Gospel & Universe 🔬 Science & Mystery
The Crystal Ball of Science
Scientific Philosophers - All Things Large and Small
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Scientific Philosophers
Agnostics might be called scientific philosophers, since they experiment with the nature of being (ontology) and the nature of knowledge (epistemology). They realize that they're trapped beneath layers of perception, compounded by history and ideology. They realize that they're separated from the true nature of things by the veil of their own being. They realize that they're in no position to make any final judgment.
While atheists have a great affinity for science, agnostics are more scientific than atheists on one key point: when they experiment with God and the soul, they don’t predict the outcome. They don’t say, Based on observation and experience (my own and that of other people), I can conclude that God and the soul don't exist. Agnostics may have various hypotheses, yet they haven't turned these into theses or conclusions. They may lean toward the godless or the mystical, yet they don’t believe these leanings prove any sort of absolute truth. They recognize that these so-called truths, however deeply we may fear or hope them to be true, can't be verified. In this sense they have a deep respect for science, at the core of which lies the quest to find verifiable truth.
Atheists, on the other hand, foretell the outcome of life, as if they had some sort of crystal ball. They affirm that there's no afterlife before they've actually died. And yet, physicists discuss the possibility of dimensions beyond the four that are common to our existence (the three dimensions of space, and the fourth dimension of time). Some even posit up to thirteen dimensions. Some astronomers speculate that the mass and energy pulled into a black hole implodes into a white hole that leads to another dimension. Given the mind-boggling discoveries of science, and given the mysteries that remain, it may be fair to weigh probabilities, yet it's premature to rule out possibilities.
No one knows the ultimate nature of the physical universe, much less of the metaphysical realm. Huxley's point is worth repeating:
Agnosticism puts aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the greater part of anti-theology. On the whole, the "bosh" of heterodoxy [anti-theology] is more offensive to me than that of orthodoxy [theology], because heterodoxy professes to be guided by reason and science, and orthodoxy does not.
How can atheists be sure there's no essence that escapes our physical measurement, especially since the concept of essence precludes measurement? How can they be sure there's no connection between the waves in our brains and the waves, forces, or fields that drift though the interstices of subatomic matter right under our noses or float through the immeasurable distances of interstellar space? Anyone who professes to know the exact nature of the relationship between the universe (with its astounding mysteries, from gravity to dark matter and infinite space) and the body (with its intricate fusion of bones and muscles and its trillions of cerebral connections) professes to know more than the most learned cosmologist and neuroscientist.
Yet just because atheists can't disprove spirit or God, it doesn't follow that theists are right in what they say. There's a big difference between leaving the door open to a spiritual realm and accepting a specific doctrine about the spiritual realm, especially if the doctrine is countered by other religious doctrines, accompanied by miracles that can't be verified, and determined within specific historical circumstances that lack solid foundations (as with biblical references, from Adam to Moses).
The absence of proof denying God doesn't prove God, nor does it validate specific versions of God.
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All Things Large and Small
We don't understand the brain or the cosmos well enough to rule out some sort of subtle, even etherial, connection between the two. The mechanistic computer model of the brain goes a long way in explaining thought, yet it doesn't necessarily explain how electrical impulses and mechanistic operations turn into emotion and into that particular form of consciousness which not just recognizes but inhabits being. Given that computers don't have emotions, it's hard to see how the constant interaction between thought and feeling (which is after all the human experience) can be understood strictly in terms of a mechanical circuit model, even if one complicates this model with bio-chemistry. The quandary of emotional consciousness is crucial to the question of belief, since belief is as much a function of what people feel to be true as what they reason to be true.
The more we find out about the small and the large, from common things like gravity and light to uncommon things like black holes and dark matter, the more we see that we don’t see the complete picture. The brain's made of atomic and subatomic particles, and the world, like the universe, is awash in waves and particles. Can we state categorically that the brain doesn't connect, vibrate, or otherwise interact with other waves, fields, planes, or dimensions? From a scientific viewpoint, interaction with a higher dimension doesn't seem likely, yet scientists have learned not to rule out the unlikely. There may be little probability, yet there is always a possibility.
To categorically rule out essentialist possibilities repeats the kind of mistake made by Medieval theists when they assumed that the earth couldn't circle the sun. It also repeats the mistake made by Modern astronomers when they assumed that the Milky Way wasn't only one of many galaxies. In these cases, both the theists and the scientists eventually admitted the error of their assumptions.
Two things suggest that scientists are closer to agnostics than they are to atheists:
1) Unlike atheists, scientists and agnostics have learned not to rule out something just because it seems unlikely.
2) Unlike both theists and atheists, scientists and agnostics actively welcome the questioning of all their assumptions.
Both agnostics and atheists rely on the methodology of science, yet agnostics are open to the possibility that verification, of God or soul, may occur with reference to other planes or dimensions, or to other ways and means that we don’t understand in scientific terms. We may not understand them now, yet we may understand them in the future. Or, we may not understand them now, and we may never understand them.
The scientist would of course like to apply the scientific method whenever possible, but there are plenty of scientists who believe in God and the soul. These scientists accept that there are as of yet no physical explanations for the things they believe. There are also scientists who don't believe in God, or remain agnostic on all points theistic. Science, one must remember, is a method, not a belief system. It has established practices, but no rites. If it can be called a philosophy, it’s a philosophy that doesn't require its practitioners to predict the range or the nature of the things it will explore.
The hard-core atheist limits the scope of science, at once saying that it can makes sense of everything and that it can only be applied in a narrow positivist manner. Yet scientists admit that science can’t at this moment explain many fundamental things, let alone explain everything. What exactly is the nature of gravity? There may be waves, forces, or fields drifting through us or around us that we may not even be aware of. We may be like the nineteenth century astronomers who weren't aware of the gamma rays travelling through them, like spirits travelling through the universe. Nor were they aware of the Van Allen belt of magnetism that shields the earth from the sun's radiation, like God's protective arm in the vastness of outer space. Yet only in like, only in metaphor, for who can say for sure?
The atheist is correct that much of what we imagined to be mysteries and much of what we supposed to be the action of deities — thunder, earthquakes, etc. — have in time been explained in scientific terms. Yet it doesn't follow that things like consciousness, love, soul, and God can necessarily be explained in scientific terms.
Being or the experience of existence appears to be a very complex mix of awareness, feeling, and thinking. It’s exceptionally hard to pin down philosophically or scientifically. The joy one feels when listening to music might be explained by the modulation and consonance of sounds resonating in the finely tuned apparatus of the ear and brain, yet this doesn’t get at the experience of the music. To say that the self perceives these as beautiful merely begs the question. How can the self feel? At what point do we go from animate motion and self-awareness to feeling?
How magical this brain of ours, how transparent the mechanisms,
which inside our brain-boxes mix inputs from organ and sense,
all the time making us forget that this is happening inside our skulls,
in a magical re-creation by billions of wiry connectors,
making us witnesses, knowers, and experiencers of the moment.
One day the biologist and the neurologist may explain it all, but until then even the most dedicated scientist need not feel shy about looking up into the night sky and wondering if God isn’t out there after all. And if one day when science does explain it all, we’ll still be hard pressed to maintain that it was all a matter of chance. Although we’ll still have no proof whatsoever that this grand thing called being is anything more than chance, we’ll still suspect that it might be something more.
That which cannot be thought, but by which the mind is able to think, know that alone to be Brahman, not this which people worship here.
— Kena Upanishad
I hear the trained soprano (what work with hers is this?)
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possessed them,
It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are licked by the indolent waves,
I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,
Steeped amid honeyed morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,
At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.
— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 26
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