SEKHMET
ATTENDS LOW MASS IN THE CHURCH OF PROGRESS
The
Fundamentalist Christian right commonly accuses its atheistic
opposition (under its various aliases: Rationalism, Secular
Humanism, Materialism) of being a religion in its own right,
and it is tempting to discount any accusation made by the fundamentalist
right (to turn the old joke inside out: with fundamentalists
for enemies, Rationalists hardly need friends). Predictably,
the accusation is both ridiculed and denied by the targeted
Rationalists, Materialists and Secular Humanists. They point
to the lack of any official, written dogma and of any central
authority vested with the power to enforce dogma; they emphasize
the absence of a belief in any sort of transcendent reality
(the essence of all other religions), they disavow both faith
and personal experience as valid means for accessing truth,
and they insist upon empirical proof as the sole criterion for
the establishment of truth.
So:
Is the Church of Progress really a Church? Even as I ask this
rhetorical question, the New York Times serendipitously provides
definitive (if decorously covert) proof that it is.
THE
REAL STAR WARS: BETWEEN ORDER AND CHAOS:
Astronomers
now know that not even the constellations represent any meaningful
order. But every so often some maverick astronomers come up
with tantalizing clues of a hidden universal order... In a report
published in the Jan. 9 issue of Nature, an international team
of astronomers say they have found reason to believe that superclusters
--giant globs of galaxies-- are arranged in a gargantuan ëthree
dimensional chessboard expending throughout the heavens...
If
true, this would be stunning news. There is little reason to
believe that the big bang, the explosion that began the universe,
scattered its debts with more care than any other blast. A universe
so fastidiously and geometrically arrayed would require... new
laws of physics. Not many astronomers will be easily persuaded
that we dwell in the cells of a celestial lattice ...
Maybe
back in the beginning the dice were loaded. As the universe
was unfolding, some unknown ordering principle might have been
at work.. One of the hard- earned lessons of modern science
is how effortlessly structure can bubble up from below, without
the need of a great designer. Random genetic mutations, sifted
by natural selection, give rise to biological order. And from
the unpredictable quantum fluctuations of subatomic particles
emerge the crystalline scaffolding of atoms and molecules. Gravity
creates its own order .. (George Johnson, New York Times, 19/
1 /97)
Sounds
legit, doesn't it? 'Rational', unemotional, factual, above all
scientific. But read carefully. It's simultaneously subterfuge
and propaganda. The dogma may be unofficial and unwritten, but
it is demonstrably Church of Progress dogma nonetheless. The
church Credo goes something like this: the universe is an accident;
matter precedes mind; consciousness is a kind of spin-off of
matter; human life, indeed, all life, serves no higher purpose.
Spiritual and sacred are no more than euphemisms for superstition.
There is no consciousness higher than our own (at least not
on this planet) and no possible transformation of the material
into the spiritual. There is only Progress, hope defrayed into
the future. Jacob's ladder no longer bridges the gulf between
heaven and earth. It has been laid flat along the ground. Given
enough time, science and technology will establish their version
of heaven right here on earth. All we have to do is continue
implementing those proven rational values that have brought
our planet to its present state. At a certain point, Progress
will automatically take over and everyone will live happily
ever after. The geneticist, J.B.S. Haldane, with characteristic
bluntness, set out the premises upon which his materialism was
founded: 1) That there was material before there was mind 2)
That there were events before there were any minds to perceive
those events. These perfectly undemonstrable and metaphysical
notions are set out in a book drolly entitled: SCIENCE AND LIFE:
Essays of a Rationalist. To this day Haldane enjoys a high reputation
among fellow metaphysicians calling themselves Rationalists.
Haldane
and George Johnson decades later in the New York Times seem
to be talking science but are actually expressing a system of
beliefs, a Credo. Call it the atheology of the Church of Progress.
Only it is not acknowledged as a Credo. It is called reason
and it is said to follow from the facts of science. But it has
little to do with science. Its several chief elements are in
no sense necessary corollaries of the actual scientifically
validated facts of the physical world --as its faithful pretend.
It
is the religious, or quasi-religious nature of these beliefs
that provide half the evidence to substantiate the accusation--
that Rationalism/Materialism/ Secular Humanism is a religion
in its own right. And this accusation has been leveled by sources
far more reputable and better informed than the fundamentalist,
creationist right. The Church likes to pretend to the public
that all who oppose its dogma are Creationists by definition
and therefore unworthy of serious attention. But the philosopher
of Science Paul Feyerabend has spelled out the similarities
between the acknowledged and the unacknowledged churches in
detail (Science in a Free Society, 1978) and much earlier in
the century the eminent mathematician and philosopher, Alfred
North Whitehead wrote: The certainties of science are a delusion.
They are hedged round with unexplored limitations. Our handling
of scientific doctrines is controlled by the diffused metaphysical
concepts of our epoch (italics mine) Even so, we are continually
led into errors of expectation. Also, whenever some new mode
of observational experience is obtained the doctrines crumble
into a fog of inaccuracies. (Adventure In Ideas, Cambridge University
Press, 1933).
Yet
sixty five years after Whitehead wrote those words, George Johnson
in The New York Times is still talking hidden metaphysics all
the while firmly believing he is talking scientific fact or
basing his conclusions upon established fact. He is not. The
big bang is hypothesis, currently the most fashionable cosmological
hypothesis but hypothesis nonetheless, and sharply opposed by
cosmologists and mathematicians no less qualified than those
who support it. Random mutation giving rise to biological order
is speculation. No scientist has ever witnessed or produced
a random mutation that gave rise to biological order. Natural
selection isn't even speculation. It is a label applied to a
mystery, and by definition devoid of scientific explicative
power. It is a tautology -- since what has survived automatically
has survival value and thus science is obliged to ascribe alleged
mechanisms ensuring survival by hindsight; which often takes
deliciously fanciful form -- when, for example, trying to account
for the survival value of the peacock's tail, or the bower birds
architectural feats, or the entire duck-billed platypus. Natural
selection proves nothing and is not itself in any sense proved.
(Actually, I would hazard that if a true civilization somehow
springs from the ashes of Progress somewhere over the course
of the next century, Neo-Darwinism will eventually be regarded
as perhaps the most deluded superstition ever to have infected
the human mind. It will be seen as a kind of intellectual Cargo
Cult of the Western World and currently fashionable proponents
such as Richard Dawkins in England and Stephen Jay Gould in
America will be remembered -- if, indeed they are remembered
at all-- as laughing stocks; figure of fun to set up and knock
down in slapstick student skits.)
The
assertion that structure bubbles up from below on its own, independent
of any guiding principle, design, or intelligence is speculation
by definition, since a guiding principle, design (in the sense
of plan) or intelligence is by definition invisible, unmeasurable,
unreplicable and therefore unscientific. A visitor from outer
space confronted by this article and unaware of the necessity
of an author, might well conclude that it (and Mr. Johnson's
article, too) is also bubbling up from below independent of
any guiding principle, design, or intelligence.í How
would he/she prove otherwise ... scientifically. The principal
if not sole attraction of each of these hypotheses is simply
that each is founded upon Coincidence as its causal metaphysical
principle.
Mr.
Johnson has woven hypothesis, speculation, fantasy and imagination
together into a tapestry that he labels science and that is
readily printed as science by the staid and respectable New
York Times, staunch guardian of the status quo. But it is not
science. It is an exercise in what Whitehead rightly terms the
diffused metaphysical concepts of our epoch. Any reader of this
column has read a thousand versions of that same article: it
is the utterly predictable reaction to any new finding that
in any way challenges the central doctrine. Johnson's obvious
aim is to minimize or slough off the possible revolution in
cosmology that might ensue if it were proven that superclusters
are arranged in a gigantic three dimensional pattern -- since
this would challenge the supremacy of that great Ungod: Coincidence.
But because the challenge in this case comes from astronomers
working within the Church itself, and that challenge is abstruse
and arcane, it poses no immediate threat to the hegemony of
the Church and so is handled with some civility. If the challenge
comes from outside the establishment, and if it concerns matters
either more accessible or more exciting to the lay public (e.g.:
UFO'S, astrology, alien abductions, homeopathy, psi phenomena,
crop circles, monuments on Mars, Atlantis -- Sekhmet will be
reporting on some of these controversies in future issues) the
tone changes dramatically. All pretense to civility is dropped,
and the offending material is if possible ignored, but if impossible
to ignore then attacked, derided or misrepresented.
It
is the rightful job of science to determine the facts of the
physical world but it is no longer science when unwarranted
metaphysical conclusions are drawn upon those facts. Once these
metaphysical conclusions are accepted as axiomatic and institutions
grow up around them dedicated to proselytizing them and preserving
them from attack, the similarities to institutionalized religion
(as we know it in the West, especially) become obvious. This
makes up the other half of the accusation: the Church of Progress
as a repressive, autocratic institution intent upon ferreting
out, exposing and persecuting its heretics.
In
an upcoming essay Sekhmet will direct her attention to the the
guardians of the Unfaith, the Jesuits of the Church of Progress:
Science, Education and the Press ...
