Pope Francis says ‘murderous indifference’ of great powers to blame for violence in Middle East

Pope Francis, center, flanked by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, left, and Tawadros II, Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of the See of St. Mark, free doves in Bari ( AP )

Pope Francis has blamed “murderous indifference” for the violence that continues to rage in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and other nations in the Middle East, driving thousands of people from their homes.

The head of the Catholic church said western powers had put profits before people in the region during a gathering of Orthodox patriarchs and Catholic leaders in the Italian port city of Bari.

And, along with releasing a dove of peace, he renewed his calls for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“So many conflicts have been stoked too by forms of fundamentalism and fanaticism that, under the guise of religion, have profaned God’s name – which is peace – and persecuted age-old neighbours,” he said.

He specifically denounced the weapons trade that he claimed had fuelled the region’s wars, and urged global powers to stop their “thirst for profit that surreptitiously exploits oil and gas fields without regard for our common home.”

And he added: “Indifference kills, and we desire to lift up our voices in opposition to this murderous indifference. For the Middle East today is weeping, suffering and silent as others trample upon those lands in search of power or riches.”

The meeting was the first of its kind, the Press Association news agency reports. It is the only time so many Orthodox patriarchs from the Middle East have met with the Pope.

In a special service during the day-long gathering designed to highlight the plight of Christians and others in the Middle East, the Pontiff said the region had been “covered by dark clouds of war, violence and destruction, instances of occupation and varieties of fundamentalism, forced migration and neglect.

“All this has taken place amid the complicit silence of many. The Middle East has become a land of people who leave their own lands behind.”

 

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/pope-francis-middle-east-violence-israel-palestine-migration-bari-a8436306.html

 

Pope John Paul II and that: «L’évolution est plus qu’une hypothèse …»

by

Damien F. Mackey

 

 

“Paul II never delivered this speech. He did not even meet with the members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences because the planned meeting was canceled”.

Prof. Dr. Benno Alexander Zuiddam

 

  

 

Many believers were horrified back in 1996 when the media proclaimed that Pope John Paul II had pronounced evolution to be correct science.

 

I, having as I did (and still do) a great respect for the pope and his philosophical expertise, found it very hard to accept that he had said that, as translated: “Evolution was more than a hypothesis”. Checking the French original of the speech, I wondered if it could actually be translated as “more than one hypothesis” (of evolution). According to a French academic I asked at the Geology Department of the University of Sydney, the French phrase could thus be translated into English. Though a Jesuit priest afterwards told me otherwise, that the French phrase would need – to convey my hopeful meaning – something additional like «plus seule qu’une hypothèse »

 

Whatever about all that – far more significant than my amateurish attempts to master the French language – it is extremely worrying if what professor Benno Zuiddam tells here is correct: http://www.bennozuiddam.com/Pope%20John%20Paul%20cancelled%20meeting%20Pontifical%20Academy%20of%20Science.pdf

 

Did Modernist Lobby pressure Pope JP2 into Pro-Evolution Speech that he never gave or signed?

….

On October 22, 1996, the scientific community and the popular press gave an account of the message delivered by Blessed Pope John-Paul II to the general meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences gathered in Rome to discuss evolutionary theories. The main part of this message, the one little sentence making headlines in the papers4, is as follows:

 

“Today (…) better knowledge leads us to see in the evolution theory more than a hypothesis.”

 

This sentence was immediately interpreted as acquiescence by the Holy Father in the principle of the evolution of all living things, in spite of the conflict between this mode of explaining creation and the very foundations of the Catholic religion. But we know that John-

 

Paul II never delivered this speech. He did not even meet with the members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences because the planned meeting was canceled.

 

This is what really happened, according to the unpublished testimony of a priest who was present:

 

“I was a member of this symposium on evolution. Blessed John-Paul II NEVER delivered the speech attributed to him on October 22, 1996. The text, without signature, was handed over to the members and outside of any Pontifical audience. After the event, I questioned Father Cottier, now a cardinal. He told me he had himself written a part of the document but that a second writer intervened, inserting his own additions into the text without showing it to him. Now, Fr. Cottier, theologian of the Pontifical House, has precisely the task to read all the texts to be signed by the Pope.

 

The reviewer could not therefore carry out his mission, he was bypassed. As to John-Paul II, confident of his reviewer, he never read nor reviewed the text!

Thus we are confronted with a text attributed to the Pope John-Paul II and published under his signature in L’Osservatore Romano, but what is its merit?5 It deals however with an essential topic, which is to tell whether man is only the product of some “evolution” or if man, just like all that exists on earth, is actually the fruit of God’s will (betrayed by man’s rebellion

with the Original Sin). This explains perhaps why Pope Benedict XVI thought it right to assert the Church’s stance in his enthronement homily at the inaugural Mass of his pontificate, on Sunday April 24, 2005, on St Peter’s Square:

 

“We are not the accidental and senseless product of evolution. Each of us is the fruit of a God’s thought. Each of us is willed, each is loved, each is necessary.”

That’s not all. Here is what the Holy Father added a few months later, on November 9,2005: ” I find that this Father’s words [St Basil, a bishop in the IVth century] are of astonishing relevance when he says:” Some, deceived by their innate atheism, imagined a universe deprived of pilot and order, as if ruled by chance.” How many are those “some” today? Deceived by atheism, they believe that it is scientific to think that all is deprived of order and purpose, as if ruled by chance. Throughout Scripture, the Lord wakes up the languid reason and tells us: “In the beginning was the Creative Word.”

  

Humani generis (1950), lorsqu’il évoquait avec des réserves « l’hypothèse » de l’évolution. Mais « plus qu’une hypothèse » n’a guère de sens intelligible, si ce n’est celui d’une théorie. Or l’évolution était déjà largement connue sous le nom de « théorie » de l’évolution. De plus, la lettre en question (du moins la partie rédigée par le

1. Cottier) évoque une multiplicité de théories évolutionnistes, ce qui était une manière de les relativiser toutes. Une seconde remarque concerne le fonctionnement inquiétant de la bureaucratie vaticane, dès lors que la propre Secrétairerie d’État, dont le rôle est d’écrire et de parler au nom du pape, se permet d’y ajouter le petit grain de sel dont, comme par hasard, les ennemis d’en face attendaient la sortie pour l’exploiter le jour même !

 

3 Translation courtesy of Kolbe Centre: http://kolbecenter.org/

4 Editor’s note: One shall measure the importance of this “little sentence” in remarking that as soon as the next day, October 24, the conservative daily Il Giornale proclaimed in its headline:” The Pope says that we may be descended from the apes.” For La Reppublica, the Pope had “made his peace with Darwin“. The following day, Le Monde entitled an anonymous editorial: “Darwin rehabilitated by the Church“.

Reader’s comment on Teilhard’s ‘silliness’

The Sheer Silliness of Teilhard de Chardin

 

 

Part Six (b):

Reader’s comment on Teilhard’s ‘silliness’

 

  

“Teilhard saw no clear dividing line between life and non-life.

Rather, all of reality coheres in a single reality”.

 John Ryan Haule

 

  

Hans-Georg Lundahl writes in an e-mail (6 Jul 2018):

 

I agree Teilhard was …. I think “silly” is too good a word for it.

C S Lewis once seems to have said on Teilhard’s “before life, there was pre-life” that before you light a lamp there is of course “pre-light” but sensible people call that darkness.

Have you included that reference yet?

….

Damien Mackey replies: No, that is a new one for me, but thanks for alerting me to it.

….

 

John Ryan Haule has written on this particular quirk of Teilhardianism (Jung in the 21st Century Volume Two: Synchronicity and Science, Volume Two, p. 173):

 

“The paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) developed probably the most comprehensive idea of a psychoid field in his book, The Phenomenon of Man (1959), an argument deeply rooted in evolutionary biology and inspired by his own mystical Catholicism—although it is an argument the Catholic Church still regards as “dangerous to the faith. Teilhard’s argument resembles Jung’s proposal that amoeba has something fundamental to tell us about the psychoid realm. Teilhard said, “By means of the cell, the molecular world ‘appears in person,’ touching, passing into, and disappearing in the higher constructions of life” (Teilhard de Chardin 1959: 81). Teilhard saw no clear dividing line between life and non-life. Rather, all of reality coheres in a single reality. What we have long called “life” and treated as an exceptional development unique to this blue planet has inevitable precursors: “a ‘pre-life’ [that extends] as far back before [life] as the eye can see” (Teilhard de Chardin 1959: 57). Teilhard draws our attention to a planetary stratum beginning with mud and extending up through water and the atmosphere, a several-mile-thick shell about the earth, filled with “ultramicro grains of protein”. He says, “If pre-life has already emerged in the atom, are not these myriads of large molecules just what we would expect?” (1959: 73)”. ….

 

 

Goodbye to Adam and Eve, etc.

The Sheer Silliness of Teilhard de Chardin

 

Part Five:

Goodbye to Adam and Eve, etc.

 

 

by

Damien F. Mackey

 “From one single stock He created the whole human race

so that they could occupy the entire earth”.

Acts 17:26

 

 

 

Kenneth Baker defends this biblical truth in his book, Fundamentals of Catholicism: God, Trinity, Creation, Christ, Mary, p. 145):

 

According to the Bible, Adam and Eve were the very first man and woman. Thus, we read in Genesis 2:5 that before Adam “there was not a man to till the earth.” Also, Adam “named his wife ‘Eve’ because she was the mother of all those who live” (Gen 3:20). St. Paul teaches the same truth in Acts 17:26, “From one single stock he created the whole human race so that they could occupy the entire earth”.

 

Not so for Cardinal George Pell, however. Many Christians shuddered during his TV debate with Richard Dawkins in which – to the great surprise of Dawkins and the ABC’s (non-impartial) facilitator, Tony Jones, Cardinal Pell flatly denied the existence of Adam and Eve.

He was doing the atheists’ job for them.

 

One Protestant viewer reacted as follows:

https://www.christianfaith.com/resources/george-pell-v-richard-dawkins

 

George Pell v Richard Dawkins

 

 

My son said he ‘cringed’.

My friend could not watch it anymore.

I was not feeling at all well today so I stayed in the very comfortable leather chair, in front of the new LCD TV and watched the program.

Why do I allow myself to do these things?

It wasn’t just awful – it was unsettling. And I was already unsettled!

Yes folks; I watched ‘Q&A’ – I watched Richard (there is no God) Dawkins debate Cardinal George (not sure about my Bible) Pell – the most influential Roman Catholic in Australia.

Yes folks; I watched and listened to George Pell declare that Adam and Eve never existed; they were a myth. Alas, if that was the only gaff I heard!

….

 

Though shocking, this is hardly surprising considering that Pell, in 1967, presented a dissertation in Rome defending the theology of Teilhard de Chardin for which he was granted high honours.

Susan Claire Potts summed up Teilhard’s own approach to Adam and Eve, and related matters, in her article for The Remnant: “Teilhard de Chardin and the Catholic ‘Evolution’”, when she wrote: “Forget Genesis. Forget Adam and Eve. They did not actually exist. To Teilhard, the universe began from something—a je ne sais quoi, perhaps the God Particle the Cern scientists are trying to isolate”.

 

Here is her feisty article in full:

 

I was in the backyard, scissors in hand, checking my flowers. The roses were in bloom, and I wanted to cut some for the crystal bud vase in my kitchen. I walked over to the largest bush. It was so tall it almost reached the breakfast room window. It dwarfed the bushes on each side.

Why is that one so much bigger than the rest? I wondered as I hurried over to it. When I got closer, I was surprised to see how bare the branches were. There were only a few blooms and fewer buds on the bush. But the thing’s huge, I said to myself. Where are the roses?

Curious, I reached for the tallest stalk. It had leaves and thorns, but no blossoms. Green as the leaves of the floribunda, strong as the stem, and thicker than my thumb, I recoiled when I realized what it was. Although the branches grew beside and within and over the rosebush, the thing was not part of it.

It was fake.

And worse than that, it was choking the life out of the rosebush.

No way! I wasn’t about to let that happen. I attacked the weed with a vengeance. As I yanked and pulled and cut the sterile branches out from my struggling rosebush, the metaphor hit me square in the face.

The plight of the rose and the vigor of the weed are like what’s happening to the Church. A new teaching has taken root. The weed is Teilhardism, and it is killing the rose. It’s sapping its strength and crowding the rose out of its rightful place in the garden. If left alone, it will destroy the rose.

Don’t expect the master gardeners to get rid of it. They love the Weed. They nurture it, extol its beauty, and feed it. Like the courtiers around the emperor with no clothes, they proclaim its magnificence: See the wonder of the Weed! See how lovely the color! See the freshness of the leaves! Smell its fragrance!

Don’t listen to them. Don’t go near it.

Let’s take a look at this thing.

We’re not dealing with known heresies, with denials of certain points of doctrine nor even the serpentine modernism that infiltrates the Church and suffocates her members. We are facing nothing less than a bizarre new religion.

It masquerades as Catholicism, renewed and reclothed for the modern mind—which makes it even more insidious, more difficult to pinpoint and excise. But it’s here, there’s no denying it. The Thing has risen up from the sea of unbelief like the Beast of the Apocalypse ready to devour the Woman.

As I wrote in Against the Wolves the new faith was imagined and fleshed out by one man, Fr. Teilhard de Chardin[1], a world-enamored priest rhapsodizing over his baby—a reimagined Christianity. Unlike heretics, Teilhard doesn’t dispute this or that point of doctrine. Unlike schismatics, he doesn’t deny the authority of the Roman Church. No, he simply sidesteps the whole thing. He reinterprets the Faith, then argues from the reinterpretation.

As Mohammedism has no history before Mohammed,

 

Mackey’s comment: I have argued in various articles that there was no historical Mohammed, that Mohammed (Muhammad) was basically a biblical composite.

 

so the new religion sprang fully formed from the mind of the rambling Jesuit. Just as Mohammed wove threads from the Old Covenant, early Christianity, and the Arab worship of the moon god Al-Ilah into a cloth called Islam, so Teilhard has sewn a garment of Eastern mysticism, speculative science, and spiritual evolution. Thrown over the Body of Christ, it lies like a shroud over the Church.

Like every heresiarch before him, Teilhard laid out the philosophical roadmap. He ransacked the Sacred Teachings of our Faith, picking out an idea here, a dogma there; and then, like a diabolical sorcerer, he threw them into a cauldron with a pseudo-scientific bouquet of fine herbs and hung the pot over the fire to cook his poison.

His prose soars, his erudition shines, but it’s not Catholic. He twists what we believe, sprinkling the admixture of disputed science and empty theology with lovely Latin phrases and quotes from the masters of the spiritual life.

His disciples (who are legion) extol the brilliance of his work. A reconciliation of theology and science, they proclaim it a faith fit for Modern Man. It’s about Love and Progress and ultimate Divinization. There is no sin–error perhaps, but, no worries, it’s all being caught up in the forward rush of History. “Everything in the world follows the road to unification.”[2]

Teilhard whispers words of encouragement; he offers a new viaticum: “Our spiritual being is continually nourished by the continuous energies of the perceptible universe.”

Distinctions will fall away. The rocks, the rivers, the distant stars, the shimmering moon—all will be swept up in a great transcendent burst of energy. It will be the Parousia, the Second Coming:

 

Mackey’s comment: For my own view on this, see my article:

 

Beyond the “Second Coming”

https://www.academia.edu/29837194/Beyond_the_Second_Coming_

 

the revelation of the Cosmic Christ—the divinization of the Universe.

“Men of little faith,” Teilhard shouts, “Why then do you fear or repudiate the progress of the world?…To divinize does not mean to destroy but to sur-create.”[3]

So the World is becoming Christ.

I’m serious. That’s the goal. The Omega Point. Not Heaven or Hell. Not Judgment or Mercy. Where is the Holy Trinity in his work? Where are the Blessed Mother and the saints? Where are the angels?

He even recasts the meaning of the Cross. Sir Julian Huxley, in his introduction to The Human Phenomenon[4], explains it for us: “The redemption of the cross had to be reconciled with the salvation of the world through active co-operation in the building up of the universe.”[5]

Say what?

The whole thing is a spawn of Hell, a dark system of belief that uses Catholic words, wears the vestments, and light the candles, but there is no truth in it. It is false.

Don’t take my word for it. Pick up his books and read them if you can. They make no sense. Reason has been cast to the wind. Huxley goes on: “Teilhard uses convergence to denote the tendency of mankind, during its evolution to superpose centripetal on centrifugal trends so as to prevent centrifugal differentiation from leading to fragmentation:”[6]

Get it? Everything is converging, everything is unifying. It will all be stuck together by sap. Don’t laugh. That’s what Teilhard calls it. He posits a “positive confluence of Christian life with the natural sap of the universe.”

All things work together, not for the Glory of God and the salvation of souls, but for the realization of the Cosmic Christ. Jesus of Nazareth? Ah, he was just the “historical Jesus,” not the same thing at all. We await the Pleroma, the fullness of time, when in a great burst of something, the entire universe is transformed and the Cosmic Christ revealed.

This is worse than nonsense. There is no salvation in it, no God to adore—only divinized Matter. Evolution is “matter becoming cephalized.” How do you like that? Rocks becoming conscious, lying beneath the Noosphere[7]—that imagined membrane on the earth’s surface, a supposed thinking layer superimposed on the lifeless layer of inorganic matter.

It gets worse. Forget Genesis. Forget Adam and Eve. They did not actually exist. To Teilhard, the universe began from something—a je ne sais quoi, perhaps the God Particle the Cern scientists are trying to isolate. Over eons and eons the universe evolved according to its own inner becoming. Man appeared as an epiphenomenon, conscious, as the whole cosmos someday will be.

Individual salvation is not mentioned. The Second Coming? What’s that? Teilhard would rather call it by the unfamiliar name, The Parousia. That way he can reinterpret it. We don’t have to worry about sin or repentance, virtue or grace. All we have to do is let ourselves be united with the universe. We must not be divisive or contrary. We must not stop this deifying Movement. All will be One. And peace will reign forever.

I’m telling you—if you start thinking this creature can be domesticated, tamed to live peacefully with Tradition, you’re mistaken. This isn’t the time for gentle speech. The beast needs to be driven out of the Church before all the lambs are dead.

It’s not like we weren’t warned. We were taught about the End Times and the Great Apostasy. We were warned of the Antichrist. We were told that hearts would grow cold and people would believe fables.

The world has always been at odds with Truth, but now, a Trojan Horse has entered the City of God and laid waste the fields and the meadows. The fig tree is sterile, and there is no Glory in the Olive.

Archbishop Sheen once said that we are living in the days of the Apocalypse.[8] I think we’re there.

 

….

[1] Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., 1881 – 1955.  A French Jesuit, Teilhard was trained as a paleontologist and geologist. His principal works are Le Phenomene Humain, The Mass on the World, and The Divine Milieu. Forbidden by his superiors to publish during his lifetime, his manuscripts were copied and spread by his devotees. His works were published after his death, and the Holy Office issued a monitum against them.

[2]

[3] Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu, Harper and Row, New York, 1960, p. 154.

[4] The English translation was once called The Phenomenon of Man but man as a generic term for humanity is not allowed in the modern lexicon.

[5] Ibid. p. 34          

[6] Ibid.

[7] Another of Teilhard’s neologisms. 

[8] Buehner, Jim, Is it Closing Time ST. James Books, Torrance, CA, 1980., p. 186

 

 

Not without reason did I use the phrase “Sheer Silliness” for this series on de Chardin!

 

 

Gavin Ardley’s Obituary

 

Gavin Ardley’s Marvellous Perception of

the Nature of the Modern Sciences

 

Part Three:

Gavin Ardley’s Obituary

 

“Universities, he was one to say, ‘have drifted dangerously towards utility,

collapsing into being mere technical institutes’.”

 

 

 

[This Obituary of her father was kindly indicated to me by Gavin’s daughter, Elizabeth.

Taken from: http://prudentia.auckland.ac.nz/index.php/prudentia/article/view/783/739].

Obituary

Gavin Ardley

 

We received earlier this year the sad news of Gavin Ardley’s death on 12 March [1992?]. Among other achievements in his life, he was a founder of Prudentia, and devoted to its fortunes a great deal of energy and affection. He had also been a member of the Department of Philosophy in the University of Auckland for twenty five years, retiring in 1981. Since we announced his death briefly in our last number, several people have written to us, recording their sorrow and respect.

 

Dr Bruce Harris writes from Macquarie:

 

I first met Gavin Ardley in England, and then knew him as a colleague at Auckland for many years. It soon became apparent that Gavin had much in common with the Classics staff, particularly through his deep attachment to Plato and his love of teaching the Platonic text in the setting of Greek philosophy generally. He valued the study of ancient

thought not only for its inherent worth but as the source of those humane values he sought to practise in his own work as an academic. The intellectual history of the western world was for him a continuum from its ancient past, and his religious convictions were also closely linked with that history. His contributions to Prudentia reflected the breadth of his interests and his essential humanitas. He had only a limited sympathy with the linguistic philosophy fashionable in modern Philosophy departments, and would like to claim that it began as footnotes to Plato!

 

The journal began from conversations we had in the late sixties, springing from a feeling that the usual journals in our fields did not sufficiently encourage cross-disciplinary interests. It was launched on a shoe-string budget, dependent entirely on the good offices of Mr Mortimer of the University Bindery. It is good to see that its title has been retained

and that its scope is still wide — ‘the thought, literature, and history of the ancient world and their tradition’. In these days of relative neglect of the humanities in universities (at least in funding), it is important that those working in ancient studies and the source of our whole western intellectual tradition be seen to present a united front. Gavin Ardley certainly adorned that tradition in Auckland.

 

Dr Dougal Blyth writes:

 

I knew Gavin only in the final years of his long teaching career at Auckland, when he supervised a research essay on Aristotle’s Metaphysics for me, and taught courses on Plato’s Laws and Republic, which I attended as part of my M.A. in 1979-1980. I was one of a small group of postgraduate students Gavin then had, including Hermann de Zocte, Paul Beech and Carl Page, among others.

 

Gavin’s method of teaching was leisurely, ordered, measured. He displayed in his own pedagogic manner the aversion to that ‘enthusiasm’, as he called it, which he thought so little of in passionate polemic. Among the scholarship on the importance of leisure in education and philosophy to which he directed our attention was a paper of his own on the role of play in Plato’s philosophy, and the balance to be had between the pedant and the boor (a very Aristotelian ideal). In teaching the Laws, he emphasized the appropriateness and significance, for the meaning of the dialogue, of its speakers and their context: old noblemen, with nothing better to do in the heat of the sun than to rest in the shade and discuss government; a conversation neither idle nor practical. Just such a conception seemed to govern the pace and direction of his readings from lecture notes and small group discussion, which form his postgraduate teaching took.

 

I found Gavin’s mode of direction of my independent work congenial, useful and, again, relaxed. In suggesting additions to my bibliography, he drew upon a wide reading knowledge beyond the confines of recent analytical criticism of Aristotle. He delicately elicited slightly more precise formulations of my points, indicating questions yet to be addressed, in a manner almost suggestive of the possibility that if one was so inclined, one might just as well overlook them. One day I was surprised to hear him encourage ‘the clash of ideas’; another to find him asleep in his office armchair.

 

After he retired, I saw Gavin relatively frequently about the campus and in the University Library, researching in the New Zealand and Pacific collection, during the few years before I left to study overseas. He certainly approved, from a distance, of my efforts with the classical tongues. I met him again when I returned on a visit in 1986. He walked more slowly and had more time to chat, quite willing to stop and hear about my intervening experiences and plans. His ever urbane yet humble manner, his cheery yet reserved demeanour, and his kind eye, along with a spirit seemingly embodying a model of gentlemanliness from another, more refined age, will remain as a cornerstone for me of my memories of those years as a student at the University of Auckland.

 

John Morton, Emeritus Professor of Zoology, wrote in the University News:

 

Born in 1915, Gavin Ardley graduated from Melbourne University in both physics and philosophy. For a spell he lectured in nuclear physics and studied the beta ray spectrum of Radium E. From war service in northern Australia, he went to Britain where he researched on Galileo. He came back in 1948 to teach science at Geelong Grammar School. 1954 to 1955 saw him back in Scotland as a master at Gordonstoun. After the war Gavin had a year’s working spell in the Australian outback, moving about by railway jigger. This was an experience he was to value all his life. It was in the bush camps, with their assorted human company, that he determined his future should be in philosophy. This was to bring him to Auckland in 1957.

 

In a University where we could still easily get to know each other, Gavin Ardley was a colleague to be valued. He came to stand for some important things.

 

He’d have been wryly amused if told this. Yet he felt an intense privilege in belonging to the University. Drawing from the past capital of generosity and freedom, he believed we were also there to extend it. He knew how to use time unhurriedly. He’d have deplored nothing so much as crowded classes and syllabi, with students thinking themselves there to be crammed. Universities, he was one to say, ‘have drifted dangerously towards utility, collapsing into being mere technical institutes’. Right through the years Gavin was to take seriously the ties of friendship. As president of the Senior Common Room, in the old Pembridge days across Princes St, he did much to create its early bonds. In the University his personal links went well beyond his own discipline, spacious enough as philosophy (still with psychology and politics) must at first have been. But Gavin’s command also of science, history, theology, English literature, international politics was wide and impressive. With an acute, inquiring mind, there never seemed to be the astringence that would have made him a specialist or, in the modern research sense, a deep-sampler. More than analytic, his world view was reconciling, unfashionable for a philosopher as it might seem. ‘Today’, he once lamented, ‘world views are optional extras, a matter of personal taste, carrying no authority. So we all just muddle along’.

 

For Gavin Ardley, as with Catholic St Anselm, belief needed to precede understanding. On such foundation, any accounting for the world had to rest; never, he would insist, to be ‘comprehended’. But enough of it could be ‘apprehended’ to be enjoyed. It was with this enjoyment — ‘play’ in its best understanding — that he believed philosophy, or even the stringent, self-critical discipline of science, was to be done.

 

For Gavin it involved, too, the versatility to get along with all kinds of people and fortunes. Gavin Ardley’s lectures were beautifully structured and delivered. He was among the last of us to keep the traditional gown. For the last lecture I heard him give (it was on Martin Buber), he’d been called in from retirement and began without introduction. Fascinated, a student broke in, ‘But who are you? Where do you come from?’ With bland enjoyment Gavin explained, ‘I’m a gardener’.

 

In retirement he was devoted to his home garden in Parnell. With the same temper he seemed to cultivate his scholarly field, and to see the world. He never lost his fascination with travel, as in Europe and the Middle East. Above all, there was his abiding love of outback Australia. In Auckland for many years he was a keen stalwart of a tramping group.

 

In political caste Gavin Ardley had to be accounted a fine vintage Tory. Get an ideology, he’d have said, and you’re dead. So he revered Burke. And he most of all distrusted intellectual Pharisaism, and what used to pass for ‘enthusiasm’. He disliked supposed thought that was ill-thought or shoddy. Like modern Oakeshott he might have accepted politics as a civil ‘conversation’. Carried on with integrity, it could occasionally be serviceable to the world.

 

Gavin’s interests in policy and diplomacy went almost globe-wide. As its president, he was to bring Auckland’s Institute International Affairs to a new level of life, with a choice of exciting contemporary speakers.

 

Of his writings, the most pleasurable to a layperson is perhaps his Renovation of Berkeley’s Philosophy (1968). Just as lucid was the early book Aquinas and Kant: the Foundation of Modern Science (1949). He jointly founded and edited the classics/ philosophy periodical Prudentia. Here I recall his elegant little essay on Aristotle’s respect for particulars and the diversity of things; it showed me — inter alia — why Aristotle is still the prototypal biologist.

 

Almost to the close of his life Gavin Ardley kept his Common Room ties alive. Where else, but in the opportunity of such exchange, was the centre of a university? He was a generous man that books read, good talk, and the silence of the outback had all contributed to form. Like his own notion of the philosopher, he was himself a ‘grave-merry man on the side of common sense’.

 

In his retired years we’d know where to find him, coming in to Old Government House late on Fridays with the familiar black beret Hilaire Belloc might have worn. As the years drew in, these visits got fewer. I wish that, on those last Fridays, I’d turned up more often.

 

….

Stephen Hawking. ‘Lord’ of a diminished cosmos

Part One:

Physics and the ‘God Hypothesis’

 

“Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos,

this makes us in a sense the lords of creation”.

The Grand Design

 

Introduction

 

The Grand Design (Bantam Books, 2010), co-written by physicists Stephen Hawking (deceased this month of March, 2018) and Leonard Mlodinow, I found to be surprisingly readable.

The intent of the book is well set out in its opening section, “The Mystery of Being”. There, though, we read some rather startling assertions, such as:

“Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead”.

“M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather, these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law”.

“… this makes us in a sense the lords of creation”.

Philosophy is dead.

God is unnecessary.

We are the creators.

A few nights ago I watched on TV quite a heartbreaking movie about Stephen Hawking and his first wife, Jane Wilde, The Theory of Everything.

Although Jane was of a religious inclination, Stephen was not, he declaring in the movie at one stage that ‘God was a distraction in physics’.

No need for the God hypothesis?

 

Not all famous physicists have so totally blotted God out of the picture.

Sir Isaac Newton, writes Joseph Hartropp in his article “Are science and religion in conflict? Isaac Newton didn’t think so”:

https://www.christiantoday.com/article/are-science-and-religion-in-conflict-isaac-newton-didnt-think-so/105915.htm

Are God and science at war? It’s a popular conception in modern culture, but one that would have been strongly denied by the man at the heart of the scientific revolution.

Isaac Newton died on this day in 1727. His discovery of the gravitational force, amongst many other things, transformed the way we see the world. He was also a Christian with a deep interest in theology and the Bible.

Newton began his prodigious career at Cambridge University, which is also where he was converted to Christianity. Science, Newton said, ‘cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things.’ Newton saw science as a ‘garden’ that God wanted him to cultivate, and saw his many of his pioneering discoveries as coming from the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. He saw an intelligent designer behind the order of the universe, sustaining creation, and he described atheism as ‘senseless’.

Newton said: ‘This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being … This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God.’ ….

Albert Einstein is famous for his saying: “God does not play dice”. But this quote needs to be put into its proper context. For Einstein apparently admitted to not actually believing in God: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/god-does-not-play-dice-quote-meaning-2015-11?r=US&IR=T

Einstein himself even cleared up the matter in a letter he wrote in 1954:

I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

Byron Jennings has written on this subject, “There is No Need for God as a Hypothesis”: https://www.quantumdiaries.org/2011/09/16/there-is-no-need-for-god-as-a-hypothesis/

Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace (1749 – 1827) was one of the great French mathematical physicists. In math, his fame is shown by the number of mathematical objects named after him: Laplace’s equation, Laplace transforms, the Laplacian, etc.  In physics, he was the first to show that planetary orbits are stable and he developed a model—the nebular model—to account for how the solar system formed.  In modified form, the nebular model is still accepted. In spite of these important contributions, he was also very much a lackey, being very careful to keep on the right side of all the right people. During the French revolution, that might have been just good survival strategy. After all, he served successive French governments and, unlike Lavoisier, kept his head.

Laplace presented his definitive work on the properties of the solar system to Napoleon.  Napoleon, liking to embarrass people, asked Laplace if it was true that there was no mention of the solar system’s Creator (ie God) in his opus magus. Laplace, on this occasion at least, was not obsequious and replied, “I had no need of that hypothesis.”

 

This is essentially the simplicity argument discussed in a previous blog, but stated very crisply and succinctly.

Laplace was not just a whistlin’ Dixie. Newton had needed that hypothesis, ie God, to make the solar system work. Newton believed that the planetary orbits were unstable and unless God intervened periodically, the planets would wander off into space. Newton had not done the mathematical analysis sufficiently completely. Laplace rectified the problem. Newton also had no model for the origin of the solar system. Laplace eliminated these two gaps that Newton had God fill.

Back to Napoleon—he told Joseph Lagrange (1736 – 1813), another of the great French mathematicians/physicists, Laplace’s comment about no need for the God hypothesis. Lagrange’s reply was, “Ah, it is a fine hypothesis; it explains many things.” Laplace’s apocryphal reply was, “This hypothesis, Sir, explains in fact everything, but does not permit to predict anything. As a scholar, I must provide you with works permitting predictions.” This is the ultimate insult in science: it explains everything but predicts nothing. Explanations are a dime a dozen; if you want explanations, read Kipling’s Just so Stories. Now, there are some fine explanations. I particularly like The Cat That Walked by Himself.

[Laplace’s] argument, I had no need of that hypothesis, is still being used today. Hawking and Mlodinow in their book, The Grand Design, created a stir by claiming God did not exist. But their argument was just Laplace’s pushed back from the beginning of the solar system to the beginning of universe:  they had no need of that hypothesis. Whether their physics is correct or not is still an open question. It is not clear that string theory has gotten past the “it explains everything but predicts nothing” stage. ….

Part Two:

A modern intellectual cowardice

  

“Pseudo-metaphysics arises from intellectual nihilism; it is a fantastic edifice of pretence, impervious to rational discussion since it obliterates all genuinely rational lines; it marks a retreat into egocentricity and a loss of the power of dialogue; ultimately … it is a craven attempt of the mind to … screen itself from the providence of God, and remove him farther off from the affairs of the world …”.

 Gavin Ardley

Introduction

Once upon a time, those who sought wisdom and inspiration regarding man and the universe began by genuflecting to the Almighty God in reverential awe (the meaning of “fear” below). Because, as they saw it:

 

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction”. Proverbs 1:7

 

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding”. Proverbs 9:10

 

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. A good understanding to all that do it …”. Psalm 110:10 (Douay)

 

“… here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind”. Ecclesiastes 12:13

 

“The fear of the Lord—that is wisdom, and to shun evil is understanding”. Job 28:28

 

“If you fear the Lord, you will do this. Master his Law, and you will find Wisdom”. Sirach 15:1

And, now in the New Testament, the Baptist is found to have been of the very same sapiential mentality. He, using the image of the light of the morning star fading with the sun’s rising (Jesus Christ), will declare (John 3:30): ‘He must become greater; I must become less’.

Why? – because:

‘The One who comes from above is above all; the one who is from the earth belongs to the earth, and speaks as one from the earth. The One who comes from heaven is above all. He testifies to what he has seen and heard, but no one accepts his testimony. Whoever has accepted it has certified that God is truthful. For the One whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God gives the Spirit without limit. The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them’.

Only “the One who comes from heaven [who] is above all” can know the real design and structure of things. And He will only reveal such things to the likes of a Solomon, who prayed for wisdom and knowledge both humbly and submissively.

Clearly there is a moral issue involved with attainment of wisdom and knowledge. And no one has explained this better, I believe, than Gavin Ardley, in Berkeley’s Renovation of Philosophy (Martinus Nijhoff, 1968). Having first discussed moral scruples: “The condition of moral scruples is morbid” (pp. 78-79), Ardley then proceeds to write about “intellectual scruples”:

….

[George] Berkeley’s estimate of the nature of pseudo-metaphysics and of its therapy runs along lines parallel to the moral case.

Intellectual scruples are a philosophical disease; they spring from a kind of vanity, a wish to be god-like, to know all; which wish being frustrated leads to the opposite extreme, a loss of confidence,  a conviction that we know nothing; which state, in turn, is a condition of receptivity to any irrational doctrine which seeks lodging; which state, in turn, is a condition of receptivity to any irrational doctrine which seeks lodging; which doctrine, in turn, is clung to tenaciously and blindly as a kind of protective cover.

Pseudo-metaphysics arises from intellectual nihilism; it is a fantastic edifice of pretence, impervious to rational discussion since it obliterates all genuinely rational lines; it marks a retreat into egocentricity and a loss of the power of dialogue; ultimately, Berkeley suspects, it is a craven attempt of the mind to “screen itself from the providence of God, and remove him farther off from the affairs of the world” (Pr. 75).

Ardley’s use of the adjective “craven” here is not an exaggeration in light of St John Paul II’s

encyclical, Fides et ratio (1998), in which the indispensability of philosophy is upheld in the face of a modern intellectual cowardice – (recall e.g. Stephen Hawking’s: “Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead”) – which, the pope wrote, “has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge and little by little has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being”.

Here is the relevant section # 5 from that encyclical letter:

On her part, the Church cannot but set great value upon reason’s drive to attain goals which render people’s lives ever more worthy. She sees in philosophy the way to come to know fundamental truths about human life. At the same time, the Church considers philosophy an indispensable help for a deeper understanding of faith and for communicating the truth of the Gospel to those who do not yet know it.

Therefore, following upon similar initiatives by my Predecessors, I wish to reflect upon this special activity of human reason. I judge it necessary to do so because, at the present time in particular, the search for ultimate truth seems often to be neglected. Modern philosophy clearly has the great merit of focusing attention upon man. From this starting-point, human reason with its many questions has developed further its yearning to know more and to know it ever more deeply. Complex systems of thought have thus been built, yielding results in the different fields of knowledge and fostering the development of culture and history. Anthropology, logic, the natural sciences, history, linguistics and so forth—the whole universe of knowledge has been involved in one way or another. Yet the positive results achieved must not obscure the fact that reason, in its one-sided concern to investigate human subjectivity, seems to have forgotten that men and women are always called to direct their steps towards a truth which transcends them. Sundered from that truth, individuals are at the mercy of caprice, and their state as person ends up being judged by pragmatic criteria based essentially upon experimental data, in the mistaken belief that technology must dominate all. It has happened therefore that reason, rather than voicing the human orientation towards truth, has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge and little by little has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being. Abandoning the investigation of being, modern philosophical research has concentrated instead upon human knowing. Rather than make use of the human capacity to know the truth, modern philosophy has preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned.

This has given rise to different forms of agnosticism and relativism which have led philosophical research to lose its way in the shifting sands of widespread scepticism. Recent times have seen the rise to prominence of various doctrines which tend to devalue even the truths which had been judged certain. A legitimate plurality of positions has yielded to an undifferentiated pluralism, based upon the assumption that all positions are equally valid, which is one of today’s most widespread symptoms of the lack of confidence in truth. Even certain conceptions of life coming from the East betray this lack of confidence, denying truth its exclusive character and assuming that truth reveals itself equally in different doctrines, even if they contradict one another. On this understanding, everything is reduced to opinion; and there is a sense of being adrift. While, on the one hand, philosophical thinking has succeeded in coming closer to the reality of human life and its forms of expression, it has also tended to pursue issues—existential, hermeneutical or linguistic—which ignore the radical question of the truth about personal existence, about being and about God. Hence we see among the men and women of our time, and not just in some philosophers, attitudes of widespread distrust of the human being’s great capacity for knowledge. With a false modesty, people rest content with partial and provisional truths, no longer seeking to ask radical questions about the meaning and ultimate foundation of human, personal and social existence. In short, the hope that philosophy might be able to provide definitive answers to these questions has dwindled. ….

Part Three:

Creating new universes

 

“M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather, these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law”.

 The Grand Design

Introduction

Those great wise men of bygone ages whose maxims we considered in Part Two, the likes of King Solomon (Ecclesiastes), the prophet Job, and Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), were men of common sense who trusted in the reliability of their God-given senses, but who were humble before the God who they believed to have created the heavens and the earth, and who they knew held the key to Nature. Their profound knowledge was metaphysically-based.

Then came a complete revolution in the nature of ‘science’.

Man, not God, became ‘the measure of all things’.

Dr. Gavin Ardley tells of it, with Galileo being the cut-off point (Aquinas and Kant, 1950):

Post-Galilean physical science is cut off from the rest of the world and is the creation of man himself. Consequently the science, in itself, has no immediate metaphysical foundations, and no metaphysical implications, in spite of popular beliefs to the contrary. These beliefs arise from the failure to realise the science’s ‘otherness’, that it belongs to the categorial order and not to the real order.

Only that which belongs to the real order is directly linked with metaphysics. The ancient and medieval science of physics belongs to this real order, and is, in principle, an integral part of philosophy in general. It has metaphysical foundations and metaphysical implications. [Footnote: This is not to say that all the particular Aristotelean doctrines of the Earth, the Skies, the Heavens and so on, are essential to Aristotelean metaphysics. They are integrated with metaphysics only in their general intention, and not in particular formulation. They could be modified without necessitating any change in metaphysical principles since the principles of metaphysics are founded on more general grounds. Many of the particular Aristotelean opinions about phenomena were abandoned in the 17^th century with the increasingly detailed knowledge of Nature. Galileo’s Dialogues on the Two Great Systems of the World is a classic account of this revision of detailed theories of phenomena. Galileo himself, unlike many of his more extravagant followers, generally pursued this revision with considerable moderation. (See Ch. XVII). He is careful to distinguish what is true an abiding in Aristotle from what is erroneous and non-essential.] ….

It is not surprising that Immanuel Kant (d. 1804), considered by some to have been the most influential thinker of the Enlightenment era, who was able to identify the artificial nature of the new sciences, whilst however adapting this methodology to his idiosyncratic new ‘philosophy’, is considered to have buried metaphysics once and for all.

The new ‘science’ has become so successful as to give almost God-like status to its better known proponents. Thus we find famous scientists now pontificating about matters of Theology and philosophy, despite the fact that they are neither theologians nor philosophers. In Part One, we read that physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow felt themselves sufficiently qualified in matters metaphysical to declare, in The Grand Design, that:

“… philosophy is dead”.

“… creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god”.

“… this makes us in a sense the lords of creation”.

Blissfully ignorant of the science of metaphysics, however, such as these have no apparent grasp whatsoever of the limited nature of their own discipline, that, to recall Gavin Ardley: “… has no immediate metaphysical foundations, and no metaphysical implications, in spite of popular beliefs to the contrary. These beliefs arise from the failure to realise the science’s ‘otherness’, that it belongs to the categorial order and not to the real order”.

And so, as Ardley rightly continues: “The general run of physicists and philosophers have gone on writing learned works on the metaphysical foundations, and more particularly the metaphysical implications, of modern physics, oblivious to this change of character”.

A whole load of science fiction

 

Two of the most visible darlings of today’s science are (until recently) Stephen Hawking (RIP) and Richard Dawkins. They both are (were) heavily influenced by science fiction.

Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, a discipline which – if it weren’t tied to evolution, as in Dawkins’ case – would be of its very nature far less artificial than is, say, theoretical physics.  Dawkins is a great fan of sci-fi writer, Isaac Asimov, whom he quotes in The God Delusion: “Isaac Asimov’s remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: ‘Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.’ It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that ‘X is comforting’ does not imply ‘X is true’.’”

That “pseudoscience” can be a comfort we shall see.

Richard Dawkins married Lalla Ward, an actress in Doctor Who.

She had previously been married to her co-star in Doctor Who, Tom Baker.

Stephen Hawking, too, was a fan of Doctor Who, he having once been interviewed as part of Doctor Who Live: The Next Doctor.

He also loved Star Trek, to which his co-writer of The Grand Design, Leonard Mlodinow, contributed an episode: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Stephen_Hawking_(actor)

 

Stephen Hawking (8 January 1942 – 14 March 2018; age 76) was a noted scientist who formerly held the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge University in England. Diagnosed at age 22 with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), he used a wheelchair for the majority of his life, and communicated by means of an electronic vocal synthesizer. He was famous for formulating several theories regarding the nature of black holes, often working with colleague Kip Thorne, and for his best-selling science books including A Brief History of Time.

Hawking is the only person, to date, to have played himself on Star Trek (excluding historical people who have appeared via stock footage), appearing as his own holographic counterpart in the Star Trek: The Next Generation sixth season episode “Descent” in 1993. While filming the episode, Hawking was taken on a tour of the engineering set; indicating the warp core, he said, “I’m working on that.” (Star Trek Encyclopedia (3rd ed., p. 185)) On a subsequent visit to the set, he passed by actor Brent Spiner and asked where his money was from winning the hand of poker. Spiner replied that the check was in the mail. Hawking was interviewed on 8 April 1993 when he filmed his Trek appearance. This interview was part of the TNG Season 6 DVD special feature “Mission Overview Year Six” – “Descent – Part 1 Featuring Stephen Hawking”.

Hawking visited the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine set during the filming of “The House of Quark“. In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, Armin Shimerman describes meeting Dr. Hawking as one of the high points of his life.

Hawking also played himself on Futurama, The Simpsons, and The Big Bang Theory, and appeared in documentaries about Red Dwarf and Doctor Who. In 2010 he co-authored The Grand Design with former Star Trek: The Next Generation story editor and writer of the episode “The Dauphin“, Leonard Mlodinow.

In the movie referred to in Part One, The Theory of Everything, Stephen Hawking comes across as one totally obsessed with his physics to the exclusion of just about everything else: a bore, definitely, a nerd?, perhaps a single-minded genius. This situation was only exacerbated by his fall on the grounds of Cambridge, followed by the terrible death-sentence diagnosis – delivered bluntly in the movie – of motor neurone disease, with only two years to live and with terrible debilitations.

The physicist was only 22 at the time (but he lived to be 76).

Stephen retreats to his room, to the comfort of his solitude – and his pseudoscience?

Simon and Garfunkel’s “I Am A Rock” lyrics come to mind (here modified):

I’ve built walls
A fortress, steep and mighty
That none may penetrate
I have no need of friendship
Friendship causes pain
It’s laughter and it’s loving I disdain

[Refrain]
I am a rock
I am an island

Don’t talk of love
Well, I’ve heard the words before
It’s sleeping in my memory
And I won’t disturb the slumber
Of feelings that have died
If I never loved, I never would have cried

I have my books
And my poetry [mathematical equations] to protect me
I am shielded in my armor
Hiding in my room
Safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me

I am a rock
I am an island

Not all physicists are so single-minded.

Others can happily live between two worlds, the one inside the laboratory, and then, leaving behind their white coats, they go outside joyfully to embrace the real world.

Thankfully for Stephen Hawking, he had a girl who loved him and who ordered him out of his room, into that real world, “to play”. By now he was terribly crippled and it was agonising to see the poor young man trying to stay upright to play a game of croquet.

But even whilst out in the real world, at the beach, or in the country, an obsessive theoretical scientist will see shapes that remind him (or her) of suns, or stars, or universes, or black holes.

There is no time to be wasted. With God gone, and philosophers also irrelevant, scientists are the torch bearers of civilisation: “Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge”.That is whatHawking and Mlodinow wrote in their book:

WE EACH EXIST FOR BUT A SHORT TIME, and in that time explore but a small part of the whole universe. But humans are a curious species. We wonder, we seek answers. Living in this vast world that is by turns kind and cruel, and gazing at the immense heavens above, people have always asked a multitude of questions: How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator? Most of us do not spend most of our time worrying about these questions, but almost all of us worry about them some of the time.

Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge. ….

In the 1920’s it was found, as they go on to explain, that the “classical picture” of an ordered universe “could not account for the seemingly bizarre behavior observed on the atomic and subatomic scales of existence”.

A collision of reality and science fiction? “… quantum and classical physics are based on very different conceptions of physical reality”. Exactly what we have been saying.

Instead it was necessary to adopt a different framework, called quantum physics. Quantum theories have turned out to be remarkably accurate at predicting events on those scales, while also reproducing the predictions of the old classical theories when applied to the macroscopic world of daily life. But quantum and classical physics are based on very different conceptions of physical reality. ….

And who was the most intuitive expounder of quantum theories, according to Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow?

Surely he must be a genuine scientist and not some science fiction writer, or Doctor Spock?

No, he was a bongo drummer in a strip club:

Quantum theories can be formulated in many different ways, but what is probably the most intuitive description was given by Richard (Dick) Feynman, a colorful character who worked at the California Institute of Technology and played the bongo drums at a strip joint down the road. According to Feynman, a system has not just one history but every possible history. As we seek our answers, we will explain Feynman’s approach in detail, and employ it to explore the idea that the universe itself has no single history, nor even an independent existence. That seems like a radical idea, even to many physicists. Indeed, like many notions in today’s science, it appears to violate common sense. ….

Hmmmm. 

Part Four:

Lords of their own creations

  

Man is the measure of all things.

– Protagoras

 

God ought to be to us the measure of all things, and not man, as men commonly say: the words are far more true of Him.

– Plato

 

 

Introduction

 

In my article:

The Futile Aspiration to Make ‘Man the Measure of All Things’

https://www.academia.edu/8494268/The_Futile_Aspiration_to_Make_Man_the_Measure_of_All_Things_

I argued against the famous dictum of Protagoras.

However, Plato is not entirely correct here either in his reply to Protagoras.

For man is indeed the measure of some things. And this is as it meant to be, for did not God tell first man and woman to “subdue” the earth? (Genesis 1:28): ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it …’.

 

The Categorial World

Autonomous modern science is thus a perfectly legitimate human enterprise – though its nature is not properly understood – as Gavin Ardley well explains, attributing to Immanuel Kant the correct interpretation of it (Aquinas and Kant):

Kant’s Achievement

 

Kant’s great contribution was to point out the revolution in natural science effected by Galileo and Bacon and their successors. This stands in principle even though all the rest of his philosophy wither away. Prior to Galileo people had been concerned with reading laws in Nature. After Galileo they read laws into Nature. His clear recognition of this fact makes Kant the fundamental philosopher of the modern world. It is the greatest contribution to the philosophia perennis since St. Thomas. But this has to be dug patiently out of Kant. Kant himself so overlaid and obscured his discovery that is has ever since gone well nigh unrecognised.

We may, in fact we must, refrain from following Kant in his doctrine of metaphysics. The modelling of metaphysics on physics was his great experiment. The experiment is manifestly a failure, in pursuit of what he mistakenly believed to be the best interests of metaphysics.

But, putting the metaphysical experiment aside, the principle on which it was founded abides, the principle of our categorial activity. ….

There are many scientists who operate in this world whilst still believing in God – whether or not they have also grasped that their world is not of the real order of things, nor are their laws (read into Nature) those of the natural order. They are laws whose end is for purposes of prediction – a mathematicising of the world for utilitarian purposes.

But in this world of non-reality, per se, there is no need of a deity, no need of a philosophy. The scientist is fully in charge using mind and imagination to create his/her own fantastic, mathematicised world(s) of expanding universes, sucking black holes and big bangs that are invariably reflected in works of science fiction, Doctor Who, Star Trek, etc.

Just after Stephen Hawking’s death, he was immediately associated again with Star Trek: http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/space/stephen-hawkings-final-paper-predicted-the-end-of-the-world-and-revealed-a-parallel-universe/news-

PROFESSOR Stephen Hawking submitted a research paper just two weeks before he died hinting how scientists could find another universe and predicting the end of the world.

The iconic physicist completed the groundbreaking research from his deathbed, said co-author professor Thomas Hertog.

It sets out the maths needed for a Star Trek-style space probe to find experimental evidence for the existence of a “multiverse” — the idea our cosmos is only one of many universes.

If such evidence had been found while he was alive, it might have put Hawking in line for the Nobel prize he had so desired, reports The Sunday Times.

“This was Stephen: to boldly go where Star Trek fears to tread,” said Hertog, professor of theoretical physics at KU Leuven University in Belgium.

The creator of these fantastic worlds, these parallel universes, is totally in charge, like a deity, his laws standing firm and are unassailable because he makes them to be so. (He may have cause all of a sudden, upon a whim, to tweak a law, or an equation – just as a master painter might decide to erase a part of his work or re-colour some aspect of a painting).

Unfortunately, some of our modern-day scientists – unlike the sages of the past – do not realise their own puniness within the vast cosmos that God has created, and they fondly imagine that they themselves, having grasped ‘the theory of everything’, are the real lords of creation.

And so they tell us that they can encapsulate everything in a mathematical equation:

Apparently ‘Everything’ looks something like this.

Sadly, people nod their heads in awe.

I, for my part, much prefer to mathematical equations the vibrant universe that Almighty God created ex nihilo, “from nothing” – or, as some prefer, “not out of anything” – with all of its qualities, and colours, and charm, and mystery.

Stephen Hawking – a ‘Lord of Creation’?

 Part One:

Physics and the ‘God Hypothesis’

 

by

 Damien F. Mackey

  

“Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos,

this makes us in a sense the lords of creation”.

The Grand Design

 

Introduction

 

The Grand Design (Bantam Books, 2010), co-written by physicists Stephen Hawking (deceased this month of March, 2018) and Leonard Mlodinow, I found to be surprisingly readable. The intent of the book is well set out in its opening section, “The Mystery of Being”. There, though, we read some rather startling assertions, such as:

 

“Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead”.

 

“M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather, these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law”.

 

“… this makes us in a sense the lords of creation”.

 

Philosophy is dead.

God is unnecessary.

We are the creators.

 

A few nights ago I watched on TV quite a heartbreaking movie about Stephen Hawking and his first wife, Jane Wilde, The Theory of Everything.

 

 

Although Jane was of a religious inclination, Stephen was not, he declaring in the movie at one stage that ‘God was a distraction in physics’.

 

No need for the God hypothesis?

 

Not all famous physicists have so totally blotted God out of the picture.

Sir Isaac Newton, writes Joseph Hartropp in his article “Are science and religion in conflict? Isaac Newton didn’t think so”:

https://www.christiantoday.com/article/are-science-and-religion-in-conflict-isaac-newton-didnt-think-so/105915.htm

 

Are God and science at war? It’s a popular conception in modern culture, but one that would have been strongly denied by the man at the heart of the scientific revolution.

Isaac Newton died on this day in 1727. His discovery of the gravitational force, amongst many other things, transformed the way we see the world. He was also a Christian with a deep interest in theology and the Bible.

 

Newton began his prodigious career at Cambridge University, which is also where he was converted to Christianity. Science, Newton said, ‘cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things.’ Newton saw science as a ‘garden’ that God wanted him to cultivate, and saw his many of his pioneering discoveries as coming from the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. He saw an intelligent designer behind the order of the universe, sustaining creation, and he described atheism as ‘senseless’.

 

Newton said: ‘This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being … This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God.’ ….

 

Albert Einstein is famous for his saying: “God does not play dice”. But this quote needs to be put into its proper context. For Einstein apparently admitted to not actually believing in God: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/god-does-not-play-dice-quote-meaning-2015-11?r=US&IR=T

 

Einstein himself even cleared up the matter in a letter he wrote in 1954:

 

I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

 

Byron Jennings has written on this subject, “There is No Need for God as a Hypothesis”: https://www.quantumdiaries.org/2011/09/16/there-is-no-need-for-god-as-a-hypothesis/

 

Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace (1749 – 1827) was one of the great French mathematical physicists. In math, his fame is shown by the number of mathematical objects named after him: Laplace’s equation, Laplace transforms, the Laplacian, etc.  In physics, he was the first to show that planetary orbits are stable and he developed a model—the nebular model—to account for how the solar system formed.  In modified form, the nebular model is still accepted. In spite of these important contributions, he was also very much a lackey, being very careful to keep on the right side of all the right people. During the French revolution, that might have been just good survival strategy. After all, he served successive French governments and, unlike Lavoisier, kept his head.

 

Laplace presented his definitive work on the properties of the solar system to Napoleon.  Napoleon, liking to embarrass people, asked Laplace if it was true that there was no mention of the solar system’s Creator (ie God) in his opus magus. Laplace, on this occasion at least, was not obsequious and replied, “I had no need of that hypothesis.”

 

This is essentially the simplicity argument discussed in a previous blog, but stated very crisply and succinctly.

 

Laplace was not just a whistlin’ Dixie. Newton had needed that hypothesis, ie God, to make the solar system work. Newton believed that the planetary orbits were unstable and unless God intervened periodically, the planets would wander off into space. Newton had not done the mathematical analysis sufficiently completely. Laplace rectified the problem. Newton also had no model for the origin of the solar system. Laplace eliminated these two gaps that Newton had God fill.

 

Back to Napoleon—he told Joseph Lagrange (1736 – 1813), another of the great French mathematicians/physicists, Laplace’s comment about no need for the God hypothesis. Lagrange’s reply was, “Ah, it is a fine hypothesis; it explains many things.” Laplace’s apocryphal reply was, “This hypothesis, Sir, explains in fact everything, but does not permit to predict anything. As a scholar, I must provide you with works permitting predictions.” This is the ultimate insult in science: it explains everything but predicts nothing. Explanations are a dime a dozen; if you want explanations, read Kipling’s Just so Stories. Now, there are some fine explanations. I particularly like The Cat That Walked by Himself.

 

[Laplace’s] argument, I had no need of that hypothesis, is still being used today. Hawking and Mlodinow in their book, The Grand Design, created a stir by claiming God did not exist. But their argument was just Laplace’s pushed back from the beginning of the solar system to the beginning of universe:  they had no need of that hypothesis. Whether their physics is correct or not is still an open question. It is not clear that string theory has gotten past the “it explains everything but predicts nothing” stage. ….

Part Two:

A modern intellectual cowardice

 

“Pseudo-metaphysics arises from intellectual nihilism; it is a fantastic edifice of pretence, impervious to rational discussion since it obliterates all genuinely rational lines; it marks a retreat into egocentricity and a loss of the power of dialogue; ultimately … it is a craven attempt of the mind to … screen itself from the providence of God, and remove him farther off from the affairs of the world …”.

Gavin Ardley

 

Introduction

 

Once upon a time, those who sought wisdom and inspiration regarding man and the universe began by genuflecting to the Almighty God in reverential awe (the meaning of “fear” below). Because, as they saw it:

 

 

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction”. Proverbs 1:7

 

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding”. Proverbs 9:10

 

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. A good understanding to all that do it …”. Psalm 110:10 (Douay)

 

“… here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind”. Ecclesiastes 12:13

 

“The fear of the Lord—that is wisdom, and to shun evil is understanding”. Job 28:28

 

“If you fear the Lord, you will do this. Master his Law, and you will find Wisdom”. Sirach 15:1

 

And, now in the New Testament, the Baptist is found to have been of the very same sapiential mentality. He, using the image of the light of the morning star fading with the sun’s rising (Jesus Christ), will declare (John 3:30): ‘He must become greater; I must become less’.

Why? – because:

 

‘The One who comes from above is above all; the one who is from the earth belongs to the earth, and speaks as one from the earth. The One who comes from heaven is above all. He testifies to what he has seen and heard, but no one accepts his testimony. Whoever has accepted it has certified that God is truthful. For the One whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God gives the Spirit without limit. The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them’.

 

Only “the One who comes from heaven [who] is above all” can know the real design and structure of things. And He will only reveal such things to the likes of a Solomon, who prayed for wisdom and knowledge both humbly and submissively.

Clearly there is a moral issue involved with attainment of wisdom and knowledge. And no one has explained this better, I believe, than Gavin Ardley, in Berkeley’s Renovation of Philosophy (Martinus Nijhoff, 1968). Having first discussed moral scruples: “The condition of moral scruples is morbid” (pp. 78-79), Ardley then proceeds to write about “intellectual scruples”:

….

[George] Berkeley’s estimate of the nature of pseudo-metaphysics and of its therapy runs along lines parallel to the moral case.

Intellectual scruples are a philosophical disease; they spring from a kind of vanity, a wish to be god-like, to know all; which wish being frustrated leads to the opposite extreme, a loss of confidence,  a conviction that we know nothing; which state, in turn, is a condition of receptivity to any irrational doctrine which seeks lodging; which state, in turn, is a condition of receptivity to any irrational doctrine which seeks lodging; which doctrine, in turn, is clung to tenaciously and blindly as a kind of protective cover.

Pseudo-metaphysics arises from intellectual nihilism; it is a fantastic edifice of pretence, impervious to rational discussion since it obliterates all genuinely rational lines; it marks a retreat into egocentricity and a loss of the power of dialogue; ultimately, Berkeley suspects, it is a craven attempt of the mind to “screen itself from the providence of God, and remove him farther off from the affairs of the world” (Pr. 75).

 

Ardley’s use of the adjective “craven” here is not an exaggeration in light of St John Paul II’s

encyclical, Fides et ratio (1998), in which the indispensability of philosophy is upheld in the face of a modern intellectual cowardice – (recall e.g. Stephen Hawking’s: “Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead”) – which, the pope wrote, “has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge and little by little has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being”.

 

Here is the relevant section # 5 from that encyclical letter:

 

On her part, the Church cannot but set great value upon reason’s drive to attain goals which render people’s lives ever more worthy. She sees in philosophy the way to come to know fundamental truths about human life. At the same time, the Church considers philosophy an indispensable help for a deeper understanding of faith and for communicating the truth of the Gospel to those who do not yet know it.

Therefore, following upon similar initiatives by my Predecessors, I wish to reflect upon this special activity of human reason. I judge it necessary to do so because, at the present time in particular, the search for ultimate truth seems often to be neglected. Modern philosophy clearly has the great merit of focusing attention upon man. From this starting-point, human reason with its many questions has developed further its yearning to know more and to know it ever more deeply. Complex systems of thought have thus been built, yielding results in the different fields of knowledge and fostering the development of culture and history. Anthropology, logic, the natural sciences, history, linguistics and so forth—the whole universe of knowledge has been involved in one way or another. Yet the positive results achieved must not obscure the fact that reason, in its one-sided concern to investigate human subjectivity, seems to have forgotten that men and women are always called to direct their steps towards a truth which transcends them. Sundered from that truth, individuals are at the mercy of caprice, and their state as person ends up being judged by pragmatic criteria based essentially upon experimental data, in the mistaken belief that technology must dominate all. It has happened therefore that reason, rather than voicing the human orientation towards truth, has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge and little by little has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being. Abandoning the investigation of being, modern philosophical research has concentrated instead upon human knowing. Rather than make use of the human capacity to know the truth, modern philosophy has preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned.

 

This has given rise to different forms of agnosticism and relativism which have led philosophical research to lose its way in the shifting sands of widespread scepticism. Recent times have seen the rise to prominence of various doctrines which tend to devalue even the truths which had been judged certain. A legitimate plurality of positions has yielded to an undifferentiated pluralism, based upon the assumption that all positions are equally valid, which is one of today’s most widespread symptoms of the lack of confidence in truth. Even certain conceptions of life coming from the East betray this lack of confidence, denying truth its exclusive character and assuming that truth reveals itself equally in different doctrines, even if they contradict one another. On this understanding, everything is reduced to opinion; and there is a sense of being adrift. While, on the one hand, philosophical thinking has succeeded in coming closer to the reality of human life and its forms of expression, it has also tended to pursue issues—existential, hermeneutical or linguistic—which ignore the radical question of the truth about personal existence, about being and about God. Hence we see among the men and women of our time, and not just in some philosophers, attitudes of widespread distrust of the human being’s great capacity for knowledge. With a false modesty, people rest content with partial and provisional truths, no longer seeking to ask radical questions about the meaning and ultimate foundation of human, personal and social existence. In short, the hope that philosophy might be able to provide definitive answers to these questions has dwindled. ….

 

Part Three:

Creating new universes

  

“M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather, these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law”.

The Grand Design

 

Introduction

 

Those great wise men of bygone ages whose maxims we considered in Part Two, the likes of King Solomon (Ecclesiastes), the prophet Job, and Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), were men of common sense who trusted in the reliability of their God-given senses, but who were humble before the God who they believed to have created the heavens and the earth, and who they knew held the key to Nature. Their profound knowledge was metaphysically-based.

 

Then came a complete revolution in the nature of ‘science’.

Man, not God, became ‘the measure of all things’.

Dr. Gavin Ardley tells of it, with Galileo being the cut-off point (Aquinas and Kant, 1950):

 

Post-Galilean physical science is cut off from the rest of the world and is the creation of man himself. Consequently the science, in itself, has no immediate metaphysical foundations, and no metaphysical implications, in spite of popular beliefs to the contrary. These beliefs arise from the failure to realise the science’s ‘otherness’, that it belongs to the categorial order and not to the real order.

 

Only that which belongs to the real order is directly linked with metaphysics. The ancient and medieval science of physics belongs to this real order, and is, in principle, an integral part of philosophy in general. It has metaphysical foundations and metaphysical implications. [Footnote: This is not to say that all the particular Aristotelean doctrines of the Earth, the Skies, the Heavens and so on, are essential to Aristotelean metaphysics. They are integrated with metaphysics only in their general intention, and not in particular formulation. They could be modified without necessitating any change in metaphysical principles since the principles of metaphysics are founded on more general grounds. Many of the particular Aristotelean opinions about phenomena were abandoned in the 17^th century with the increasingly detailed knowledge of Nature. Galileo’s Dialogues on the Two Great Systems of the World is a classic account of this revision of detailed theories of phenomena. Galileo himself, unlike many of his more extravagant followers, generally pursued this revision with considerable moderation. (See Ch. XVII). He is careful to distinguish what is true an abiding in Aristotle from what is erroneous and non-essential.] ….

 

It is not surprising that Immanuel Kant (d. 1804), considered by some to have been the most influential thinker of the Enlightenment era, who was able to identify the artificial nature of the new sciences, whilst however adapting this methodology to his idiosyncratic new ‘philosophy’, is considered to have buried metaphysics once and for all.

 

The new ‘science’ has become so successful as to give almost God-like status to its better known proponents. Thus we find famous scientists now pontificating about matters of Theology and philosophy, despite the fact that they are neither theologians nor philosophers. In Part One, we read that physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow felt themselves sufficiently qualified in matters metaphysical to declare, in The Grand Design, that:

 

“… philosophy is dead”.

“… creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god”.

“… this makes us in a sense the lords of creation”.

 

Blissfully ignorant of the science of metaphysics, however, such as these have no apparent grasp whatsoever of the limited nature of their own discipline, that, to recall Gavin Ardley: “… has no immediate metaphysical foundations, and no metaphysical implications, in spite of popular beliefs to the contrary. These beliefs arise from the failure to realise the science’s ‘otherness’, that it belongs to the categorial order and not to the real order”.

And so, as Ardley rightly continues: “The general run of physicists and philosophers have gone on writing learned works on the metaphysical foundations, and more particularly the metaphysical implications, of modern physics, oblivious to this change of character”.

 

A whole load of science fiction

 

Two of the most visible darlings of today’s science are (until recently) Stephen Hawking (RIP) and Richard Dawkins. They both are (were) heavily influenced by science fiction.

Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, a discipline which – if it weren’t tied to evolution, as in Dawkins’ case – would be of its very nature far less artificial than is, say, theoretical physics.  Dawkins is a great fan of sci-fi writer, Isaac Asimov, whom he quotes in The God Delusion: “Isaac Asimov’s remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: ‘Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.’ It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that ‘X is comforting’ does not imply ‘X is true’.’”

 

That “pseudoscience” can be a comfort we shall see.

 

Richard Dawkins married Lalla Ward, an actress in Doctor Who.

She had previously been married to her co-star in Doctor Who, Tom Baker.

 

Stephen Hawking, too, was a fan of Doctor Who, he having once been interviewed as part of Doctor Who Live: The Next Doctor.

He also loved Star Trek, to which his co-writer of The Grand Design, Leonard Mlodinow, contributed an episode: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Stephen_Hawking_(actor)

 

Stephen Hawking (8 January 1942 – 14 March 2018; age 76) was a noted scientist who formerly held the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge University in England. Diagnosed at age 22 with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), he used a wheelchair for the majority of his life, and communicated by means of an electronic vocal synthesizer. He was famous for formulating several theories regarding the nature of black holes, often working with colleague Kip Thorne, and for his best-selling science books including A Brief History of Time.

Hawking is the only person, to date, to have played himself on Star Trek (excluding historical people who have appeared via stock footage), appearing as his own holographic counterpart in the Star Trek: The Next Generation sixth season episode “Descent” in 1993. While filming the episode, Hawking was taken on a tour of the engineering set; indicating the warp core, he said, “I’m working on that.” (Star Trek Encyclopedia (3rd ed., p. 185)) On a subsequent visit to the set, he passed by actor Brent Spiner and asked where his money was from winning the hand of poker. Spiner replied that the check was in the mail. Hawking was interviewed on 8 April 1993 when he filmed his Trek appearance. This interview was part of the TNG Season 6 DVD special feature “Mission Overview Year Six” – “Descent – Part 1 Featuring Stephen Hawking”.

Hawking visited the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine set during the filming of “The House of Quark“. In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, Armin Shimerman describes meeting Dr. Hawking as one of the high points of his life.

Hawking also played himself on Futurama, The Simpsons, and The Big Bang Theory, and appeared in documentaries about Red Dwarf and Doctor Who. In 2010 he co-authored The Grand Design with former Star Trek: The Next Generation story editor and writer of the episode “The Dauphin“, Leonard Mlodinow.

 

In the movie referred to in Part One, The Theory of Everything, Stephen Hawking comes across as one totally obsessed with his physics to the exclusion of just about everything else: a bore, definitely, a nerd?, perhaps a single-minded genius. This situation was only exacerbated by his fall on the grounds of Cambridge, followed by the terrible death-sentence diagnosis – delivered bluntly in the movie – of motor neurone disease, with only two years to live and with terrible debilitations.

The physicist was only 22 at the time (but he lived to be 76).

Stephen retreats to his room, to the comfort of his solitude – and his pseudoscience?

Simon and Garfunkel’s “I Am A Rock” lyrics come to mind (here modified):

I’ve built walls
A fortress, steep and mighty
That none may penetrate
I have no need of friendship
Friendship causes pain
It’s laughter and it’s loving I disdain

[Refrain]
I am a rock
I am an island

Don’t talk of love
Well, I’ve heard the words before
It’s sleeping in my memory
And I won’t disturb the slumber
Of feelings that have died
If I never loved, I never would have cried

I have my books
And my poetry [mathematical equations] to protect me
I am shielded in my armor
Hiding in my room
Safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me

I am a rock
I am an island

Not all physicists are so single-minded.

Others can happily live between two worlds, the one inside the laboratory, and then, leaving behind their white coats, they go outside joyfully to embrace the real world.

Thankfully for Stephen Hawking, he had a girl who loved him and who ordered him out of his room, into that real world, “to play”. By now he was terribly crippled and it was agonising to see the poor young man trying to stay upright to play a game of croquet.

But even whilst out in the real world, at the beach, or in the country, an obsessive theoretical scientist will see shapes that remind him (or her) of suns, or stars, or universes, or black holes.

There is no time to be wasted. With God gone, and philosophers also irrelevant, scientists are the torch bearers of civilisation: “Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge”.That is whatHawking and Mlodinow wrote in their book:

 

“WE EACH EXIST FOR BUT A SHORT TIME, and in that time explore but a small part of the whole universe. But humans are a curious species. We wonder, we seek answers. Living in this vast world that is by turns kind and cruel, and gazing at the immense heavens above, people have always asked a multitude of questions: How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator? Most of us do not spend most of our time worrying about these questions, but almost all of us worry about them some of the time.

Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge. …”.

 

In the 1920’s it was found, as they go on to explain, that the “classical picture” of an ordered universe “could not account for the seemingly bizarre behavior observed on the atomic and subatomic scales of existence”.

A collision of reality and science fiction? “… quantum and classical physics are based on very different conceptions of physical reality”. Exactly what we have been saying.

 

Instead it was necessary to adopt a different framework, called quantum physics. Quantum theories have turned out to be remarkably accurate at predicting events on those scales, while also reproducing the predictions of the old classical theories when applied to the macroscopic world of daily life. But quantum and classical physics are based on very different conceptions of physical reality. ….

 

And who was the most intuitive expounder of quantum theories, according to Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow?

Surely he must be a genuine scientist and not some science fiction writer, or Doctor Spock?

No, he was a bongo drummer in a strip club:

 

“Quantum theories can be formulated in many different ways, but what is probably the most intuitive description was given by Richard (Dick) Feynman, a colorful character who worked at the California Institute of Technology and played the bongo drums at a strip joint down the road. According to Feynman, a system has not just one history but every possible history. As we seek our answers, we will explain Feynman’s approach in detail, and employ it to explore the idea that the universe itself has no single history, nor even an independent existence. That seems like a radical idea, even to many physicists. Indeed, like many notions in today’s science, it appears to violate common sense. …”.

 

Hmmmm.

 

Stephen Hawking – a ‘Lord of Creation’?

 

Part Four:

Lords of their own creations

 

 

by

 

Damien F. Mackey

 

 

 

Man is the measure of all things.

– Protagoras

 

God ought to be to us the measure of all things, and not man, as men commonly say: the words are far more true of Him.

– Plato

 

 

 

Introduction

 

In my article:

 

The Futile Aspiration to Make ‘Man the Measure of All Things’

 

https://www.academia.edu/8494268/The_Futile_Aspiration_to_Make_Man_the_Measure_of_All_Things_

 

I argued against the famous dictum of Protagoras.

However, Plato is not entirely correct here either in his reply to Protagoras.

For man is indeed the measure of some things. And this is as it meant to be, for did not God tell first man and woman to “subdue” the earth? (Genesis 1:28): ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it …’.

 

The Categorial World

 

Autonomous modern science is thus a perfectly legitimate human enterprise – though its nature is not properly understood – as Gavin Ardley well explains, attributing to Immanuel Kant the correct interpretation of it (Aquinas and Kant):

 

Kant’s Achievement

 

Kant’s great contribution was to point out the revolution in natural science effected by Galileo and Bacon and their successors. This stands in principle even though all the rest of his philosophy wither away. Prior to Galileo people had been concerned with reading laws in Nature. After Galileo they read laws into Nature. His clear recognition of this fact makes Kant the fundamental philosopher of the modern world. It is the greatest contribution to the philosophia perennis since St. Thomas. But this has to be dug patiently out of Kant. Kant himself so overlaid and obscured his discovery that is has ever since gone well nigh unrecognised.

 

We may, in fact we must, refrain from following Kant in his doctrine of metaphysics. The modelling of metaphysics on physics was his great experiment. The experiment is manifestly a failure, in pursuit of what he mistakenly believed to be the best interests of metaphysics.

 

But, putting the metaphysical experiment aside, the principle on which it was founded abides, the principle of our categorial activity. ….

 

There are many scientists who operate in this world whilst still believing in God – whether or not they have also grasped that their world is not of the real order of things, nor are their laws (read into Nature) those of the natural order. They are laws whose end is for purposes of prediction – a mathematicising of the world for utilitarian purposes.

But in this world of non-reality, per se, there is no need of a deity, no need of a philosophy. The scientist is fully in charge using mind and imagination to create his/her own fantastic, mathematicised world(s) of expanding universes, sucking black holes and big bangs that are invariably reflected in works of science fiction, Doctor Who, Star Trek, etc.

Just after Stephen Hawking’s death, he was immediately associated again with Star Trek: http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/space/stephen-hawkings-final-paper-predicted-the-end-of-the-world-and-revealed-a-parallel-universe/news-

 

PROFESSOR Stephen Hawking submitted a research paper just two weeks before he died hinting how scientists could find another universe and predicting the end of the world.

 

The iconic physicist completed the groundbreaking research from his deathbed, said co-author professor Thomas Hertog.

It sets out the maths needed for a Star Trek-style space probe to find experimental evidence for the existence of a “multiverse” — the idea our cosmos is only one of many universes.

 

If such evidence had been found while he was alive, it might have put Hawking in line for the Nobel prize he had so desired, reports The Sunday Times.

“This was Stephen: to boldly go where Star Trek fears to tread,” said Hertog, professor of theoretical physics at KU Leuven University in Belgium.

 

The creator of these fantastic worlds, these parallel universes, is totally in charge, like a deity, his laws standing firm and are unassailable because he makes them to be so. (He may have cause all of a sudden, upon a whim, to tweak a law, or an equation – just as a master painter might decide to erase a part of his work or re-colour some aspect of a painting).

 

Unfortunately, some of our modern-day scientists – unlike the sages of the past – do not realise their own puniness within the vast cosmos that God has created, and they fondly imagine that they themselves, having grasped ‘the theory of everything’, are the real lords of creation.

And so they tell us that they can encapsulate everything in a mathematical equation:

 

Apparently ‘Everything’ looks something like this.

Sadly, people nod their heads in awe.

 

I, for my part, much prefer to mathematical equations the vibrant universe that Almighty God created ex nihilo, “from nothing” – or, as some prefer, “not out of anything” – with all of its qualities and colours and charm, and mystery. And, too, by the way, I prefer God’s rainbow.

 

 

Part Four:

Lords of their own creations

  

Man is the measure of all things.

 – Protagoras

 

God ought to be to us the measure of all things, and not man, as men commonly say: the words are far more true of Him.

 – Plato

 

  

Introduction

 

In my article:

The Futile Aspiration to Make ‘Man the Measure of All Things’

https://www.academia.edu/8494268/The_Futile_Aspiration_to_Make_Man_the_Measure_of_All_Things_

 

I argued against the famous dictum of Protagoras.

However, Plato is not entirely correct here either in his reply to Protagoras.

For man is indeed the measure of some things. And this is as it meant to be, for did not God tell first man and woman to “subdue” the earth? (Genesis 1:28): ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it …’.

 

The Categorial World

 

Autonomous modern science is thus a perfectly legitimate human enterprise – though its nature is not properly understood – as Gavin Ardley well explains, attributing to Immanuel Kant the correct interpretation of it (Aquinas and Kant):

 

Kant’s Achievement

 

Kant’s great contribution was to point out the revolution in natural science effected by Galileo and Bacon and their successors. This stands in principle even though all the rest of his philosophy wither away. Prior to Galileo people had been concerned with reading laws in Nature. After Galileo they read laws into Nature. His clear recognition of this fact makes Kant the fundamental philosopher of the modern world. It is the greatest contribution to the philosophia perennis since St. Thomas. But this has to be dug patiently out of Kant. Kant himself so overlaid and obscured his discovery that is has ever since gone well nigh unrecognised.

 

We may, in fact we must, refrain from following Kant in his doctrine of metaphysics. The modelling of metaphysics on physics was his great experiment. The experiment is manifestly a failure, in pursuit of what he mistakenly believed to be the best interests of metaphysics.

 

But, putting the metaphysical experiment aside, the principle on which it was founded abides, the principle of our categorial activity. ….

 

There are many scientists who operate in this world whilst still believing in God – whether or not they have also grasped that their world is not of the real order of things, nor are their laws (read into Nature) those of the natural order. They are laws whose end is for purposes of prediction – a mathematicising of the world for utilitarian purposes.

But in this world of non-reality, per se, there is no need of a deity, no need of a philosophy. The scientist is fully in charge using mind and imagination to create his/her own fantastic, mathematicised world(s) of expanding universes, sucking black holes and big bangs that are invariably reflected in works of science fiction, Doctor Who, Star Trek, etc.

Just after Stephen Hawking’s death, he was immediately associated again with Star Trek: http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/space/stephen-hawkings-final-paper-predicted-the-end-of-the-world-and-revealed-a-parallel-universe/news-

 

PROFESSOR Stephen Hawking submitted a research paper just two weeks before he died hinting how scientists could find another universe and predicting the end of the world.

 

The iconic physicist completed the groundbreaking research from his deathbed, said co-author professor Thomas Hertog.

It sets out the maths needed for a Star Trek-style space probe to find experimental evidence for the existence of a “multiverse” — the idea our cosmos is only one of many universes.

 

If such evidence had been found while he was alive, it might have put Hawking in line for the Nobel prize he had so desired, reports The Sunday Times.

“This was Stephen: to boldly go where Star Trek fears to tread,” said Hertog, professor of theoretical physics at KU Leuven University in Belgium.

 

The creator of these fantastic worlds, these parallel universes, is totally in charge, like a deity, his laws standing firm and are unassailable because he makes them to be so. (He may have cause all of a sudden, upon a whim, to tweak a law, or an equation – just as a master painter might decide to erase a part of his work or re-colour some aspect of a painting).

 

Unfortunately, some of our modern-day scientists – unlike the sages of the past – do not realise their own puniness within the vast cosmos that God has created, and they fondly imagine that they themselves, having grasped ‘the theory of everything’, are the real lords of creation.

And so they tell us that they can encapsulate everything in a mathematical equation:

 

Apparently ‘Everything’ looks something like this.

Sadly, people nod their heads in awe.

 

I, for my part, much prefer to mathematical equations the vibrant universe that Almighty God created ex nihilo, “from nothing” – or, as some prefer, “not out of anything” – with all of its qualities and colours and charm, and mystery.

 

 

Miranda Live: Jordan Peterson’s dire warning on our ‘far gone’ universities

The Daily Telegraph

March 13, 2018 7:23pm

Canadian Professor Jordan Peterson joined Leigh Sales on the 7:30 Report to discuss the role of political correctness and self-help in modern life. Courtesy: ABC

Jordan Peterson on self-help and political correctness

Miranda Devine Blog Posts

CANADIAN professor and cultural critic Jordan Peterson has a dire warning: “our universities are so far gone they can’t come back” after years of political correctness and social justice warfare.

In the second part of an in depth interview with Miranda Devine’s online radio show Miranda Live, Professor Peterson took aim at universities for furthering radical Marxism instead of teaching young people facts.

LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW:

https://player.whooshkaa.com/player/episode/id/179450?visual=true&sharing=true

“I think our universities are so far gone they can’t come back, I don’t think they’re salvageable in the least,” he told Miranda Live.


Episode One: Political correctness hurting our young men says Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson says our universities are broken. Picture: Sarah Matray

The Canadian academic stopped by as part of his already sold out Australia lecturer tour. He’s been a vocal figure back in his native country about universities pushing politically correct agendas.
The foe of political correctness Professor Peterson also took aim at Aussie airline Qantas, which has recently implemented a range of PC guidelines, including banning the word “guys” and phrases like “mum and dad” in fear of offence.

Dr. Jordan Peterson has also taken aim at Qantas’ new PC guidelines. Picture: Getty Images

“You’re a complete bloody fool,” he said, of the Qantas political correctness.
“People who are doing this at the corporate level will rapidly get the comeuppance.”

….
Taken from: https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/blogs/miranda-devine/miranda-live-jordan-petersons-dire-warning-on-our-far-gone-universities/news-story/e949299c77370241912306832eba83e4

Posted by AMAIC at 3:56 PM 0 comments

Labels: AMAIC, Australian Marian Academy of the Immaculate Conception, Sacred Heart of Jesus and Eucharist John the Evangelist Book of Revelation Apocalypse

Pentecost a reversal of Babel?

Part One: A long-held Christian tradition

 

“On the Vigil of Pentecost, the Old Testament reading is of Babel, the mythical tale of humanity’s hubris and the aetiology of the myriad of languages — and resulting confusion — existing throughout the world. Anyone who has ever fumblingly studied foreign languages can aim his or her frustration at those arrogant ancient citizens clamoring, “Come let us build ourselves a city and a tower (or a wall?) with its top in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the earth”.”

 Dr Michael M. Canaris

 

It has long been recognised amongst the Christian faithful that the Pentecostal outpouring of the Holy Spirit effectively reversed the human tragedy – the wilful rebellion against the Divine – that was the Tower of Babel incident.

 

Dr. Michael M. Canaris has written about it most perceptively for the Catholic Star Herald: http://catholicstarherald.org/on-pentecost-the-reversal-of-babel-takes-place/

 

On Pentecost, the ‘reversal’ of Babel takes place

 

The feast of Pentecost was not originally a Christian feast, but rather a Jewish one marking 50 days since Passover and the first-fruits of the wheat harvest. Yet, in the fullness of time, Christians came to remember the Lord’s sending of the Spirit on that day, and so it is sometimes referred to as the “birthday” of the church (though other sources, like Saint John Chrysostom, identify the piercing of Christ’s side as the moment in which the church formally came to exist).

 

On the Vigil of Pentecost, the Old Testament reading is of Babel, the mythical tale of humanity’s hubris and the aetiology of the myriad of languages — and resulting confusion — existing throughout the world. Anyone who has ever fumblingly studied foreign languages can aim his or her frustration at those arrogant ancient citizens clamoring, “Come let us build ourselves a city and a tower (or a wall?) with its top in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the earth.”

 

But in its wisdom, the church points out through the connection of the readings that the havoc wrought by human selfishness can be rectified by the always-greater power of God. For on Pentecost, the “reversal” of Babel takes place. Instead of humanity remaining confounded by the din of voices seeking to talk over one another in pride, the Spirit’s arrival as tongues (lingua) of fire at Pentecost enables each to hear the Word of God proclaimed in his or her native vernacular.

 

Language is then closely associated with Pentecost. Scholars since Wittgenstein and Heidegger have been quick to point out that thoughts do not occur in some “chemically pure” form and then subsequently come to be articulated in language. Rather, language forms and makes possible conscious thought. “Language is not just an instrument by which we express what we already know, but is the very medium in which knowledge occurs. Language is the voice of Being, and [humanity], in whom language takes its rise, is the loudspeaker for the silent tolling of Being…It permits Being to show itself” (Avery Dulles, “Hermeneutical Theology”).

 

Christians of various types, especially charismatics and Pentecostals, believe the Spirit can endow them with a gift regarding “speaking in tongues,” or glossolalia. The second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles is often cited as evidence that this mysterious and effusive verbal outpouring is an authentic fruit of the Spirit. Catholics have historically been cautiously open toward this phenomenon, though it is, to be sure, not a very usual occurrence in suburban parishes on Sundays. While the charismatic wing of the church has fostered a greater willingness to explore the genuine spiritual riches of this reality, and the pope himself has prayerfully engaged in groups where it is practiced, Catholic teaching makes clear that it is not necessary for salvation, somehow evidence of greater holiness than in those who do not experience it, or an integral part of formalized liturgical prayer life for most believers.

 

Images of fire and wind and breath remind us that the Spirit “blows where it will.” Sometimes this is in entirely unexpected places. Popes John XXIII, John Paul II and Benedict XVI all employed language of a “new Pentecost” when describing the Second Vatican Council. The spiritual common ground being sought both within the Catholic Church and across denominational boundaries reminded the participants (which all three popes were in various capacities) of that day when the Spirit enables the Apostles to proclaim anew what they had witnessed, experienced, touched with their hands and accepted in their hearts: the Author of Life, the Rock of Ages, the All-Consuming Fire, the Alpha and the Omega. The victorious Word of God spoken finally, definitively, and irrevocably to human hearers.

 

Collingswood native Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., teaches at Loyola University Chicago.

 

The soul is God’s temple, not your own, Francis warns

• In Catholic News Agency, Vatican
• Hannah Brockhaus
  Mar 4, 2018

  CATHOLIC NEWS AGENCY

Like Jesus cast out the merchants from the temple in Jerusalem, we should drive the desire for personal gain and advantage from our hearts, replacing it with love, Pope Francis said Sunday.

VATICAN CITY – Like Jesus cast out the merchants from the temple in Jerusalem, we should drive the desire for personal gain and advantage from our hearts, replacing it with love, Pope Francis said Sunday.

“We are called to keep in mind those strong words of Jesus: ‘Do not make a market of my Father’s house.’”
“They help us to reject the danger of making our soul, which is the abode of God, a marketplace,” the pope said March 4, “living in continuous search of our personal profit, rather than in generous and supportive love.”Speaking before the Angelus, Francis noted that “this teaching of Jesus is always relevant, not only for ecclesial communities, but also for individuals, for civil communities and for societies.”
Recounting the day’s Gospel reading from John, he said that it is a common temptation to want to take advantage of some good and necessary activity in order to cultivate “private, if not even illicit, interests.”
“It is a serious danger, especially when it exploits God himself and the worship due to him, or service to man, [who is made in God’s] image. So Jesus used ‘strong ways’ that time to shake us from this deadly danger,” he explained.The pope also pointed out that when Jesus drove out the merchants and moneychangers from the temple, it wasn’t considered a violent act by those who witnessed it, but a typical action of prophets, who would often denounce abuses and excesses in the name of God.
That is why in the Gospel passage the Jews ask Jesus: “What sign do you show us to do these things?” They are asking what authority Jesus has to speak and act in the name of God.
The “sign” that Jesus will give as proof of his authority is his death and resurrection, the pope continued. Jesus said, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up,” and as the evangelist notes: “He spoke of the temple of his body.”
“The attitude of Jesus recounted in today’s Gospel passage urges us to live our lives not in search of our advantages and interests, but for the glory of God, who is love,” he said.

“May the Virgin Mary support us in our commitment to make Lent a good opportunity to recognize God as the one Lord of our life, removing every form of idolatry from our heart and our works.”

….
Taken from: https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2018/03/04/soul-gods-temple-not-francis-warns/