Faith, Hope, Mystery, and the Epidemic of Misplaced Certitude

What if we just don't know? No, I'm not making the postmodern claim that man is an idiot sealed in tenure, rather, I am making a... something claim. I don't yet know what that something is, but this post aims to find out. 

To back up a bit, I've finished A Catholic Case for Intelligent Design, and I don't know if I want to review all the reasons why natural selection cannot possibly be true, since we've written extensively on this subject in the past. 

In particular, it cannot account for macroevolution, especially the leap from subhuman to human. Nor can it account for the appearance of life, for irreducible wholeness, or for complex specified information.

Evolutionists, of course, claim that there are perfectly natural explanations for these things, but they just haven't yet found them. Most of these folks have a prior commitment to metaphysical naturalism, hence the visceral hostility to intelligent design. 

For example, the evolutionary biologist Dobzhansky said that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution," which is true as far as it goes. As we know from our Thomas Kuhn, science is always in need of a larger paradigm in order to frame reality, illuminate relevant facts, and ask fruitful questions. But there is not, nor can there be, a "perfect" paradigm, since the map is never the territory. 

Nevertheless, man is always vulnerable to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, thereby conflating his theoretical abstractions with the larger reality that necessarily escapes them. About this, Schuon wrote that

Transformist evolutionism is the classical example of the bias that invents “horizontal” causes because one does not wish to admit a “vertical” dimension: one seeks to extort from the physical plane a cause that it cannot furnish and that is necessarily situated above matter....

So, that's a big hint: that there is a vertical dimension that is in principle excluded from any horizontal explanation. Natural selection simply doesn't deal with any sort of vertical causation, nor should it, really, any more than your doctor should speculate about possible demonic influences on your medical condition. It doesn't mean such influences don't exist, but even supposing they do, they are rather mysterious. 

Now, the question is, if natural selection isn't true, then what is? With what do we replace it? With Bishop Usher's calculation that the world was created on the evening preceding Sunday, October 23 , 4004 BC? 

Time out for some thoughts from yesterday's unfinished post:

For Aristotle, the chain of whys ends in happiness, or eudaimonia. We have proximate reasons for our beliefs and actions, but supposing we keep asking Why?, the chain eventually leads to happiness, or at least the hope for it. Everything is but a means to this end. No one ever asks, Why be happy?

Yes, but what is happiness, and is it even attainable herebelow in the absence of an impenetrable fortress of denial?

We'll defer on that question for the moment, the main point being that the Chain of Whys ends in happiness, or at least the hope of its attainment.

Now, what about the Chain of Hows? Here it seems that every such chain ends either in self-refutation or in mystery. For example, Dávila says that

Natural laws are irreducible to explanation, like any mystery.

To take only the most obvious examples, both natural selection and astrophysics hit a wall of mystery when pursued to their ends. As discussed in the previous post, natural selection is powerless to explain the origins of Life Itself, just as astrophysics is powerless to explain the origins of the Big Bang. 

In the context of physics, it makes no sense to ask what was "before" the big bang, because there was no before; in other words, time is consequence of it. Which is absurd, but there it is.

Now, what about knowledge, which is to say, truth? We all want it, but what is it and how do we go about getting it? A moment's reflection will reveal the paucity of our first hand knowledge, and how much of our so-called knowledge really comes down to faith in the expertise of others, whether in your plumber or your cardiologist.

So, it seems that Why?, How?, and What? end in hope, mystery, and faith, respectively.

***

End of yesterday's brainwreck. Back to today's post.  

You may not like the mystery, but when all is said and done, we are indeed plunged into it. Now, the peculiar thing about this mystery is that it is so endlessly intelligible. It's not that we don't have enough information about it, rather too much: it is an endlessly generative mystery. Which is my favorite kind. 

For example, the physicist Eugene Wigner spoke of "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences," likewise Einstein famously said that "the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible" -- in short, a mysteriously comprehensible mystery. 

I suggest that we take this literally.

By the way, we pretend that physics is close to an account of the mystery, but the other day I was reading about the impossibility of reconciling relativity with quantum physics, which is said to be physics' most embarrassing problem, specifically, that

the vacuum energy in the universe must be very small -- about 120 orders of magnitude smaller than what quantum theory predicts. That’s like saying that something weighing five pounds should really weigh five-with-120-extra-zeros-after-it pounds. The discrepancy has prompted some scientists to call vacuum energy “the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics.”

Now, I dropped out of high school physics, so I can't pretend to understand this total lack of understanding. But I am intelligent enough to understand ignorance, which is to say, the ignorance of the experts who confess their own ignorance. At least physicists are honest about this embarrassing problem, unlike biologists who claim that natural selection explains things it cannot possibly explain.

Now, just because biologists and physicists have a prior metaphysical commitment that precludes vertical causation, it doesn't mean the restavus are so constrained. Gödel, for example "was a proponent of intelligent design, before the term was coined." In a letter, he suggested that

the formation within geological times of a human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of a similar nature), starting from a random distribution of the elementary particles and the field, is as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components.

But here again, if natural selection isn't the explanation, exactly what is? One can say "intelligent design," but how exactly does this work? To simply say "God did it," and leave it at that, isn't very intellectually satisfying. Schuon suggests that 

Evolutionism is the very negation of the archetypes and consequently of the divine Intellect; it is therefore the negation of an entire dimension of the real, namely that of form, of the static, of the immutable; concretely speaking, it is as if one wished to make a fabric of the wefts only, omitting the warps.

This is another good hint, acknowledging the need of verticality for any comprehensive vision of the whole of reality. He also speaks of archetypes, which is to say forms, and as we mentioned a few posts back, form is something of which quantum physics is powerless to speak, since all forms dissolve into the sub-existential sea of quantum potential, where subatomic particles have only a probability of existing, but no existence per se. Thus, form must emanate from above, not below.

Elsewhere Schuon writes that 

to speak of an absolute conformity of our thought to the Real is a contradiction in terms, since our thought is not the Real and since our sense of a partial conformity to the Real implies that our thought is separated from it or different from it.

Here is another key point and big hint -- again, that our best and most accurate map of reality will never be reality. 

Nevertheless, this doesn't mean that the intellect as such doesn't have access to the real; in a way, we must maintain a balance between deep epistemological humility and the incredible privilege of being made in the image of the Creator. 

The fact that we can have a perfectly adequate notion of a tree cannot possibly signify that our thought is identified with the tree, but on the other hand neither can the fact that our adequation is not an identity signify that we cannot know the tree in any way.

That's a little unclear, but I think it mirrors Aquinas' point that we can know an endless amount about everything, but cannot know everything about so much as a single gnat. Our knowledge is real, even if it can never be total.

I apologize for the ramblin'. We'll tighten it up in the next post.