New Physics and Old Metaphysics, reprise

I tried to discuss Stephen Hawkings' book The Grand Design back here. I wasn't that thrilled with my post but wanted to get my thoughts out in writing.  I wrote

I do not know if the authors are making this assumption, but I have seen some scientistis and even some theologians assume that the word "God" is a way for people to explain physical mysteries.   So when there are no more physical mysteries, there is no more need for God. 

I have never quite understood that line of thinking, but apparently it came about in the Enlightenment, when philosophy took a post-Cartesian credibility hit and physical science came to the fore as a presumably more realistic substitute given the terms of the Cartesian approach.   Most of the scientists of the time were still Deists, though many of them weren't orthodox.   And the same was true of many theologians.  So God did begin to become for them a way to explain what couldn't be explained by empirical methods of the time.   In that approach, God became a component of our thinking, a kind of placeholder, so as our thinking became more scientific, the place for God  in our heads got smaller and smaller.  

 Well, over here is a lecture called The New Physics and the Old Metaphysics by Br. Guy Consolmagno, S.J., Ph.D.   He says it much more elegantly and Chestertonianly (: )) by saying that Hawkings was absolutely right, he did eliminate the need for God to explain the universe, and rightly so, because that kind of deist God, designed as an explanation for what can't be explained otherwise, needs to be done away with.

The real God, Consolmagno says (I can't past his words directly because of the format of the lecture text), the God of Abraham, is not bound within the cosmos.   Quoting Wittgenstein, he says, "the sense of the world must lie outside the world." 

This may sound a bit Kantian, but it does not have to be that way.  While Kant would say that God can't be known, Consolmagno says that God indeed can be known experientially.    We cannot "derive" God from analysis, but we CAN know Him; in fact, we know all things BY Him, whether we happen to know that or not. 

I'm not updating this blog regularly anymore but this doesn't quite seem to belong to Take Up and Read so I'm putting it here!

HT for the link to the talk:  Michael Baruzzini in the CatholicScience.com newsletter.  

Questions, Wonder, Faith

Going for a walk this afternoon --  we have had a warm winter so far and the outdoors isn't covered with snow as it usually is -- I was thinking more about that quote about wonder and how it is the beginning of the road to wisdom.

I was thinking about how I can read a book or article, understand what I'm reading yet after I put it down remember almost nothing about it UNLESS (and this is what struck me) it was somewhat mysterious.   And there are all sorts of ways to be mysterious and therefore memorable.   My favorite poetry is somewhat obscure; and I often remember an essay better if I disagreed with it than when I completely agreed; and the stories I remember best are the ones that seem to open up a new vista or leave something unresolved.

It can't be a mystery of incompetence -- I don't like pretentiously obscure poetry, or blockheaded essays, or stories that have lots of loose ends because the writer dropped literary stitches as he wrote.   It has to be a puzzle or like a curtain that somehow shifted where I got a glimpse of something beautiful and strange, but the curtain fell back before I could see it completely.

Realizing this, I wonder if it could help me remember better what I read.  Study Skills courses tell me to pose myself questions as I read in order to remember, and this paralyzes me with disgusted boredom from the start.   It's sort of like looking at a Cosmo cover in the grocery line which promises to tell me how to attract my significant other.   I feel like something slimy has tried to drop on me. 

But in another way, it seems true that this wondering instinct leads me to muse and ponder, and those are the only ways to find out.   It is said more than once of Mary that she "pondered in her heart" and this is a very sign of how she recognized and acknowledged mystery without turning away from it as if it were merely a closed box marked "mystery here"


It seems like nowadays we either deny there is mystery, or think of it as a sort of shallow puzzle or distraction, or imbue it with a deceptive gnostic cloak,  turn away with fear and distrust in favor of something more easily grasped by our senses. 

We also teach badly by ignoring real questions in favor of ones that are too easily answerable.   Children start wondering as soon as their survival needs are met.     But it's easy to imply to them that learning is just stocking the head with information, and then they stop wondering.  

Cardinal Newman says that learning is ultimately directed towards wisdom or enlargement of mind, which is a very different thing from mere quantity of information. 

Or, again, the censure often passed on what is called undigested reading, shows us that knowledge without system is not Philosophy. Students who store themselves so amply with literature or science, that no room is left for determining the respective relations which exist between their acquisitions, one by one, are rather said to load their minds than to enlarge them.

Some other things that are different from true enlargement of mind, though they may masquerade as such: 

 love of system, theorizing, fancifulness, dogmatism, and bigotry

Aristotle (in the Metaphysics)  says similiarly that wisdom is not just a mass of particulars  

"Again, we do not regard any of the senses as Wisdom; yet surely these give the most authoritative knowledge of particulars. But they do not tell us the 'why' of anything-e.g. why fire is hot; they only say that it is hot.

 So Wisdom is the knowledge of "what kind are the causes and the principles". 

It is in wondering, according to Aristotle, that we start on the journey to wisdom, not by doing or making things per se: 

"That it (wisdom) is not a science of production is clear even from the history of the earliest philosophers.  For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters, e.g. about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and of the stars, and about the genesis of the universe.

And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders); therefore since they philosophized order to escape from ignorance, evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end. And this is confirmed by the facts; for it was when almost all the necessities of life and the things that make for comfort and recreation had been secured, that such knowledge began to be sought. Evidently then we do not seek it for the sake of any other advantage; but as the man is free, we say, who exists for his own sake and not for another's, so we pursue this as the only free science, for it alone exists for its own sake. 

 Newman talks about Wisdom somewhat differently, as beginning in Faith, but still "right judgment" is not all that different from knowledge of first principles and causes, except that (as Newman says later in his sermon) Faith can bypass and surpass the painful intellectual rigor needed to even approach by human means a partial understanding of these causes and principles. 

The Collect virtually speaks of Faith, when it makes mention of Almighty God's "teaching the hearts of His faithful people by the sending to them the light of His Holy Spirit;" and of the Wisdom of the perfect, when it prays God, that "by the same Spirit" we may "have a right judgment in all things."

In this context the movement of the Holy Spirit begins with Faith and is perfected in wisdom, or right judgement.

  knowledge itself, though a condition of the mind's enlargement, yet, whatever be its range, is not that very thing which enlarges it. Rather the foregoing instances show that this enlargement consists in the comparison of the subjects of knowledge one with another. We feel ourselves to be ranging freely, when we not only learn something, but when we also refer it to what we knew before. It is not the mere addition to our knowledge which is the enlargement, but the change of place, the movement onwards, of that moral centre, to which what we know and what we have been acquiring, the whole mass of our knowledge, as it were, gravitates. And therefore a philosophical cast of thought, or a comprehensive mind, or wisdom in conduct or policy, implies a connected view of the old with the new; an insight into the bearing and influence of each part upon every other; without which there is no whole, and could be no centre. It is the knowledge, not only of things, but of their mutual relations. It is organized, and therefore living knowledge.

Later on in the sermon, he describes how Faith (speaking generally) can reach the highest that Wisdom is capable of (naturally speaking):

Whatever be the subject-matter and the point in question, sacred or profane, Faith has a true view of it, and Wisdom can have no more; nor does it become truer because it is held in connexion with other opinions, or less true because it is not. And thus, since Faith is the characteristic of all Christians, a peasant may take the same view of human affairs in detail as a philosopher; and we are often perplexed whether to say that such persons are intellectually gifted or not. They have clear and distinct opinions; they know what they are saying; they have something to say about any subject; they do not confuse points of primary with those of secondary importance; {305} they never contradict themselves: on the other hand they are not aware that there is any thing extraordinary about their judgments; they do not connect any two judgments together; they do not recognize any common principles running through them; they forget the opinions they have expressed, together with the occasion; they cannot defend themselves; they are easily perplexed and silenced; and, if they set themselves to reason, they use arguments which appear to be faulty, as being but types and shadows of those which they really feel, and attempts to analyze that vast system of thought which is their life, but not their instrument.

 He distinguishes it here from Bigotry, which is like Faith often partially uneducated, but doesn't possess the habit of right judgment -- it misjudges, and over-extends partial truths, and puts things out of order.  Of course, in most actual people you find a mixture of traits -- there is hardly anyone free of bigotry, either rationalistic or fideistic, but you do find exemplars of Faith in the saints, whether they happened to be well educated, or not.

In this way, true Faith is perfected in Wisdom, not by human means but by grace.   I am supposing that false or warped faith always resolves into some kind of bigotry.  And I'm not just talking about professedly religious faith here, either, because, as Newman says, we can't do without some sort of dogmatism or principle, whether we happen to acknowledge it or not: 

Thus, what is invidiously called dogmatism and system, in one shape or other, in one degree or another, is, I may say, necessary to the human mind; we cannot reason, feel, or act, without it; it forms the stamina of thought, which, when it is removed, languishes, and droops. Sooner than dispense with principles, the mind will take them at the hand of others, will put up with such as are faulty or uncertain;—and thus much Wisdom, Bigotry, and Faith, have in common. Principle is the life of them all; but Wisdom is the application of adequate principles to the state of things as we find them, Bigotry is the application of inadequate or narrow principles, while Faith is the maintenance of principles, without caring to apply or adjust them..

and also

Even sceptics cannot proceed without elementary principles, though they would fain dispense with every yoke and bond.

Hollow Men

This is from The Hollow Universe, by Charles de Koninck, and reminds me a bit of CS Lewis's Abolition of Man which we were discussing this fall:

The prevailing 'scientific outlook', above all in the Commonwealth, is now more than ever dominated by Hume. His critique does not affect science as a tool; indeed, mathematics is now largely recognized for what he thought it was—a tool, and a quite reliable one. But his treatment of induction and causality is now being used to snuff out that first type of wonder : wonder about what a cause is, what is cause of what, what movement is, what place and time are, and so on. His apparently cold analysis has met with considerable popular success; and its effect is to drive from the human mind that primordial curiosity, the parent of all other motives of inquiry, which Aristotle describes in his account of the beginnings of science and wisdom.

Surely it is disheartening to reflect that we live in an age when it can be necessary, not merely to explain Einstein's speculative goal, but even to defend it against another type of mind which would have it that his time might have been better spent in the practice of plumbing. But the spirit of intellectual nihilism is gaining ground. It is frightening to think of the extent to which people are now being encouraged to banish from the minds of their children great questions as devoid of all meaning; to dispel the wonder which is a young mind's birthright; to confine their spirit to petty problems that can be answered once and for all to the satisfaction of reasoners incapable of raising a question to begin with. We now have a philosophy to show that there are no problems but those which it has shown to be no problem; and to decree that there is no philosophy other than one that is a denial of philosophy. Under the twinkle of a fading star, Hollow Men rejoice at a hollow world of their own making.

De Koninck was a Belgian Thomistic scholar who taught on the topic of "the compatibility and complementarity of philosophical knowledge and scientific inquiry".  Apparently the late Dr Ralph McInerny studied under him.   There are several writings of De Koninck's linked online at Good Catholic Books. 

Interesting factoid, if Wikipedia is to be believed:

De Koninck and his family hosted and entertained many notables in their Quebec City residence, among them Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and his fiery writer-artist wife, Consuelo Suncín, during their five week stay in the province in the spring of 1942. The De Koninck's precocious eight year old son, Thomas, whom Saint-Exupéry met, may have served as an inspiration for the extraterrestrial visitor of his most famous novella, The Little Prince.

Reading Nietzche during Advent

I don't know why it is, but during Advent and Christmas I always seem to want to read modern philosophy.   Perhaps because it reminds me what the world escaped when our Savior was born into that cave as an unknown infant.   Every secular modern (post-Christian) philosophy is in some way a regression, a shutting out of what it doesn't care to deal with.   As Chesterton says of the coming together of many things in the Nativity:

The second element is a philosophy larger than other philosophies; larger than that of Lucretius and infinitely larger than that of Herbert Spencer. It looks at the world through a hundred windows where the ancient stoic or the modem agnostic only looks through one. It sees life with thousands of eyes belonging to thousands of different sorts of people, where the other is only the individual standpoint of a stoic or an agnostic. It has something for all moods of man, it finds work for all kinds of men, it understands secrets of psychology, it is aware of depths of evil, it is able to distinguish between real and unreal marvels and miraculous exceptions, it trains itself in tact about bard cases, all with a multiplicity and subtlety and imagination about the varieties of life which is far beyond the bald or breezy platitudes of most ancient or modem moral philosophy. In a word, there is more in it; it finds more in existence to think about; it gets more out of life. 

 Anyway, this Advent I have started reading Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.   I might blog about it in a naive fashion, just as a reader.   That's why I thought I would mention that I'm reading it, so you aren't surprised if I suddenly start quoting and commenting a seemingly evil crazy person, especially during such a strange time of year.   Winter slows me down and I find I can tackle harder and more unsympathetic books during this time.    "The people in darkness have seen a great light"  -- it seems that I see the light more clearly when I better see the darkness that closes in when the light does not shine.  

My long-term project is to read the Thomas Aquinas College syllabus.   It goes slowly, so slowly that I don't know if I'll finish before my last child finishes college, which will be in 15 years.   But when my kids are going to college, it helps me keep attached to them to read some of the things they are reading.    And I can ask their opinion if I run into a problem with reading books that are basically beyond my philosophical grounding.

Of course, the entire syllabus is not composed of dangerous books.  There is a very fundamental emphasis on reading good things there, things that form the mind rather than test it.  Nevertheless, students do read Hume, Spinoza, Machievelli, Freud, Nietzsche and Marx, not to mention Lucretius and (I think) Empodocles.

The dean of TAC has been presenting some talks to the TAC board of directors and some of them are in article form here.

Here is one called:   Reckoning with Rousseau:  Why Even Bad Books Can Be Great. He uses Rousseau as a paradigm to discuss why it's worthwhile to read "bad" books.  So you could substitute the names of Nietzsche or Spinoza or Machiavelli since the general points apply across the board. 

 A few things he says there that speak to why I bother to use my limited brain power reading difficult books that I don't even agree with, and why I want my kids to go to a college where erroneous but influential thinkers are read and discussed seriously:

Rousseau matters because he had a large effect on the world in both its thinking and the unfolding events of history. ....Without understanding Rousseau it is very difficult to understand the world around us, or even ourselves as children of the modern world.

 he is answering some of the greatest questions that can occupy our minds: what is man? what is his purpose in life? These are timeless questions. These are questions that we have to address if we aim at liberal education.

So Rousseau is in fundamental opposition to us; it is important that our students not shy away from this but rather take it head on, reading and savoring his words and ideas, not lightly dismissing him, but examining the merits of his claims and arguments.

when we judge that Rousseau has erred, we want to see why he went astray and what truth is mixed in with his error. 

 we learn best when we take into account different and opposing arguments. We do not make good judgments, intellectual or practical, when we avoid conflict.

These are all things I agree with.  Dr Kelly also says:

We trust that sober and careful reason is not lightly led astray, especially when it is bolstered by the blessing of Faith. Thus class does not begin with the tutor instructing the students that Rousseau is badly mistaken. Rather, we examine his arguments, in his own words, in the context of a serious discussion and with the Faith as a guiding light.

Here is where I feel a little less confident about myself as a reader, for several reasons.  Though staunchly loyal to my Faith,  I am a convert who was educated in very secular environments deeply influenced by Rousseaun and Lockean methodology and philosophy.

I am not reading with the guidance of a tutor and with the support of fellow students.

I am not approaching the syllabus systematically -- I take it up in bits and pieces.

Thus, I am most definitely not the Very Model of A Sober Careful Reasoner. 

On the other hand, that doesn't make my need to know and judge any the less.   For the very reason that I was bathed in Romanticism, Enlightenment rationalism, and received a genuine but unrigorous Christian catechesis in my younger days, I need to better understand, from the source, the currents of thought in the books I read and the society I live in.  

Everyone philosophizes, either well or badly.   So it's better to try to improve.

I'm not saying that this is for everyone.   And I don't do it year around.  Most of the time I read the Bible, and the saints, and devotional and philosophical works I trust.   And there are times I don't read much at all, except for practical works and read-alouds.

And I think that just living without reading is sufficient.   I know lots of people who read little but act wisely and live well.    But since I have opportunity to read, and will read billboards and cereal boxes if I don't have anything else, and I like to tackle books that make me think, I read hard stuff sometimes because it's there, you know?

So there is my rationale.

So far I can't help feeling sorry for Nietzsche.  He makes the telling if reductive point that philosophy is to some degree autobiography.  And certainly here his form reflects his content, since I hear misery and rage and pride in his approach.  He debunks other philosophies sharply and acutely, but so far (I'm just in the early pages) doesn't seem to be able to proclaim his own systematically.  And I think that's part of his intent, which seems sad in itself, like sound and fury.   He does say some very good things, though.   Some other time I'll quote the bits I like, but this post probably is trying your patience quite enough.    For some reason I can't get my friends and family to listen for very long to this kind of thing (wonder why?) so I resort to my blog because my readers can so easily click away if they aren't interested.

If you have read to the end, you are either a rare kindred spirit, or a very patient and benevolent reader, or someone who has set their Google notifications to give Nietzsche alerts (that happened to me once when I mentioned Ayn Rand on my other blog).    Anyway, thanks for reading to the end and you are totally welcome to comment in any of those cases!

Poetry, the Imagination, Morals, Paradox, Mystery, Sensibles, and the Observer Effect

I had so much fun catching up on my Google Reader today.  You can see my shared items on the sidebar but here's a few heavy but interesting ones I wanted to save especially to go back to later.

Somehow all those things in the title seem related to me, but I can't quite figure out how.  How about you?  

-- Starving the Imagination -- Russell Kirk at Paying Attention to the Sky

Yet this is no effective way to impart a knowledge of norms: direct moral didacticism, whether of the Victorian or the twentieth century variety, usually awakens resistance in the recipient, particularly if he has some natural intellectual power.

 How Poetry Finds Laws for Moral Existence -- Russell Kirk, at Paying Attention to the Sky

Sheer Experience, As Franklin Suggested, Is The Teacher Of Born Fools.
Of course it was not by books alone that the normative understanding of the framers of the Constitution, for instance, was formed. Their apprehension of norms was acquired also in family, church, and school, and in the business of ordinary life. But that portion of their normative understanding which was got from books did loom large. For we cannot attain very well to enduring standards if we rely simply on actual personal experience as a normative mentor. Sheer experience, as Franklin suggested, is the teacher of born fools.
Our lives are too brief and confused for most men to develop any normative pattern from their private experience; and as Newman wrote, “Life is for action.” Therefore we turn to the bank and capital of the ages, the normative knowledge found in revelation, authority, and historical experience, if we seek guidance in morals, taste, and politics. Ever since the invention of printing, this normative understanding has been expressed, increasingly in books, so that nowadays most people form their opinions, in considerable part, from the printed page. This may be regrettable sometimes; it may be what D. H. Lawrence called “chewing the newspapers”; but it is a fact. Deny a fact, and that fact will be your master.

Organizing Curriculum -- Why History?   at Life, Books and Education

But why use history as the organizing principal – especially if it has never been part of classical education in the past?  I've been thinking about this question ever since I read the preface to Norms and Nobility.  David Hick’s writes, “Although in my curriculum proposal I use history as the paradigm for contextual learning, the ethical question ‘What should one do?’ might provide an even richer context for acquiring general knowledge.”

Also, a series on Mysteries and the Higher Mystery, by Daniel McInerny, at High Concepts

• Mystery as Paradox

What good and bad paradoxes possess in common is the shock derived from contradiction: paradox is [apparent] contradiction, explicit or implied” (Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, p. 15). That shock may occur in a fragment of Heraclitus or in the Gospels, but it is perhaps most often encountered, though usually incognito, in tales of mystery and suspense. In fact, G.K. Chesterton, the master of paradox, in Heretics defines paradox as mystery (Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, p. 14).

• Sherlock Holmes 

The Holmesian “Clue.” The clue is a bogus epiphany. In itself it has no ontological significance. It doesn’t open to contemplative penetration the intelligible depths of some object; rather it suggests to the quick deductive wit discursive attention to the superficies of a dozen other objects. The clue and the chain of reasoning function, like a jigsaw puzzle, in two dimensions. The sleuth’s reconstruction of a crime works at the level of efficient causes only; the epiphany implies an intuitive grasp of material, formal, and final causes as well (Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce, p. 176). 

• Father Brown

the Chestertonian sleuth is not about “clues” as much as he is a reader of the human heart. “the only thrill, even of a common thriller, is concerned somehow with the conscience and the will,” “In Defence of Detective Stories.” 

Finally, James Chastek at Just Thomist wrote on the topic Could sensation make an essential division in physical theory?

Seen from this angle, the purely relative difference between the very small and the classically sized takes on an absolute value. Sensation uses physical interaction, and the relative distinctions of large and small make essential differences in physical interaction. Hitting a bug with your car is not the same thing as hitting a tree.

and Catholic sci fi novelist Mike Flynn followed up on that one with a post Heisenberg Dances with Aristotle.

in Aristo-Thomism, the sense object is a compound of

• a thing in the world and
• the subjective/personal dispositions of the one sensing.

IOW, the observer affects the thing observed.  The proper sensibles really do exist in the world AND they are combined with observer’s subjective disposition.  Why don't we call this "the observer effect."Funny.  That has a familiar ring to it.

The Grand Design

Now that I've read Stephen Hawking's and Leonard Mlodinow's book The Grand Design, thanks to my library's Kindle lending program, I want to write out some thoughts.  I blogged about it before I read it, back when it first came out.    This isn't really a review but just about some issues the book brought up in my mind, that seem to want to keep spinning around in there until I write them out. 

So here goes ---

Sean Carroll, another physicist and author, writes in a review of the book:

The Hawking vs. God debate has featured prominently in the news of late. He and Mr. Mlodinow don't claim to have proved that God doesn't exist; their argument is somewhat more confined, but still important in its implications. We understand enough about the ultimate laws of physics, the authors say, to conclude that we don't need God to understand the universe.

 Or, as the book says,

Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does nature have the laws it does? Why do we exist? Some would claim the answer to these questions is that there is a God who chose to create the universe that way. . . . We claim, however, that it is possible to answer these questions purely within the realm of science, and without invoking any divine beings."

Father Stanley Jaki, a physicist and theologian who wrote many books about the relation of science and religion, has written that physicists, if they are not careful,can confuse the operational with the ontological.

The way I understand what he is saying, good physics does not add up to good philosophy or good theology.  When you have explained the steps by which you think the universe has begun, even supposing your model meets all the standards of a good model, you have perhaps accomplished a wonderful feat of theoretical reverse engineering, but you have not even started to say anything about metaphysics (which is the study of things beyond matter and motion).   You are still in your own field. 

Also, at the very least, the epistemological presuppositions upon which physical science is founded are metaphysical.   We have to presuppose that we can say something meaningful about the physical world before we can even start writing a book of this sort.  And that is a giant metaphysical presupposition.    It can't be verified physically. 

It's important to get that out on the table at the start, I think.   I am not sure whether Hawking and Mlodinow would disagree, though I suspect that they would, and that is one of the ambiguous elements in the book.   I definitely think they intended to fire a shot over the bow of traditional metaphysics, but in spite of their provocative "Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead," I don't think they have managed to fly their flag on the mast yet.  

As far as physics go, Hawking and Mlodinow posit an "M-theory" which I will have to simplify even more than they already did in the book, in order to fit it in this post.   They hold that any universe that can exist, will exist; that 

the universe does not have just a single existence or history, but rather every possible version of the universe exists simultaneously in what is called a quantum superposition.

So, given this theory, what looks like extraordinary odds that our universe should be as it is, habitable and capable of producing beings like ourselves (I believe they give a number of 10 to the 500th power for all possible permutations of the basic physical laws, which is a number beyond staggering), is actually not a highly improbable thing at all but demonstrably inevitable for this universe.  The very fact that it does exist means that it could. 

The conclusions that they draw from this, if it were true, are:

•  We are not special  -- sentient human beings are the inevitable byproduct of the particular set of laws that exist in this particular universe.  
•  God did not custom-design our universe  -- it's just one of a vastly, mind-boggingly number of alternate universes. 

The only way I can make these conclusions follow the premise is by including an assumption that sheer quantity has any kind of relationship to qualitative importance.  Such an assumption certainly isn't a given, and I think it would be somewhat difficult to defend. 

To  prepare the ground for their multiverse theory,  Hawking and Mlodinow explain their philosophy of model-dependent realism.  They say that it is meant to short-circuit the philosophical debate between what the book calls "realists" and "anti-realists". 

"There is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we will adopt a view that we will call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. This provides a framework with which to interpret modern science."

"According to model-dependent realism, it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation. If there are two models that both agree with observation ... then one cannot say that one is more real than another. One can use whichever model is more convenient in the situation under consideration."

As I understand it, this approach allows them to speculate a bit past the normal grounds of our physical universe, while still staying within bounds of natural science.

I sort of  like this concept of model-dependent realism because as they say in the book, it speaks to something we are aware of in ordinary life as well as in science.  A lot of times, what we see is dependent on what we have seen and understood in the past.  A new baby is awed by the swooping of the mobile above his head, whereas his mother, who has snapped it together and clipped it to the crib and turned it on, is seeing it very differently -- probably looking past the mobile watching the baby with his big eyes and dancing motions.   When Hawking and Mlodinow look at a physics equation they see something very different than I do.   Last year, Kieron read a book called The View from the Oak which was about the sometimes radically different ways different creatures perceive things.   For example, a dog's nose is hundreds of times more sensitive than mine, so he can almost get a 3D representation of something by its smell, where I would be only vaguely aware that there is a smell at all.

Yet it strikes me that we humans do not really practice model-dependent realism even though in some ways we are somewhat subject to it and hopefully, somewhat aware of it.   In other words, no one ever REALLY says, "That is just my model of reality" though they might say it to someone else "That is just YOUR model".

All of us, from the baby in the crib to the physicist, are trying to come to some absolute truth from our relative stance in the universe.  We hope to transcend our model-dependence at least partly, by taking it into account and attempting to compensate for it, even though we know our attempts can never totally succeed.  We may not see a whole truth given our limits (Thomas Aquinas said that a natural philosopher can never totally understand even a fly), so the understanding that our knowledge is limited induces a healthy humility and wonder that induces us to find out more, but we don't rest in our partial perspective.   (A flea or dog, on the other hand, does rest in its limited knowledge, because it doesn't care to KNOW so much as to meet its biological needs).

Even the baby is striving to universalize his initial impression of the world.  As soon as he is physically able  to get his hands on the toy he has previously only observed, he turns it, tastes it, shakes it, pulls it, throws it.  He is not content until he runs out of ways to study its behavior and sensory properties.   Then he turns to something else.  And we all do the same thing in our own way.   Hawking and Mlodinow are not really, really content to say "this is our model and we're happy with it."  They will want to defend it and refine it.  They will want it to be true in some way, though they may be completely and humbly willing to admit it is not the whole truth and some future genius may springboard from their theory to a more explanatory and predictive one.  

Plus, though Hawking and Mlodinow want to propose model-dependent realism as a philosophical approach that "short-circuits" the debate between realism and idealism, I don't think it can work this way.  It does more and less than short-circuit (their term) -- it simply sidesteps the issue by not confronting it.

Model-dependent realism seems like it must be a form of realism -- by using the example of a goldfish bowl, it brings up an image of a "real world" out there even if we can only see it from our vantage point.   The goldfish is seeing things accurately from his perspective; his perception only "works" if you are in a bowl, but it is realistic from that perspective.   Knowing that he is in a bowl he could theoretically compensate for the distortion and "see" the world outside of his glass. 

But model-dependent realism also echoes idealism or anti-realism in its radical subjectivity, in its agnosticism about whether what we perceive is real or not.  It starts from inside our own heads.  Inside our own heads, or inside a fishbowl, we can never really say anything about reality, only about what appears to our inner minds as reality.    All statements then are self-reports and no more.  The only way the goldfish can compensate for his subjective perspective is to presuppose that there really is a world outside the goldfish bowl, that the outside world is not just a deceptive Matrix-like stream of images on the surface of the glass.

So model-dependent realism works as a procedural or operational approach, not as an ontological or epistemological one.   Or so I would think.  

As a physical-scientific protocol or tool, I would imagine that model-dependent realism is quite effective.  It allows physical scientists to posit certain hypotheses without getting embroiled in scientific dogma (which is, as every high school text will tell you, an obstacle to the pursuit of the physical sciences, though I have started to wonder just a bit about that).   When a new model is (1) more elegant (2) more explanatory (3) more predictive it can replace the old model, no hurt feelings.   Ideally it would keep the natural sciences from infringing on fields outside their own, though in practice with respect to individual scientists it doesn't seem to fully avoid this. 

But as a form of philosophy, model-dependent realism seems to add up to a form of scientism -- that whatever can't be quantified, isn't really worth thinking about.   Scientism unfortunately has a tendency to contradict itself -- because it tends to want to pronounce that because its procedures don't work on unquantifiables, that therefore those unquantifiables don't exist.  This is illogical.   You can see by drawing a Venn diagram that you can never stand inside a circle and make any pronouncements about what is outside that circle.   If the goldfish holds that everything that exists is within the view of his goldfish bowl, he can't then say that this is a proof that there is nothing beyond the view of his goldfish bowl.



Hawking and Mlodinow, in fact, do not make an explicit case that nothing exists that can't be at least determined probabilistically.   Neither do they, in spite of the publicity when the book was released, make a case that God does not exist.   Their case is considerably more limited:

Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing ..... Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

I was confused when I first read this.  Certainly no orthodox Christian, for example,  imagines that the role of their God is to act as curator of the universe.... someone to turn on the lights in the morning and turn them off in the evening, and keep things running during the day.   What God did the authors think they had pre-empted the necessity of?   Surely not my God, the transcendant and yet immanent, He Who everything else is through, by and in? 

I do not know if the authors are making this assumption, but I have seen some scientistis and even some theologians assume that the word "God" is a way for people to explain physical mysteries.   So when there are no more physical mysteries, there is no more need for God. 

I have never quite understood that line of thinking, but apparently it came about in the Enlightenment, when philosophy took a post-Cartesian credibility hit and physical science came to the fore as a presumably more realistic substitute given the terms of the Cartesian approach.   Most of the scientists of the time were still Deists, though many of them weren't orthodox.   And the same was true of many theologians.  So God did begin to become for them a way to explain what couldn't be explained by empirical methods of the time.   In that approach, God became a component of our thinking, a kind of placeholder, so as our thinking became more scientific, the place for God  in our heads got smaller and smaller.

A book by Father Stanley Jaki called Miracles and Physics (short, but difficult, at least for me) discusses this history of thinking in physics and philosophy.  I recommend the book.   He thinks many believers inadvertently fall into the trap of using God to explain things in the natural universe that are so far not well comprehended.     This is "the God of the gaps".   This is a mistake because not only is it subordinating God to the universe's laws -- making Him sort of a factotum or curator or even wall-moulding material, filling in gaps in our construction-- but it leads to the discrediting of theology whenever one of these mysteries is unpacked.

God is thoroughly outside the universe, though the universe is not thoroughly outside Him.  By studying science, we can learn more about Him indirectly and secondarily through His work.  For example, the descriptions of magnitudes in The Grand Design gave me a better look at "infinity" by showing it as something altogether different than a "very very very large number", even an unimaginably large number.

To God, who is infinite, even 10 to the 500th power is nothing to boggle at.   The only way I can picture Hawking and Mlodinow seriously supposing His agency to get lost in it as in a field of tulips would be if they really are presupposing that He is a figment of our minds.     In that case, of course, quantity would boggle Him as it does us. 

We can never find God while locked within physicalist presumptions, except in negative terms by finding our empiric presumptions unjustifiable (really not that unlikely, since strict empiricism runs into difficulties at every turn) and so looking outside the goldfish bowl.   Certainly we can never demonstrate His absence, any more than the goldfish can demonstrate the non-existence of the rooms beyond his range of sight. 

I would take it that Hawking and Mlodinow understand this, and that is why they do not pronounce the non-existence of God, though they clearly think of Him as an unnecessary hypothesis.  All in all, I think they do religion a favor by debunking (or at least exposing) a few of the methodological problems that believers and non-believers alike tend to fall into when discussing religion and science.   The book leaves enough questions hanging so that I am not entirely sure whether or not they are actually stating that philosophy and theology are dead and science has taken their place, or are just having fun stirring things up.

Certainly I can't imagine their book really means to settle any philosophical or theological questions -- rather, if anything, I take those elements to be an incidental part of the main objective, which is to extend the boundaries of what we think of as theoretical physics.   And that part of it is the fascinating and evocative part of this book; it is their area of expertise, and they take the trouble to write it in a lively and simple way, with lots of examples and illustrations.

Socrates and Parenting

I'm trying to read Plato's Republic.  I'm determined to get through it as best I can even if I know I am not understanding all its implications.  From a sheer reading point of view, it is not as fearsome as you might think by hearing about its place in the Western canon.   As CS Lewis has remarked, the book itself is more accessible than many of the scholarly tomes written about it; and in addition, I have a feeling that a sincere amateur would have just as much chance of getting a gem or two out of the reading as many professors well-informed about the context and controversies.    I  feel rather like Glaucon, considering questions thoughtfully but not able to draw out the argument without help; but after all, Socrates seemed to enjoy hanging around with that type of person, so perhaps he wouldn't mind me reading his dialogues, even if in translation.   So with that out of the way, let me go on. 

In Book I, Socrates deals with a kind of modern sophist called Thrasymachus.   Thrasymachus sounds like a hard-headed realist type, or perhaps an old-school Klingon, who has heard that Socrates is wily and is determined not to be verbally run around (but in that case, probably should not have start arguing with Socrates with Plato as listener in the first place).   He  makes a crude case that justice is what is good for the stronger, and that worldly goods end up in the hands of those who are strong and unscrupulous, not with those who are weak and naive enough to believe in things like justice.   He gets what he deserves --a sort of bull-baiting dialogue where he goes from snorting and stamping and rushing into a kind of muttering reflexive "I suppose it must be true if you say so, Socrates."   He's glad to escape back into his routed-bull shelter. 

In Book II, following the initial verbal skirmish with the ancient-Greek Klingon type,  the dialogue takes a deeper tone.  Socrates's friend Glaucon, for the sake of finding truth, takes Thrasymachus's argument and puts it into a more thoughtful frame.  His brother Adeimantus brings out the strongest view of the case in even deeper and subtler terms.   Basically, they are on Socrates' "side" in thinking that to be just is better than to be unjust, but they want to bring out the full difficulty of the issue, in less comic-book tones than Thrasymachus has been able to do.

For this reason, Glaucon makes a case that it would seem to be better to have the appearance of being just and in fact BE unjust, than to in truth be a just man. When you are unjust, he says,  you have nothing to hinder you from grabbing all the good things for yourself.   Which would seem better on the surface than being just and having to deny yourself good things for the sake of justice.

He says that of course it is better to SEEM just, because then you are honored and trusted.   But if an unjust man could manage to convince everyone that he was really just, he would be in the best condition possible.  Whereas it seems that if you were truly just but didn't have the reputation that comes with justice, you would be far worse off.    In essence, it would seem you wouldn't have anything -- you wouldn't have the good things you collected by your injustice, plus you wouldn't have the respect and trust that goes with the reputation of justice.

Basically, Glaucon wants Socrates to tell him whether this justice inside a man is really worth having, or if justice is really only valuable because of the good things you get as a result.  He believes that it is worth having for itself, that to be just is better than to be unjust, but he can't quite figure out the argument in its favor, whereas he can easily argue the opposing position, that it is better to get the goods that come with injustice AND the goods that come with the appearance of justice -- so, bluntly stated, it is better to BE unjust and LOOK just, than to BE just and LOOK unjust.

To answer this, Socrates decides to go on a seeming rabbit trail about cities and thus, I am assuming, we will talk about his notion of the Republic.   His logic is that if something is true for a larger thing (like a polis or city) it will also perhaps be true of the smaller thing (the individual person).  I haven't read any further yet so I don't know how this works out.

But I was struck by Glaucon's argument which seems to be essentially how many people would argue nowadays and think they were espousing a traditional, virtuous position when really, as is apparent in the context, it's just a subtler presentation of Thrasymachus' sledgehammer "might makes right" approach. 

Here's Glaucon presenting the case: 

They say that to do injustice is, by nature, good; to suffer injustice, evil; but that the evil is greater than the good. And so when men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just. This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice; --it is a mean or compromise, between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil, and honoured by reason of the inability of men to do injustice. For no man who is worthy to be called a man would ever submit to such an agreement if he were able to resist; he would be mad if he did. Such is the received account, Socrates, of the nature and origin of justice.

Now that those who practise justice do so involuntarily and because they have not the power to be unjust will best appear if we imagine something of this kind: having given both to the just and the unjust power to do what they will, let us watch and see whither desire will lead them; then we shall discover in the very act the just and unjust man to be proceeding along the same road, following their interest, which all natures deem to be their good, and are only diverted into the path of justice by the force of law.

Adeimantus deepens it even more by bringing in the religious perspective:

There is another side to Glaucon's argument about the praise and censure of justice and injustice, which is equally required in order to bring out what I believe to be his meaning. Parents and tutors are always telling their sons and their wards that they are to be just; but why? not for the sake of justice, but for the sake of character and reputation; in the hope of obtaining for him who is reputed just some of those offices, marriages, and the like which Glaucon has enumerated among the advantages accruing to the unjust from the reputation of justice. More, however, is made of appearances by this class of persons than by the others; for they throw in the good opinion of the gods, and will tell you of a shower of benefits which the heavens, as they say, rain upon the pious; and this accords with the testimony of the noble Hesiod and Homer, the first of whom says, that the gods make the oaks of the just--

So honestly -- don't we tend to tell our children that they should be just because it will bring rewards? And perhaps this is not altogether illegitimate --because many Old Testament passages speak in the same terms.   Even Jesus isn't opposed to declaring frankly that there are rewards for righteousness properly understood.

However, Glaucon's description of the just man who does not get any temporal benefits from justice could ery well be a description of Job, and later Jesus.   So plainly the Bible deals with this question seriously.   So while the idea that "justice will be rewarded"  (either by men, or by "the gods") is certainly an associative cause/effect in normal situations, it's not enough to make a case for justice (or righteousness) in itself.  Or so it would seem from what Glaucon and Adeimantus are saying, and from the direction of Socrates' reply -- where he acknowledges they have made a strong case, and turns to an extended analogy in order to reply.

The other reason we tell our children to be just is that we would want the same to be done to us.  This is what Glaucon says -- that the best would be to be unjust and get away with it, and the worst is to have injustice done to us without recourse, so people make a sort of contract for the "mean", which means that we can't get away with everything but neither can anyone else.

Again, this seems legitimate to an extent.    After all, Jesus said to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you."  But it doesn't address the deeper issue, which Jesus also brought out many times.   Is there something more to justice than just hedging our bets?  

Anyway, I am interested now in seeing how Socrates moves from these questions to the political/social one and in turn, how he applies that back to the individual case of the just man.

effort is not what is good about virtue

I was up late at night going through my drafts and decided to go ahead and tweak this one and post it even though it goes way back to the Leisure: The Basis of Culture discussion which was a whole year ago!  But it relates to something I've been thinking about recently.

"Effort is good"; objecting to this thesis in the Summa theologiae, Thomas Aquinas wrote as follows: "The essence of virtue consists more in the Good than in the Difficult...." "When something is more difficult, it is not for that reason necessarily more worthwhile, but it must be more difficult in such a way, as also to be at a higher level of goodness."

The Middle Ages had something to say about virtue that will be hard for us fellow countrymen of Kant to understand. And what was this? That virtue makes it possible for us... to master our natural inclinations? No. That is what Kant would have said, and we all might be ready to agree. What Thomas says, instead, is that virtue perfects us so that we can follow our natural inclinations in the right way. Yes, the highest realizations of moral goodness are known to be such precisely in this: that they take place effortlessly because it is of their essence to arise from love.

And yet the overemphasis on effort and struggle has made an inroad even on our understanding of love. Why, for instance, in the opinion of the average Christian, is the love of one's enemies the highest form of love? Because here, the natural inclination is suppressed to a heroic degree. What makes this kind of love so great is precisely its unusual difficulty, its practical impossibility. But what does Thomas say? "It is not the difficulty involved that makes this kind of love so worthy, even though the greatness of the love is shown by its power to overcome the difficulty. But if the love were so great as completely to remove all difficulty -- that would be a still greater love."

I've been thinking about this and about Jesus' struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane. This has to have been a different kind of struggle from the one that Josef Pieper and Aquinas are talking about here, though. When we struggle to be virtuous, we are struggling against concupiscence -- pride of the flesh, of the eyes, pride of life, etc (1 John). This was not the case with Our Lord.  He was not struggling to be virtuous.  He was dealing with sorrow, which is a passion, an emotion, something that you undergo as you undergo extrinsic suffering.

Aquinas says that the emotions are sort of like inner senses.    We feel cold when we are in a cold room.   We feel sorrowful when something we love has been lost to us.   The sorrow is not a fault but rather due to a faculty of our human nature which we can respond to by using our rational, spiritual nature.  The intensity of Our Lord's sorrow, and His profoundly loving, obedient response were both marks of His integrity, wholeness of body and soul, reason and will.   To distinguish between how His human and divine natures would experience human emotion is beyond my theological knowledge, but we do know His response is a model of how we should act, and our responses can be a participation in His through the mysterious communion between man and God.... what JoseMaria Escriva calls divine filiation.

love regards a thing as it is in itself

From Whether knowledge is a cause of love?

Something is required for the perfection of knowledge, that is not requisite for the perfection of love.

For knowledge belongs to the reason, whose function it is to distinguish things which in reality are united, and to unite together, after a fashion, things that are distinct, by comparing one with another.

Consequently the perfection of knowledge requires that man should know distinctly all that is in a thing, such as its parts, powers, and properties.

On the other hand, love is in the appetitive power, which regards a thing as it is in itself: wherefore it suffices, for the perfection of love, that a thing be loved according as it is known in itself.

Hence it is, therefore, that a thing is loved more than it is known; since it can be loved perfectly, even without being perfectly known.

Inquiring into Causes

I like what Pope John Paul II says here -- the whole thing is worth reading. 

....He who reflects with an open mind on what is implied in the existence of the universe, cannot help but pose the question of the problem of the origin. Instinctively, when we witness certain happenings, we ask ourselves what caused them.How can we not but ask the same question in regard to the sum total of beings and phenomena which we discover in the world?

...Whatever the theory adopted concerning the origin of the universe, the most basic question cannot be avoided This universe in constant movement postulates a Cause which, in giving it being, has communicated to it this movement, and continues to sustain it.

Without such a supreme Cause, the world and every movement in it would remain "unexplained" and "inexplicable", and our intelligence would not be satisfied. The human mind can receive a response to its questions only by admitting a Being who has created the world with all its dynamism. and who continues to maintain it in existence. 

 Science, like all other areas of human endeavour, seems to necessarily lead beyond itself.  Any serious inquiry into causes, it seems to me, will run into one of three alternatives:

1. It will have to simply stop artificially at some point with some placeholder doctrine that does not explain or lead to the possibility of further insight.  
2. It will have to use methods which aren't fitted to the inquiry.
3. It will genuinely inquire beyond physical science into metaphysics.

I like the way John Paul expresses it -- that what is "unexplained" and, especially, "inexplicable" simply does not satisfy human intelligence, broadly speaking.   Of course everyone has personal limitations -- intellectual areas where one doesn't have time, capacity, or inclination to investigate -- but disqualifying inquiry on principle is intellectually unsatisfying.

Time and Eternity

One of those "research as I go" posts --  sorry.  I can't help it sometimes. 

Although Science may solve the problem of ~how the universe began, it can not answer the question: why does the universe bother to exist? Maybe only God can answer that. -- Stephen Hawking. 

I kept stumbling across blogs and other things talking about Stephen Hawking and his new book.   I am a fan of Hawking from way back when I read Brief History of Time.   But obviously I don't subscribe to his religious theories.

The best review of his new book  I've found so far is here.   The question that is being aired on various media sites is not a new one, and could be phrased as Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?    Their book of course won't solve that question, and I don't know if that is its primary purpose, but it does allow everyone to air out their thoughts on that old debate.

According to Hawking: 

"To understand the universe at the deepest level, we need to know not only how the universe behaves, but why. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some others?" (from here)

This is interesting.  It actually is in the traditional scope of science, but the more recent empiricist view (since Hume, as I understand it) seem to focus more on the "how" questions, the mechanics.  Causality is disallowed as outside the empiricist purview and essentially subjective, a construct of the mind rather than a reflection of what we can truly know from reality.  So it is nice to see a first-rate modern scientist take on the Big Questions.  

Hawking goes on to say  (according to the blurbs released to the news agencies):

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist,....

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going," 

"From nothing" -- this is is distinct from the theological "ex nihilo"  --  nothing is defined by Professor Alexander Vilenkin as a

“state with no classical space-time . . . the realm of unrestrained quantum gravity; it is a rather bizarre state in which all our basic notions of space, time, energy, entropy, etc., lose their meaning".

"Spontaneous creation" does not seem to be an explanatory phrase; rather, sort of a placeholder.   The way I understand it, the general idea in quantum cosmology that anything that CAN happen given the physical preconditions, WILL happen. Apparently this can be postulated fairly reasonably, though somewhat controversially.    So given the initial gravitational conditions, everything else would follow.   So if the universe was bound to ensue from the "original  realm of unrestrained quantam gravity" then that would somewhat answer Hawking's question "Why does the universe bother to exist?"  It bothers to exist because given the original laws, it was most probable that it would exist.... in fact, it almost couldn't have been any other way.  And this response is conveniently secular. 

I haven't read the book, obviously, since it will release tomorrow.  But it seems to me that Hawkings and Mlodinow are postulating something familiar to people who have been reading Hawking for some time.    This is a long quote, but even then it's too short to provide the whole explanation. 

In 1983, Jim Hartle and I, proposed that the state of the universe should be given by a Sum over a certain class of Histories. (cf  Feynman)  This class consisted of curved spaces, without singularities, and which were of finite size, but which did not have boundaries or edges. They would be like the surface of the Earth, but with two more dimensions. The surface of the Earth has a finite area, but it doesn't have any singularities, boundaries or edges. I have tested this by experiment. I went round the world, and I didn't fall off.

The proposal that Hartle and I made, can be paraphrased as: The boundary condition of the universe is, that it has no boundary. It is only if the universe is in this ``no boundary'' state, that the laws of science, on their own, determine the probabilities of each possible history. Thus, it is only in this case that the known laws would determine how the universe should behave. If the universe is in any other state, the class of curved spaces, in the ``Sum over Histories'', will include spaces with singularities. In order to determine the probabilities of such singular histories, one would have to invoke some principle other than the known laws of science. This principle would be something external to our universe. We could not deduce it from within the universe. On the other hand, if the universe is in the ``no boundary'' state, we could, in principle, determine completely how the universe should behave, up to the limits set by the Uncertainty Principle.

He goes on to say that this hypothesis meets the standard for falsifiability, and that he has been working on it ever since, and so far it has not been falsified.

Relativity and quantum mechanics, allow matter to be created out of energy, in the form of particle/ anti- particle pairs. So, where did the energy come from, to create the matter? The answer is, that it was borrowed, from the gravitational energy of the universe. The universe has an enormous debt of negative gravitational energy, which exactly balances the positive energy of the matter. .... The debt of gravitational energy, will not have to be repaid until the end of the universe. 

 I am guessing that in the intervening 3 decades there has been more evidence that at least does not work against the original hypothesis.

The quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, in which there would be no boundary to space-time and so there would be no need to specify the behavior at the boundary. One could say: ‘The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.’ The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE.

His conclusion, even back then in 1988, was that it leaves a very tiny role for God in the universe as it exists.   The way I understand his reasoning, because the material universe incorporates time and space within it, it would be for that reason eternal and self-existent.   And because the universe "had to" be born, there was no necessity for God to turn on the light, so to speak. 

Aquinas apparently would have agreed with the bit about the possibility of an eternal material universe -- though he judged that it was not eternal.  According to this article by William Carroll., Aquinas actually didn't have a problem with the universe being eternal, with time basically enclosed within it,:

Aquinas saw no contradiction in the notion of an eternal created universe. For, even if the universe had no temporal beginning, it still would depend upon God for its very being. There is no conflict between the doctrine of creation and any physical theory. Theories in the natural sciences account for change. Whether the changes described are biological or cosmological, unending or finite, they remain processes. Creation accounts for the existence of things, not for changes in things.  

(I think this also helps with the idea of "cause" being inextricably associated with "time".  This argument is used by some, in combination with Hawking's theories, to say that there is no necessity for a First Cause because time is basically a part of the universe... so nothing has to proceed ultimately from Something Else.   But that is not a new idea and the philosophical idea of "cause" is not limited to quantifiable causes, no more than it is  inextricably linked with sequence.   In fact, given that time is enclosed by the universe, any Uncaused Cause would by definition be outside of time, which is a truism to theists). 

Back to Hawkings -- so, then, the ideas of a "no boundary" universe are nothing new for him, though most of the blogs are saying it is a change from his earlier statements about knowing the mind of God.   And the ideas are not a new surprise or a philosophical crusher to Catholics either, (or to Islam, apparently) since Aquinas and Avicenna were discussing the possibilities several centuries ago.

 I do think Hawkings is more firmly convinced than ever that there is no room for or necessity for a personal God, but this is an opinion or judgment on his part.  The physical evidence doesn't work for or against Revelation (almost by definition)  -- though the theory that a few simple truths could power all the seeming complexity of the universe does give an impression of sheer elegance, beauty and power that evokes awe in my mind. 

But Hawkings sees it differently than I do: 

Of course, God would still be free to choose the laws that the universe obeyed. However, this may not be much of a choice. There may only be a small number of laws, which are self consistent, and which lead to complicated beings, like ourselves, who can ask the question: What is the nature of God?

I wonder if it would be helpful here to make a distinction that has been made since Aristotle--  between metaphysical and physical necessity.    From that article:

The laws of nature, therefore, being subject to physical necessity, are neither absolutely necessary, as materialistic Mechanism asserts, nor merely contingent, as the partisans of the philosophy of contingency declare; but they are conditionally or hypothetically necessary. This hypothetical necessity is also called by some consequent necessity.

Given X and Y and Z preconditions, something can follow by consequent necessity.... like an "If .... then" statement in programming.   But the necessity is NOT necessarily absolutely necessary (can I use that word even more times if I keep this sentence going??).   It's sort of a retroactive necessity.   Given these conditions, the following will ensue.  If you drop salt in water, given the nature of salt and water and mixing, you will have a saline solution.   

Metaphysical or absolute necessity is somewhat more difficult.   It means what couldn't be otherwise by its very being, what doesn't depend upon something else to provide its origin.  Aristotle puts the existence of God in this category.    Some scientist/philosophers seem to say that physical law is an absolute or metaphysical necessity.     Here is where I'll stop because I don't want to get going on another big topic.   But I wonder if Hawking's theories on probability get into the necessity mix here -- they would almost have to in some way, I suppose.     That's something for me to think about while I'm making dinner and feeding my trio of flying squirrels.

more thinking

Some further cogitationes. I feel like I'm going out on a limb here! But just take this in the spirit of “anything worth doing, is worth doing badly.” (GK Chesterton).

I mentioned that one reason that I was interested in the connection between consciousness and external reality is that so many people seem to get this wrong. It's probably very easy to get it wrong and I know I slip into errors of thinking as much as anyone. However, thinking upon these things does induce a sort of humility that goes missing in some of the public discourse on the Big Questions, like this one: Does science make belief in God obsolete?

A lot of secular rationalists seem to think their system of thought is grounded on pure reason. But if Husserl is right, that's like saying "I am not standing on the Earth, I'm standing on a rock". The obvious next question is: "Upon what is the rock standing?" To put it another way, believing in reason per se is a powerful leap of faith. You can see that in the very semantics of "belief in reason". Upon what is that belief grounded? Belief by definition is not reason, it's a precursor to reason. It is not UNreasonable by definition, please note. But that gets us back to the territory of the rock and what it's standing on.

I was trying to think of all the different ways people find to approach this problem. Here's what I came up with, a tentative list:

(1) People who explicitly start with faith in an outside referent, outside their consciousness (I think it pretty much has to be some version of a deity, even if the material universe becomes a provisional deity for this purpose), and derive from this their faith in the essential integrity of human reason. I think some philosophers even start from a humanist position in this regard -- in other words, their "belief" is in the power of humanity to be reasonable, to think in correspondence with objective reality. If you "believe" in the universe, maybe you think that the universe MUST evolve in such a way as to eventually produce a thinking species, and we are that species. And I think monotheists generally believe in reason because they believe in a God who is reasonable and made humans in His image. In other words, in all these positions you believe in reason, but you acknowledge the "belief" part of it explicitly. It is not unreasonable to "believe" -- as Aquinas points out, it's an economy of thought and functionally necessary to us in order to live -- but it seems important that the "belief" is a grounded one, ie that it corresponds with truth, otherwise it is erroneous, mistaken and consequently unreasonable. In other words, one "belief" isn't just as good as another -- even though I've put a variety under the same general category.

(2) People who base all their lifelong endeavors on an implicit but "naive" belief in human reason and its ability to penetrate into reality -- they act "as if" their perceptions were simply and existentially true. In other words, they are somewhat like the Category 1 people but don't really bother to make explicit their implicit assent of faith. This is materially but not formally sufficient. In other words, it seems that you can live a decent life, build nice skyscrapers and efficient toilets, or become a quarterback legend with this kind of presupposition. You need no more. And there are lots of other things you can do or be. You can be a very successful baby or toddler, too. But what you can't do: You can't claim you "know" God doesn't exist and you can't coherently proclaim that the material world is all there is. When you do this you get into absurdities, the kind where you have focused your question too narrowly. Or so I would say.

(3)People who claim that reason is in doubt but generally act as if it weren't -- ie using reason to cast reason into doubt (there are skeptics and Christians in this category). The radical skeptics don't believe that human reason is in touch with reality, or perhaps they don't believe there IS a reality, just our perceptions of it which may wildly vary and yet be "true" in the sense that "appearances" are true for the one perceiving. However, it's impossible to hold this position coherently, it seems to me, since one uses the tools of reason even to write out such a statement. Of course, there are various mental gymnastics to avoid the more obvious errors in this position. It's funny to meet Christians, too, who think that reason is a hopelessly corrupt tool, and will put forward "reasonable" arguments to show that this is true.

(4) People like Descartes that started with what he thought we COULD know with certainty and then tried to derive everything else from there, but with mixed success. This seems like a gallant endeavor to me in some ways, but I've never been sure whether or not it's a false construction from Ground Zero. I mentioned that in my earlier post.

Are there any other solutions? That's one of my ongoing puzzles. And this is sort of what Husserl seems to deal with. He tries to take up where Descartes left off, avoiding the skeptical pitfalls that his predecessors fell into. Does he circle back to Aristotleanism? I don't know enough even to frame these questions correctly. But this doesn't stop me from trying; philosophy is something that everyone does well or badly, consciously or by default, so errors aren't necessarily fatal as long as one doesn't get locked into them.

I am thinking that I fall into Category 1. But I don't think I described it very well. And I'm not sure how much it overlaps with Category 4. My lack of Thomist foundation really handicaps me here.

Many people you meet and hear from nowadays seem to fall into Category 2. Either they devote themselves to practical matters and never deal with epistemology at all, or they deal with epistemology by denying there needs to be such a thing, which seems sort of like the "see no evil" monkey picture. Of course, it is wise in one way of them to do so. Every human science depends on it. Reasons itself depends on it. Yet the reasoning chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and the weakest link of a secular rationalist is their starting presupposition: that their perceptive and reasoning process corresponds to reality.

Now that I've said that, I wonder if there is a more philosophical way to be in Category 2. That's another puzzle that keeps recurring to my mind. If there is, I should like to hear it. Also, now that I think of it, some rationalists seem to fall into Category 1 -- they ascribe a sort of provisional divinity to the physical universe -- but that raises other questions.

I am only focusing on rationalists because they still influence the public mind to a great degree. I think the reason for this is that Americans are practical. They want an efficient philosophy, one that gets the job done. Inquiry into causes doesn't seem too practical when it is effects that matter. But why do effects matter? Unless you accept the view that comfort, health, long life and lots of good things are what count. But what then? What are those for? Are they good in themselves or for the sake of something else? It seems that "getting the goods" or "getting the job done" are servile goods -- they're only FOR something beyond themselves.

Cogitationes

Plainly, however, that cause is the first which we call the final one. For this is the Reason, and the Reason forms the starting-point, alike in the works of art and in works of nature. -- Aristotle.

Reading a biography of Edith Stein (scroll down on this page), I came across the name and a brief description of the thought of Edmund Husserl. Edith Stein was one of his students, and apparently a lot of his students came to some form of Christianity through association with his thinking. Edith Stein herself had been raised in a devout Jewish home and had become an atheist, but ultimately converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun (she died in Auschwitz).

I was talking about consciousness with Liam some time later and he gave me a series of lectures by Husserl on The Idea of Phenomenology (pdf excerpts).

It's not easy going, at least not for me, but I was motivated to blunder through the whole thing because it deals with an issue that has vexed me for the longest time. .... the problem of subjectivity. And here Husserl clarifies some things for me, even while introducing his thought into my muddled storehouse mind probably also adds to the general chaos in there. What I'm saying is that where I go off base in the following will be MY fault, not necessarily his. (see my apologia for the philosophical enterprise done amateurishly).

So the problem that has always vexed me is the grounds upon which we posit objective reality from our subjective vantage point. OK? That is, how you get (without divine help) from the vantage point of your own stream-of-consciousness to understand, describe and evaluate outside reality (even assuming there is such a thing is a bit of a leap of faith).

I have heard that Aristotle held objective reality, and our capacity to apprehend it truly, to be self-evident. I am not sure at this point whether he inquired into it past that, or whether it actually needs an inquiry past that (it seems that if you could show it doesn't, a bunch of post-Cartesian philosophers would have to say the equivalent of "never mind, then"). At any rate, whether it needs to be justified or not, this relation between our consciousness of reality and reality itself MUST be a starting-point upon which all the sciences rest -- natural sciences, mathematics, metaphysics and even theology insofar as it is a human endeavor apart from the deposit of revelation. You can't start from the other end. You can't use the natural sciences, for instance, or psychology, or sociology, to "prove" that our consciousness represents reality, because the very thing you are using is the thing in doubt (or so, it seems, Husserl says, and convincingly in my opinion).

So, then, the basis of further human endeavor rests on this initial truth of correspondence (between consciousness and objective reality), which I will here call reason. If our consciousness has nothing to say about the reality of things outside itself, and yet our consciousness always and everywhere THINKS it is at least approximating or approaching the reality of things, then we are in a sad state. Everything we do or think is based on this presumed correspondence; it seems built into our intellectual framework (but we can't use that as an argument, I am thinking).

Rene Descartes and subsequent philosophers, notably Kant, called reason itself (as I've defined it) into philosophical question (please recall that "philosophical question" is not precisely the same as "doubt" -- it's not necessarily a precursor to denying reason, though it CAN be such a precursor). Descartes introduced the skeptical question -- HOW do we KNOW that what we perceive through our subjective consciousness is actually representative of objective "reality"? His intention was to provide some kind of scientific certainty starting with what we do know unequivocally -- our own cognitions. That is, his intention was NOT to debunk reason, but to affirm it by basing it on more solid philosophical grounds.

However, subsequent philosophical endeavors were thrown into some turmoil by the implications of his thought processes. We haven't yet recovered.

To move on -- Husserl establishes some distinctions in his first lecture about the scientific method. Under the sciences, as I mentioned, he includes not just the physical and natural sciences, but also metaphysics, logic, etc..... everything that is "transcendental" (I'm guessing at a definition here, but I understand transcendental in this context to mean everything in human thinking that makes a claim to be correlated with objective reality).

In other words, as far as I can tell, everything that Aristotle wrote was "science" in this sense, the sense that Husserl is talking about. Even his metaphysics and ethics. That was an interesting point to me. Husserl looks for an entirely new approach to critique reason. "Entirely new" sounds a bit frightening to post-Modern-era people like me, but I think what he's saying is not "throw reason out the window" but rather, "seek for the grounds on which reason is founded". Like Descartes, Husserl doesn't seem to radically doubt the validity of science defined as reasoning about transcendental things (things presumed to be outside ourselves, "objects" or noumena), as much as that he seeks to put it on a more solid epistemological foundation (whether he succeeds at this might be a different question, and I'm not the one to answer it definitively). Perhaps it is no accident that many of his students became Christians and he himself joined the Lutheran church. At the time, many people saw his work as leading back to objects rather than inwards to the recesses of one's own mind.

Aristotle apparently (I have not found anything to quote from him, but so I understand so far, correct me if you know better and I will edit this) explicitly presupposed that our subjective cognition corresponded with objective reality. In other words, he did not demonstrate it or seek to prove it (as far as I've been able to find out). He approached it as part of the nature of the human, and this provided a starting point for everything following. "Everything following" includes psychology, which investigates the capacities and limitations of the human personality; Logic, which investigates (and applies and evaluates) the workings of the reason; the natural sciences, which take for granted and utilize these capacities in order to acquire information about the exterior world from this foundation, and so on.

Husserl points out that the critique of reason itself is not done in these branches of science. It CAN'T be done scientifically, because you are using the very tool you are calling into question. For instance, you can't critique reason using a biochemical or psychological explanation, because those disciplines are subsidiary to reason; their credibility derives from the credibility of human reason per se. They use scientific processes, and he is looking for something preceding and beyond science (that sounds weird in our scientific age but it doesn't mean UNscientific -- it just means that scientific processes MUST properly start on some foundation; they don't come out of thin air; something that we tend to ignore nowadays).

Needless to say, I am not writing this as precisely as he does, and there are probably semantic holes you can drive a truck through!

To put it a slightly different way, all the sciences presuppose something in order to further their own investigations. (Aristotle writes about this here). Any reasonable endeavor is based on the very possibility of reason. Husserl, however, points out that when the possibility of reason (correspondence of thought with objective reality) itself is what is under scrutiny, it's naive to presuppose materially that reason is possible by USING reason.

You see, apparently Aristotle didn't go there. He did not critique reason itself. He accepted it as unquestionable and went on from there, very fruitfully, sketching out the parameters of most of the human sciences. Unquestionable may not be the word I want, though! This is something I wish I understood better. Perhaps he saw the validity of reason as integrally combined with reason itself..... something that post-Cartesian philosophers have broken into two separate things, which could be like using transcendentalism to deny transcendentalism? In other words, he sidestepped, without much fanfare, an error that's been boggling philosophy ever since Descartes?

Kant, following Descartes and more proximately refuting Hume, DID attempt to critique reason. But Husserl seems to say that Kant used science to reach his conclusions about the possibility of science, which would be an invalid enterprise, sort of like a tautology, I'm thinking? Like a geometrical proof that ended where it started? Here is where I start really puzzling, and I don't see the end in sight!

Husserl attempts to go back to the Cartesian starting point of doubt and rehabilitate it from the absurdities that came of it later in history. If you start where Descartes did, you start with your own cogitatio (Husserl's term for something like consciousness, ongoing awareness -- my provisional definitions, again). This cogitatio you cannot doubt. And I agree with him there. Why can't you doubt it? Because your very doubt is a cognition in the sense meant, which gets you into immediate existential and semantic absurdity. I am cognizant of doubt that I cognize, etc. It's like SAYING that you can't say anything. It's like Pooh and Rabbit and the "How can nobody be home if Somebody just said "Nobody?" You CAN doubt whether your perceptions correlate with truth, though perhaps it is better not to do that (I think Husserl has something to say about this too, but this is long enough already)

I'll have to stop there and go on some other time (hopefully). But you are probably wondering why this is a subject of interest. What's the good of it? Here are my reasons:

1. It's been puzzling me for a long time and it would be nice to get a better handle on it (I guess I could let that go if I had to, but it's even more fun than Sudoku or GeoChallenge, and this IS summer, after all, time to play!).
2. As I said above, one of the meta-questions I'm wondering about is whether humans CAN or SHOULD critique reason. As for the possibility, the CAN part -- is it humanly possible to critique transcendentalism without employing it? As for SHOULD -- the endeavor to evaluate reason itself has caused a lot of human errors in the past 3 or 4 centuries. Wasn't the pursuit of reason more fruitful when we were carefully avoiding the least taint of solipsism? Does Aristotle, implicitly or explicitly, have a better vantage point than Descartes in this regard?
   
3. On the other hand, the genie is out of the bottle and is in the intellectual air we are breathing nowadays. While it may not necessarily be possible to get this question RIGHT, a lot of muddled thinking comes out of getting this question WRONG, or ignoring the fact that it is there at all. That doesn't so much apply to believers who are explicitly conscious of their foundation of belief, but it does apply to those who seem to think that they have built their house on some sort of more rock-like rational or "skeptical" foundation. But I already said that.
   
4. I had one more reason, but it has now escaped my middle-aged brain. I'm sure it will come to me when I'm washing the dishes this afternoon, so I'll leave it for now ;-).

Oh, and happy Independence Day, fellow Americans! Can you tell this post is really all about freedom? LOL.