Prospero's Books

It's called literature

From John Horgan's response to a letter in the May-June 2008 issue of Science and Spirit:

Many so-called emergent phenomena can be understood, at least partially, through conventional reductionist methods. Particle physics has yielded extraordinary insights into the origin, composition, and evolution of the entire cosmos. Molecular biology has illuminated once opaque mysteries such as conception, heredity, and speciation. But some emergent phenomena, notably that of the human mind, stubbornly resist reductionist analysis. Fortunately we do have a "different methodology" for understanding ourselves. It's called literature (6).

The cosmic dance which is always there

For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity, and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not. Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.

--Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

(Thanks to God's Politics for the quotation.)

       

Neither arbitrary nor absurd

Yesterday, after naming Paul Davies's Cosmic Jackpot as the Prospero's Books Book of the Year, I spent some time skimming the book again, especially the notes I have made in it. Here's a passage that stands in contrast with Richard Dawkins's portrayal, in The God Delusion, of religion and science as polar opposites:

. . . there were religions, especially monotheistic faiths, which encouraged belief in a created world order. The founding assumption of science is that the physical universe is neither arbitrary nor absurd; it is not just a meaningless jumble of objects and phenomena haphazardly juxtaposed. Rather, there is a coherent scheme of things. This is often expressed by the simple aphorism that there is order in nature (6).

Book of the Year

The second annual Prospero's Books Book of the Year is Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life, by physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies.

A few sentences from the first pages of the book (especially when read alongside this blog's description, at the top left of each page) may suggest why it was chosen:

About 350 years ago, the greatest magician who ever lived finally stumbled on the key to the universe--a cosmic code that would open the floodgates of knowledge. This was Isaac Newton--mystic, theologian, and alchemist--and in spite of his mystical leanings, he did more than anyone to change the age of magic into the age of science . . . .

The word science is derived from the Latin scientia, simply meaning "knowledge." Originally it was just one of many arcane methods used to probe beyond the limitations of our senses in the hope of accessing an unseen reality. The particular brand of "magic" employed by the early scientists involved hitherto unfamiliar and specialized procedures, such as manipulating mathematical symbols on pieces of paper and coaxing matter to behave in strange ways. . . .

The ancients were right: beneath the surface complexity of nature lies a hidden subtext, written a subtle mathematical code. This cosmic code contains contains the secret rules on which the universe runs (4).

(The 2006 Book of the Year was The Museum of Lost Wonder.)

Ultimate and Absolute Mystery

Chet Raymo, whom I often refer to as today's finest science writer, has posted a characteristically thoughtful piece on "A Reality Inscrutable." He begins with a quotation from 19th-century thinker Herbert Spencer (as quoted in turn by Jeremy Campbell):

In the early days of Darwinism, the nineteenth-century scholar Herbert Spencer wrote that religions tend to harbor a secret fear that everything may some day be explained, which suggests they are hiding a residual doubt as to whether God as an Incomprehensible Cause is really as incomprehensible as they supposed. What they must face up to, Spencer said, is that it is only in the assertion of a reality utterly inscrutable that religion can be reconciled with science. "A permanent peace between science and religion," he said, "will be reached when science becomes fully convinced that its explanations are proximate and relative, while religion becomes fully convinced that the mystery it contemplates is ultimate and absolute.

Raymo responds:

As Campbell notes, the first of Spencer's two conditions has arguably been met. As we enter the 21st century, I don't know any scientist or philosopher of science who does not admit that scientific knowledge is partial, tentative and subject to change. There is no theory of science so thoroughly entrenched that it would not be overthrown if the evidence demanded it or if a more economical theory came along.

But we are no closer to meeting the second condition than we were in Spencer's time. Indeed, it could be argued that God as Ultimate Mystery is in full retreat. Billions of people right across the planet claim to know God's mind, or claim a personal relationship with the presumed creator of the universe. The God of many churches, mosques and temples is not Ultimate and Absolute Mystery -- to which all of us might reasonably bend our knee in adoration -- but a cross between an avuncular Bill Gates and Michelangelo's po-faced Moses, a God who turns his ear to the congregant's every prayer and asks nothing in return but a generous tithe, or perhaps blowing oneself up in a crowded marketplace.

I agree fully with Raymo. But I would want him to know (as he surely does) that there are many of us religious people, in all faith traditions, who rejoice in the findings of science but who also give the totally inadequate name "God" to the Ultimate and Absolute Mystery--as an inexpressible answer to the unanswerable question "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

Back in May 2006, I quoted Bruce Feiler, author of Where God Was Born, Walking the Bible, and other books:  

Religion . . . breeds overconfidence, and one challenge for today's believers is to rediscover in the fire of faith the source of warmth that can overpower the flames of destruction. This change can only be achieved by fellow believers, I think. The first conviction I took from my journey is that the only force strong enough to take on religious extremism is religious moderation.

Feiler's term "moderation" should not be read as "halfheartedness." Rather, it denotes, for me,

• radical love, acceptance, and respect for all our fellow creatures regardless of their religious faith or lack thereof
• the practice of gratitude, humility, and celebration in the face of the Ultimate and Absolute Mystery

Raymo continues to demonstrate wonderfully that he joins a great many of us people of faith in striving to practice gratitude, humility, and celebration. The outward forms that our gratitude, humility, and celebration take may look different. But that's hardly important.

A myth before the myth

I'm reading Wallace Stevens's long poem "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" with one of my grad students. Here's a passage that has stood out for me:

The clouds preceded us.

There was a muddy centre before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.

(Among the categories into which I've put this blog posting are Signs, Systems, and Spirit, but also Emergence. Those tags may help you see some of the things Stevens is saying to me.)

Chalkdust in the atmosphere?

Muji, a chain of stores in Europe and Asia, is selling the beautiful, wooden Blackboard Globe, apparently available by mail in the continental United States, Canada, and the EU for 6.95 British pounds.

An ordinary globe just sits there; there's nothing we can do--short of destruction--to change it. The Blackboard Globe looks like a wonderful way to give children--and adults, too--a big-picture sense of the Earth as something with which we interact, something on which our actions have consequences.

It also looks fun.

(Thanks to moleskinerie for the tip.)

Intricate beauty born out of chaos

Karmen, at Chaotic Utopia, has posted one of her best-ever "Friday Fractals," an Earth-like planet she has formed by plugging a just-right seed number into a fractal formula. She writes:

As I toyed with the different settings, I couldn’t help notice how such intricate beauty was born out of chaos. Now, I could be speaking of the fractal, or of our planet. I’ll let you decide.

(Please check out the video she has posted, of the fractal Earth being formed.)

Skyhooks and cranes

In a review of David Dennett's Consciousness Explained, Chet Raymo employs two brilliant metaphors for two ways of looking at purpose in the universe:

The big question is how we got here. Was our existence foreordained, drawn up as by a skyhook from the dreary world of matter into the realm of angels? Or are we the unforeseen accumulation of blind, chance mutations selected by interaction with the environment, matter lifting itself into ever greater domains of complexity, eventually into consciousness, as if by those cranes used by builders of skyscrapers that ratchet upward as the buildings rise?

After a thoughtful look at both world views, Raymo concludes:

This humble reader is not convinced that we yet know enough about life or mind to commit ourselves solely to cranes or skyhooks. No one who is remotely knowledgeable about science doubts that life and consciousness evolved over billions of years; what is still at issue is how complexity and consciousness arise. Is natural selection enough to drive evolution toward ever more sophisticated systems? Or is there a natural tendency toward complexity and consciousness built into creation from the very beginning, a lawful natural skyhook of sorts that might be accessible to scientific description?  In my mind, the issue is undecided.

Happy fiftieth, fellow traveler

Fifty years ago today, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite. I think I remember that the Des Moines Register published orbit times. I know I remember my parents' taking my kid sister and me out to the Seymour, Iowa, town reservoir--the darkest public area available--to see the speck of light crossing the night sky.

Sputnik brought wonder and fear. We knew that the world had changed. But we feared that the change was for the worse, that Sputnik showed that the Soviets were winning the Space Race. So we continued--maybe intensified--A-bomb drills in our school.

A few years ago, on a dark February night in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, I talked about Sputnik with a Ukranian colleague of my generation. She, too, remembered standing with her family to see the little satellite. She remembered the pride they felt, and she remembered that her school had "duck and cover" drills too.

On October 5, 1957, Allen Dulles, director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, drafted a suggested statement for President Eisenhower. It began

The launching by the Soviet Union of the first earth satellite is an event of considerable technical and scientific importance. However, that importance should not be exaggerated. What has happened involves no basic discovery and the value of a satellite to mankind will for a long time be highly problematical.