Further Topics:
God, Science, and The Unknowable Thing-in-Itself

(All notes are copyrighted in 2009 through 2011.)

By Way of Introduction
“A universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind capable of understanding it.” ~John Barrow

It is as if the human brain is at war with itself, with one side wired to receive data and put it to practical ends, and the other side wired to penetrate beneath the surface of things and get at something that cannot be communicated through either language or theorems. In our current reductivist era, the second approach eludes the scrutiny of the first, and so is rarely brought into the light of day for serious consideration.

What does the mind/matter paradox of the brain have to tell us about the nature of reality and the way we approach it in thought? What does infinity tells us about the part of reality we cannot make fit into either our logic or experience? Are these riddles of the Universe simply parlor games of no consequence? Or trifling difficulties that will eventually be solved by all-knowing science? Or is the inscrutability of “the eye that sees everything but itself” a clue of profound but forgotten significance?

Metaphysics has largely fallen out of favor in our fragmented, fractious Information Age, but the questions that preoccupied the ancients have lost none of their luster or potency. Sometimes the point of a riddle is not to generate an answer but to inspire wonder. If one accepts intuition is our first teacher, then one has already learned the most important lesson in life.

 

Background on Author and Book

From Theism to Atheism to Agnosticism back to Theism
“Emma remained confounded. 'I don’t understand.'

Omar was as charitable as he could be. 'Being unknowable, the Thing-in-Itself doesn’t require understanding. Only humility.'

'And you believe this?'

The philosopher quieted for a moment. 'When I first heard this idea some twenty-five years ago, I thought it was laughable. And after thinking more carefully about it, I thought it was a clever trick. And later still, I came to view it as plausible. Then, finally, I understood not only was it the only thing of certain truth in this world, but it was the only thing that mattered.'

Emma was moved. 'It sounds like God.'

'That,' the teacher answered, 'is humility.'” ~from Chapter Twenty-three of Icarus Transfigured

Most of my adult life I was an agnostic, and I even briefly flirted with atheism in my early twenties. However, though I was convinced at the time Christianity made little rational sense, I knew atheism—more a reaction than a true system of beliefs—was logically blinkered, spiritually uncurious, and bereft of imagination. Beyond these criticisms, which are as much about style as substance, there is also this:

When I was a young boy, I had a religious experience I have never been able to explain as a hyper-rational adult. I was “saved” into the Baptist church around the age of thirteen, and for several weeks following I was overwhelmed by a profound sense of peace and divine purpose. Everything I saw in my day-to-day life possessed unspeakable beauty and indefinable significance. The “feeling” faded soon enough, and it was not until I was a young adult I again grazed similar intense sensations while contemplating art, music, and the starry sky on the other end of my telescope. I hesitate calling these sensations feelings, for though these sensations elicited feelings of happiness and wellbeing, feelings were clearly secondary effects. The best way I can explain the impression is to say my experiences got at something bigger than me.

There have been attempts to rationalize this universal transcendent experience, from the romantic idealism of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie to E.O. Wilson’s quasi-scientific concept of biophilia. However, it was only in making an acquaintance with the Transcendental Idealism of Arthur Schopenhauer I hit upon the first coherent explanation of what I experienced in youth, as well as the underlying ideas of Immanuel Kant upon which Schopenhauer built his philosophy. As Kant was theistic in his thinking, and Schopenhauer tended to Buddhism, I have found through these men, as did Ludwig Wittgenstein and others, my own illuminated path.

Autism, Metaphysics, and A Memoir: Where It Begins For Me
I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome in 2007, at the age of forty-nine, although my interest in philosophy and science began long before this. Metaphysical thinking is a natural fit for the autistic mind, which is why I believe Kant, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein—all of whom displayed autistic traits—are excellent candidates for Asperger’s Syndrome. Autistics are less concerned with sociological and programmatic perspectives that unconsciously prejudice many lines of inquiry. When coupled with inexhaustible powers of concentration, a Proustian eye for detail, and unlimited blocks of time, they are singularly equipped to study a range of recondite subjects.

For most people, religion is as far as they will wade into a discussion on metaphysics. Many autistics, being creatures of blunt logic and limited empathy, tend to be indifferently atheistic on the question of God’s Existence; and of the ones who go the other way, as with Kant and Wittgenstein, they bring a wealth of intelligence and insight to the subject that is perhaps more cerebral to the layman than recognizably spiritual. I am in the second camp, though I hope to address the issue in a way that makes it vital and accessible.

With regard to my memoir/novel, Icarus Transfigured, from which I have culled numerous quotations to elucidate my arguments, Transcendental Idealism (a view physical reality is only possible through ideation) ties in neatly with my protagonist’s dilemma: namely, there is no real there there in his or any reality. Owing to this, the original title of the book (An Aversion to Ladders) had two meanings. It referred to Michael’s fear of heights, and also to a metaphysical musing of Wittgenstein, which opens Chapter Two:

“I might say: if the place I want to get to could only be reached by way of a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now.”

Icarus Transfigured can be seen as one part autistic memoir, one part book of metaphysics, and one part work of speculative fiction. This second book’s primary functions are to expose Icarus Transfigured to a wider readership and to flesh out philosophical ideas that germinated in its pages. Although my philosophy begins with the ideas of Kant and Schopenhauer, I do not claim to represent these men’s ideas* in all their particulars..

(*Following from this, I frequently capitalize thing-in-itself and noumenon, as well as their variations: value, infinity, eternity, ideal, etc… I do this to differentiate my view of reality-in-itself from both Kant and Schopenhauer’s views.)

The High Functioning Autistic Personality: In It But Not Of It
“From my clinical experience I consider that children and adults with Asperger’s Syndrome have a different, not defective, way of thinking. The person usually has a strong desire to seek knowledge, truth and perfection with a different set of priorities than would be expected with other people. There is also a different perception of situations and sensory experiences. The overriding priority may be to solve a problem rather than satisfy the social or emotional needs of others. The person values being creative rather than co-operative. The person with Asperger’s syndrome may perceive errors that are not apparent to others, giving considerable attention to detail, rather than noticing the ‘big picture’.” ~Dr. Tony Atwood

Though some autistics may have an empathetic view of the human race as a whole, this view is generally abstract and less particular to specific individuals. This is due to the fact that most with High Functioning Autism (or Asperger’s) possess a genuine need for social interaction, though may be perceived as selective in their modes, emotionally aloof, and peculiar in how they interact. The objectification of others, as well as feelings about others, is a light switch the autistic turns off and on by his or her terms. Emotions can therefore swing pendulously (and sometimes quite suddenly) between gushing sentiment and detachment. Regardless, the formal aspects of social relations with friends and family remain intact even when the emotionally supportive aspect is not there; and it is perhaps because of these contradictory modes that most high functioning autistics go undiagnosed, since they appear mostly “normal” even when they display socially dysfunctional traits. To the larger point, “in it but not of it” is not simply descriptive of the autistic personality, but it is also a prerequisite characteristic for any life of exceptional achievement and genius, since social entanglements and responsibilities can be significant distractions.

Autism and Science
“Able autistic individuals can rise to eminent positions and perform with such outstanding success that one may even conclude that only such people are capable of certain achievements.” ~Dr. Hans Asperger, 1944

Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Alan Turing are all excellent candidates for Asperger’s Syndrome.

If you accept that one in a hundred-and-fifty people are on the autistic spectrum, and that high functioning autistics on this spectrum naturally gravitate to fields that take advantage of their intellectual talents, then it is not unrealistic to suppose a goodly number of high-functioning autistics are in science, engineering, and mathematics. Furthermore, as autistics put the individual before the group, factualness before feelings, and details before the big picture, they are just as likely to be blinkered as brilliant. It is not merely a question of intellectually gifted people (as some autistics are) being more objective when assessing the possibility of God’s Existence, but they are predisposed to be literal in their thinking. Literal-mindedness of this type is not subtle, emotive, or particularly thorough on subjects that do not fall under a purview. It is logic as an end-in-itself, which to sounder, more experienced reason should be viewed as a hobgoblin. In finding intelligibility to reality, and a fertile creative spirit that builds on itself and what its understands, as well as value in what is created and understood, the layman readily deduces something miraculous about existence. It is not a matter of imposing order on reality, but order is already there. The literal reductive mind does not dwell on this obvious privilege. It only seeks to employ its privileged talent where the talent allows it to bypass the obvious.

A recent study revealed a link between atheism and Asperger’s Syndrome, and since I argue many with mild autism are naturally attracted to analytical pursuits, their type of linear thinking is deficient in positing value and empathy where the totality of human experience is concerned.* Put succinctly, many smart people are not atheists because they are smart, but because they are likely neuro-atypical. Therefore the “reality without larger purpose” presupposition inherent in much scientific inquiry, especially in bigger fields like Evolution and Cosmology, correlates with a general autistic outlook, even if there is no conscious philosophy to join the two. This is not to say all autistics are non-spiritual individuals,* but that where certain interests are displayed, this tendency may be a default.

Owing to this confluence of outlook and disposition, the debate between “big picture” reality and “no big picture” reality is unfairly skewed toward the latter view in our current science-adorning culture, which is more a reaction against the social politics and troubled history of religion than a true belief the Universe is pointless. In hopes of encouraging a less bifurcated discussion on the subject, I believe the debate should not be between science and religion but between science as a philosophy and metaphysics as a philosophy. The boiling point of water does not indicate a system of beliefs. Nor does it exclude one. Yet there is little attention paid to the distinction between science as a discipline and science as a philosophy, as it is assumed they are one on the same. But how does one get from a collection of facts and theories to an overview that is not strictly derived from either? My criticism of science stems from its attempts to assume a big picture from details and process alone. There is nothing inherently ideological about its methodology; however, the only way to defeat the prejudicial aspects of detail-oriented analytic thinking is to bring an equal dose of detail-oriented analytic thinking coming from the opposite direction.

Unfortunately, there is little in current “philosophy” I can appeal to for support in my effort. The New York Times recently started an online blog dedicated to philosophical subjects. Unfortunately (at the time of this writing) featured bloggers have been mostly biologists or philosophers wanting to be biologists. It is a bleak prospect from which to start, for philosophy as a discipline in its own right has forsaken metaphysics so it may serve as booster for reductive materialism, which makes it little more than science’s breakroom where clinicians muse around a coffee maker in their downtime.

(*This is not only about a lack of empathetic feeling, but given the hyper-vigilance exhibited by most autistics [what I call in my memoir “the omnipresent mind”], it is very difficult [but not impossible] for such individuals to experience pure moments of undirected thought, which prefigure most transcendental moments where one becomes God-infused.)

(*Many autistics have beliefs that are not exclusively rational or empirical, as with Newton’s dabbling with alchemy. There may also be a predilection to superstitions and conspiracy theories. This eccentric tendency is not necessarily defective, since it can be argued that atypical thinking is a prerequisite for thinking outside any and all boxes, which is an orientation shared by those with mental disorders and genius.)

Philosophical Divisions Within Science
We can break down scientists into three main camps: Copernican reductivists, who believe man is no special case and occupies no special place in the Universe; Anthropic reductivists, who believe man is no special case yet nevertheless occupies a special place in the Universe; and Mysterians, who believe, regardless what case or place man occupies in the Universe, reductivism is likely just plain wrong.

Not all scientists are reductivists, as some think of themselves as “holists” or “functionalists” and confront the difficulties materialism presents by interjecting a bit of philosophical overview where continuous observation breaks down. However, many in these camps share the general premise behind reductivism: that science will eventually be able to explain everything by its matrix.

Beyond such parsing, we can more generally categorize scientists as either being classical or non-classical: Classical scientists take a skeptical view of theoretical scientific speculation where no testability or empirical proof is ultimately provided; and this is a good thing given the parameters of science as a distinct discipline. Again, many of these hardnosed scientists are more likely to be atheistic than the wider public, and consequently fail to grasp the spiritual limits of science even as many propound the empirical limits of the scientific method. Non-classical scientists, though similarly disinclined to religious precepts, are nevertheless more open to the possibilities of inaccessible realms.

I should hasten to point out that physicists tend to be more “spiritual” than evolutionary biologists. This may be in part because evolutionary biologists, who are engaged in a heated, ongoing battle with Creationism, are more defensive about their turf. A spiritual tendency among physicists may also be the result of the quasi-mystical nature of physics itself. It goes without saying that one finds spiritual believers in all fields of science, and so it is important to stress that my central arguments are directed at scientific reductivism as a philosophy, both as it is advanced by science and uncritical popular media.

This photograph, taken from the Voyager 1 space probe, shows the Earth as a pale blue dot against a sea of stark black. This image was taken at Carl Sagan’s urging, and is meant to both underscore humankind’s “preciousness” in the Cosmos as well as its miniscule role in the grand scheme of things. (This divided mind on the subject of humankind was not unique to Sagan.)

The Deification of Science in Popular Culture
When I was a young man in the early 80’s, I was enamored with Carl Sagan’s PBS series, Cosmos. Its mix of ambient music and space age graphics made it the precursor to the ubiquitous cosmological science programs prevalent on current cable television. More uniquely, Sagan brought a poetic sensibility to his subject matter that is mostly left out of today’s sensationalistic versions of what he pioneered. When coupled with the visually rich Voyager missions to the outer planets, and the rise of CGI animation and computer modeling, this period of high visibility for science and cosmology laid the groundwork for the subsequent romanticisation and deification of science and speculative science by popular media. Things like black holes and wormholes were soon to gain the pop culture currency of Death Stars.

Around the same time as Cosmos (and as typified by Cosmos), the oxymoronic term “secular humanism” was coined to characterize a strange marriage of humanistic liberal politics to a Copernican view of humankind as a statistical anomaly. Not all scientists approved of Sagan’s romantic depictions of science as a form of hero worship, or his politics; however, these objections were mostly drowned out as science transformed from a respectable occupation of clinicians to a presentation of monolithic reductivist belief we find in today’s culture wars.

God versus Science: Is It Really Only A Different Word for The Same Thing?
Before we proceed to examine science and its relationship to culture, let us give expression to questions posed by Sagan in Cosmos about the unnecessary assumptions we suppose in positing the existence of a God:* Why do we need to insert the idea of a God as Creator into a picture where physical evidence alone should suffice for explanation of the Universe? Since we cannot account for all the particulars of the Big Bang and what came before it, how is a mystical God an improvement as an explanation? If we ask what came before God, and the answer is “God is infinite,” then since we perceive the Universe as also being infinite, why not remove God as an unnecessary step in naming infinity?

As I will shortly explain, attributing anthropomorphic qualities to God, such as being a Creator, may lead to unproductive debates about the logic of analogies. More centrally to what we will discuss, infinity is hardly a stumbling block for religion, or a get-out-of-jail-free card for science. We are led to believe that calculus and infinite sets have solved the paradox of infinity, at least as it applies to the logic of Zeno’s infinitely halved distances, but mathematical fixes of this kind are gimcracks. We should not confuse their elegance with a thorough treatment of their subject. Indeed, infinity is closer to a suspension of causality than causality’s bedrock. Because space, time, and causation break down at the microcosmic level with quantum physics, and because they also break down at the macrocosmic level of General Relativity, science finds itself bookended by enigma.

Some reductivists embrace this dilemma for argumentative purposes*—not by explaining infinity in real terms but by insisting that its non-explanation puts Nature and God on equal footing. For example, to say God is “uncaused” is no different than saying the Universe is “uncaused”, since quantum physics make mush of causation. Yet an uncaused God is less an affront to sense than saying a causally connected Universe is uncaused. Though causation disintegrates with subatomic particles, this hardly explains the Universe’s steadfast adherence to it everywhere else. This queer logic has us beginning with magic and ending with science; and because we end with science we need not pay further attention to magic.

By the same turn of reasoning, reductivists argue, since quantum physics destroys any conventional notion of a “thing” at the subatomic level, the “un-thingness” label applied to God can also apply to the realm of matter/energy. Once more we have Nature and God being made distinctions without a difference, yet as miraculous as quarks are, there is no necessary (or obvious) connection between them and single cell organisms, or between them and Goethe’s Faust, for that matter. Yet because reductivists see Nature as prima facie, it is through Nature prima facie we get to every-thing else.

However, without a concept of differentiation (things), science and scientific laws become meaningless, regardless if one categorizes these differences as “things”, “phenomena”, or “illusions”. By comparison, “undifferentiation” or “un-thingness” is the very Soul of the concept of God. Indeed, with the general acceptance of singularities in quantum physics, we approach the realm of Hawking’s “principle of ignorance”, where physics as we presently understand it stops. Here the knowable gives way to the unknowable, and science is willing to entertain, at least as a present reality, that un-differentiation (which serviceably describes a singularity) is where the supernatural and the natural become indistinguishable. Because of this (and as we will explore), the “appearance” of things and things as they exist in themselves cannot be the same thing, for differentiation is needed to establish sequence and relationship, which means appearance, where these components make difference intellectually meaningful, ends long before reality does. We cannot call what we cannot differentiate “Nature” and still be talking about science. This part is more like “God”.

To propose God as a concept distinct from Nature, distinct from natural processes that flow inextricably of their own accord, one must not merely talk about the curiosity engendered by exquisite mechanics, but by a serious examination of curiosity itself. For curiosity is only a rudimentary form of value positing, which cannot, as a purely physical explanation, be accounted for in mechanics. As Elizabeth Browning once wrote, “If you get simple beauty and nought else, you get about the best thing God invents.” In other words, the God-part of the equation of reality may be an empty concept by the naturalist’s reckoning, but it is hardly empty of value.

Even if one rejects the idea of Divine Intelligence as formulated by the world’s religions, the issue of a metaphysical cul-de-sac remains, for the riddles posed by the nature of presupposition are not and cannot be made elements of empirical and rational investigation—and this empirical and rational investigation is the very thing that separates science from religion. More practically, the physical processes upon which science builds its case are far from matters of simple revelation, for as infinity checks first causes, will (impetus) checks prime movers. Science, apart from insisting physical process is the thing that animates substance and naturally leads to self-organizing criticality, cannot discover this mechanism of animation in substance beyond rudimentary electrical stimuli.

And where is identity in electricity?

Since I have alluded to metaphysics as being the dark cave from which first causes and prime movers emerge, we must begin with it before we can adequately address the limitations to science. Metaphysics will also be the springboard for our other discussions, where we will attempt to envision a Universe that does not exclude science but adds to it.

(*Carl Sagan evolved in his attitude on the subject of God. What began as an out-and-out rejection of God in Cosmos became a more nuanced skepticism in his novel Contact. Carl Sagan said of atheism: “An atheist has to know a lot more than I know.” He described himself as agnostic, and owing to his humanism, he was a throwback to an era of scientists (as with Einstein) who were more old-world intellects learned in the humanities. Much of science’s side in the current debate between God and science is made by a different caliber of scientists: modern-day clinicians who make broad, dismissive pronouncements from within the narrow scope of a specialized field of inquiry. Sagan was a generalist, and this was his saving grace.)

(*Reductive science deems paradoxes within its own domain as temporary inconveniences, whereas paradoxes found in other philosophies are regarded as fatal since there is no “scientific” methodology to improve them.)

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