Every writer comments indefinitely on his brief original text.
I just finished another book by Wolfgang Smith, Science and Myth, and things are indeed starting to get a little repetitive, his main points being vertical causation, irreducible wholeness, anti-scientism (and its Cartesian bifurcation), and the ontological distinction between the reality of our everyday corporeal world and the less real quantum realm.
I already agree with those things, except for the last one. It's not that I disagree with it, it's just that I wouldn't want to debate an actual physicist on the question. For even the briefest cross-examination would reveal my embarrassing failure to complete high school physics. What right have I to an opinion on matters that far surpass my ability to comprehend them?
No, really: what right do you have?
Well, let's see. One can always play the philosophy card, which trumps science every time:
Without philosophy, the sciences do not know what they know.
Also, one can adopt a Socratic approach to reveal the implicit metaphysical assumptions of the physicist. Which is to say,
The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.
Moreover, in so doing, he has actually transcended, or at least escaped, his own conclusions, a la Gödel. In other words, any formal system of the scientist will contain axioms or assumptions unprovable by the system. Gotcha!
Also, no free miracles:
The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician's rule book.
As alluded to above, having now gone through his entire corpus, I can summarize Smith's main points. Which raises the awkward question of whether some clever reader might come along and do the same with me, that is, read a few posts and say, "I get this Gagdad Bob fellow. He believes x, y, and z, and just keeps repeating them in various ways."
Now, if you ask me what is the main point(s) of the previous 5,000 post, I couldn't tell you. But maybe there is some unconscious algorithm that is causing me to crank out the same old nonsense in superficially new ways.
It is not so much that men change their ideas, as that the ideas change their disguises.
I would prefer to compare myself to a jazz musician who creates on the spot, such that every solo is unique. Sure, even the greatest improvisor has his stock phrases and riffs, but he can combine them in original ways, plus he has a larger storehouse of them. Last night I watched a documentary on John Coltrane, and he was this way, always searching for novel ways to surpass himself, to the point of eventually being (to my ears) unlistenable.
No comment. Too easy.
Also, when I find one of those compatible thinkers, it's not so much the content I enjoy as the container, or atmosphere. In other words,
It is not the ideas that I look for in the intelligent book, but rather the air that one breathes there.
It's liberating to dwell in a vertically capacious intellect:
Collision with an intelligent book makes us see a thousand stars.
Which is why
Reading is the unsurpassed drug because it allows us to escape not only the mediocrity of our lives but even more so the mediocrity of our souls.
Back to my imaginary debate with a physicist. Dávila answers his own rhetorical question with a bold claim:
Why deceive ourselves? Science has not answered a single important question.
Is he being literal? Is he some kind of anti-intellectual crank, hiding behind the arrogant bravado of a superior ignorance?
No, I suspect he's referring to a science elevated to ideology, AKA scientism. Which is a good segue to our book, which begins with the following claim:
Unrecognized and unacknowledged as the fact may be, science too has its mythology.
That's true in a sense, and we've devoted many posts to the subject. However, there is myth and there is myth, and the two are by no means the same thing. In the words of the Aphorist,
Myth is a layer of meaning beyond reality and fiction.
In this context, scientism is just a shallow and simplistic fairy tale for the tenured.
But can any civilization really live on science alone? That's the question. Science is supposed to be "the very antitsis of myth," but is this not just its own mythology? Signs point to Yes, and Smith aims to explain how and why:
in practice, the two misconceptions -- the over-valuation of science and the undervaluation of myth -- go together and count equally as a mark of enlightenment among the "well-informed."
Science "begets myths of its own," and undermines "not only religion and morality, but indeed all culture in its higher modes." This is necessarily the case, being that scientism reduces the vertical to the horizontal, and here we are.
Smith wants to "break the spell of scientistic myths" and "their stranglehold upon educated minds, and in so doing, to provide access once more to the perennial myths of mankind." The latter type of thinking can "open doors rather than bolt them shut."
To me scientism is more reminiscent of Chesterton's definition of the madman, who hasn't lost his reason, rather, everything but his reason -- like total right brain capture by the left. So, if scientism is a myth, it's the myth of no myth.
An empty myth?
Yes, and too impoverished to even function as one. Smith talks about how
there could be no such thing as spiritual life in a mechanical universe, because in such a universe there could in fact be no life at all: not even an amoeba could exist in a mechanical world! And why not? For the simple reason that no living organism is reducible to the sum of its parts....
[T]he Newtonian world is perforce bereft of all qualities, beginning with color, and is consequently imperceptible. It constitutes a world... which can be neither seen nor imagined, and which consequently does not in truth answer to a "worldview" at all.
In the penultimate chapter, Smith engages in an epic takedown of Stephen Hawking. Now, Hawking was much more intelligent than I'll ever be, so what was the problem? Yes, bad metaphysics.
On the other hand, were I in Hawking's situation, I'm not so sure it would be obvious to me that a loving God had placed me in that situation, i.e., fated to live with, and die of, Lou Gehrig's disease. I frankly would be a little embarrassed to slam dunk on a wheelchair-bound man living on a respirator. Then again, we didn't start this fight: just think about
the likely impact, the effect upon millions of the claim that a mathematical physics has trashed the sacred wisdom of mankind!
Turn the tables on him and play the victim card?
You're right. Not really my style. To be continued...
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