Chapter 1   Part B 

Descartes 

After Bacon came the man whom many still see as the leading light of the Renaissance's new way thinking, the sickly French parochial-school boy who became a sickly man with a mind like a razor: Rene Descartes. He spent years maneuvering to get a feel for what the religious leaders of his time would let him say, and only then did he publish his views on how thinking should be done. 

He separated Science from religion and morality. Under his model, Science can advance our ways of dealing with the physical world of the body, but religion and the morality it implies must still oversee the activities of our minds and souls. The affairs of our souls are seen as being much more important than those of our bodies or any other things made out of matter. Under his model, religion retains primary control over our decisions about what we should be doing with our lives, including how we should be using the findings of Science (3., 4.).

Descartes devised a very clever maneuver that somewhat ameliorated the religious authorities’ scrutiny of those who studied the physical world and how the things in it worked, but he only delayed the inevitable. Sooner or later, human beings were going to have to deal with the logical conclusion that the two realms had to interact somehow in order for them both to apply to, and make sense to, beings like us, who have issues and concerns in both of these realms, the realm of sensory experience and the realm of abstract thought.

Describing all the ways in which Science sometimes eroded, sometimes blasted, the traditional beliefs of the majority of people would fill a whole encyclopedia. We can be content with looking closely at three such ways. I chose these three because I believe they are paradigmatic, as did Freud. (5.)

In 1543, Copernicus proposed a model of our universe in which the Earth was not at the center, with the rest of the heavenly bodies like the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars revolving around it. In his model, the sun was at the center of our solar system, and the Earth was just one more planet – along with Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn – revolving around the sun. In the 1600’s, Galileo and, later, Newton took up and refined the Copernican model. They discovered a set of natural laws that described both events in the cosmos and events on the earth in subtle mathematical formulae that gave precise predictions about phenomena like falling objects, fired cannonballs, eclipses, comets, and planetary orbits – phenomena that had previously been given only inaccurate, ad hoc explanations. 

 Today, Galileo and Newton’s picture of the solar system and how it works seems intuitive and obvious to most people. But Galileo in his time was seen by religious leaders as a demon. God had made man as His special darling creation. The Bible said so. And the Earth had been created, along with all of its systems and life forms, as a special home for us. The Earth had to be the center of the universe. Ptolemy also had said so, over a thousand years before. The ancients and the Bible: the explanations fit. Besides, the sun came up in the East and went down in the West. So did the moon and the stars. These things would not be if the Earth were not the center of all. What fool could question these truths?

  Galileo did and almost paid with his life. He was forced to recant under the threat of horrible torture. Galileo had begun his higher education studying medicine. He knew what they could make him say once they began to apply their irons, racks, and thumbscrews. With his telescope to back him up, he tried very hard to persuade the pope and his agents that the evidence proved the Copernican model was correct. They weren’t interested. In fact, they got angrier. So he signed where they told him to sign. But according to one legend, as he left the building, he pointed up at the moon and said: “It still moves.”

   That statement deeply reveals the way of thinking on which it is predicated. It could stand as a statement of the fundamental belief of Science. Material reality is what it is. Our role is to learn about it by observing it, formulating theories about it, and doing experiments to test those theories. We can’t impose our views on it. If one of our theories goes against what has long been society’s received wisdom on any subject, this contradiction, for scientists, means nothing. 

    Aristotle and the authors of the Bible, even last year’s scientific theories, have no more of a lock on truth than any one of us. Most crucially, we can always go back to physical reality and test again. Let reality be the arbiter. That is the method and belief system that scientists are committed to. (The Catholic Church pardoned Galileo in 1992, nearly 360 years after his “offense”. The Copernican model of the solar system, the one that Galileo championed, has been generally accepted as the essentially correct model since about 1700.)  

   Some scientists have also been deeply religious people whose scientific findings have clashed with their religious beliefs. The history of Science is filled with accounts of people who felt they had to drop their faith in the Bible, usually after much personal anguish, in order to continue to pursue Science.

   What their torments mean to our argument today, again however, is nothing. Their anguish does not have any bearing on what Science considers to be knowledge; only the evidence does. Over and over during the last four hundred years, the old ways of thought have taken so many hard blows because of the uncompromising methods of Science. But let us deal with just two more.

Darwin 

   

   In the mid 1800’s, Darwin hit the faithful and the institutions and beliefs by which they had lived their lives with the biggest of all of the jolts. What he gave an excellent scientific explanation for was life itself. Life, by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, evolved on Earth from a few simple cells over the course of millions, or perhaps billions, of years. 

   Darwin had the theory, and he had the evidence to support it. The models of genetic variation and natural selection can explain all the life forms on Earth in all their many subtle variations. The fossils in the rocks all over the world show the steps by which life developed and spread. Chemical and physical tests give consistent, predictable results that unfailingly support Darwin’s theory. Life, in all its complex forms on this Earth, developed from a few simple cells, by gradual increments, over hundreds of millions, or more probably, billions, of years.

  Where was the Bible then? Genesis puts the creation of all that is into a time scale of six days. The Theory of Evolution basically implies that this model is ridiculous. Furthermore, this theory seems to imply that natural physical processes – ones that can be observed, predicted, and even manipulated – can account for all of the phenomena in reality, living and non-living. For scientists, the concept of God is not needed in their discussion of what this universe is or what human beings are. It isn’t even relevant.

  The Theory of Evolution was a shock of such magnitude that the church authorities and most of the faithful who listen to them are still reeling and still lashing out at it. The scientists who believe that it does give a true picture of reality find these attacks annoying and silly. The evidence is there … mounds of it. What evidence is there for the “alternate” explanation? One old book, written by a bunch of priests with vested interests and sinecure jobs to protect, making claims about events that they did not witness, events that can’t be replicated or examined, claims that can’t be tested. It just isn’t Science.

  In fact, how can the “faithful”, who every day get most of the comforts of their way of life from things that scientists have found, be such ingrates? It is a sure bet that however much they may want to attack and criticize the whole activity called “Science”, they don’t want to starve and they don’t want their electric power turned off. They don’t even want to be eating tainted food, shivering in a hovel by a wood fire, watching their children die of mysterious, inscrutable “swamp vapors”.    

  On the other hand, the point of this book is to show that the full description of both sides of this nasty quarrel is much more complex than what the last couple of paragraphs portray. But for now we can sum up this small section on the Theory of Evolution by saying that Darwin’s theory, for most thinking people, floored the Bible for the count. He had found a theory that explained the greatest of the mysteries of our human experience, and he had assembled the evidence to back up that theory.

  The Bible had been reduced, apparently, to a collection of quaint myths and poems, with some bits of one ancient tribe’s history woven in, and God had been relegated to the status of Zeus or Wotan. A fiction created by a gang of theocrats who played on human fears in order to rule the masses.

Notes 

3. Descartes, Rene; “The Passions of the Soul”, articles 211, 212   

   http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfbits/despass3.pdf.

4. Descartes, Rene; “Meditations on First Philosophy” 

   Meditations 3. and 4.;

   http://www.classicallibrary.org/descartes/meditations

5. Freud, Sigmund; “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis” (James Strachey, editor);

       W.W. Norton and Co.; 1966; p. 353. 








Chapter 1      Part C 




         Sigmund Freud 

Now all of this seems bad enough, but it gets worse. The third big shock came when Science began to understand the workings of the human brain. Human beings had long felt that there are many things in this world that cannot be explained in physical terms because human beings had long known that inside the privacy of their minds, they had imaginings and feelings, and outside in physical reality, they sometimes even saw or did things, that – by the logic of everyday life – made no sense. Cruel or lustful acts and many more cruel and lustful thoughts were bad enough. But at least they seemed somewhat predictable, given humans’ “sinful” nature. From long experience, we know our human drives, so we can accept intermittent thoughts of fornication, theft, and murder as “natural”. But people also have much weirder dreams and even see weird things when they’re wide awake, things that are, by the usual rules of Physics, and even common sense, not possible.

Why do people have dreams, and a few even have waking visions, of angels or of demons, hovering in the air, or of talking cats on mountain tops, bathed in orange light and standing on their back feet? Night after night, we dream not just greedy or lustful dreams, but also many more that are simply absurd. Furthermore, some people wide awake see angels, demons, and miracles. For centuries, if a person saw or did something that afterward he himself could not make sense of, the widely accepted explanation that was believed literally was that God (or Satan) had caused the event or had made him do the deed. Big parts of human experience, apparently, lie beyond Science and even common sense.

When Freud came along, his big contribution to human knowledge was simply the proposition that all of these perceptions come from inside the brain of the person having the dream or vision. Thus, visions and miracles can be easily explained. They come from stored up memories being combined and re-combined, to form symbolic narratives that are driven by deep, unconscious needs, needs that the visionary isn’t aware of because they are buried so deeply that he can’t consciously access them, no matter how he tries. Under stress, his brain can transmit images into his optic nerves, which is the opposite of what usually happens. Even wide awake, we can see what in physical reality is not there.

Most of our memories may not be recallable at will, but they are all in there. Unless a person has had some brain-destroying injury or disease, his brain holds all he has ever experienced, all of the sense data that have ever been fed into it via eyes, ears, etc. How they will affect his moment by moment flow of consciousness can’t be exactly predicted in advance; but the motifs and patterns in these “paranormal experiences” too often coincide too closely with the subject’s personal, affective issues for those experiences to be considered somehow disconnected from the mental states that preceded them. We can literally see what we want to see.

While at first, Freud and his followers were considered to be sex-obsessed crackpots, they soon began to gain credibility and command respect, mainly because they could get results. Under their model, they could explain all of human behavior, they could make good probability predictions about how individuals with certain backgrounds would act in specific future situations, and they began to cure people of neuroses and psychoses that, in earlier times, would have been pronounced hopeless.

Then as research on the human brain advanced, other researchers showed that the idea that all of a person’s experiences are stored in the brain, even though we can’t recall them at will, is literally true. Patients willing to stay conscious during neurosurgery and to let researchers place tiny electrodes on tiny areas of their brains are able, when the milliamp current is turned on, to recall all kinds of memories in detail, memories that ordinarily they have no access to, or conscious awareness of (6.).

Freud went much further with his psycho-sexual explanations of all or nearly all of the motives that drive human behavior. Much of what he had to say has today been discredited; little girls, by and large, are not consumed with a desire to grow a penis. But the big impact of what he had to say remains. Those parts of a human being’s experience that seem to defy logic, science, and common sense turn out to have a rational explanation. The dreams and visions were, and are, figments of overactive human imaginations; they never actually took place in the real, physical world at all. No more miracles.

If we just consider the three scientific theories briefly summed up above then, what can we say have been their consequences? Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, for most people, removed the biblical God as the operator of the cosmos. They didn’t need him in their model of the real, physical universe. Darwin removed God as the creator of life. He even reduced humans to just one more kind of animal. And Freud made humans look like obsessive, even sick, animals, easily deluded by their own aggressive, lustful, self-absorbed, wishful thoughts.

The scientists haven’t refuted the logical possibilities of God or of a moral code that is real and universal. Science has not proved that God and a universal code of right and wrong are impossible. But Science certainly has, over the past four hundred years, severely shaken the traditional ideas of God and faith and thus inevitably, the traditional ideas of morality. However, let me stress again that what does not follow is that there is no God or that every form of theism and every form of moral code are merely wishful thinking. We just need a new understanding of what God is and what the fact of His existence should mean for us in how we live our daily lives, an understanding that incorporates some subtler ideas of God and Science into a single, consistent, coherent picture of what we believe is real.

  

But for now, we can say that Science has almost totally leveled the old, pre-Enlightenment ways of conceiving of these things. And let us make no mistake about what the loss of their belief in God has done to the vast majority of ordinary people. Removing God from Western society’s generally accepted picture of how this world works had the inevitable consequence of removing our society’s confidence in its moral code, our ideas of what right and wrong are and how we should try to act – toward the world in general, but especially toward each other. If our moral rules aren’t God’s rules, whose rules are they?

Now the point may seem to most people in the West to be a rather trivial one anyway. Why should we care whether the old ideas of God and right and wrong are crumbling? Explaining in more detail why humans all over, sometimes at deep, subconscious levels, are struggling to cope with this loss, even though they may not be aware of the philosophical names for the thoughts and feelings that they are having, will be the business of the next chapter.

Notes 

6. Delude, Catharine; “Researchers show that memories reside in specific brain cells”;

       MIT News; Mar. 22, 2012; p. 11-12.