The Tale of the Kale
All I ask is that you will take heed whether what I say be just
Plato
§This brief chapter may be regarded as a general recap. If you think you’ve followed all the points up to now, you can safely skip it. If you feel you’d like to go over a few points again, from a different angle, then read on…
In pursuing scientific method, it is vital to start with a watertight premiss. You must have a sure foundation, otherwise you will be liable to the Gigo Effect (‘Garbage in; garbage out’: a computing term which applies to all forms of rational thought).
If, for example, you want to find out why your cup of coffee gets cold, you might choose as your Hypothesis one of the following:
- God does it, for His own magnificent unquestionable reasons.
- Demons do it, against God’s will.
- The Sun withdraws its blessing of warmth to all the Earth.
- There’s something called ‘heat’ that gradually dissipates.
- There’s something called ‘cold’ that gradually infiltrates.
How do you pick the right one? Perhaps it’s true that beastly demons are maliciously ruining your coffee break, but how do you test this theory, especially if it risks upsetting them?
Maybe 1 or 3 are true as well, but how can you prove it? 1, 2 and 3 are the stuff of Belief, and are immune to Reason and Logic until we have absolute knowledge of how the minds of God, Demons, or the Sun operate.
On the other hand, it is easy to test 4 and 5 for ‘heat’ or ‘cold’. But which do you choose?
If you pick 5, you will eventually realise that there seems to be a limit to coldness (‘absolute zero’, where all vibratory movement, perceived as heat, theoretically ceases completely), but no limit to hotness (billions of degrees, and counting). Your calculations now need to invoke ‘negative cold’ to account for all that heat. Something feels awry… and you might eventually suspect that it makes more sense to to use ‘heat’ as your basis, and not coldness, as ‘cold’ looks like being ‘not much heat’.
So do you battle on? Or accept that you’ve been working to the wrong Hypothesis for the past 150 years, or whatever, and joyfully switch over to the correct Hypothesis, which instantly removes all those awful negatives? Reason suggests the latter course, but prejudice and dogma often trump reason.
§ Science often rejects Hypotheses because it claims they are untestable. They may be 100% true, but if someone decides he can’t test for it, Truth doesn’t come into it. Materialists ‘know’ that the paranormal does not exist: thus they refuse to test for it. Thus there is no evidence for it; which proves that it doesn’t exist; which means they don’t test for it. A circular argument is hard to crack, but this one will be cracked within your (great?)grandchildren’s lifetime. It just needs one or two Big Shots to change their mind, or more likely, a groundswell from the lower echelons who are fed up with unreason.
A wrong Hypothesis might work in the short term, but will eventually fail, as you delve deeper.
On Jan 31 2009 the Daily Telegraph‘s science correspondent reviewed Why Us?, a book written by a fellow columnist which used the findings of DNA and neuroscience research to cast very serious doubts upon Materialism. In dismissing this thoughtful book the reviewer wrote:
‘The cold materialist, rational approach of science is truly wonderful because it works.’
I would quibble at the use of the word ‘rational’, as I do not see anything rational in Materialism, but the main point here is ‘What do we mean by ‘works’?’ Materialism has had huge successes; no doubt about that. But sooner or later it comes up against the buffers. Paradoxes appear that won’t go away.
§ A physicist will think of the paradox that the 4th dimension apparently has two (or even three) quite different definitions.** A biologist will wonder, one hopes, about the paradox of Life and Meaning spontaneously creating themselves from abiotic chemicals.
One problem with Materialism is that it inevitably leads to Reductionism, which claims that the closer you look the more you will find. There is some truth here, but to think that Reductionism will tell you more than it can is a grave error, as the deeper the level of dissection, the further you move from the entity. By chopping up Einstein’s brain (against his wishes) and examining slices under a microscope, nobody found what made Einstein tick. Would they have found more by going deeper, to the molecular level? No, clearly not…..(unless you think that there is a particular chemical brain molecule that created your amusement at the very idea or the meaning in this sentence).
§ ‘There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole… Unity and complementarity constitute reality.’ Werner Heisenberg, top notch quantum theorist.
§ Molecules are really tiny. If a single drop of water were magnified until it was as big as the Earth, each molecule would be about the size of a tennis ball. So I’m told.
This over-reliance on Reductionism is an example of a faulty premiss leading to a meaningless result. What will you learn from The Times leader by examining the etymology of every word it contains, or from the molecules of the ink it is printed with?
If we start from the faulty premiss that ‘A rabbit is a machine’ (as per Descartes) and then treat it like a machine, and disassemble it, and hope we will learn everything worth knowing about rabbits (as opposed to ‘dead rabbits’ bodies’), it simply won’t work. It is an inappropriate tool.
Basic physics worked fine according to Newton’s laws; then the premiss needed to change, when Einstein proposed relativity theory; then quantum physics posed an even greater challenge, incompatible with Einstein even. These two mighty theories remain incompatible. I suggest they will remain so until the faulty premiss of Materialism is abandoned, after which, who knows?
§ Is there a ‘wrong premiss’ for running a country? Governments think they should make their country richer. But Britons, for example, have never been wealthier (2019), yet the rate of alcohol and drug addiction, and food-related problems has never been higher. The divorce and suicide rate is climbing. Polls confirm that 50% of UK citizens are not happy, and our children are among the least happy in Europe. This suggests that there is a wrong premiss somewhere in the sphere of government policy.
Perhaps the correct premiss for a government is to encourage happiness. The government of Bhutan seems to be alone in thinking this way.
If we had happiness as the target of government, money worship would be much reduced and the ongoing banking scandals of 2008++ might never have happened.
If men of wisdom and government think-tanks were to ask themselves ‘What is happiness, and how can we all get some more of it?’ as opposed to chanting the mantra that More Money = More Happiness, the world must surely become a better place. As an example, we wouldn’t have packs of disaffected youth wandering the streets, as a happiness-oriented society would realise that youth needs challenges, not over-priced designer trainers, and would see to it that creative challenges were available to the kids who need it most.
Polls confirm that what people want is not wealth, but happiness. Adequate money may enable happiness, but huge money does not mean huge happiness. If it did, millionaire rock stars would not regularly kill themselves with booze and drugs.
I once met a scientist-inventor who had huge cheques drop on his doormat every week. He drove the biggest Bentley in the world. He killed himself a month or two later.
***
When I began researching for this book I was gently working on the smallholding. One day I stopped to consider the grubby little seed I was about to sow.
§ If you still aren’t convinced that Materialism is fatally flawed, please read on. Otherwise, please skip to Chapter 12, and join me in finding a prickle-free passage through the thorny thicket of Religion.
I rolled the seed across my palm and was struck by curiosity. How can that tiny black sphere, some two millimetres wide, convert into a thundering great kale plant, four feet high, with huge crinkly waterproof leaves, hundreds of yards of pale wiry roots, masses of purple shoots, then brilliant yellow flowers and, ultimately, several thousand carbon copies of itself, each containing the same astonishing powers as its parent? Where do all the myriad patterns and designs and energies and potencies come from? There’s no sign of pale wiry root or yellow polleny flower inside the seed. I’ve looked.
Logic and science require that every Effect must have a Cause, so all these patterns and forms must have a cause. They must come from somewhere. If not from inside the seed, then they must come from outside. Where else is there? Inside; or outside. That’s all there is.
DNA-alone produces (at best) the elements of bland tissue, not complex structured organs like hearts or livers. How can an abiotic chemical ‘contain’ the information for leaf structures and textures, the root patterns, and the astonishingly intricate blueprints for the machinery of the kale’s flowering, pollinating, and seed-replicating systems?
Materialism requires the spontaneous generation of Life from non-life which Louis Pasteur, a hero of scientific method, proved doesn’t happen.
Likewise, Materialism requires Mind to arise spontaneously from non-mind, and Consciousness to arise spontaneously from non-consciousness.
Something coming from nothing, again and again. Paradox upon paradox. Non-sense upon non-sense.
What is more, in order for the structure of the simplest replicating organism to spontaneously ‘arise or emerge’ by accident from chemicals, Materialism requires an astronomical number of atoms to have accidentally come together in a phenomenally complex and precise sequence of patterns and orders: a process so statistically unlikely, as to require odds of multiple gazillions to one against.
§ For any bookies out there, who know that odds of 10:1 against are never worth taking, one trillion to one against looks like this: 1,000,000,000,000:1. Professor Paul Davies has calculated that the odds against just the proteins needed to form the simplest self-replicating entity coming together by accident is 10-followed-by-forty-thousand zeroes:1 against. A trillion contains just 12 zeroes. As a rough guide, 40,000 zeroes would take up over twenty pages of this book.
Meanwhile, Dr Harold Morowitz of Yale thinks we should raise Prof Davies’ estimate to 1 in 10-followed-by-340,000,000 zeroes. They would make this book some 170,000 pages longer if spelled out in full. Be grateful.
Where do they get these numbers from? I’ve no idea. I’m not sure they were speaking of precisely the same thing anyway. But what matters is not the accuracy of these estimates, but the fact that thoughtful people agree that any spontaneous coming-together of such enormously complex chemicals is well beyond vanishingly unlikely to have ever happened.
These odds suggest that, even if possible in theory, the spontaneous creation of Life by accident is overwhelmingly unlikely. The Cambridge astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle compared the likelihood of Life having ever spontaneously arisen via the accidental assemblage of all the trillions of atoms and molecules required as being similar to having a tornado sweep through a scrapyard, and leave behind it a perfectly formed Jumbo Jet.
Yet scientists who regard playing the Lottery (at odds of a mere 14,000,000:1 against) as a mug’s game continue to accept these ludicrous odds by insisting that Life definitely arose by spontaneous chance upon chance upon chance-to-the-power-of-‘n‘ and by chance alone.
Of course, if Life never spontaneously occurred by chance (as Idealism claims) then none of these ludicrous odds will have any meaning or relevance at all. Time to switch from studying ‘coldness’ to studying ‘heat’? Well, yes….
There is a fundamental Law of science which states that Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. The simplest and most obvious of these implications is that Life, if it is an Energy, can not be destroyed, and must thus be eternal. Now there’s a thought… and derived from a principle of science itself.
As Energy and Matter are taken to be different phases of the same entity, according to Einstein’s formula E=Mc2,
§ I’m capitalising the ‘m’ of ‘matter’ to maintain consistency with ‘Life’, ‘Mind’ etc.
it is taken as fact that E and M must be interconvertible. Thus if Life is an Energy, it must not only be eternal but it might (or must) be interchangeable with heat or electricity.
I have never heard anybody, scientist or otherwise, claim that Life is interchangeable with normal physical Energy in this way. Thus, it seems we already, if tacitly, regard Life as being ‘different’. We certainly agree on it being of a higher order than un-living ‘stuff’.
If it is indeed the case that Life is unique, and of a higher order than lumpen physical stuff, then Life may not be treated according to the rules for everyday lower order Energies and Matter.
Thus we may not reasonably claim that Life, a higher-order entity, arose spontaneously from lower-order Matter/Energies. Yet Materialism does claim just that: that the Higher spontaneously arose from the Lower.
If Life is not an Energy, then it is something outside the purview of material science as currently defined: ie, ‘The study of Matter/Energy/the physical world’. Thus Materialist Science can make no valid comment on what Life is, or where it came from.
We thus arrive at more or less the same conclusion, whether we take Life to be an Energy or not an Energy: Life is different; it cannot be weighed or measured or inter-changed in any way meaningful to Materialist Science. Therefore Materialist Science may make no valid declamations as to the nature and origin of Life.
Idealist science may have a great deal to say, however, and should do so as loudly and as soon as possible, I suggest.
§ Note: If you define science as the study of anything other than only Matter/Energy, then you are automatically not a Materialist, but an Idealist, and the objections above will not be a problem for you. You will be free to study Anomalies as well as normalities. And who would not choose freedom?
Time to take a look at Religion. As an intrinsically Idealist mode of enquiry, Religion must surely have come across ghosts and banshees and so forth at some point. Let’s see…
Meanwhile, I kept looking for my White Crow…
§ I had read of many apparent wonders, including the exotic alleged hauntings of Castle Berry-Pomeroy, and the psychic drawings of Matthew Manning. Intriguing, but not totally copper-bottomed unfakeable.
Religion
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use
Galileo Galilei
You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother
Albert Einstein
When I finally plucked up the courage to look into the weirdnesses of Religion I realised I really didn’t know how to define it, except that it must surely all be of an Idealist bent, and must therefore contain non-physical components, which must themselves be of a Mental and/or paranormal nature.