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Thoughts of a Solitary Walker IV: Is the World a Machine?

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In the previous essay, I addressed the question “Do we live in a material world?” I argued that the existence of matter is a philosophical postulate rather than a scientific observation or theory. Moreover, I explained further that matter, understood as something completely impervious to mind, contradicts the Christian doctrine of creation. In that essay I warned that if we accept materialism, even in its pseudoscientific form…

Matter becomes the enduring substance of the world and effectively takes the place of the sustaining power of God. We can no longer see God doing anything or feel God’s presence. And the loss of a sense of divine presence and activity in the world lies at the origin and growth of modern agnosticism and atheism.

The Machine Metaphor

In this essay, we will explore the companion idea almost always associated with matter, that is, the machine. How shall we explain the movement, change and transformation that occurs within the physical world? For about 2,000 years before the modern scientific revolution Aristotle’s explanations of natural phenomena had been the norm. Aristotle understood all movement through the analogy of a living organism, which is moved by an internal principle, soul. Every living thing possesses a soul that moves it toward its natural end. The cosmos as a whole is moved by a world soul.

A defining mark of early modern science is rejection of Aristotle and the organic metaphor. But if the world does not move, change and transform in the way an organism moves, changes and transforms, how then does it move? The machine provides an alternative metaphor that seventeenth-century scientists appropriated to their ends. A machine possesses no soul or mind, no internal principle of unity; it does not strive toward an end. Its constituent parts relate to each other externally and transfer movement by physical contact. Having no internal consciousness or hidden purposes, machines are not mysterious and can readily be understood mathematically. And perhaps—I am speculating here—the desire for simplicity and clarity is the reason Galileo, Descartes, and Gassendi were attracted to the machine metaphor. As I argued in “Thoughts of a Solitary Walker II,” excluding from science everything that cannot be measured in mathematical terms—psychological, aesthetic, moral and causal qualities—makes it clear, simple, and comprehensible.

Machines All the Way Down?

A machine is made of components. Understanding a machine scientifically—a mechanical watch, for example—requires differentiating the components from each other and discovering how they relate to one another and in what order and measuring their movements in mathematical terms. But machines in the microworld are composed of components that are themselves composed of components. But how do we know that the mechanical/mathematical model of explanation explains the movement of all physical things? Perhaps in the hidden world, beyond the reach of empirical experience, there is a psychic/spiritual reality at work that manifests itself in our macro world as machine-like behavior? (Think of how our own minds manifest themselves in the movements of our bodies. Indeed, common sense finds it implausible to think of any animal as a machine.) If we cannot rule this out, we cannot know that our mathematical formulae impart real knowledge of nature.

The Buck Stops with Atoms and Corpuscles

Early modern scientists were aware that we cannot prove that the mechanical model applies to every dimension of the physical world. Hence along with the postulate of the existence of matter as the substance of the physical world, they postulated the existence of tiny parts they called atoms or corpuscles. The Greek word “atom” means uncuttable or indivisible. The existence of atoms was first postulated by presocratic philosophers in approximately 500 B.C. Pierre Gassendi and Robert Boyle used the word corpuscle, a word derived from Latin that means “little body.” Though functioning like atoms, they are not necessarily indivisible.*

The postulate of the existence of atoms or highly stable corpuscles allowed the new mechanical/mathematical science to assume as a working hypothesis that all movement and change of any kind in the physical world conforms to the model of mechanical interaction of material components.

To Summarize

The postulate of the existence of matter exorcised all inner psychic factors from the physical world, and the postulate of the existence of atoms or corpuscles justified applying the mechanical model to all movement in the physical world.*

A Working Hypothesis Becomes Metaphysical Truth

As I have emphasized throughout this essay and the previous one, these two postulates were unprovable working hypotheses made to guide research and scientific explanation. Even as working hypotheses I doubt that they are completely innocent of metaphysical hubris. However, it is very tempting to conclude that their success in giving satisfactory explanations of physical movement and change warrants treating them as true representations of metaphysical reality. Many people followed this path into practical or theoretical deism, agnosticism, or atheism, each of which is devoid of the sense of divine presence in the world.

Misplaced Realism Again

The methods used by empirical/mathematical science of the 17th or the 21st century cannot prove—or even provide evidence for—a metaphysical hypothesis, whether material/mechanical or psychic/organic. It cannot distinguish between appearances caused by material atoms interacting externally and mechanically or those caused by internal psychic powers striving to achieve ends. A decision between these two opposing views must be made on other bases. For my part, I believe modern culture has been unwarrantedly and thoughtlessly confident in the material/mechanical hypothesis. So many impressive phenomena of nature and human experience are discounted by this hypothesis. It’s time to rediscover and reconsider the undeniable mental and psychic dimensions of the world. And in doing so we may very well recover a sense of God’s presence and activity all around and within us.

*I have simplified a very complex topic conceptually and historically. Hopefully, I have not falsified it. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for greater nuance. Search for “atomism” and other relevant terms.

Thoughts of a Solitary Walker II: Is Science Really Omnicompetent?

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In this second installment of this series, I will share some thoughts from my most recent walk.

As my frequent readers know, I have been thinking, writing and reading for many years in search of an answer to the question, “Why do modern people find it tempting to live as if God does not exist?” Another way to put it is: “Why does God seem absent from modern the world?” It wasn’t always true. Before 1500, God seemed very present and active in the world and in the human soul and mind. But something happened between 1600 and the present to change that. What was it? What was lost and what was gained by the changes? And can we recover that sense of “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28)?

In other places, I have argued that the modern scientific revolution lies at the root of this change in perception. It was not the empirical, observational, and mathematical aspects of modern science that cause the problem; it was a mistaken realism that refused to recognize the limits of empirical science. That is to say, the models that guided the new natural science—the machine and the material particle—were treated as if they described what is truly real, the basic building blocks of the world.

Modern science developed in conscious opposition to Aristotle’s theories. Aristotle proposed organic, teleological, and metaphysical explanations for natural phenomena. Galileo, Descartes, Gassendi, and other pioneers of modern science rejected Aristotle’s organic model and replaced it with a mechanical one in which material corpuscles (or atoms) interacted through contact in a way that could be described mathematically. Modern science has been spectacularly successful in disclosing and describing the empirical phenomena of nature in mathematical terms. And it has used these discoveries to create technologies that have revolutionized the way we live.

Modern natural science is so impressive that many people assume—or even proclaim—that it will eventually explain everything: If science can’t explain it, it doesn’t exist. Its methods can answer every legitimate question. Perhaps I will address at length these claims in a future post. Here I can make only a brief refutation of these extraordinary claims.

What does modern natural science do? Answer: it measures empirical phenomena—that is the appearances we receive through our five senses—using simple or sophisticated mathematics. It does not explain why things happen, that is, science cannot translate the concept of causality into mathematical terms. Causality is not a phenomenon that can be measured! Contrary to popular belief, natural science cannot rationalize causality; that is, it cannot explain why the transformations we find in nature are necessary. Consider for example Einstein’s famous formula:

E = MC2

It says in words: “the measure of Energy (in Joules) equals the measure of Mass (in kilograms) times the Velocity of Light (in meters per second) multiplied by itself.” Each of the letters in the formula stands for a number that measures a quantity of something we perceive through the senses, a phenomenon. The equal sign is also a mathematical symbol.

The same is also true of Newton’s second law, which says that force equals mass times acceleration:

F = Ma

One more. This time consider a chemical reaction between sulfuric acid and sodium hydroxide, which yields sodium sulfate and water:

H2SO4 + 2NaOH → 2Na2SO4 + 2H2O

Again, every mark in this chemical equation stands for a mathematical quantity or a mathematical operation. The arrow (→) stands for a mathematical equality and a transformation reaction. It is true that the quantities relate to substances (sulfuric acid, sodium hydroxide, sodium sulfide and water) but those substances are themselves known scientifically only in mathematical terms: atomic weights, number of electrons and protons. Of course, these different substances affect the senses differently…but modern natural science does not consider sense perception of qualities—color, taste, odor, sound, and texture—to be scientific knowledge.

In none of these formulae is causality quantified, that is brought into the sphere of scientific (ie mathematical) knowledge. As David Hume pointed out in the 18th century, causality cannot be perceived empirically and therefore cannot be understood in terms of empirical, mathematical science.

Don’t miss this: modern natural science can say nothing about causality in scientific terms! It cannot get beyond the common sense of the non-scientist. People do not believe anything happens without a cause. Why does everyone believe this? Because nothing makes sense without it! And we know that we act causally in some of our actions. We want to raise our arms and we make it happen. We are the proof that some things act causally.

Here then is my refutation of the omnicompetence of modern, empirical, mathematical science: it can’t explain why anything happens…it can only measure it. But causality (the why) is the glue that holds the universe together and makes sense of it all.

Next Time: Another walk and another thought

God is Not Just (Or Even Primarily) A Mathematician!

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Last week we explored the consequences of the early modern shift from the organic model of the world to the mechanical model. When we imagine the world and every process within it as working like a machine we place ourselves outside of everything and every process in world. Our point of view is always that of an external observer of how the surfaces of things relate to each other. The external viewpoint is maintained even if we modify the metaphor to include waves, fields and strings. And the interrelationships of particles, waves or fields can be described scientifically only in mathematical terms.

Today let’s think a bit more about what science is, what it does, and what it can and cannot do; and I will apply this to the question of Big Bang Cosmology and divine creation. As I pointed out above mathematics is the native language of modern science. All other languages are at most pre-scientific; yet as we will see, science cannot rid itself of all pre-scientific concepts. As a most conspicuous example take the concept of a “thing.” Things are designated by names and properties. Its name designates a thing as a whole in its difference from other things: This is a dog, not a cat or a chair or a star. Its properties describe the distinct intelligible aspects that make the thing what it is and identify it as such: Cats meow, dogs bark and rivers flow. One of the properties of things is quantity. It seems to me that the only things that have only the property of quantity are numbers; and I even have doubts about this: can a thing have only one property? In general, the meaning of a thing cannot be fully described by expressing its quantity.

Pure mathematicians use only numbers and quantitative operations in their science. But as soon as you attempt to understand the empirical world in mathematical terms like physicists do you leave pure mathematics and begin to speak of things. And empirical things are more than numbers and can appear to us only through their non-quantitative qualities. The importance of this transition cannot be overstated; for it means that even physics, the most mathematical of all the sciences that study the real world, cannot escape the language of things and qualities into the clarity of pure mathematics. In order to increase our understanding of the world we experience through the senses physicists must tell us what things they are measuring. What is the mass of an electron? What is the electromagnetic charge of a proton. Physicists must relate their mathematical formulae to something we experience through the senses or their work illuminates nothing. And what is a proton or an electron or energy…or any of the other things physicists name? The answer cannot be a mere quantity! That would be a number. It must be a quantity of something. And things have qualities!

Physics and other natural sciences pride themselves on being empirical, that is, their goal is to explain theoretically the world we experience through our five senses. A scientific theory should be able to predict the occurrence of some event in the empirical world and the measure of success is whether or not its predictions turn out to be correct. Hence natural science begins with empirical experience and ends with empirical experience. Between the beginning and end of the scientific process scientists abstract from these empirical experiences aspects that are amenable to theoretical generalization, ideally in mathematical language. But when scientists abstract only the quantitative information from empirical experience what do they lose? What is the status of this ignored information?

On the purely empirical level, before the operation of our minds in reading the sense data, we receive only physical impacts that cause physical and chemical changes in our sense organs. But unless we are completely skeptical about our ability to know the external world, we understand that raw sense data encode information that are decoded by the mind. The information communicated by the senses to the mind includes the quantitative properties of things, but it also includes the other properties as well. Galileo dismissed all properties other than the quantitative as secondary. He considered such qualities as color, heat and cold, and smell to be mental reconstructions of more primitive mechanical qualities and these reconstructions do not tell us the truth about the external world.

But Galileo’s dismissal of qualities as secondary is blind to a huge fact: the sense data that the mind decodes and experiences as qualities is itself information. And information is created only by minds and is understood only by minds. Galileo and modern science in general are so focused on quantitative information that they relegate other types of information—esthetic and moral and religious—to the subjective realm. But why privilege quantitative information over qualitative information? If we read novels like physicists read nature—strictly as physicists, not as human beings who happen to be physicists—we would examine the quantitatively measurable properties of the paper and ink but completely miss the story. If however we read nature like we read novels we would find ourselves united with another Mind for an inside view of that Mind, its beauty, goodness and power. Why shouldn’t the Creator use the physical properties of the world to impact the senses, which the created mind decodes into various qualities, which in turn makes meaningful esthetic, moral and religious experience possible?

Next Week: I did not get to the Big Bang today. Next week, I promise! Hint: All physical theories of cosmology relate one empirical state of the cosmos to another state by way of theoretical explanation of the transition from a previous to the present state. Big Bang Cosmology is no different. It is not a theory of creation. It is a theoretical account of the development of the present cosmos from a previous state. On a theoretical level it speaks the language of mathematics. That is the secret of its explanatory power but also of its poverty. It sees numbers where we see color and hear music and feel the cool of the evening air! It can’t read the messages of running water, a singing bird, a sunset, the smell of a rose, the touch of a loved one. But these too speak truth! God is not merely a mathematician! God is also a composer, an architect, a lover, an author and a painter. Perhaps math is merely the medium whereas love, life, goodness and beauty are the messages!