Creation Metaphysics and “A Single Unified Science”
Creation Icon.
I have written on scientism lately, and in the archives
several more critiques of scientism and naïve empiricism (its
presupposition) are available. The question then arises as to how are
we to replace this bad, contradictory narrative of man’s “progress” with
something better. Is there an answer elsewhere? Can claims of
religious belief and theology be rational? Are they not merely leaps of
faith, with no reason behind them? In short, there are answers and
religious claims are just as warranted as a “scientific” claim, and
sometimes more so. When we consider “warranted” beliefs, as they are
often termed in philosophy, we can see alternate explanations that are
far superior to the reductionist materialism of our day.
It is my thesis that there is an alternate metaphysics
that is suppressed by the centralized western establishment that has
allowed a covert advancement in highly complex technologies, while the
ignorant public have been given a mass consumption physics and worldview
that is ultimately a dead-end (materialism). One of the chief
arguments I fall back on is the fact that highly advanced technologies
are based on a rigorous, formal logic that is ordered and perfectly
systematic. Since logic itself, which forms the basis and
presupposition of those systems, is not, and cannot be “matter,” the
central narrative explanation of reality given by modern academia for
man’s origins, “Enlightenment,” and so-called scientific advance is
completely wrong.
This alternate metaphysics is closer to what is found in
aspects of Platonism and Eastern Orthodox theology, and this is likely
what informed Tesla to be so successful with his inventions, despite his
latter days of theosophy. I do not intend to advocate all of Platonism
or Pythagoreanism or later developments in Plato’s students, but rather
when considering foundational philosophical presuppositional
commitments and assumptions, the ideas of thinkers closer to this
tradition are more correct than those of an atomistic, materialist
bent. Modern quantum thinkers generally tend to be open
about “Platonic” theories of metaphysics matching up to their
discoveries, while materialistic science is utterly bankrupt at
providing any coherent account of reality.
One of the founding fathers of quantum physics, Werner Heisenberg, stated:
“In the philosophy of Democritus the atoms are eternal
and indestructible units of matter, they can never be transformed into
each other. With regard to this question modern physics takes a definite
stand against the materialism of Democritus and for Plato and the
Pythagoreans. The elementary particles are certainly not eternal and
indestructible units of matter, they can actually be transformed into
each other. As a matter of fact, if two such particles, moving through
space with a very high kinetic energy, collide, then many new elementary
particles may be created from the available energy and the old
particles may have disappeared in the collision. Such events have been
frequently observed and offer the best proof that all particles are made of the same substance: energy.
But the resemblance of the modern views to those of Plato and the
Pythagoreans can be carried somewhat further. The elementary particles
in Plato’s Timaeus are finally not substance but mathematical forms.
“All things are numbers” is a sentence attributed to
Pythagoras. The only mathematical forms available at that time were such
geometric forms as the regular solids or the triangles which form their
surface. In modern quantum theory there can be no doubt that the
elementary particles will finally also be mathematical forms but of a
much more complicated nature. The Greek philosophers thought of static
forms and found them in the regular solids. Modern science, however, has
from its beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries started
from the dynamic problem. The constant element in physics since Newton
is not a configuration or a geometrical form, but a dynamic law. The
equation of motion holds at all times, it is in this sense eternal,
whereas the geometrical forms, like the orbits, are changing. Therefore,
the mathematical forms that represent the elementary particles will be
solutions of some eternal law of motion for matter. This is a problem
which has not yet been solved.” (Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (1958) Lectures delivered at University of St. Andrews, Scotland, Winter 1955-56)
The principle at work here is explained in notable philosophy of science writer, Michael Polanyi, who wrote:
“To say that the discovery of objective truth in science
consists in the apprehension of a rationality which commands our
respect and arouses our contemplative admiration, that such discovery,
while using the experience of our senses as clues, transcends this
experience by embracing the vision of a reality beyond the impression of
our senses, a vision which speaks for itself in guiding us to an even
deeper understanding of reality-such an account of scientific procedure
would be generally shrugged aside as out-dated Platonism: a piece
of mystery-mongering unworthy of an enlightened age. Yet it is
precisely on this conception of objectivity that I wish to insist in.” (Personal Knowledge, p. 5-6)
Ours is a day of cowardice, ignorance and lack of real
knowledge and wisdom, despite the avalanche of information available at
everyone’s fingertips. Without a framework to place information, the
never-ending data stream is useless and destructive. If anyone has the
desire to find truth, he must not be afraid to go against the grain and
consider options outside the so-called mainstream, not because going
against the grain is somehow inherently laudatory, but because it is a
time of tremendous deception. In a land of supposed free inquiry and
free thought, the only thing considered untenable and anathema is
creation by a single Personal God. In fact, Carl Sagan and Richard
Dawkins even say we can posit alien origins, yet belief in God
is somehow irrational. On the contrary – those on our side have a far
superior explanation of reality that is actually coherent. A biblical
worldview may not answer every single question posed, but no worldview
can provide that, much less one that is fundamentally contradictory like
materialism or unobserved aeonian Darwinian evolutionary theory.
Atomic
orbit. “The smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the
ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed
unambiguously only in mathematical language.” -Werner Heisenberg
In response, I would like to suggest the metaphysics and
philosophy of science posited by one of my favorite thinkers, the
Orthodox theologian and traditionalist, Dr. Philip Sherrard. Dr.
Sherrard is not well-known to Western academics. His concise, yet
brilliant approach to this question solidifies a new way to look at
science based on the Eastern and biblical tradition, which provides a
unique metaphysic, and particularly the metaphysic found in thinkers
like St. Maximos Confessor. I believe these ideas form a part of
the hidden metaphysics mentioned earlier. Sherrard’s brief, but
brilliant article “A Single Unified Science” is below and includes my comments and analysis.
“The fall may best be understood not as a moral deviation or as a
descent into a carnal state, but as a drama of knowledge, as a
dislocation and degradation of our consciousness, a lapse of our
perceptive and cognitive powers—a lapse which cuts us off from the
presence and awareness of other superior worlds and imprisons us in the
fatality of our solitary existence in this world. It is to forget the
symbolic function of every form and to see in things not their dual,
symbiotic reality, but simply their non-spiritual dimension, their
psycho-physical or material appearance.”
Dr. Sherrard is discussing the sacred view of nature, in
which the divine origin of reality is not lost in the deistic divide of
God from his direct immanent energetic presence in all reality. As
I have written elsewhere,
Thomism and the Enlightenment led the West to this great divided, based
around the theological and metaphysical assumptions in Aquinas and
Enlightenment thinkers. Sherrard’s metaphysic matches up to the
discoveries of quantum physicists, such as the notion of higher and
lower dimensions.
“Seen in this perspective, our crime, like that of Adam, is
equivalent to losing this sense of symbols; for to lose the sense of
symbols is to be put in the presence of our own darkness, of our own
ignorance. This is the exile from Paradise, the condition of our fallen
humanity; and it is the consequence of our ambition to establish our
presence exclusively in this terrestrial world and to assert that our
presence in this world, and exclusively in this world, accords with our
real nature as human beings. In fact, we have reached the point not only
of thinking that the world which we perceive with our ego-consciousness
is the natural world, but also of thinking that our fallen, subhuman
state is the natural human state, the state that accords with our nature
as human beings. And we talk of acquiring knowledge of the natural
world when we do not even know what goes on in the mind of an acorn.”
If the immediate perception we have is not the totality of reality,
then whole worlds of possibility are opened up to us. This does not
mean adopting any and every fantasy, but rather using reason, which we
have from God, as a tool of revelation itself. Knowledge is very
different from what modern man conceives it to be: It is traditional and
initiatory, contrary to common assumptions, modern man suffers from a
fetish of the new, in which the only real or true knowledge can only be
ever-evolving and changing theories that are wholly overturned a year
later. The futile search for a single unifying elementary particle
reflects this idolatrous desire of man to find his deity through
science, and not through revelation. But if knowledge is initiatic and
revelatory, this quest is a dead end. Man’s knowledge of this world is
always temporal, finite and partial, and a presuppositional commitment
to a world of constant flux can only give rise to a science that is ever
and always in flux, with no objective certainty or purpose.
This does not mean a traditionalist approach to knowledge is never
added to or refined, but rather that there is no oppositional dialectic –
no old versus new, revolutionary versus archaic. There is a harmony of
advance within
stasis. The new can only expand on some tradition, which is why the scientific community itself is a hierarchical
cultus
within which knowledge is transmitted through tradition. Neil de
Grasse Tyson has not personally experienced all the scientific
experiments he has read about – he must accept them as a reliable body
of doctrine based on his more fundamental worldview commitments to
scientism. This is not to say Tyson is completely unwarranted in his
belief in scientific journals: Rather, it is to say that he, like a
religious believer, has unexamined, non-empirical faith commitments
which inform his
modus operandi in the world.
“This dislocation of our consciousness which defines the fall is
perhaps most clearly evident in the divorce we make between the
spiritual and the material, the esoteric and the exoteric, the uncreated
and the created, and in our assumption that we can know the one without
knowing the other. If we acknowledge the spiritual realm at all, we
tend to regard it as something quite other than the material realm and
to deny that the Divine is inalienably present in natural forms or can
be known except through a direct perception which bypasses the natural
world— as though the existence of this world were, spiritually speaking,
negative and of no consequence where our salvation is concerned.
This other-worldly type of esotericism only too often degenerates
into a kind of spiritual debauchery, in the sense that it has its
counterpart in the idea that it is possible to cultivate the inner
spiritual life, and to engage in meditation, invocation, and other
ritual practices, whether consecrated or counterfeit, while our outward
life, professional or private, is lived in obedience to mental and
physical standards and habits that not only have nothing spiritual about
them but are completely out of harmony with the essential rhythms of
being: Divine, human, and natural. We should never forget that an
authentic spiritual life can be lived only on condition, first, that the
way in which we represent to ourselves the physical universe, as well
as our own place in it, accords with the harmony instilled into its
whole structure through the Divine which brings it into, and sustains it
in, existence; and second, that insofar as is humanly possible, we
conform every aspect of our life—mental, emotional, and physical—to this
harmony, disengaging therefore from all activity and practice which
patently clash with it. If we offend against the essential rhythms of
being, then our aspirations to tap the wellspring of our spiritual life
are condemned to fruitlessness, or in some cases may even lead to a
state of psychic disequilibrium that can, in truth, be described as
demonic.”
This is a hard pill for modern man to swallow or even consider. If
modern physicalism and “naturalistic” explanations are not correct, man
may have erred in his ideological trek out of “self-imposed slavery”
into Enlightenment scientism. The stages of August Comte’s advancement
may actually be backwards. Comte’s positivistic and rationalistic
theory of history posited that man progressed from religion to
metaphysics/philosophy to science. In fact, the inverse may be the case
– man finds his science needs a unifying principle and foundation that
is not provided by impersonalistic philosophies and rationalist
speculations. Instead, true knowledge of the world may be had more
readily in a tradition that provides a framework for things science
uses, like math and logic. In fact, modern atheism and materialism are
more like something demonic than a mere ideology, which explains why
more men have died in world wars and under secular, atheistic,
materialistic regimes in the 20th century than in all previous religious
conflicts combined.
“The divorce between the spiritual and the material
means that material forms are regarded as totally non-spiritual, and
thus either as illusion or as only to be known through identifying their
reality with their purely material aspects. Such a debasement of the
physical dimension of things is tantamount not only to denying the
spiritual reality of our own created existence, but also, through
depriving natural things of their theophanic function, to treating a
Divine revelation as a dead and soulless body. And in this case it is
not only of a kind of suicide that we are speaking; we are also speaking
of a kind of murder.
It is just as dangerous to think we can attain knowledge of God while
ignoring, or even denying, His presence in existing things and in their
corresponding symbolic rituals as it is for us to think that we can
attain knowledge of existing things while ignoring, or even denying, the
Divine presence that informs them and gives them their reality. In
effect, there cannot be knowledge of the outward appearance of things—of
what we call phenomena—without knowledge of their inner reality; just
as there cannot be knowledge of this inner reality which does not
include a knowledge of the outer appearance.”
Sherrard hits on a crucial insight into the metaphysics of unbelief,
if you will. They always devolve into monism or solipsism, where
external reality is illusory, or the internal reality of mind or soul is
illusory. Materialism, by its definition, can never escape the
strangeloop of cyclical nonsense and incoherence, and must give way to
ultimate irrationality and holistic negation. Unless the world is seen
as a
theophanic revelation of the Divine Mind and the
logoi,
there is no unifying principle for creation. All that is left to
unifying reality is man’s finite mind, which is merely a mirror of an
unknown external existence of phantasms and flux, never attaining any
capability beyond linguistic constructs about knowing external reality.
“It is the same as with the Holy Book: the integrality of the
revelation cannot be understood simply from its letter, from its outward
literal sense; it can be understood only when interpreted by the
spiritual science of its inner meaning. At the same time this inner
meaning cannot be perceived except by means of the letter, of the
outward literal sense. There is an unbreakable union between the
esoteric and the exoteric, the feminine and the masculine, between the
inner reality of a thing and its external appearance. And any genuine
knowledge of either depends upon both being regarded as integers of a
single unified science.”
Just as nature requires a tradition and contextual worldview to
“interpret” it, so does a book or the Bible. There is no purely neutral
footing where man, as a blank slate, can create a fresh, new meaning
for the world or a book, but is always bound by the inherited lexicon
from which he has emerged. This is not to say all beliefs are
culturally relative, but that a cultural and semantic lexicon of some
kind is something passed on to all, and this fact is inescapable.
Everyone learns a particular language into which they are born, learns
in some academic institution and is informed (or misinformed) by other
institutions, like religion.
Without a tradition and a worldview to inform science, science is not
a search for knowledge or truth, but a tool of power politics, enforced
by the nastiest oligarchs to their own ends. Science becomes
scientism, and the baseless ideology of a technocratic state with no
other
telos than the perpetuation of the technocratic corporate
state itself. Might now makes right, because there is no truth,
“truth” is simply made by the entity with the most “stuff,” whether
material or virtual. The removal of
telos from the world, and thus of the divine from the world, is the replacement with the Great Monadic Particle God of Flux, and his
cultus,
the fetish of the ever-new. Yet the ever-new that must constantly be
churned out constantly denies eternal truth and permanence, and so
negates itself nihilistically as irrelevant. Religion then degenerates
according to this destructive scientistic spirit, becoming a mirror of
the consumerist plastic society in which it dwells. Without a
metaphysical basis, science is meaningless. If ultimate reality is
irrational, man’s finitely-constructed subjective meaning is a drop in a
vast ocean of universal meaninglessness. Modern man and his scientism
are ultimately doomed to nihilism, as the empty promises of scientific
progress simultaneously tell man his life meaningless, and thus so is
science.
The apex of scientism: The fast food religion in Cloud Atlas.
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