http://mindbodypolitic.com/?p=562

Thanks for the good work.

As one of my college professors loved to say, a materialist making truth claims is like shaking up a bottle of Dr. Pepper and a bottle of Mountain Dew, setting them on the table and asking ‘who’s winning the argument?’

Obviously no one is, it’s just a chemical reaction, atoms banging around. So what raises the atoms banging around (or strings vibrating around) in the scientist’s head from the bubbles in the soda? If you are a materialist, the sad answer is: Nothing.

In Pax Christi,

Matt

I linked it at my blog:

http://burketokirk.blogspot.com/2007/10/cs-lewis-on-gk-chesterton-and-others.html

I read that book recently, too. It was excellent. He did a wonderful job of explaining some very complicated ideas, I thought.

The dance analogy is a good one: picture looking on a complicated, choreographed dance. You and I see the beauty of the dance – the arabesques, the tangoes, the swings, the swoops and whirls and leaps – and praise God for it. The reductionists see only slavery, the incoherency or impossibility of breaking free from a pre-programmed life. No wonder they call it a bleak outlook!

Why are strings more repugnant than atoms?

The same reductionist question came out when atoms were first being contemplated, I think. To understand how strings advance the reductionist ideology, you have to understand where it comes from in the first place. To a cave-man, lightning is an act of God, because it is something he cannot fathom or control. Lighting is essentially proof that God exists. The more we understand how lightning works (and the more control we can exert on the world), the less inclined we are to believe in something fundamentally more powerful than ourselves as being the source of all the workings of the world.

Atoms promised to explain “everything” – not just the ingredients, as you said, but also the sum total of human experience. But then we discovered quantum physics, and it’s much harder to argue that the world is a pre-programmed place when you find out about the uncertainty principle, Schrodinger’s cat, or even quantum tunneling. Greene sort of brushes this off by saying that we can still predict things statistically, even if we can’t know them precisely. That it only removes the determinism one step back, not breaks it entirely. Either way, quantum physics can test anyone’s belief in determinism.

So when string theory came along, holding out hope for being the “Theory of Everything”, you can maybe see how that bolstered reductionism. Atoms failed to live up to their promise of explaining everything; strings offer that hope back again.

And while I do believe that they are missing the point that we are not only physical creatures, and therefore cannot be governed only by the physical laws of nature, I think that the basic challenge of reductionism is a real one that is worth thinking about.

Drugs and such today make it increasingly clear the impact of various chemicals on our thought patterns. If the chemical interactions are predestined (determined by the workings of nature), then how can we maintain that our thoughts are not also predestined? (Is it ordained that certain parts of a brain MRI will light up, based on the chemical interactions, or is it not set in stone, because it reflects our not-predestined thoughts? At what level do we draw that line?) And if we want to claim that the chemical interactions are not predestined, then what scientific basis do we have for that? It’s a question worth pondering for anyone interested in science and theology.

The reductionist worldview is chilling and impersonal. It has to be accepted as it is, not because we like it, but because that is the way the world works.

Am I the only one that sees the utter irony in arguing that people must accept a worldview which teaches that the thoughts and actions of those people are determined by the chemicals in their brains and, ultimately, the initial state of the universe?

It’s really a sort of very twisted, ironic testimony to the fact that we all of us know on some level that Truth is absolutely Good, even while we are trying to deny that there is any (absolute) Good in the universe.

I decided to edit those two segments you posted from Elegant Universe. I switched out terms to reflect ancient Hebrew and Greek cosmology.

“Many find it fatuous and downright repugnant to claim that the wonders of life and the universe are mere fluctuations emerging from the primordial chaos of the universal waters, especially since they must behave in accord with the unkowable will of the Deity. Is it really the case that feelings of joy, sorrow, or boredom are nothing but letters etched on the pulsating heart by the pressure of forms it encounters? Is it true that knowledge consists of mere indentations on the gray organ within our heads? — forms imposed on the object by routine exposure to stress? Even more disturbing, are we merely clay vessels controled by the gods, and is our free will only a derivative of a higher will, unable to exist without it? Everything, even fundamental elements, are mere products of the breath of God, which is just pure, inaccessible and unsearchable Being?

I would not try to answer critics with a pep talk about the beauties of ancient natural philosophy. The Greek and Judeo-Christian worldview is chilling and banaly personal. It has to be accepted as it is, not because we like it, but because that is the way the world works.”

I love making fun of scientists who slept through philosophy class. Seems they slept through a lot of real life too…

“good science and good theology never refute each other.”

You have expressed yourself beautifully – I am quickly being addicted to your blog. Thanks.

It’s the JUST part that gets me.

We are JUST a collection of nerves and chemicals.

Just? Have you ever seen a collection of nerves and chemicals spontaneously arise from the ether and create the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?

All THAT is is PAINT, by the way.

To expand upon my point, I believe that good science and true religion will never contradict each other. When there’s an apparent contradiction, either the science is bad, the theology is false, or both.