Aquinas and the “New Athiests”

Fr. Brian Davies OP, Aquinas scholar among other things, takes on the new athiests: Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens.

Good stuff. It’s an audio recording.

Tags: faith and reason, knowledge

Stephen Hawking and why is there something rather than nothing — Read More Philosophy!

From the Wall Street Journal book review of the new Stephen Hawking / Leonard Mlodinow book The Grand Design, in which he concludes that we don’t need the concept of God to answer the question, Why is there something rather than nothing?

“Mr. Hawking’s own major contributions have involved the spontaneous creation of the universe ‘from nothing.’ The basic idea comes straight from conventional quantum mechanics: A particle does not have some perfectly well-defined position but rather lives in a superposition of many possible positions. As for particles, the logic goes, so for the entire universe. It exists in a superposition of many possible states, and among those states is utter nothingness. The laws of quantum cosmology purport to show how nothingness can evolve into the universe we see today.”

I haven’t read the book, just the review, but I’ll take a crack at the issue anyway.

My understanding is that conventional quantum mechanics attempts to explain the behavior of existing matter at the atomic level (e.g., photons and electrons, etc.) that act both as particles and as waves. The “superposition” thing gets to this interaction – “to completely describe a particle one must include a description of every possible state and the probability of the particle being in that state,” (Wikipedia) which its wave characteristics define; the position of a photon or an electron while it’s being a particle is controlled by the wave characteristics of said photon or an electron.

But here’s the thing. Superposition is a characteristic of existing matter. These friendly little particles have to exist before they start popping into various positions in a defined way out of nothing; nothing is just one of the states of their existence.

The philosophical question of “why is there not nothing” has not been answered; superposition is a characteristic of “something” not “nothing.”

Tags: faith and reason, scientific proof

The persistence of mystery

As cosmologists noodle the question of whether the known universe is all there is, or if parallel universes exist, or if there is other way of looking at things we haven’t yet thought of, they are continually pushing back the boundaries of knowledge. The boundaries of knowledge are also being pushed back as we learn more about the world through various scientific endeavors from the cosmic to the sub-atomic, and through continuing insights into human and social behavior. There’s a lot of knowledge out there and just in the nick of time we’ve invented digital storage, the Internet and the Web to help manage it all. We’re swimming in information and none of us will ever be able to truly absorb even a fraction of it.

Nevertheless, no matter how much knowledge expands, the basic mystery of existence still persists, that strange core of unknowing at the heart of everything.

Tags: knowledge, mystery

What’s the difference between reason and proof?

Remember all those science projects you suffered though in grade school, with the hypotheses, the experiments, the measurements and the results? That’s the scientific method. It’s how we build our repository of knowledge about the world and it’s the best thing we have going to establish the physical nature of reality. But it’s pretty clear that we’re not going to be able to take such an approach to much of what we experience in life; the level of scope and complexity is too great. We will never be able to set up an experiment to tell us what college to attend, or how to raise our children, or what career to pursue, or why we love Venice, or what music is really about, or whether God exists. The fact is, we live in a hugely complex world in which proof can only take us so far. Yet we obviously can and do think rigorously about these complicated experiences, even if they are not suited to experimental verification.

How do we reason about complicated things? In many ways. We gather information, we check facts, we recognize patterns, we make connections, we abstract, we draw diagrams, we map patterns to one another, we deconstruct by creating a new context by which to see things, we name, describe, we categorize (e.g., think about how much of biology is categorization into genus and species), we make judgments. We answer the question, “what just happened” or “what did I just see,” specifying the experience in words and creating the inputs for logic. We do what scientists do prior to the experiment, when they exercise scientific insight to figure out how to set up the experiment in the first place. In fact, it is in this intellectual space of pattern recognition and analysis that we live most of our lives; it is in this space that we run our businesses, raise our families, govern ourselves, produce our music and our art, and think about the sacred. It is not unusual in our culture to conflate reason with proof, but proof is just one of the tools in the kit.

While it’s not sensible to expect that faith will be amenable to scientific proof, it can be thought about, and thought about rigorously, using all the intellectual tools we have for thinking about complicated things. Just ignoring the contradictions we find in so much religious experience won’t do. Faith is not some subjective preference, like whether you like red wine or white wine; it is a reflection of our most basic understanding of the nature of reality. Faith, as much as science, is a way to gain insight into the world, just at a higher level of context and complexity. Therefore to engage it with anything less than full intellectual rigor is, well, illogical. Between the sloppiness of fundamentalism and the cluelessness of relativism lies the rational apprehension of reality, which includes an engagement with the phenomenon of the sacred. 

Tags: reason, scientific proof

Where do we draw the line between reason and mystery?

One of the interesting things I think we can observe by rationally inspecting existence is that it is essentially mysterious: in the most basic sense, none of us have any idea how we got here or where we go when we depart. We can also observe that to be completely logical, we have to acknowledge that reason must accept mystery as a phenomenon, since the mystery of existence is an essential aspect of reality that must be reckoned with if we are to be truly rational. This then irrevocably changes the realm of things to which reason may be applied. Reason tells us that mystery, because it is mystery, cannot be parsed, solved, computed, proven or otherwise processed; it must simply be recognized and acknowledged.

There are a number of different ways to handle this observation. You can just ignore it and expect everything to be knowable and provable. Or you can say that you can know mysterious things by faith independently from knowing them by reason, giving your faith a free pass into irrationality. Or you can just deal with things as they are, trying to draw the line between reason and mystery in just the right place, neither accepting things that can in fact be reasoned about, nor expecting reason to prove things it can’t.

Tags: faith and reason, mystery

Why don’t we expect religion to be rational?

If faith is supposed to present a satisfying framework to understand and deal with the essential fabric of being, one would think it would need to make sense, resembling what we otherwise know of reality. If we are to enter the realm of faith, we shouldn’t have to park our brains at the door. Yet it seems that today religion in the public sphere is dominated by claims of truth rather than reasoned argument; today it seems that faith and reason aren’t expected to engage. This not  only justifies religious irrationality but worse, keeping us from even arguing about it. As Rabbi Jacob Neusner pointed out in his May 29, 2007 article in the Jerusalem Post, in which he commented on Pope Benedict’s book Jesus of Nazareth (which in turn held commentary on a previous book of Rabbi Jacob Neusner’s), “Disputation went out of style when religions lost their confidence in the power of reason to establish theological truth.” 

Tags: faith and reason