A Life-Shrinkers Roll-Call

The world is not what we see, but what we are taught to see and what we believe it to be.

Constellation image by NASA (Larger version below)

(CALGARY, Alberta) - Despite the fact that about a third of Americans don’t believe in evolution, we and they still live in a world dominated by science. In 1962 Jawaharlal Nehru, then Prime Minister of India said:

“It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste or a rich country inhabited by starving people...Who indeed could afford to ignore science today? At every turn we have to seek its aid...The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science.”

Nearly half a century after this comment, all the problems he mentioned still exist—in some cases expanded—on a global basis. Add global warming, pollution, declining fish stocks and nuclear weapons proliferation to that list.

It’s easy to find writers opposed to religion (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens being the most vocal and well-known), but it’s difficult to find any significant discouraging words about science.

Let me make the immediate disclaimer that there is much good that comes out of science and I acknowledge that. But we must not tip over into scientism—the belief that science can furnish answers to all human problems, making science a substitute for philosophy, religion, manners, and morals ending up in the doctrine (not an accidental word-choice) that science knows or will soon know all the answers. As physicist Roger Jones concludes: "Science is no longer a field of study—an 'academic' discipline. In our culture, it has become a way of life and a system of belief. At its worst, science is a form of idolatry."

Carl Sagan biographer Timothy Ferris said to Sagan that he had heard that to have a liberal education, you must be familiar with five fields, science, philosophy, religion, art and history. Sagan snapped back, "Well, three of the five are reducible to science. And the other one is a delusion."

Physicist Brian Greene writes that:"At a deep level, there is a collective longing for an explanation of why there is a universe, how it came to take the form we witness, and for the rationale—the principle—that drives its evolution. The astounding thing is that humanity has now come to a point where a framework is emerging for answering some of these questions scientifically."

The logical end of scientific imperialism, like religious imperialism, is intellectual tyranny—the Sagan atitude. As philosopher Alan Bloom wrote: “The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.”

There is a lack of a word, here, and I’ve thought long and hard to coin one. A person who follows science is positively described as a scientist. How to describe a believer in scientism—a scientismist? Far too awkward a word. The word I will use for now is—science-monger.

The British essayist, J. B. Priestley would describe science-mongers as Life-shrinkers "lop-sided, nothing but” men.

"It is our Life-shrinkers who have been busy as long as I can remember just sealing us down and then squeezing the juice out of us. We quit their company feeling like desiccated dwarfs. The most important of them have been lop-sided “nothing but” men on the very highest and most imposing level. And to prove I am not dealing in vague abuse, I will stick my neck out as far as it can go. Among the very greatest names of the last hundred years, those men whose influence can hardly be over-estimated, are Marx, Darwin and Freud. And with all due respect for their personal qualities, I say that all three of them, working in their very different fields, have been Life-shrinkers."

Carl Sagan said “my fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings—what we sometimes call ‘mind’—are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology and nothing more.”

Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, says that the human mind “is nothing but a machine, nothing but the on-board computer of a robot made of tissue . We don’t need spirits or occult forces to explain intelligence.” (italics added in quotes)

In fact, they echo the scientism of behaviourist B. F. Skinner, arguably the most influential psychologist of the 20th century who denied that the mind existed. “To man qua man we readily say good riddance. Only by dispossessing him can we turn to the real causes of human behavior. Only then can we turn from the inferred to the observed, from the miraculous to the natural, from the inaccessible to the manipulable.”

Skinner compared studying the mind to astrology and numerology:

The extraordinary appeal of inner causes and the accompanying neglect of environmental histories and current setting must be due to more than linguistic practice. I suggest that it has the appeal of the arcane, the occult, the hermetic, the magical—those mysteries which have held so important a position in the history of human thought. It is the appeal of an apparently inexplicable power, in a world which seems to lie beyond the senses and the reach of reason. It is the appeal still enjoyed by astrology, numerology, parapsychology, and psychical research.

This is Life-shrinking in action.

Religion in the Western world was, until very recently, the universal basis for all attempts to explain life and death—as it still is in most of the Islamic world. Religion began losing its cosmogonic supremacy with the discoveries that the Earth revolved around the sun; that the Earth was round; that the stars were far distant suns; that man had descended from an animal heritage; and that the Earth was millions, then billions, of years old.

In the 17th century James Ussher, the Archbishop of Armagh, Ireland, produced a biblical timeline based on an intricate correlation of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean histories with Holy Writ, that was incorporated into an authorized version of the Bible in 1701. Having established the first day of creation as Sunday 23 October 4004 BC, Ussher calculated the dates of other biblical events concluding, for example, that Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise on Monday 10 November 4004 BC (what a way to start the week), and that the Ark touched down on Mt Ararat on 5 May 1491 BC—a Wednesday. For believers, Ussher supplied a certainty and specificity that has since been transferred to science in the form of scientism.

Except in fundamentalist circles, the certainty of religion is mostly gone. Science and rationality have discredited the sacred role in the lives of most people although many maintain a nominal, uncritical, belief in religious mythology. In our Western culture we have come to worship materialism and science. But, does science have any answers? By its own self-definition, it cannot ask “why” questions, so consequently cannot offer meaning. Science has its own creation myth, called the Big Bang of which, says physicist Roger Jones:

"Worst of all is the effect—mostly unconscious—that this myth has on the human psyche. Suppose you try for a moment to dream up your own alternative to our creation myth but with the following proviso: it must terrify and scare the living daylights out of everyone you tell it to. I doubt very much that anyone can do better than our current big bang myth. If taken emotionally and with full psychological awareness, this is a story that can fill the human heart with awesome terror. And yet, we are supposed to stiffen our upper lips and view this account of creation dispassionately, and even with a certain respectful appreciation, as a fabulous but utterly meaningless pageant."

Was there even a Big Bang? Physicist Eric Lerner has argued that because of the religious and philosophical underpinnings of our society, believing in beginnings and endings to phenomena, it was natural to postulate a “beginning” and science came up with the Big Bang. His book The Big Bang Never Happened asks many provocative questions. Cosmologist Fred Hoyle was never a supporter of the Big Bang theory which had been developed largely by George Gamow in the 1940s. Hoyle himself sarcastically coined the term itself in a 1950s radio interview. Hoyle argued for a Steady State universe where matter was constantly being created as the galaxies moved away from each other in an expanding universe. As Hoyle and his co-authors remark:

"The concepts underlying the [steady state] theory were thought to be of doubtful validity when the model was under intense discussion in the 1950s and 1960s, but the 1980s with the introduction of inflation they have become more respectable. This early view of the theory is one of the reasons why it was received with considerable hostility, but there were clearly other strong emotions. For some the idea of [matter] creation was acceptable if it took place at an early time and only once, i.e. a big bang, but for it to go on steadily at a rate which made it undetectable locally was unacceptable. For some it was clear that western religion is important when origins are considered; parallels between the big bang and the creation described in the Old Testament are inescapable, and it is clear that in part at least some of our colleagues were driven by religious motives.”

Science, as a cultural element, is fundamentally nihilistic which is an extension of the scientistic attitude. Science gives no meaning to human life. For example, humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow described the first operation he ever witnessed as

"almost a representative example of the effort to descralize, i.e., to remove the sense of awe, privacy, fear, and shyness before the sacred and of humility before the tremendous. A woman’s breast was to be amputated with an electrical scalpel that cut by burning through. As a delicious aroma of grilling steak filled the air, the surgeon made carelessly “cool” and casual remarks about the pattern of his cutting, paying no attention to the freshmen rushing out in distress, and finally tossing this object through the air onto the counter where it landed with a plop. It had changed from a sacred object to a discarded lump of fat. There were, of course, no tears, prayers, rituals, or ceremonies of any kind, as there would certainly have been in most preliterate societies. This was all handled in a purely technological fashion, emotionless, calm, even with a slight tinge of swagger".

Maslow called this attitude counterphobic toughness which is a common attribute of the scientistic personality. Here’s a bit of a roll call.

Biologist Peter Atkins:

"We are the children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe."

Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker:

"Any explanation of how the mind works that alludes hopefully to some single master force or mind-bestowing elixir like “culture”, “learning” or “self-organization” begins to sound hollow, just not up to the demands of the pitiless universe."

Biologist Richard Dawkins:

"Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense."

Biology Nobelist Jacques Monod:

"Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor his duty."

Non-scientists have taken up the cause. Historian Carl Becker:

"Man is little more than a chance deposit on the surface of the world, carelessly thrown up between two ice ages by the same forces that rust iron and ripen corn."

Drama professor and theatre critic Martin Esslin:

"The true dignity and courage of man lies in his ability to face the reality of his universe with all its meaninglessness."

Sociologist Peter L. Berger:

"History is a stream of blood, behind us, carrying us. Our age scoops up the blood in plastic bags and stores it, out of sight, for electronic retrieval. There is an obligation to remember, not in the memory cells of computers but in the heaviness of the heart. Over the memories of pain looms the solitary figure of the Virgin of Consolations, ever wiping the brows of the Quixotes of this world."

In his 1973 book on the Big Bang, The First Three Minutes, Nobel cosmologist Steven Weinberg wrote:

"As I write this I happen to be in an airplane at 30,000 feet, flying over Wyoming en route home from San Francisco to Boston. Below, the earth looks very soft and comfortable—fluffy clouds here and there, snow turning pink as the sun sets, roads stretching straight across the country from one town to another. It is very hard to realize that this is all just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe....The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."

The comment about pointlessness dogged him thereafter and in 1993, in Dreams of a Final Theory, he attempted to clarify: “I did not mean that science teaches us that the universe is pointless, but rather that the universe itself suggests no point. I hastened to add that there were ways that we ourselves could invent a point for our lives, including trying to understand the universe.”

Psychiatrist Eric Berne, one of the founders of the self help movement said near the end of his ground-breaking 1964 book Games People Play:

"The somber picture presented in Parts I and II of this book, in which human life is mainly a process of filling in time until the arrival of death, or Santa Claus, with very little choice, if any, of what kind of business one is going to transact during the long wait, is a commonplace but not the final answer. For certain fortunate people there is something which transcends all classifications of behavior, and that is awareness; something which rises above the programming of the past, and that is spontaneity; and something that is even more rewarding than games, and that is intimacy. But all three of these may be frightening and even perilous to the unprepared. Perhaps they are better off as they are, seeking their solutions in popular techniques of social action, such as ‘togetherness.’ This may mean that there is no hope for the human race, but there is hope for individual members of it."

Psychotherapist Sheldon Kopp, perhaps best remembered for his 1972 book If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him! said: “A person can be a long way past childhood and still be intimidated by an overwhelming sense of powerlessness and insignificance when faced with a head-on view of our place in the universe.”

I could go on.

I’m only putting one name on the anti-Roll-call, Albert Einstein:

"What is the meaning of human life, or, for that matter, of the life of any creature? To know an answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: Does it make any sense, then, to pose this question? I answer: the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life."

What prompted me to write this

A few days ago, astronomers announced the discovery of 32 more exoplanets—planets in orbit around distant stars, bringing the total to more than 400. These claims make we wonder how many, if any, of those exoplanets actually exist.

Are these findings realistic or fanciful nonsense?

How old is the universe? Cosmologist Wendy Freedman and her team, using data from the Hubble Space Telescope arrived at a new, lower number for the Hubble constant—that's the rate of expansion of the universe. Hubble had originally estimated it at 250 and by the 1970s it had fallen to the mid-50s. The number settled at around 50 which meant that the universe was 15-20 billion years old.

The Freedman number was 80, suggesting that the universe was 8-12 billion years old—probably closer to 8 billion. Astronomers, estimating the rate at which hydrogen is converted to helium in stars, believe that some of the oldest stars in the Milky Way are 14 billion years old, or more. Obviously the universe can't be younger than the stars in it. Commented science writer Kitty Ferguson:

"The discrepancy made the front pages of newspapers all over the world. Scientists ground their teeth. It's difficult not to notice that the attitude of the science community in the twentieth century is sometimes startlingly reminiscent of the attitude of the Church in Galileo's day. There is a reluctance to let the public know about anything that might undermine simple faith—in science, this time around. Since the future of astrophysics and astronomy depends on massive public spending, these branches of science do have an enormous stake in maintaining their credibility. Researchers are concerned that if public opinion is to favor continuing support for this wondrous but expensive adventure now that the Cold War rivalry is history, there should be no announcements indicating that tax money is buying nonsense!"

The accepted number today is approximately 75, putting the universe’s age at 13.5 to 14 billion years old.

The issue I am addressing here is potential nonsense in science. Seeing as virtually all physics, astronomy and cosmology is paid for out of tax dollars, it’s important not only that it be seen as socially beneficial and useful, but that any discrepancies in any fields be seen as normal and manageable within the science itself.

On October 19 an international astronomy conference on extrasolar planets held in Portugal, announced a list of 32 new exoplanets bringing the known catalog to a total of 403 worlds.

Considering my comments above, I wonder about both the accuracy and verifiability of these findings.

The new “planets” were all found by the radial-velocity wobbles that they induce in their host stars, as detected by the HARPS planet-hunting spectrograph on the European Southern Observatory's 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla, Chile.

HARPS, the astronomers say, can apparently measure a star's radial-velocity patterns with an accuracy as fine as 1 meter per second—a slow walking speed.

How the technique works is that if a planet is orbiting the star, the planet’s motion will cause a slight “wobble” in the star’s position. To extract this slight (I suggest almost undetectable) motion astronomers have to subtract out the much larger continual changes caused by the telescope's own motion on the rotating Earth, Earth's curving motion around the Sun (at about 30,000 meters per second), and even the gravitational influences of the Moon and our solar system's other planets on Earth.

The star and the planet both revolve about a common centre of gravity, which makes the star appear to "wobble"

No one mentions the three-body problem in this scenario. If there are two bodies gravitationally attracted, their motions can be calculated to whatever degree of accuracy is wanted. But for three or more bodies, no such precision is possible. Considering how miniscule the effects are, it’s possible that the three-body imprecision could nullify the results.

Further, trickier, confounding factors on the distant star itself, such as surface turbulence or starspots that mimic a change in the star's radial-velocity signature as the star's rotation carries the spots around add to the imprecision.

Without even detecting any exoplanets, the idea that our solar system is rare in the universe, is logically improbable. There are almost certainly billions of planets orbiting stars in our galaxy alone. The underlying motivation here is the search for planets that may harbor life. If we were to learn that there is life elsewhere in the universe, everything for mankind would change.

I am not arguing against this search or the funding for it. My conclusion, however, is that none of this is or ever will be verifiable. I don’t believe the technology will ever exist to actually “see” such planets and verify their existence. There are too many assumptions, overt and hidden, built into both the technology and interpretation of results.

Isaac Asimov is best known as a science fiction writer, but he was trained as a biochemist. He describes his difficulty with embryology which “consisted, in very large part of looking through microscopes at slides of embryo sections of chicks at each day of their twenty-one day period of development, and then drawing what one saw.

“I was under a double handicap here. No matter how I adjusted my microscope focus and my light and my slide, I never saw what the embryology text told me I would see. I saw clearly, of course; there is nothing wrong with my vision; I just don’t have that kind of visual imagery that sorts out tiny details.” It was this overall difficulty in biology that pushed him to switch to chemistry as a major. And, we also see his self-deception. There is no “of course” to his seeing clearly; he wore glasses all his adult life.

Our use of technology is not unbiased. We must “learn” to see what our teachers tell us we will see. For example, writes biologist Steven Rose:

“[Looking at an electron micrograph] illustrates very well the extent to which one has to learn to see patterns of differing shades of grey as ‘representing’ cells, their nuclei, mitochondria, membranes and so on. To the novice these patterns make little sense. The apprentice electron microscopist is taught just how and what to see, what to regard as ‘real’ and what as ‘artefact’—the unwanted consequences of one or more of the procedures used to prepare the living tissue. Thus the new observer is initiated into the conventional wisdom developed by half a century of biological work in the artificial world of electron microscopy.”

He concludes: “The world-view we biological researchers create is derived from the intimate interaction of technology and science with the eye of craft experience, shaped by the theoretical expectations according to which we operate.”

It’s the same with the pictures of cloud chamber events in particle physics. To the novice, making sense of cloud chamber pictures requires significant training and learning “how” to look. The Berkeley bubble chamber group developed a program in which faked histograms resembling final data were mixed together and physicists had to find the “real” data from the pile, which included the fakes. In his Nobel speech, Luis Alvarez noted that “one can appreciate how many retractions of discovery claims have been avoided in our group by the liberal use of [this] program.” In addition, the removal of the physicist from the apparatus, the specialization of tasks, the increased role of computation and the establishment of hierarchical collaborations have become hallmarks of high-energy physics experiments. Computer programming and engineering have become essential parts of high energy physics experiments. As science historian Peter Galison observes:

“The path from instrument to argument is long. To capture something of the richness of even one device we have had to draw not just on a history of physics results but also on a history of machines and a history of work organization….The modern history of instruments and patterns of their use may lack the glamour of the history of our overarching theoretical constructs. Nonetheless, these bubbling, sparking, clanking devices remain the weft and warp of physics.”

The teaching/learning paradigm exists, too, in medical science. In an ultrasound examination, says physician Jerome Groopman, “the developing baby is imaged, appearing in a two-dimensional representation inside the uterus, a swirl of black and white.” It looks, he says, “like a weather map…specifically a snowstorm. The flux of white specks across a black background makes the discrete outlines of organs difficult, if not impossible, for me to make out.”

The above ultrasound images show a bicornuate uterus with a gestation sac in the right cornu (1). The empty left cornu (2) shows typical decidual changes of pregnancy. The 3rd image (bottom) is a sagittal section through each cornu. (I won’t even attempt to translate. Images courtesy of Dr. Ravi Kadasne, UAE)

We have seen spectacular pictures taken with the Hubble Space Telescope but how “real” are they? Here is an HST picture of NGC 602. On the HST site, NASA writes:

“Taking color pictures with the Hubble Space Telescope is much more complex than taking color pictures with a traditional camera. For one thing, Hubble doesn't use color film — in fact, it doesn't use film at all. Rather, its cameras record light from the universe with special electronic detectors. These detectors produce images of the cosmos not in color, but in shades of black and white.

“Finished color images are actually combinations of two or more black-and-white exposures to which color has been added during image processing.

“The colors in Hubble images, which are assigned for various reasons, aren't always what we'd see if we were able to visit the imaged objects in a spacecraft. We often use color as a tool, whether it is to enhance an object's detail or to visualize what ordinarily could never be seen by the human eye.”

The colors are all artificial and depends on astronomer’s opinion of what color is expected for each part of the image.

NGC 602 Credit: NASA and HST

The world is not what we see, but what we are taught to see and what we believe it to be.

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Daniel Johnson was born near the midpoint of the twentieth century in Calgary, Alberta. In his teens he knew he was going to be a writer, which explains why he was one of only a handful of boys in his high school typing class—a skill he knew was going to be necessary.

He has been writing exclusively for Salem-News.com since March 2009 and continues to work on a creative non-fiction book which he began in 1998. You can write to Daniel at: Salem-News@gravityshadow.com