually implicit, which included a general belief in the uniformity of laws and stuff throughout this universe. Modern mathematics would actually allow various cutting and sewing operations which would allow a universe to be constructed out of parts inconsistent in some ways. This construction would be rather strange but describable in rigorous terms. Arguably, some entities conjectured by modern physicists, such as the worm-holes which would allow time-travel, are regions `sewn’ into the fabric of our universe—if they exist. But they can plausibly exist under our current understandings of physical reality. In fact, speculative theories describe how `normal’ regions of our universe could develop into strange regions, but they are as if cut from someplace else and sewn into our universe by some mathematician with a strange sense of humor.
A century from now, those in the know, especially those who read the best of popular science books, might well laugh at our ideas about cosmology and genetics and human history. More sympathetic and more knowledgeable thinkers in those future generations might have good reason to consider us to have been headed in the right direction, however wrong some of the ideas held back in 2013.
I was born in 1955, the year Einstein died. I was born a century and a half after Cauchy and various predecessors had largely completed the construction of a solid mathematical foundation for the calculus and Newtonian dynamics. I was born about a century after Darwin began publishing his major works, half a century after brain-scientists began disciplined studies of neurons, half a century after the beginning of the exploration of aspects and regions of the cell which seemed to be some sort of machinery of inheritance. I was born a century after John Henry Newman calmly and quietly advocated an acceptance of the world as God had created it, though he seems to have still accepted a dualistic view of human being. I was born a half-century after the rediscovery of the truly radical nature of Thomistic existentialism and the teaching of Thomas Aquinas and others in the High Middle Ages that all we know, even divine revelations, comes through our senses. Aquinas had also taught that all that is truly human is embodied and an immaterial soul is a non-human thing attached to us to carry out abstract forms of reasoning he thought impossible to a brain seen as static in its structures—an interesting combination of anticipations of modern scientific discoveries and ancient errors.
From a Christian point-of-view, it’s quite possible to accept a full-blooded Biblical Christianity and also accept that God works in ways not describable by Intelligent Design Theory, oddly tied to freshman calculus and physics, an introductory course in probability theory, and a common-sense of the sort which powered the Industrial Revolution. Biblical Literalism is part of the package and not a good description of the ways of thought of the leaders of the school of Intelligent Design. In other words, the limited views and knowledge-base of the advocates of Intelligent Design are very much what were part of the worldview of the men who developed modern construction techniques, including the use of iron and then steel beams, and modern forms of production and transportation and public utilities. We owe our fresh-water and sewage systems to men who thought like the current advocates of Intelligent Design Theory. The Bible is read literalistically on Sunday afternoon after worship services on a day breaking up the main work of a man’s life. This doesn’t mean that every follower of Intelligent Design is a competent mechanical engineer or skilled steel-worker. It does mean that their view is limited in a way that ties them to outmoded 19th century thought, that is, the thought of those those who played a disproportionate role in creating the prosperity of the modern world, the prosperity which allows us to send anthropologists around the world to find bones and to pay philosophers and literary scholars to tell us how stupid their benefactors were. Gratitude and criticism can be directed to the same figures but we modern people seem to have more trouble with gratitude than with criticism, often downright nasty criticism.
We should be very careful in how we reason. Indeed.
Maybe we can do better than those who limit the Creator to engineering sciences and introductory probability theory? Maybe we can do better than those who take the odd view that anything physically small by galactic standards must be meaningless? Apparently, a child dancing in a sunny yard is worth less than an advancing army with great fire-power, let alone a black-hole which distorts spacetime with its mass millions of times greater than the mass of our sun. Is Shakespeare less important than those who miniaturized nuclear-fusion bombs so they could be carried by ICBMs? Yet, these morally dense thinkers, led by the likes of Carl Sagan and Richard Dawson, usually pretend to humanitarian sensibilities even as they worship size and power and impressive numbers in general, but only galaxies; they pretend to dislike the physical greatness of nuclear bombs.
I’ve been reading an often insightful book on the technical aspects and general principles of complex systems and the author wrote of how Creationism is implausible because it depends upon an agent no one has ever seen. And he went on to conduct more insightful analyses of highly abstract, invisible aspects of being which reason can find in this concrete world though those aspects remain invisible, other than in their effects, to the human eye.
We should be very careful in how we reason. Indeed.
Do these people not have the imagination to realize that even our universe in its early years, as described in the standard cosmological theory, was a very abstract, very strange entity with no thing-like being?
We should be very careful in how we reason. Indeed.
This very problem of unconscious or ideological bias, or the largely equivalent problem of assuming our metaphysical beliefs are simply common-sense rules of absolute truth, leads me to still more strongly advocate the view that even the most quantitatively successful realms of science have to be put into a greater framework or worldview to make total sense or to be seen as nonsensical. Even good thought, outside of a more general framework or worldview, can be wrongfully understood and can lead to a variety of problems in our political and economic activities as well as in our religious and intellectual activities.
Download Four Kinds of Knowledge for a coherent way of understanding how human beings know.