Rational Irrationalism

Quantum Mechanics and the Big Bang

The reviewer for the Dallas Morning News must have been having a bad hair day.  He or she declared that Leon Lederman’s The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question (New York: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006) was “the funniest book about physics ever written.”  If that were true, physics must be world’s apart from sophisticated humour.  Closer to the truth is Lederman’s penchant for geeky humour, which often falls flat and is overdone.  Hardly humorous, unless the author was engaged in self-parody, which would be another matter entirely. 

But, humour aside, as a book about particle physics, Lederman’s The God Particle is pretty good.  It covers all the usual “stuff”.  The micro-world of the atom is counter-intuitive and abnormal (as far as our human experience is concerned).  Federman writes

So forget about normal; expect shock, disbelief.  Niels Bohr, one of the founders, said that anyone who isn’t shocked by quantum theory doesn’t understand it.  Richard Feynman asserted that no one understands quantum theory.  (Op cit., p. 143f)

 The overwhelming impression for the non-specialist lay reader is of extreme complexity in the micro-world of matter.
  The “standard model” started out, with Rutherford, proposing that the atom consisted of two components (a nucleus, plus electrons).  Today, says Lederman, we have in the atom

 6 quarks, 6 leptons, 12 gauge bosons and, if you want to be mean, you can count the antiparticles and the colours, because quarks come in three shaded (count 60)  But who’s counting. (Op cit., p. 63.)

It is possible that behind all this complexity will be found a “pristine symmetry” which will reduce it all to some more fundamental, more simple, more basic particles.  This is supposed to be the Higg’s boson, recently claimed to have been discovered by the CERN collider in Switzerland. 

In addition, the behaviour of sub-atomic particles can turn out to be weird.  Quantum mechanics, says Federman, has problems:

This issue has to do with the wave function and what it means.  In spite of the great practical and intellectual success of quantum theory, we cannot be sure we know what the theory means  Our uneasiness may be intrinsic to the mind of man, or it may be that some genius will eventually come up with a conceptual scheme that makes everyone happy.  If it makes you queasy, don’t worry.  You’re in good company.  Quantum theory has made many physicists unhappy, including Planck, Einstein, de Broglie, and Schrodinger. (Ibid., p. 185.)

At the end of his book, Federman contemplates the Big Bang.  It is unknowable.  It is the materialist’s idolatrous substitute for the Creator God.  But the ultimate creator is the eternal laws of physics.  This is not a paradox; it is evading the question and clutching at straws.

We can try to imagine the pre-Big Bang universe: timeless, featureless, but in some unimaginable way beholden to the laws of physics . . . .

It is comforting to visualise the disappearance of space and time as we run the universe backward toward the beginning.  What happens as space and time tend toward zero is that the equations we use to explain the universe break down and become meaningless.  At this point we are just plumb out of science.  Perhaps it is just as well that space and time cease to have meaning; it gives us the possibility that the vanishing of the concept takes place smoothly.  What remains?  What remains must be the laws of physics.  (Ibid., p. 402.  Emphasis, ours)

The necessity of eternal laws of physics, as here propounded by Lederman, is not an antinomy (an apparent contradiction between two equally valid principles).  To propose that laws eternally exist in a void of meaningless nothingness is irrational–pure and simple.

Ineffable Glories

Beyond Fear and Wonder

We have a hard time conceptualising the smallness of atoms and, therefore, the number of them.  The Guardian, in a piece entitled 20 Amazing Facts About the Human Body contained the following factoid:

It is hard to grasp just how small the atoms that make up your body are until you take a look at the sheer number of them. An adult is made up of around  7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms.

The number of atoms in the material universe is finite but uncountable.  The number of atoms in just one human body is hard enough to reckon with.  But it gets even more difficult.  Particle physicists–both of the theoretical and experimental kind–tell us that that the standard model of the atom now consists of a dozen or so particles and four forces.  This would suggest that one human body is made up of far more than 84 octillion atomic particles (since there are multiple sub-atomic particles of the same type in each atom). 

All of these particles are behaving in exactly the way they are commanded to behave.  There are two ways to think about these commands.  The first is the dominant view of our time.
  Unbelief postulates the commands that keep all of these atomic and sub-atomic particles in place doing what they should do are impersonal causes that just are.  It is the ultimate “just so” story.  The Bible, however, reveals that the commands are personal: they come from God Himself.  His speaking and commanding keep every atom and every sub-atomic particle, and every force in existence and in place–all the time. 

The Unbelieving materialist–that is, vast majority of human beings upon the planet in our day–have a strange binary view of the situation.  For some bizarre reason they argue that if there is a natural cause of particular matter or a material phenomenon it serves to disprove the existence of God.  Natural causation, therefore, means no divine causation–a remarkably banal idea.  All this does is beg another question which runs something like this: since both Unbelievers and Christians alike acknowledge the existence of natural causes as self-evident, the real point of division between Belief and Unbelief must lie elsewhere.  And it does.  The real point is to explain why natural causation exists at all. 

Christians talk about primary and secondary causes.  We can illustrate as follows.  A man lifts a billiard cue and strikes a billiard ball, sending it careering into another, which then shoots off in a tangential direction. The primary cause (in this illustration) of the balls’ movement is the billiard player; a secondary cause is Newton’s laws of motion.  The Bible reveals that the Living God has created and providentially maintains all things.  He is the primary cause of all things; He also has established and maintains all secondary causes.  The existence of secondary causes is due to the grace and goodness of God.  That is the Christian’s explanation as to why natural causation exists.  Unbelief has no rational explanation.  It’s only recourse is to resort to chance. 

Atoms and sub-atomic particles and the forces which keep them together and control their movements exist, and exist in perfect harmony, because God unceasingly speaks these things into existence.  But there’s more.  Particle physicists tell us that

. . . electrons are confined to specific orbits–as if they run on rails.  They can’t exist anywhere between these orbits but have to make a “quantum leap” from one to another.  

But within those rails the precise orbit or position of each electron appears to be random: influenced and controlled by no secondary cause whatsoever.  This is what led Einstein to grumble about God “playing dice with the universe.”   If this is correct–future experimentation may be able to make predictive sense about the precise path and location of each electron in an atom–it implies that the precise positioning of electrons is subject to no secondary causes whatsoever, but the direct, fiat command of God as the alone cause.  God, of course, does not play dice with the universe. Einstein simply was blind to the One True God who has revealed Himself as the all conditioning Conditioner.   The precise location and path of each electron in the human body, and of all electrons existing in the universe is commanded and known by God at all times.

God is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable.  His greatness and majesty and power is on display without ceasing.  When the Psalmist declared, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made” he was speaking the truth.  But we, in our days, are privileged to apprehend the truth of that statement in ways that the Psalmist could never imagine. 

 

Creation By Divine Command

The Regular is the Miracle

Christians believe in the God Who is the Cause of all causes.  Here is an excerpt from one of the most comprehensive confessions ever made by the Church, written about four hundred years ago:

God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established. (“Of God’s Eternal Decree”, Westminster Confession of Faith 3:1)

Natural causation exists only because God has ordained and commanded all.  But this confession, this aspect of the undoubted Christian faith, has never been understood by materialists and Unbelievers in general.
  To them god can ever only be nothing more than a warranting concept, a bucket if you will, to hold all that we don’t know and understand about natural causes.  As scientific knowledge increases, and our understanding of natural causation grows, the “bucket”, and therefore god, shrinks.   This is known as the “God of the gaps” theory. 

Materialists cling to it like petulant children because the identification of god with all that we are agnostic about is already required by their materialist pseudo-religion. It is the only god their religion allows them to acknowledge.  For them it is always “matter versus God”.  For the Christian it is always “only matter and natural causes because of God”.  Thus, the dichotomy of matter versus God has only and always been a straw man.  When materialists talk of god they always are making reference to an idol–to a god as they have conceived it to be, not to God as He has revealed Himself to be.

Marilynne Robinson reflects on this circumstance.

For almost as long as their has been science in the West there has been a significant strain in scientific thought which assumed that the physical and material preclude the spiritual. The assumption persists amongst us still, vigorous as ever, that if a thing can be “explained,” associated with a physical process, it has been excluded from the category of the spiritual.  But the “physical” in this sense is only a disappearingly thin slice of being, selected, for our purposes, out of the totality of being by the fact that we perceive it as solid, substantial. We all know that if we were the size of atoms, chairs and tables would appear to us as loose clouds of energy. [Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 9f]

Robinson, of course, is making reference to the astounding discoveries over the last century in particle physics.  It turns out that matter is not “hard” at all.  It is all loose pulsating clouds of energy.  We are all loose pulsating clouds of energy.  Robinson continues:

It seems to me very amazing that the arbitrarily selected “physical” world we inhabit is coherent and lawful.  An older vocabulary would offer the world “miraculous.”  Knowing what we know now, an earlier generation might see divine providence in the fact of a world coherent enough to be experienced by us as complete in itself, and as a basis upon which all claims to reality can be tested.  A truly theological age would see in this divine Providence intent on making human habitation within the wild roar of the cosmos. 

But almost everyone, for generations now, has insisted on a sharp distinction between the physical and the spiritual.  So we have had theologies that really proposed a “God of the gaps” as if God were not manifest in the creation, as the Bible is so inclined to insist, but instead survives in those dark places, those black boxes, where the light of science has not yet shone.  And we have atheisms and agnosticisms that make precisely the same argument, only assuming that at some time the light of science will indeed dispel the last shadow in which the holy might have been thought to linger.  [Ibid.]

Given what we now are learning about the cosmos and the natural order, the old dualism between matter and spirit is exploding to pieces.  This is not to say that men will cease clinging to it with stubborn ferocity.  It is to say, however, that their intractable stubbornness will be increasingly plain.  The material realm’s testimony to the God who created all things is getting louder and more scintillating as our understanding of the material grows.  The chaotic, wild roar of the cosmos makes the plain, the hard, the ordinary, the predictable, and the regular character of the creation appear comprehensively and utterly miraculous. 

>Progressive Enslavement

>The Seductions of Pseudo-Science

One of the silly characteristics of our age is the credulous and naive veneration of science.  It has led to the emergence of what we call scientism–faith in science as the ultimate source of truth and wisdom.  This faith is pervasive.  How many social issues or ethical questions are falsely claimed to be resolved by the magisterium of “scientists say . . . “, or “science tells us . . . “?  Consider the insinuation of “science” into the humanities: social “science”; political “science”; anthropological “science”; and “scientific” pedagogy, to name but a few.  Recall how global warming propagandists have tried to pull a swift one by asserting, “the science is settled” by which is meant that infallible truth has been discovered, and that all must now stop debating, stop questioning.  Reflect on how politicians crave “scientific” warrant for crazy schemes.  Consider how the adjective “unscientific” is used to bludgeon the views of opponents.  It is the ultimate evisceration of an opponent’s argument.

How did it come to this?  Whilst not alone, probably the most influential protagonist in the English speaking realm for “science”  and the “scientification” of all of life  has been John Dewey.  He moved things along a bit from the first phase of the Enlightenment which had held to the idea that Nature was governed by a collage of immutable laws.  Darwin had taught Dewey and his contemporaries otherwise.  Darwin had “convinced” the West that Nature was not fixed, but was changing; mankind, therefore, could not be said to have an immutable nature.  Mankind was also changing and developing.

But, reasoned Dewey, this opened up the opportunity for mankind to seize the day.  Mankind had become so advanced and developed that he could now take charge of and manage his own evolutionary development.  “Following Bacon’s prescription, the power to manipulate nature with a view to human purposes had been exercised to remarkable effect.  But the [old] belief  in a fixed human nature meant that the power unleashed by science had not yet been applied in a thorough fashion to our essentially plastic human nature and political society.” (J. Judd Owen, Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism: The Foundational Crisis of the Separation of Church and State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p.19)  http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0226641929&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifrIf the scientific method were applied to humanity, we would be able to take effective charge of our evolutionary development.  Humanity would therefore progress more effectively and more quickly.

Here is Dewey, writing in 1931:

The entrenched and stubborn institutions of the past stand in the way of our thinking scientifically about human relations and social issues.  Our mental habits in these respects are dominated by institutions of family, state, church, and business that were formed long before men had an effective technique of inquiry and validation.  It is this condition from which we suffer today.  Disaster follows in its wake. (Cited by Owen, ibid, p.21)

 Note the radical nature of the claims here. We must, says Dewey learn to think scientifically about human relations and social issues.  Science alone has an effective technique of “inquiry and validation”; the verities of the past (family, church, state) are relics.  If we continue to resist the “sciencing” of society, we will face disaster.  He means by this that we will not be able to take control of our development–which opens up the possibility, if not probability, that mankind will self-extinguish, proving unfit to survive.  Because Nature is evolving, old verities are worthless.

Dewey  went on to assert that the Great Scientific Revolution was still awaiting.  We ain’t seen nothing, yet.

In spite, then, of all the record of the past, the great scientific revolution is still to come.  It will ensue when men collectively organize their knowledge for application to achieve and make secure social values; when they systematically use scientific procedures for the control of human relationships and the direction of the social effects of our vast technological machinery.  (Ibid, p.22)

The hard, natural sciences had allowed man to understand and then to control and exploit nature to his own advantage.  Dewey says the same rigorous methodology, when applied to humanity and society will allow us to “secure” social values (picking out the best from the emergent changing value grid); then controlling human relationships and setting the direction of society.  “Science” will enable humanity to take control of its own destiny; control its own evolutionary development.

Two postulates immediately follow: “science” must be elevated into a quasi-infallible status, which explains why scientism is an intrinsic part of the new idolatry.  The ultimate answer to all public and human problems becomes, What does “science” tell us? or, What is the scientific approach?  Secondly, science must control humanity–which is to say that a power nexus of science-government must be formed to order everything, which helps explain the relentless expansion of state powers in the twentieth century to “make things right”.  

The natural law theorists of the early Enlightenment elevated natural law to the place of God.  This meant that mankind was subject to the natural order and could only succeed as he worked in accordance with natural law or “the way the world worked”.  As Rushdoony has astutely pointed out, the climate of the early Enlightenment, therefore, meant that

man’s attitude is one of laissez-faire; there must be no interference with nature’s laws and controls.  Planning was thus transferred from God to nature.  R. J. Rushdoony, The Biblical Philosophy of History (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co, 1974), p.7.

This is why the early phases of the Enlightenment produced classical liberalism, mercantilism,  modern libertarianism, and conservatism.  All of these political philosophies have in common a view of limited government, and “hands off” the natural order.  You can be comfortable with such a view if you believe (as virtually everyone did back then) that Nature runs itself; to interfere is to mess things up.

But Darwinism destroyed this idolatrous faith in Nature–only to replace it with a more destructive idolatry.  Nature was changing and evolving–and none too efficiently, since many faux adaptations did not survive.  Dewey’s morphing of “science” into systematic and rigorous analysis enabling man to secure the right path through the wasteful evolutionary mess of discarded failures provided a welcome introduction to Phase Two of the Enlightenment.  Mankind was no longer to be controlled by the laws of Nature, but would take control of his own evolutionary destiny through rigorous application of the scientific method to human nature and society itself.  And if you, dear reader, are responding to this with a reflexive, “of course” you betray the depths of your seduction to Dewey’s idolatry.

Note how the shape of the idol has changed.  In the first phase of the Enlightenment, the idol was Mother Nature.  In the second phase–the beliefs of which still remain regnant in the hearts and lives of many–the shape of the idol is Father State.  Rushdoony again:

Nature as the agency of predestination was gone.  It became increasingly evident to naturalistic thinkers that man must control his own evolution and also control the evolution of plant and animal life.  Moreover, man must create and control his own social order, so that total statism, total socialism is “scientific socialism” . . . . Socialism, statist education, mental health programmes, social security, and a variety of other statist programs provide the framework for man’s growing attempt to claim the power of predestination for himself.  Man seeks in short to become his own savior and god. (Ibid, p.7-8)

 “Nature as god” gave Unbelieving man room to flex his muscles and preen.  “Government as god” reduced Unbelieving man to the indignity of progressive enslavement.  The Autonomous Man of one generation is followed by Enslaved Man in the next.

One of the signatures indicating we live in an era of progressive enslavement is the ubiquitous invocation of “science” in the public square; our inundation by surveys, polling, and statistical “research”; and the craven credulity of the majority when it comes to science. 

There is an irony in all this “fetishisation”  of pseudo-science, which at root is driven by a false religion.  Precisely at the time when scientism has come to ascendency, hard science finds itself stumped and having to  learn to live within its own creaturely limitations.  The material realm is proving so irreducibly complex and mysterious that science is reduced to description and story telling, rather than comprehension or understanding.

There was a time when competent Unbelieving rationalistic scientists used to ridicule Christians because there was so much that Christians could not explain about God and the teachings of Scripture.  Antinomy and paradox at the foundations of Belief were mocked as sure evidence of irrationality and fideism.  Now, serious scientists are laughing no longer.  The history of hard science in the twentieth century is one of discovering antinomy and paradox at every turn–in matter itself.  Sub-atomic physicists are now “content” to describe the properties and functions of atomic particles in contradictory ways and accept that all “work” but cannot explain them or reconcile them or understand them. 

Stephen Prickett writes: http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0521009839&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

It was, however, quantum theory that was to change the nature of description so radically as to prevent any return to the relative certainties of the nineteenth century.  The problem presented by the new physics was not so much the bizarre behaviour of matter at the level of sub-atomic particles, but that it made description–whether verbal or mathematical–a crucial part of that behaviour. The effectiveness of the theory in terms of its powers of prediction has never been in question.  Indeed, it has permitted a level of experimental precision unprecedented in science, and no known experiment has ever contradicted the predictions of quantum mechanics in the last fifty years.  Stephen Prickett, Narrative, Religion and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.243.  Emphasis, author’s.

So, what’s the problem.  The problem is that the theory describes matter operating in a way which is physically impossible–“that Newtonian physics and commonsense would hold to be absolutely incapable of mixing with each other. For example, an electron can be in a state that is a mixture of ‘here’ and ‘there’. . . . This counterintuitive principle just had to be accepted as an article of quantum faith.” (John Polkinghorne, Quantum Physics and Theology, [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007], p.18.) http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0300138407&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifrPhysicist Richard Feynman says, “We cannot make the mystery go away by ‘explaining’ how it works.  We will just tell you how it works.” (Ibid., p.19)  And again,

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will go ‘down the drain’ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped.  Nobody knows how it can be like that. (Prickett, op cit., p. 245)

For Dewey, science was a metaphor for man taking control of his own destiny, for asserting his sovereignty and control over himself.  His legacy is deep and long lasting because he has a pitch-perfect appeal to Unbelief which is driven to assert the autonomy and sovereignty of Man.  But it is an illusion.  Its enticements and blandishments have led the West to the kind of house once discovered by Hansel and Gretel.  Subjugation and progressive enslavement is our fate.

The Christian response to this nonsense is to proclaim the mysteries of God.  We do not presume to explain God to the world.  We just tell Unbelief Who He is and how He works.  His truth sets us free.