A PROFOUND SADNESS, for a past century lost.

In the atmosphere of profound sadness felt throughout the world for the passing of a great man from the human stage these past few days, I reflected upon what the last century represented for us. Memories of Hitler and Stalin were still fresh when I was a boy living in France, but the real movers of our past century were intellectual going back to the century before. The great minds that molded how we think today were seminal in how they saw the world, or the universe. Karl Marx redefined for us our social imperatives, while Sigmund Freud focussed on what were our wishes, our deepest needs and desires. In combination, these two thinkers, along with Lenin and Jung, and many others like Camus, saw this world in an existential sense, that what connects us to each other and to all of being is personal, inside ourselves, that humanity defines it for itself, and not part of some greater universal design. This was however the great shortcoming in Communism, in that it did not allow each human being to be who we are, but had instead to fit into a social model of some perfected society, which in the end failed. It failed because we really are Who we are, and that any society must allow for this very personal individuality. So in this respect, Freud and Marx were at odds. Other great minds of that past century were people like Claude DeBussy, who rose above the classicists to bring music even more sublime, or Erik Satie, Gershwin, Copeland, or authors like Joseph Konrad. They saw the madness of the human condition, especially the wars, and raised their sights far above what we had done to ourselves in our servile ignorance. These were the first glimmers of hope that the future would be different, not senseless and impersonal, not grey with authoritative oppression where none were allowed to speak their minds, to explore truth, nor to even be who they are, such as envisioned darkly by H.G. Wells or Aldous Huxley; but instead was a world of beauty and hope. This last century, aside from the crushing madness of its Hitlers and Mussolinis, its Stalins and Maos, who felt so self righteous in their ideals that they thought themselves justified in crushing millions of human lives; the world also had its grand thinkers, artists, writers, and poets, like Thomas Merton, or Hans Kung. And one of these great men of the age was a Pope, John Paul II, who died a day ago.

This sadness takes me to another level, one of science and human knowledge of our place in the universe. It is more a philosophical sadness, that in this past century the mind that dominated over our scientific growth was that of Einstein. In his postulated relativity, founded upon a postulated first principle that all reference frames are equal, gave us an incredibly complex universe of variable space-time, where it takes a life long study of the arcane mathematics to master the tools, never mind the understanding, of how this universe works. It is sad because I suspect that it too, like Communism, will be shown in the end to be inherently flawed. In both, the individual understanding of things is per force subjugated to a higher order of understanding, one which means a life long dedication to solving its paradoxical and inherent contradictions, that human beings are somehow only their needs, or that society is defined only by its class struggles, or that reality is made of mythical strings. In that same era was the idea that the universe is somehow relativistic, that what we see is not what it is but must be interpreted through a new lens of what is reality. But the universe may yet prove itself incredibly simple, not relativistic at all, and rather only relativistic in how we perceive the rays of distant cosmic light reaching us, as it journeys through the incredible distances of an infinite universe. This sadness is that Einstein's vision of the universe, which is so incredibly complex, may in the end prove futile, that like Communism, it will have proven to be built upon an inherent flaw. In Communism, it was believed that the individual had no real definition in and of him or her self, but could be molded to suit the grander needs of society; in the relativistic universe, it is believed that time is not a chosen value of measure but can be manipulated mathematically to fit into the other three dimensions of our physical, cum energy, reality. Both are in error, and both suffer the same fate in the end, that they do not represent what is real. In the world of physics, this transition that had already toppled Communism has not yet happened. But I suspect it is very close, just around the corner. And for this it makes me sad, because another great man will prove fallen.

When Karol Wojtyla died, it was the death of a generation, my father's generation. They fought wars to establish freedom, and yet one wonders if they really understood what those freedoms were. My father was an existentialist, of the Parisien cafe community, a poet and writer, politically aware, and yet he had difficulty with individual intimacy. Pope John Paul II had an intimate relationship with God, through prayer and meditation, had great intimacy in his personal dealings with people, and yet suffered from a lack of intimacy of what the events of the world were telling us. He stayed rooted in the traditions of the Catholic Church while the world was evolving away from those traditions. Some of today's tradition do not even date back to the origins of Christianity, such as priest celibacy; we are shocked to know that once the Church actually condoned slavery, as did all the Classical world upon which we built our civilization. Things change. But though his arch conservatism was a kind of failing, he was a great man. It was him who addressed the rabid dogmatism of religious fanaticism with an appeal to peace, to not focus on our differences but instead build on our ecumenical commonalities. Einstein, who also believed in peace, had another failing in that his general relativity could never match up with the quantum world if there is an energy to gravity inverse relationship; simply impossible to reconcile opposing forces; yet he was a great man. Freud had brought our human emotions down to a base level of innate sexuality, which in some form is correct, but it does not define Who we are. Marx was caught within the wheels of the industrial revolution and saw it up close, though he himself was unemployed, and formulated a social theory based on the inequities this transitional time of industry went through. He was a great man, a great thinker, but a society built upon his ideals of necessity failed, because it failed to see who we were as individual human beings. Truth is truth, whether or not we know it, or can see it, or even do our very best to hide it; it is nevertheless Truth. Scientific truths are what they are: DNA, preventable disease, jet travel, electronic communications, computing power, laser technology, etc. These really represent how is built our universe, real science. And in this new century, what gives me hope in the wake of sadness for our last, is that we will recognize certain truths with greater clarity:

We are important each one of us in terms of Who we are, our human right; the universe is simple, and about to be uncovered simply; to do things through agreements rather than coercion yields far better results, that are infinitely greater than deception and theft; economic freedom is far more productive than economic oppression; wars are an anachronism; our land and air and rivers and oceans are sacred; and finally, intimacy between human beings, with genuine tolerance for all our shortcomings, is the greatest good.

Once we can see these plainly, it will be a better world, even if existentialist and secular. In time, we will discover the great Living Reality of our Universe. But until then... I am sad, because I know it will take time. We have inherited the legacy of our past century. Now let us bring forth the promise of a new century of freedoms and truths, and a genuine respect for one another.

Ivan D. Alexander
California, USA

ART IN IMITATION OF SCIENCE

Back in the days of our Cro-Magnon ancestors we painted images of the hunt on cave walls. We did this until fairly recent times as pictoglyphs around the world testify. It was magic, an imitation of the real hunt, or need for water and harvest, in order to bring forth reality. In ancient Egypt, the gods were taken down the Nile to visit each other, in order to insure the safety and abundance for the two kingdoms. I had seen something similar in Nepal, at Katmandu, where a goddess was carried on the shoulders of believers to meet another god, to visit each other and thus bring fruitfulness to the people. It is not so unlike what I had seen in Viterbo, Italy, where Santa Rosa represented by a very heavy "la machina" is burdened on the shoulders of men called "pachini", to commemorate a past victory, but also to insure the people's well being in the coming year. It is a prayer of sorts, where the strength and toil of the pachini is offered in exchange for the saint's blessing. A similar procession of saints, or pilgrimages, can be seen around the world for all believers. We imitate a reality we consider just beyond reach in order to bring it into our own. This is an imitation of reality through magic, or faith, through an expression of some deeper need and feeling in terms of symbolism. Some might say this symbolism represents art.

In our more progressively modern world, where science is mostly believed in more deeply than the magical intervention of goddesses and saints, there is a like process of imitation of reality. In this world of science we may not see it so readily because it is subtly disguised in the belief that our mathematics is an expression of reality. This may hark back to the ancient Greeks upon whose philosophies we established our modern thinking, in particular the belief that the universe was a function of perfect forms that could be defined symbolically. We now use a finer symbolism, and a new grammar, to express this perfection in the form of algorithms that seek to express how is made our universe. Thus we do not see it as magic, but as mathematics which through postulates and equations give us real results. This can be verified, measured and observed, so the needs of scientific proof are met. However, the match between mathematical expressions and reality are still elusive in the sense that we cannot truly observe the universe except through these same equations. And this is where the art, or magic, meets reality. In our belief that somehow the perfection of mathematics, and it is totally self consistent and logical, is in some form an imitation of what is real in the universe, we burden on its shoulders reality itself.

Now let us think about this. If we believe that our mathematics, when totally correct in terms of its self consistent logic, is representative of how is built the universe, such as we do in the world of physics, or astrophysics, then are we not painting on cave walls? Does the mathematics of field equations or tensors, or general relativity for example, really express what the universe is doing with itself? Or are we merely imitating what it is, in terms of what we understand it to be, in order to bring about its physical order? And this is how subtle it is, that we imagine that in our perfection of mathematics as a universal language, it is philosophically self justified, being a perfection, as an expression of reality. The art of mathematics, which can be exceptionally beautiful and elegant within its totality complexity, is thus raised to a higher level of universality, where its perfection imitates the universe. This is a serious belief for some, so that if it is challenged on any level, the rebuttal is that we simply do not understand it well enough. But is this a valid complaint? If art is raised to such a high level that it becomes a belief system in and of itself, are we not merely changing the patterns of what we are painting on the walls?

Our sophistication, mathematical and scientific, may be blinding us philosophically to what it is we are doing. We may not see readily how our mind's belief, at many levels justifiably, has maneuvered itself into believing its own creations. That is magic, that we believe the paintings, the art, mathematical art, to represent the real. I do not know whether or not painting the hunt on cave walls gave our distant ancestors bounty, where perhaps a better hunt was due to better weapons used; but I do suspect that as our mathematics yielded verifiable results, such as evidenced by our technology and space program, it has insinuated itself into our belief system, that we now trust it more than the reality it is seeking to understand. And this is the art imitating science, that the mathematical perfection is somehow representative a priori of the elegance and beauty of the universe. Or as Einstein, who was a deep believer, had said: "God does not play dice." In the context of quantum mechanics, the observation of an electromagnetic wave going through a single slit will nevertheless form a spectral pattern, same as an electron observed cannot be known in advance with precision in relation to its momentum at any point in time. We use mathematical probability to overcome these obstacles, where the observation will influence the observed, but it does not mean the universe is probabilistic, merely that we cannot know it completely. The universe "knows" exactly where the electron will be, but our modern physics cannot. The same is true of our cosmology, where we had created an incredibly elegant and beautiful mathematical theory of creation, of a universe that burst forth in a Big Bang from nothingness into the billions of galaxies in existence, and we had come to actually believe this. Merely, this is a highly sophisticated art in imitation of the real. We cannot think of it otherwise than another painting on cave walls, though done with extremely powerful computers, of what we want reality to be. It does not of necessity follow.

For our highly complex and beautiful mathematical expressions to be true, we have to test them against reality. We need a kind of "double blind" test for what they are saying for us. This means we cannot use the same mathematics to interpret the data, but must do so independent of it. So if anomalies show up in our observations of the universe, they may not be systematically ignored and explained away. Rather, they must be confronted directly. In using Newton's universal constant gravitational "proportional" we had succeeded in launching our space craft deep into the solar system, and even landed space probes on far off bodies. But we may have been deluded by our success into thinking the hunt was successful due to the bounty of our art. In fact, it may have happened in spite of it rather than because of, if Newton's G "constant" is not. In using gravity as a propellant for our distant probes, via planetary slingshots, we were using something we had assumed to be right, when it might have been wrong, but it worked. The results were good enough to have us believe we were on the right track, that our art was good, and so we may have been misled into a false belief. To overcome this possible error, we need to actually go into the distant solar system and measure what is gravity out there. Otherwise, from an Earth based assumed physics we are placing a greater belief in our own mind's ability than in what reality is, out there. So we carry our saints in procession to commemorate our successes, and laud our great minds with Nobels, but it may not be real. In our atom smashing experiments we had built up a pantheon of "elementary" particle, with up and down spin, with which to understand the nature of the atom. But here too we may have been misled into believing something without understanding it. We need a double blind test for what is real in the atom, and not merely use the same mathematics that defined its energy to determine its reality. In fact, we may be ignorant of what is the atom, why it has a dual charge, and why its inertial mass acts the way it does. Being unable to understand well enough how the atom represents reality, we remain unable to use its secrets beyond electronic manipulations, or a massive release of energy such as an atomic explosion. But what do we really know?

When we transcend our belief system, us still painting on cave walls with pure mathematics, and test our theories in situ at the distant locations of our solar system, we may finally get a better understanding of how the universe works. We may likewise get greater insight into how is built the atom. And when we do this successfully, its other properties will become evident to us. The magic of our universe is that it is understandable, that we can unlock its secrets with our minds. And once we do, we will be rewarded, just like the cave hunters were rewarded. But their reward was not because of their art and magic, but because they invented a better spear. It will be likewise for us, that we will be rewarded with better uses of energy, and perhaps a form of energy still unknown to us, when we invent a better science. The real science, the one that can leap over our belief system's philosophical arts, will come in the form of a better manipulation of the universe's inner secrets. And then, and only then, looking back upon our present, its scientific achievements as quaint art magic, will we be ready to travel into space. Until then, we are Earthbound by our ignorant belief, because in our manipulations of knowledge through the same tools that defined it, we do not really know what is real. We need a real science that transcends its own mathematical self definitions. And that, when we truly understand it, will be magic.


Ivan D. Alexander

in memory of a veryveryvery long ago...

i remember when men went into caves, to do secret drawings, which we women were not allowed to see, unlike the paintings on rocks which washed away with time, these were hidden from ice and rain and snow forever, so they were forever. i am told by men who should not tell me, that much discussion took place, and arguments, should the animals point to left or right, shown as standing or running, so that magic is made more strong. when a great hunter killed many bisons, his hand was placed on that wall and red dust blown over it, a great honor in memory, so it was on the wall forever. the spirits were forever. if anyone doubted the magic, maybe said the new throwing spears were why the kill was great, they were told to leave, because they did not believe in the magic strongly, the spirits would be angry with them, and all go hungry. i remember these, told to me in secret, but i never saw them, only the drawings on the rocks outside, also forbidden, those i saw. i never saw the sacred fires by which men painted their knowledge on the spirits of cave walls. it was forbidden to me, a woman.

lannalannalannalanna.

...just call me Anna for short.

OUR SORRY STATE OF KNOWLEDGE

We had made great strides in science. The electron, both as electricity and photons of light, is used daily, powering our whole planet, even as I write this on my computer. DNA testing and sequencing has left a trail of our ancestry, or of solving crimes committed. We can talk to anywhere on the planet, or get there in a matter of hours. Physics equations can put men on the Moon, or land probes on distant planets, with superb accuracy. From genetic engineering to automotive engineering, we are a planet of nearly miraculous achievements, on the move, and in a fashion in charge of our destiny. With such great achievements, why should I say "our sorry state of knowledge"?

It is because we are disconnected. Our individuation of knowledge has given us an ability to peer deeply into phenomena, but not see them as a whole of their relationships, their connections, to all of knowledge. So knowledge exists in small individual pockets divorced from the rest of existence. We are unable to make the connections how all these pockets of knowledge fit together into a vast interrelated whole. As a consequence, our world is not a living world, in our knowledge, but an inanimate creation of arbitrarily arranged forces that somehow combined into a planet able to sustain life. We can trace more or less the evolutionary path from first bacteria to modern humans, for example, but why this happened is nothing short of a mystery. I believe it was David Suzuki, a Canadian, who said that when we walk a city street, we are not aware that it is the Earth underneath the pavement that supports us. We are thus disconnected. In the basic premises of Habeas Mentem are the interconnectedness of all existence, there called 'interrelationship', which not only connects everything to infinity, but actually re-defines it from there. Our knowledge cannot see this. So we remain in a sorry state oblivious to the greatness and beauty of our existence.

So we know little bits and pieces here and there. Surprisingly, even though so disconnected, we can make those little pieces work for us, here and there. But how much greater can we make it if we can see how all these pieces fit together into a vast and organic whole? Life will not be some probabilistic accident of our universe, but rather generic and inherent to it. Evolution not some random development of the fittest, the meanest, the toughest, the most cruel, but rather a development of how all things come together in agreement. Yes, some of those agreements are cruel, as each things strives to devour the other, but it is a web of agreements rather than disagreements that makes all of life work. Like every cell in our bodies working together, the great outer world is likewise interconnected into an immense body. From plankton and bacteria, to mosses and trees and flowers, to insects and lizards and mammals and birds, to fish and octopi, even molusks, are all working together on our planet. Some call it Gaia, as first did Lovelock. Others may call it Genesis of the Old Book, or Mother Earth of our indigenous cultures, but the state of being of all reality is that of interconnectedness, not isolation, and thus it is a living world. And if we do not see this, we kill it with our knowledge, pollute our waters and air, kill our forests, destroy species by the score. That is sad. By extension, if we can see how we live in a living universe, from right down to the single celled bacteria that inhabit us, all the way out to those riding comets to seed other worlds, we can reverse the destruction. Life is generic to our universe, and in our intellectual isolationism, we fail to see its great and wondrous, harmonic beauty. What do we think harmonics are? It is agreement within itself, right down to the electron. Harmony.

That is why I said we are in a sorry state of knowledge. We need to reconnect all the pieces into a whole, and stop destroying our world, so that we too can become in agreement with all of existence. And when we do that, when we can see all existence both material and organic as in agreement, then it will be a real Science.


Ivan D. Alexander
California, USA

RATIONAL MIND AND IRRATIONAL BEAUTY.

(inspired by the works of Mellissa Zink, "A Few
Beautiful Mysteries")

Our knowledge is precious, a gift of reason
endowed to our world's higher species. To
think is a gift we often squander thoughtlessly.
But to create, to dream, to see what none
others see, that is a sublime gift, one of which
only a few chosen are privileged to share. To
speak, to sing, to write, or dance, these are
levels achieved of mind that surpasses the
reasonable, and to sculpt or paint, they all take
us to another world. The mind is so rich, that
to shackle it with constraints of only pure
reason is to cast it into a narrow well, where
the greatness of what it is to have a mind is
submerged into a brackish darkness. We
need to express more than merely reason, for
we need to dream and create.

It had often seemed to me that there is a
delicate balance between the brain's ability to
think rationally and its ability to see beyond
reason, into the irrational. A mind so tightly
trained in rational thought is forced into
channels of existence that suppress that other
side, that other wonderful world where it is
free. We need both. We cannot exist in this
world of material things, of want and dangers,
without the mind of reason resolving
difficulties presented to us. But we also
cannot be so totally absorbed by this that we
stop the other side, that other mind that is so
rich in wealth of creation, or we cease to
dream. Free association, creativity, images
surpassing the rational, those are what that
other worlds are made of. And we need these
as much as the water we drink and air we
breathe. They are food for a part of the mind
that is closer to who we are in our soul. And if
they are mysterious, imperfect, human, they
are beautiful.

Ivan

WHAT DO I REALLY KNOW?

Mostly I know that I don't know. This may appear a contradiction, so let me explain it thus: Knowledge is like a net that both holds up and entangles, so that both clarity and confusion exist side by side. Though knowledge is built up of layers upon layers, often from simplicity to greater complexity and to greater catalogs of facts and ideas, nevertheless there is a thread that runs throughout all this complexity as a fine network all tied together. I think that this finer thread, it unifying all the diverse parts, is what we do know, though often it is not obvious, and thus lost in the webs of the mind. That is why I really do not know what I know.

This finer thread of what I think I really know is then modeled after a fashion on all the things I had learned in life. Sometimes I actually stop and think about it: Do I really know this? What if my knowledge is built up of false facts, or accepted on false beliefs? May there not be a truer way to see this than what I had come to accept as true? Perhaps what we think we know is in fact but a poor caricature of what knowledge really is, and thus we live in a self delusion of thinking that we actually know. I am quite certain that mostly I do not know, and what I have come to believe as knowledge, especially that all encompassing model of reality so fully acceptable to me, may be no more than a confused derivative of wrong facts. And if I were presented with a greater intelligence, then perhaps I would more easily see the errors, hence why it is so important to communicate with other minds. If nothing else, they will have a different point of view, from their perspective of knowledge, and thus challenge us to reexamine our own.

My insecurity of this inner knowledge runs deeper still: What if the whole structure of my model of what I have come to believe as what I know is itself flawed? What if my ideas are overly childlike, over simplified, and that reality is in fact a far richer and more beautifully complex place to which my mind's ideas still have no access? Imagine presented not with challenges of ideas from fellow human beings, but from beings a million years ahead of us in evolution. What would their ideas look like? How would my mind compare to theirs? How would they model the universe of ideas that describes their knowledge? Would that finer thread that holds it all together be anywhere near what mine is? This is most disturbing to consider, that whatever we had come to believe as true is merely a faint shadow of what truly is. How can we know with our limited ability of thought, if their ideas are beyond our comprehension? This is, of course, a problem that already exists in our own world, that there are people, or intelligent beings, incapable of understanding what others had come to understand. Explaining modern physics, for example, to indigenous tribesmen of the Amazon basin, or mountains of the Himalayas, or in Micronesia, may result in a blank stare, the two cultures scarcely able to communicate at the higher levels of mathematics. Most people are ignorant of it. I am quite certain my dogs have some level of intelligence, but how can I explain things to them, if they miss the meaning of my words, or actions? Also, how well do parents communicate with their children, or children with parents? Regrettably, this misunderstanding happens daily on a worldwide basis, where through miscommunications one culture looks upon another with suspicion or loathing, where neither can truly understand the other. Of this, I am quite sure, having traveled the planet and visited every continent save Antarctica. And though I was generally well received, cordially and with ease and friendship, there were times it was clear that I was not understood, and that I did not understand the other. It was not the language problem, but rather the structure of ideas and beliefs. Then we would simply smile, and often drop it.

So what do I really know, if my knowledge itself is suspect? I think it must be reduced to that finer thread that runs through all the webs and catalogs of my mind, but which holds it all together into a unified model of how I see it fit together. Let me try to schematicize how this looks to me.

Here is a catalog of things I am quite certain of:

1. My reality is composed of sets. Within each set is an interrelated structure which I may or may not understand, but which makes up this set so that each thing within it is part of that whole set. That whole of necessity lends a structured meaning, or definition, to each part within it in terms of the whole set, so that how or where it is within the whole is defined in terms of that whole, of necessity. How each thing within a set is defined is thus always in terms of the whole of its interrelated structure, and when taken to infinity, where all possible sets are taken together, that definition is complete. Each thing within an infinity of sets is exactly what that totality defines it to be.

2. Within that structure of infinite sets defining each and every part of itself I exist. This is my universe, the one within which I live, and within which developed my mind. In my mind is Who I am. And when I connect with that Who, I am connected with that infinite definition of myself, in terms of how is structured the universe. I have an infinite identity which is at some level conscious of this, in that I am conscious of who I am within a much greater Who. But that Who is still a mystery to me, since my mind cannot perceive it in toto, being not able to understand infinity. So what I am relegated to, in knowing that I don't know, is merely a shadow of my true being. Yet, within that incomplete knowledge exist my beliefs, what I have come to believe as true.

3. I believe that when we as human beings, conscious of who we are, interact with each other with full respect for the Who of another, then we find agreement. This is reciprocal, that the other must also respect Who you are, though neither of us knows who or what that ultimate Who is, since that is from an infinite set. And when we do this through agreement, as opposed to disregarding the other and forcing them against agreement instead, we then connect of necessity with that greater structure of the universe. Therefore, when we do through agreement with another, we call into our presence, into our lives and circumstances, that greater reality of how the universe defines itself. In agreement, we work with it, in terms of our respective Whos, and in return, the universe's structure of infinite sets works with us. This idea is still a great mystery to my conscious mind, but I had come to accept it as true, though I scarcely understand it.

4. Being in agreement does not necessitate that we are right, merely that we are connected through a greater web of knowledge, and that this web will manifest for us reality in terms of our agreements, in sometimes surprising ways. We may be proven wrong, for example, in what we believe, so reality will not manifest what we expect. However, when two beings, or a multitude of beings conscious of this, come together in their minds in agreement, we bring about a reality that has meaning in and of itself, in terms of a much greater whole. Together we are better than alone, so have a better chance at being right. And that bringing together of conscious minds is a bringing together of an infinity of sets, defining us individually and collectively, at every moment of time. We are our universe, when we are allowed to be Who we are by the other, as they are Who they are when we respect their whoness. When we finally do succeed in finding a mutually respected agreement, our respective universes meet, and something wonderful happens.

5. Abstract ideas are grand, but friendship and especially loving friendship, are greater. That is when our respective universes, that into which we are so intimately connected and from which flows our Who definitions, are then interacting on their levels. Those levels are mostly opaque to us, our minds are not equipped yet to understand this, but we already have a capacity for it, in how we respond to each other in our emotions. And the greatest of those is when we find love for one another. That is an incredibly precious gift to us from infinity, from our universe, and a gift often squandered by us because we do not understand it. Or perhaps we are afraid of it, if it comes from such a high place, much too complex to comprehend. We love naturally but at the same time we flee from it, while we are drawn to it, because it is also frightening. Friendship's love may disappoint, and that is deeply painful to us.

6. Our universe is structured simply. In its infinite sets, in its infinite interrelated definitions of itself, the universe had already worked out absolute economy. That absolute economy is a reduction of infinity to total simplicity, which is why the universe is understandable to us, even with our simple minds. We are not evolved much above a simple understanding of how things work, but already we can function within this infinitely complex universe because it has reduced itself to such absolute simplicity. What we know may not be correct, but even if only a parallel of what reality is about, only an approximating, it already allows us to manipulate reality in advantageous ways. The witness to this is modern science, technology, great architectural achievements, travel and communications, the arts, music, and at some levels even medicinal successes. We are connectedly rightly when all this works, either because we gain real advantage, or only because it touches the heart.

7. If we are in error, the universe corrects us. All living things are sustained by this. Non living things cannot err, they are always what and where they are supposed to be within the infinite sets of the universe. But living things make choices, even if unconsciously so, which means that when they err, the universe immediately tells them to seek a better way. If I as a child put my hand in the fire, I immediately know I made a mistake, so will not do it again willfully. If the error is too great, then we die, which is true for all living things. On a more conscious scale, we can err and not be aware of this error for long periods of time, but eventually we must correct our error. For example, in our present understandings of how reality works, we may have many misconceptions, so what we believe as true may eventually be proven false, and we will need to rethink our knowledge. That is how works the universe, and to some that is the hand of God. No matter what we may think we know, a greater Being of existence already guides us away from error. This is a function of how are structured the infinite sets of what defines for us reality, and when we connect with that greater guidance, whether through meditations or reasoned understanding, we are connecting into a much greater Knowledge than our minds can possibly know. On the emotional level, to which we all respond, there already is a greater connection for each one of us. It is called love. And when we err, at the highest levels of our being, we are corrected, not always harshly with pain, but often caringly with love. That, I believe, is something I a priori already know. The greatest being of all existence, of infinity, of a universal consciousness, some call God, is Love. That is why we are corrected all the time, all of us, right down to the smallest living things. The universe does not tolerate error for long, and eventually we are corrected. And if we fail in this, then we are returned back into that Love we came from, same as when our body's structure finally fails, and we die. I actually truly believe this.

IS SCIENCE GOD?

Or the question can be asked the other way: Is God Science?

The thought came from reading a recent NewScientist article, "Creationism rift opens within the Vatican" where the Vatican's chief astronomer, George Coyne, responds to a comment by Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, "that evolution is incompatible with a belief in God." American President George Bush had also said regarding teaching "intelligent design", that it is part of education to be exposed to different ideas. The late Pope John Paul II leaned towards the Church accepting evolution, but with the understanding that the science has ample evidence of intelligent design in biology and the cosmos, so should not ideologically explain it away.

Science traditionally had not lent much support to religion. The parting of the seas by Moses, or walking on water by Jesus, for example, have no scientific explanation. And to most, science places itself above religion, though many great scientists in their personal beliefs did not discount a belief in God. Einstein, perhaps our most famous scientist, said "God does not play dice." In the life sciences, there is no scientific explanation either for why life began, what sparked the first combination of carbon molecules and amino acids into living cells. How did life start from inert matter, and what keeps it going? The underlying idea of all scientific investigations is that there is no chaotic randomness to the universe, but rather there is intelligent design in how it is put together, even if this intelligent evolution originated in some random fashion. Modern science recognizes the interrelated web of connections in systems, whether vast cosmic relationships, or those of our living planet, of the cells in our body; and even that life somehow molded the planet to its needs by creating oxygen in the early Earth, later moderating carbon dioxide into some form of planetary re-balancing for life to continue, or Gaia. Clearly, there is design, but whether it is God's design or some inherent structure to how the universe evolved into an understandable system, is perhaps at the center of this debate. Is it God? Or is it Science?

What makes science different from religion is that it is impersonal. Religion is personal, it reaches into our soul, into each one of us through our personal belief in something greater than our own existence. Through religious belief, we defer our being to a Creation that made us in the image of God, for example, and totally transcends us. This is both a comfort within an otherwise impersonal existence, as well as a philosophical idea that we are connected to something much greater than our very small existence here on this small planet. God is in everything. But it is this everything that science wants to identify, catalog, theorize, and ultimately understand. So is science looking for God? Most would say not, because science is not searching for the essence of a personal creator, but rather for the essence of an impersonal existence. Cosmologically, this existence is immense, immensely impersonal, though currently accepted theory of a universal origin in a Big Bang some fifteen billion years ago has the earmarks of a "neo-creationism". But it remains impersonal to the point that this universal creation, even if life is found to be common throughout the universe, it nevertheless is something the universe is, has not been in some personified way created. Existence is not personified. Science, unlike religion, does not connect the personified soul to a personal God, but rather seeks the soul of knowledge in an impersonal universe. So science places itself above religion, in a manner of speaking, by arbitrating impersonally through pure reason what it is all about. God then becomes a personal choice of belief, if that is what the person, layman or scientist, chooses to believe.

However, seen this way, science when it is raised to the ultimate impersonal arbiter of understanding, of all in the cosmos, becomes a de facto God, with the ultimate goal of complete total understanding of all that is in existence. And it is for this reason that religion may at times feel threatened by scientific theory, such as evolution for example, because the scientific explanations, which happen to be very good, supersede the religions ones, which now seem rather outdated. Earth was not made in six days, and Eve was not made from Adam's rib, we can be quite certain. If understood scientifically, their science was bad. In fact, it may be nearly impossible for us to relate to what the writers of biblical text were thinking thousands of years ago, so must accept the written word such as it is, without necessarily giving it modern interpretation. Religious text is that, and that pretty much ends the science there. But scientific text changes all the time, or at least it should change, as each new layer of understanding builds upon previous errors. So in this way, science reaches for God, or the universe, or ultimate understanding, in a progressively dynamic way, whereas religion tends to remain extremely conservative in its views. The Church of Rome burned Giordano Bruno alive, a sixteenth century philosopher, because he believed in an infinite universe which had no boundaries and no center, that life was likely on many planets, and that souls could transmigrate. This label of heresy, today seen as unfair and absurd, the Church has not yet removed, since Bruno's heresy was so threatening to it in the early days of modern science, that it remains unforgivable today. Copernicus and Galileo treaded lightly, so were spared the pyre, but Bruno spoke his mind. So religion looks backwards intensely, but towards the future only timidly, and perhaps even suspiciously, while science embraces the future openly.

Then comes the main obstacle to science, of not merely understanding how things work in the universe, but how they relate to our personal individual existence. Can science transcend reason into the domain of our soul, that which keeps us alive and gives us reason, gives us a sense of who we are, and which perhaps connects us to all of existence? Perhaps not, and philosophy is the default here. But religion is philosophy, if for no other reason that it was created by men, and sometimes women, who expressed their beliefs as they saw them in their innermost feelings. In ways still mysterious to us, did they have some special intuitive knowledge of God? We know from history that their sense of scientific inquiry was limited, and they knew little of how worked the universe. Earth was then mostly at the center of the solar system, likely flat, the sun and planets going around it, and the stars fixed in their orb of heaven. We know now that this is not true, so our science progressed dramatically, and our bullock and donkey carts are replaced with automobiles and jet travel. But this does not mean science made any real progress into understanding realms greater than what is readily observed in reality. What ties it all together, gives it intelligent design, and ultimately gave it life with the ability to look back upon itself with wonder, and be who it is, is beyond science. What do we really know? The best we can hope for is to give it a human voice.

Personally, I am a believer in God, and think that my feeble understandings of all things can never reach into the infinitely rich realms of being, that my reason is too feeble to reach far enough into an infinitely intelligent state of being, of love. For that, I must transcend reason into some deep intuitive feeling of a universe so fabulous that my reason fails to understand it. Can science ever bridge that gap? Perhaps not, since that realm of being is beyond the material and the rational, and steps off into something so big that even at the emotional level I stumble. God is too big for me to understand, yet it is not too big for me to feel a connection to that infinite bigness, because I live. And when I am to die, it will not be to science I will turn to answer the questions of my being, but to God. So in this respect, science is superseded by something much greater than itself, something that cannot be explained by scientific inquiry alone, and reaches out into infinity, my life. I am alive, a thinking being, a feeling being, and one infinitely curious to the best of my mental and emotional abilities, which makes me into a philosophical being. That I can also related to an existence that, at least to me, is an infinite love of being, of transferring that infinity into each living cell, is awesome beyond reason. So I turn my face towards belief, not necessarily any one religion's belief since I find them all curious, but into an inward belief that defines my being within all of existence. And when I look into that being, I see an infinite love from the universe, and for it. In my beliefs I am closer to Giordano Bruno than the Church, because the universe has no center and no end, and it is infinitely, totally, interrelated with the life essence, right down to the waves lapping pebbles at my feet. That to me is God.

So what makes science God, and God science? If I could somehow encompass all of possible knowledge scientifically, deduced what is reality and our universe, all of it, I would be immensely awed, perhaps even driven to insanity. But if I could somehow reach into the very essence of all being, a living universe, into the infiniteness of being so rich in life and care, with life given to every cell in existence throughout our universe, I would break down like a child and cry, and fall totally in love. That is the difference between religion and science. On a scientific level, I am in mind; but on a religious level, I am in soul. There is almost no way for the two to meet, except through me as a living and feeling human being. Then I bring together my knowledge, internalized, into my belief on a greatest level of all, my being, to some minimal level understanding God, a whole universe, a creation so great that my tears are called upon to answer. There is nothing impersonal about God, and in some ways, neither is science an impersonal arbiter of understanding, edited for emotional content; since both are human creations. The intelligent design behind both is that at one end we have human understanding, but at the other end we have what is humanly understandable. And the understandable is still far greater, always, so science must falter when it comes up against this ultimate challenge. All in the universe is still more mysterious and wonderful. And by default, we call it God.

Thus, between science and God is an infinite gulf, for God is infinitely greater. Short of infinity, there is no way to bridge this gulf, there is no way to understand this, to bring the two on equal grounds. God as we understand religiously, is on hallowed ground, so it is not science. Likewise, science as applied to knowledge, is on more solid ground, but it is not God. We may take an infinity of steps to understand God scientifically, and yet still fail. God is what makes science possible, but not the other way around, though it may give us insights into what it is all about. So science is only a tool, but God is all of existence, right down to each individual living cell's being. To reach that God, science is on an infinite timeline, and when that time is finally met, it may very well be the "end of times". Then, perhaps, the game of the eons will start all over again, and in some infinite distance, in some mysterious way, we are all born again. Science cannot be that. That is God.


Ivan

This is a cross-post from The Examined Life Philosophical forum’s “Is Science God?” discussion:

By Ivan A. ( - 199.67.138.27) on Friday, August 19, 2005 - 12:13 pm:

Velos, Fell, Anon, all are excellent points. However, I would like to point out that the perceived “dualism” is not real. We have mythically accepted this dualism (good-bad, hot-cold, black-white, etc.) in our understandings of reality, it seems forever, so it has become part of our normal thinking. But we should remember that the “subjective” must live within the “objective” world, so that in reality this dualism does not really exist, except in our minds. Further, our agreements on laws of nature, confirmations of experimental evidence, process for acceptable theory, confirmed truths, the scientific process, are all inherently “subjective” in the sense that it is our human minds that had come to agree on these. So we see the universe the only way we can, through the processes of our brain’s comprehension of what is observed, which then stripped of its subjectivity we call it “objective”. We don’t have any choice on this, and the fact that we had come to agree universally on this methodology is proof that, within the framework of how our minds work, this is the format acceptable to us.

If we think in another way, rather than accepting what had always been acceptable to us, on what we had come to agree as paths to truth, and instead saw the matrix of reality not as defined by us, but as it defines itself, we would have a different paradigm in our agreed upon perception of reality. This is a significant development, if it can be done. One possible way to do this is to think of the matrix of all the laws of nature, all equations, all knowledgeable possibilities, as being interrelated in toto into a universal whole; but more importantly, it is a whole that is self defining, self regulating, and self directing, all within the laws of nature. In effect, this internal matrix process of how things in the natural universe interact continuously, is what lends meaning, or definition, to each thing within it. This means, in effect, that nothing in existence can be anything other than what the rest of existence has “allowed” it to be, itself. The context of each thing’s existence within this totally interrelated matrix of reality is perpetually around it, ad infinitum, so each thing is constantly being affected by its extended surroundings, forever. The reason I call this a paradigm shift in thinking is because it cannot be conceived by us, other than how I described it here in the abstract as a concept, because our point of view is always so limited: we cannot fathom all the interconnections in the universe at any moment of time to see it as a complete totality. The best our minds can do is catch little glimpses here and there how these interconnections work, and call them laws of nature, or cause and effect, and remain blind to the rest of it stretching off into infinite sets of connections spanning the universe. So our objective knowledge is thus limited by this small perspective from our mind’s point of view. The point, however, is that the universe already does this. And to me, that is “intelligent design”.

If this is so, then we cannot get away from it, for it hugs us closely right down to our molecules constantly, as it has forever. And when seen this way, the “dualism” we perceive between the subjective-objective melts away. They already are one. We simply are not mentally equipped (yet?) to see it this way, so tend to separate the two.

Fell, I hope this answers yours:
“ Perhaps you see me (as Ivan might) defending a mechanistic
universe against some sort of dualism that Ivan is defending.
Well, for one, I'm afraid I haven't been successful in getting Ivan
to tell me whether his understanding of the world includes
influences that transcend the laws of nature (i.e., influence
outcomes that run counter to or defy natural laws) or are
identical with natural laws, some or all of which have yet to be
discovered by science.”

Velos, I think this above answers your point on “cognizance” as well, where you say: “>I suppose that what I was trying to get across but failed was that there is an aspect to human life which is subjective. And that this hypothetical/subjective/a priori realm is cognizance. And it is this cognizance which serves as our reservoir of ‘experience’ from which we draw for the administration of tasks. I think that Ivan is right to evoke his sentiments as far as that cognizance is concerned, however;

-The completion of tasks requires the interface with material reality; and so problem solving requires that interaction between cognizance and material reality for meaning.”

Anon, I don’t think scientists ever willfully skew their experiments towards desired effects, if they are sincere in their research, as I believe most are. I think what Velos was saying is that they may be unwittingly doing this, same as I pointed out the Achilles heel in Relativity’s testing only within the “domain of applicability”.
In yours: “ Well, go tell that to the scientists who invent hypotheses to explain things, and then construct experiments to test the robustness of those hypotheses, rejecting or modifying those hypotheses which are found to be lacking in their explanatory power. They clearly should be doing things differently, like constructing and including in their research programmes only such experiments as will confirm the truth of their hypotheses.” It is not that they willingly construct programs to verify their hypotheses, but rather they construct their programs within the parameters of their understanding leading up to their hypothesis, so the tests are of necessity defined by these parameters. The humorous result is often publicized in the popular press as “Einstein was right again!” Of course, he may have been right, but only within the parameters of his domain of applicability. J