Heisenberg, the Tao and the Unbreakable One

We've all heard it said that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" but what if the reality is even greater than that - what if there are no parts to begin with and that most mistakes that we make in trying to understand the nature of things result from an inability to accurately perceive reality for what it truly is?

One of the most fascinating aspects of Quantum Mechanics is known as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The principle essentially states that there is a limit to the precision with which we can know "complementary physical variables" of a particle such as position and momentum. The more we know about the one the less we seem to know about the other. It almost appears to be that the very act of measurement somehow affects the particle and makes it less knowable. One of the fathers of Quantum Physics, Neils Bohr once made the surprising observation that "it is a mistake to think that a particle ever existed prior to our measurement...isolated material particles are abstractions."

So if the particle didn't exist before we measured it, what exactly was it before? According to Werner Heisenberg it was "a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality." Oddly, prior to measurement, the particle is said to exist everywhere, in a state of "superposition" - up until the time that we attempt to locate it - at which point we are able to discern certain qualities that it has but not others.

Some scientists go so far as to suggest that these particles don't exist at all. In an essay entitled "Particles Do Not Exist" by physicist Paul Davies, we find that "the particle concept is nebulous and ideally it should be abandoned completely." John Gribbin agrees and writes that "we call those objects particles, for want of a better name, what they really are, we do not know...the particle concept is simply a crutch ordinary mortals can use to help them toward an understanding of mathematical laws."

Perhaps we can posit that the reason for the strange particle phenomena and our inability to describe what they are is a consequence of attempting to reduce an unbroken whole - a unity - into parts. Particles are what we believe we perceive when we try to grasp a portion of the whole and hold on to it. Fortunately or unfortunately, this is impossible - and always will be. To truly apprehend the All we would need to be that All ourselves. A subunit can never discern the all-encompassing totality of the whole.

C.S. Lewis has suggested that a similar dynamic is at play with spirituality and morality in general. Any attempt to isolate any particular facet of morality or goodness off from the comprehensive unity that it came from will ultimately be self-defeating. Much as trying to make sense of one square millimeter of the Mona Lisa must necessarily limit our ability to see "the big picture," so must cherry-picking certain preferred moral practices thwart our appreciation of the context from which they were drawn. In "The Abolition of Man" Lewis referred to this comprehensive morality as "the Tao."

"This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one of a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory."

According to Lewis there is no way for this moral system to evolve and that any effort made to critique it can only be attempted using elements drawn from the system itself. Once we declare a thing to be right or wrong we are tacitly admitting the existence of an actual right and wrong by which we are able to judge that thing - indeed the terms "right" and wrong" themselves are borrowed directly from the "Tao." Only a full-scale rejection of the system (of the very notions of right and wrong) could suffice to dislodge any particular aspect of it. The only disadvantage of that approach is the necessity of forfeiting the ability to make moral declarations of any sort. As he wrote:

"There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) 'ideologies', all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess."

In Judaic Tradition this concept finds expression in the practice of the twice daily recitation of the "Shema" prayer - which is essentially a meditation on the concept of the ultimate oneness of the Creator. The first line is said while the practitioner covers his or her eyes with the right hand - an indication that it's necessary to stop seeing with the eyes and rather with the mind's eye to block out the apparent (and false) perception of the multifariousness of the universe in favor of the true, unified oneness that it is.

From the search for a "Unified Field Theory" to the creation of the UN to the emergence of holistic medicine, human beings possess a natural drive towards and craving for unity. Perhaps this drive is indicative of an innate ability - to divine within complex systems the true, One, indivisible whole that underpins reality itself.

She Blinded Me: the Limits of Scientific Inquiry

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking alongside a real scientist - Harold Gans - formerly a senior cryptological mathematician with the NSA.  His talks on the improbability of the origin of life and a mathematical argument for God's direct intervention in human affairs can heard here.  My presentation on the limits (and of the manifold achievements) of the scientific endeavor can be found at the same link.

Enjoy!

A Religious Scientist - Lo and Behold

The most interesting thing (to me) about MIT professor Jeremy England is that he's so "out" religiously.  With the atmosphere in the academy so toxic for those of the spiritual persuasion it seems remarkable that he survived it - and is even getting positive press! Check out this profile in OZY optimistically entitled "The Man Who May One Up Darwin."  Considering the esteem that Darwin is held in materialist circles it strikes me a doubly remarkable that this piece simultaneously questions the durability of the Darwinian principle while admiringly exploring the musings of an Orthodox Jew - who's research could upend it in time.

For those of us who believe that science and theology are just two sides of one coin - methods of exploring and making sense of the world that we find ourselves in - its awfully refreshing to hear a contemporary scientist reflect on the study of Torah and remark "that studying the Torah provided an opportunity for intellectual engagement that he says was 'unlike anything that I had ever experienced in terms of subtlety and grandeur of scope.'"  Yep.

He has also drawn the correct conclusion vis a vis the inherent limitation that science is subject to - that it cannot tell us anything about the meaning of the discoveries that it makes.  As the article notes "for his part, England believes science can give us explanations and predictions but it can never tell us what we should do with that information.  That's where, he says, the religious teachings come in. Indeed, the man who's one-upping Darwin has spent the past 10 years painstakingly combing through the Torah, interpreting word by word much the way he ponders the meaning of life."

It remains to be seen if Professor England will have the scientific impact that many are predicting for him, but I sincerely hope that he blazes another trail within the scientific community - one that once again makes it scientifically acceptable to take metaphysics as seriously as the physical sciences.

6 Arguments For the Existence of the Non-Physical

I often hear materialists suggest that there is "no proof" for the existence of anything immaterial. Leaving aside the fact that the smaller material things get the less "material" they actually seem, is there no other way to evidence the non-physical?

We can begin by trying to define what actually constitutes physicality.  By and large, what we mean when we say that something is physical is that it exists a) in time and space or b) in a mind. To discover the immaterial, therefore, is simply a matter of demonstrating the existence of that which is nether a nor b.  To explore this I am drawing from the work of my favorite theological philosopher, Edward Feser in his superb book, The Last Superstition. Here are some examples:

1. The "one over many" argument.  While there may be very many examples of triangles such as scalene, obtuse and isosceles and many shades of blue such as cobalt, turquoise and ultramarine, "triangularity" and "blueness" are not reducible to any particular triangle or blue thing.  Indeed, even if there were no physical examples of any triangle or anything blue, they would still be truths that could come to be exemplified in the future.  They also can, and many times are, exemplified even when no human mind is aware of them.  Hence, triangularity, blueness and many other "universals" are neither material nor dependent on a human mind for their existence.
2. The argument from abstract objects.  Geometry deals with perfect lines, angles, circles, etc and discovers objective facts about them.  As the facts are objective, we haven't invented them and they could not be altered (like material things).  Clearly then, they do not depend of our minds. Also, no physical objects have the perfection that geometrical ones do so clearly they do not depend on the material world.
3. The argument from mathematics.  Like other universals, math is necessary and unchangeable - exactly the opposite of material things.  2+7=9 was true before there was a physical universe or any mind to apprehend it and would be true even after both were long gone. Another interesting twist with this one is though there is an infinite series of numbers, there is only a finite amount of physical things and mental events.  Therefore, the series of numbers can't be equated with the physical or the mental.  Take 10 minutes to listen to mathematician David Berlinski discussing this here.  
4. The argument from the nature of propositions. A proposition like "Kurt Cobain is a member of the 27 Club" would remain true even if the entire world and all the minds in it suddenly went out of existence.  Interestingly, even if no mind or material world had ever existed, the proposition "there is neither a material world nor any human mind" would still be true - proving that it is neither material nor mental.
5. The argument from science.  Science is the business of discovering objective mind-independent facts (though that often is not really the case).  As such, to accept the results of science is to accept the notion that there are such things as mind-independent universals.  Here's an interesting video of MIT physicist Gerald Schroeder discussing the implications of the laws of nature as universals.   
6. The argument from words and concepts.  How is it that I understand what you mean when you say "puppy?" Clearly, there is a universal understanding of a word that is shared over and above our various utterances of it.  If one were to argue that there is no standard conception of what various words mean then we would run into some serious problems, such as the fact that it would render all communication impossible since we would never be truly using the same words - even, perhaps, when speaking to ourselves!  Would it be possible to suggest that I think about my own Pythagorean theorem and you think about yours (which is different from mine)? Obviously not.  Rather, we are sharing one universal notion.  One that is neither physical nor mental.

Granted, all of this is a tad heady and it should be acknowledged that there is a good deal of philosophical back and forth about this approach - which I think doesn't at all defeat the premise.  I strongly suggest picking up The Last Superstition and giving it a careful read.  Each chapter builds on the previous in a deep but accessible presentation that lays out what I consider to be as air tight a case as can be made for something.

Modern Science: The Best Evidence for God To Date

A reader on this post which outlines some of  the issues posed to the materialist world-view due to the "Fine Tuning" of the Universe argument kindly linked a series of posts on the Mesora.org website called God vs. The Multiverse.  The four posts take a few minutes to read and absorb but I think that they're well done and outline the issue (and its implications) in its fullness.  

They start off by defining their terms and their goal:

In the proof, we will use inductive reasoning from the fine tuning of the constants in nature and the initial conditions of the big bang, to infer an Intelligent Designer of the universe.  What we mean by 'proof' is that a reasonable person would logically draw the same conclusion after understanding the arguments.  We do not mean 'proof' in the sense of a mathematical proof or deductive reasoning, but rather in the sense of a rational argument.

Our main objectives are to show a path in studying the deep wisdom in the creation as revealed by modern science, and also to present a proof of God from the constants and initial conditions. Because of this dual objective, we will be including many interesting ideas from modern science that are related to the proof, even though it is not contingent upon them.  We will try to be clear about what is necessary for the proof, and what is only to provide a direction to understanding the great wisdom in the universe, as revealed through modern scientific knowledge.

They then go on to explain what is meant by a "Cosmological Constant."  They are the numerical ratios that govern "how heavy an electron is, how fast light moves, how strong gravity is, etc.  All these things are finite quantities, which have particular, unchanging values that we only know through measurements and observations. These quantities are called constants."

Scientists have long wondered at the values at which these ratios are set.  They seem to be quite random.  Where do they come from and why are they so utterly precise that if they were the slightest bit different then the universe as we know it could not have formed and life would not exist?  This has given many scientists sleepless nights.  Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman emoted about this conundrum, saying:

Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." 

They give some good examples of the mystery of these constants:

Stars produce energy by fusing two hydrogen atoms into a single helium atom. During that reaction, 0.007 percent of the mass of the hydrogen atoms is converted into energy.  If the percentage were 0.006, the universe would be filled only with hydrogen.  If it was 0.008, the universe would have no hydrogen, and therefore no water and no stars like the sun. Bingo!

There are about 25 of these constants and simply put, they refute the notion that life as we know it is random. On the contrary, they demonstrate clearly, scientifically, that the universe is the result of design.   Materialist scientists recognized this, and didn't much like it.  But instead of owning up to the overwhelming brute fact of design, they did something rather brilliant - they pushed the problem back - so far back, in fact, that it can never be proven or refuted.  They posited the existence of the "Multiverse" - a hypothesis that posits that perhaps there are an infinite number of interconnected universes, all with different properties.  With that being the case it's not remarkable at all that our particular universe has all of these fine tuned peculiarities - but rather to be expected!  Problem solved.  Or is it?

There are quite a few issues with the Multiverse theory, such as:

• It's non-scientific.  In as much as it is impossible to test, it cannot officially fall within the purview of science.  Yet the same folks who insist that theology must provide testable, scientific proof are generally content accepting this un-provable notion.
• It's incoherent.  Belief in an infinite number of universes sets up necessary logical contradictions.  For instance, in as much as a God is a logical possibility, in one of the universes there must exist an infinite God who actually created the Multiverse itself (and in another there would not be).
• It doesn't follow Occam's Razor - the problem-solving principle created by William of Occam in the 14th Century.  Occam encouraged us to select the least complex of competing hypotheses. The preceding two points highlight the unnecessary complexity introduced by the unsubstantiated belief in a multiverse. 

So there you have it.  As things stand, either there is a Designing Agent (that some of us choose to call God) or there are an infinite number of universes - one of which contains an Infinite God in any event.

Which way do you prefer?

Questions For Camille Paglia

I'm a fan of Camille Paglia.  I think that she's an honest and original thinker who is also a gifted communicator.  As such, I take interest in her recent comments at Salon - especially as they pertain to theology.   

Ms. Paglia is an atheist, but of the thoughtful and respectful variety.  She has no trouble identifying the positive contributions that religion has made to society.  As she says:

"I respect every religion deeply. All the great world religions contain a complex system of beliefs regarding the nature of the universe and human life that is far more profound than anything that liberalism has produced. We have a whole generation of young people who are clinging to politics and to politicized visions of sexuality for their belief system.  They see nothing but politics, but politics is tiny.  Politics applies only to society. There is a huge metaphysical realm out there that involves the eternal principles of life and death."

She also has scant respect for atheists who never really did their homework.  She was asked "what do you make of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and the religion critics who seem not to have respect for religions for faith?"

She answered:

"I regard them as adolescents. I say in the introduction to my last book, “Glittering Images”, that “Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination.”  It exposes a state of perpetual adolescence that has something to do with their parents– they’re still sneering at dad in some way. Richard Dawkins was the only high-profile atheist out there when I began publicly saying “I am an atheist,” on my book tours in the early 1990s. I started the fad for it in the U.S, because all of a sudden people, including leftist journalists, started coming out of the closet to publicly claim their atheist identities, which they weren’t bold enough to do before. But the point is that I felt it was perfectly legitimate for me to do that because of my great respect for religion in general–from the iconography to the sacred architecture and so forth. I was arguing that religion should be put at the center of any kind of multicultural curriculum."

Fair enough.  But it seems to me that there are questions that atheists should struggle with - ones that I would think would challenge much of the fascinating world-view that Ms. Paglia has developed. If I could, I would ask her:

1. As an atheist, you most likely don't believe in free will.  Do you believe that people should be held accountable for their "wrong-doings?"  If so, why?  Clearly, they have no choice to act in any other manner.
2. Do you believe in concepts like justice and morality which have no scientific or material basis?  What do you view as the source of these concepts? 
3. What is the origin of matter, life and consciousness?  Would our lack of explanatory ability in these matters cause you to suspend your judgement as to weather or not a creative intelligence could have brought them about?  If not, are you accepting your atheism on the basis of faith? 
4. If you believe that life (and as an extension, thought) are the results of blind and impersonal forces, how do you know that your mental faculties are reliable?  Do you have confidence that what your brain tells you (whoever "you" actually is) is coherent?  How do you know?
5. Are any ideas superior to any others?  Given that, materially speaking, ideas are nothing more than haphazard firing of neurons, and that neurons have no actual worth or meaning, how could an idea be said to have any actual value?  As such, should we refrain from all critique of ideas that we subjectively find displeasing? 

That should do for now.  Camille, if you happen to come across this, let's talk!  I would truly be interested to hear what you have to say.

9 Reasons to Believe That the Biblical Exodus Actually Happened

In 2013 Rabbi David Wolpe asserted in print and at the pulpit that the historical Exodus was a fiction. He based this conclusion on what he believed was (lack of) archaeological evidence. A common mistake.  This lead biblical historian Richard Elliot Friedman (someone who's conclusions I generally have significant issues with) to respond in the following way:

After reading those articles, your readers may have concluded that scholarship shows that the Exodus is fictional, when, in fact, that is not so. There is archaeological evidence and especially textual evidence for the Exodus.

I respect Professor Sperling and Rabbi Wolpe. They were understandably following the claims of some of our archaeologists. Those archaeologists’ claims that the Exodus never happened are not based on evidence, but largely on its absence. They assert that we’ve combed the Sinai and not found any evidence of the mass of millions of people whom the Bible says were there for 40 years. That assertion is just not true. There have not been many major excavations in the Sinai, and we most certainly have not combed it. Moreover, uncovering objects buried 3,200 years ago is a daunting endeavor. An Israeli colleague laughingly told me that a vehicle that had been lost in the 1973 Yom Kippur War was recently uncovered under 16 meters—that’s 52 feet—of sand. Fifty-two feet in 40 years!

Ok, so that helps us to understand that our inability to locate the "Moses was here" plaque is not as conclusive a matter as some would have us believe.  But what about positive evidence?  What "archaeological and textual evidence" is professor Friedman referring to?

Rabbi Dr. Joshua Berman, professor of Bible at Bar Ilan University, recently wrote a piece for Mosaic Magazine entitled "Was There an Exodus?" in which he claimed to be revealing evidence "for the first time" for the historicity of the Exodus account.  What follows is a summation of some of that evidence:

1. There is rich evidence that West-Semitic populations lived in the eastern Nile delta—what the Bible calls Goshen—for most of the second millennium. Some were slaves, some were raised in Pharaoh’s court, and some, like Moses, bore Egyptian names.            
2. We know today that the great pharaoh Ramesses II, who reigned from 1279 to 1213 BCE, built a huge administrative center out of mudbrick in an area where large Semitic populations had lived for centuries. It was called Pi-Ramesses. Exodus (1:11) specifies that the Hebrew slaves built the cities of Pithom and Ramesses, a possible reference to Pi-Ramesses. The site was abandoned by the pharaohs two centuries later.
3. In the exodus account, pharaohs are simply called “Pharaoh,” whereas in later biblical passages, Egyptian monarchs are referred to by their proper name, as in “Pharaoh Necho” (2 Kings 23:29). This, too, echoes usage in Egypt itself, where, from the middle of the second millennium until the tenth century BCE, the title “Pharaoh” was used alone.
4. The names of various national entities mentioned in the Song at the Sea (Exodus 15:1-18)—Philistines, Moabites, Edomites, et al.—are all found in Egyptian sources shortly before 1200 BCE; about this, the book of Exodus is again correct for the period.
5. The stories of the exodus and the Israelites’ subsequent wanderings in the wilderness reflect sound acquaintance with the geography and natural conditions of the eastern Nile delta, the Sinai peninsula, the Negev, and Transjordan.
6. The book of Exodus (13:17) notes that the Israelites chose not to traverse the Sinai peninsula along the northern, coastal route toward modern-day Gaza because that would have entailed military engagement. The discovery of extensive Egyptian fortifications all along that route from the period in question confirms the accuracy of this observation.
7. Archaeologists have documented hundreds of new settlements in the land of Israel from the late-13th and 12th centuries BCE, congruent with the biblically attested arrival there of the liberated slaves; strikingly, these settlements feature an absence of the pig bones normally found in such places. Major destruction is found at Bethel, Yokne’am, and Hatzor—cities taken by Israel according to the book of Joshua. At Hatzor, archaeologists found mutilated cultic statues, suggesting that they were repugnant to the invaders.
8. The earliest written mention of an entity called “Israel” is found in the victory inscription of the pharaoh Merneptah from 1206 BCE. In it the pharaoh lists the nations defeated by him in the course of a campaign to the southern Levant; among them, “Israel is laid waste and his seed is no more.” “Israel” is written in such a way as to connote a group of people, not an established city or region, the implication being that it was not yet a fully settled entity with contiguous control over an entire region. This jibes with the Bible’s description in Joshua and Judges of a gradual conquest of the land.
9. Professor Berman gives a good deal of background for the remainder of his piece on the similarities between the structures of the Tabernacle and the battle compound of Ramesses II as well as the Book of Exodus's "Song of the Sea" and an Egyptian battle hymn known as the "Kadesh Poem."  He explains that Maimonides held that the Torah makes liberal use of the material of other nations as a kind of "cultural appropriation."  But in this case, how could the Torah's author have known about the details of these highly specific Egyptian references had they not been privy to them - as part of that culture?  As Rabbi Berman explains:

The evidence suggests that the Exodus text preserves the memory of a moment when the earliest Israelites reached for language with which to extol the mighty virtues of God, and found the raw material in the terms and tropes of an Egyptian text well-known to them. In appropriating and “transvaluing” that material, they put forward the claim that the God of Israel had far outdone the greatest achievement of the greatest earthly potentate.

Like many events that occurred in the past and are explored through sciences such as forensics, evolutionary biology and archaeology, researchers are working with only limited and fragmentary information as R Berman says, "Proofs exist in geometry, and sometimes in law, but rarely within the fields of biblical studies and archaeology. As is so often the case, the record at our disposal is highly incomplete, and speculation about cultural transmission must remain contingent." Ultimately, the "mesorah" - the Judaic chain of transmission from one generation to the next - speaks to me more than whatever biblical scholarship and archaeology "dig up," but for those who need an official scientific stamp of approval before taking something seriously, this is real grist for the mill.

For further reference, please check out http://www.patternsofevidence.com/en/ and read Professor Ken Kitchen's "On the Reliability of the Old Testament."