As our souls, being air, hold us together, so breath and air embrace the entire universe.
Anaximenes
This will be a book about science, about quantum, astrophysics, biology, and about the way in which one takes up where the other one leaves off; about what the many scientific discoveries of this tell us about ourselves and our role as a species in this planet, even in this cosmos. It is also a book about the ways in which many scientists have interpreted science and most importantly, about how some of them have strained and struggled to make science more than a mere mental exercise; how some actually have tried to make science answer the tough existential and ontological questions for us.
Before we start with science, though, we would like to start not in the laboratory or quoting from eminent scholars, but inside a house, in what we imagine must be routine for most readers in the world. If it is not true that the following is a routine for many readers, then, let's start with a fictional but, we believe common scenario: a living room or library. Imagine you are about to sit down and read. But before you start, you turn some music on. Let's say you listen to classical music and from your collection you pick Beethoven's late quartets. One of us has a CD by the Hollywood String Quartet that he cherishes. If you are familiar with Beethoven late string quartets, you know the weight of this reference. The late quartets are the most private meditations, aside from the late sonatas, that Beethoven left us. They are difficult, brooding pieces that plumb the depths and scale the heights of Western music. Some critics, like Beethoven's great biographer, Salomon, have seen the enterprise of the late quartets as Beethoven's ultimate quest for meaning, for meaning in life, the cosmos, nature. As you listen to the players make their way through the difficult score, you know you are witnessing a quintessential human activity: not only do we love performances of all sort, but when we listen to great music or look at great art, most of us believe we are witnessing some of the innermost and most unintelligible aspects of ourselves unravel. When we are before great art, we somehow believe that that entity which theologies and religion call a soul has found its manifestation.
This attitude or faith, if you happen to be skeptic, is not unique to musical or artistic audiences. Einstein, one of the greatest scientific minds of our century, shared the attitude with us. When he heard the very young prodigy, Yehudi Menuhin play, he told Menuhin after the concert: "Today you have proven to me that there is a God in heaven." It is stunning to think of the greatest mind of the century, the mind that changed the concept of who, where and what we are so profoundly, make such statement. And truly, Einstein's remark, made with the wide eyed innocence and wonder he was prone to, might be the only thing we can hope to have in common with that great mind. Whether one is religious or not, whether one believes in God or not, most of us have sensed awe before great art and/or before nature; we have had the sense that the world is not just skin-deep. And yet, many contemporary scientists have dedicated whole lives to belie this awe. And at first sight, they seem to be right. We know for instance that what we call the mind seems to be an infinitely complicated network of very specialized cells which react to chemical releases and transmit infinitesimal electrical impulses that make up, not just our sentient life, but what we call emotions.
In fact, an average scientific view of our scenario, our living room where we listen to Beethoven would be the following. The four string instruments that make up the Hollywood String Quartet are wooden boxes that amplify the friction of box and string. The friction creates a vibration, a tiny change in the pressure that travels into the box and that the box, on its own turn, amplifies and projects toward the microphone. The microphone converts the sound waves into electromagnetic waves that are recorded into a magnetized tape. Furthermore, since the record we are imagining is a digital re-mastering, the tape has been digitized by turning the electromagnetic signals into zeros and ones which a laser can read and a computer can process and play back. When we pop our imaginary CD into the player and push play, our eardrum, fine tuned by evolution to listen for predators, vibrates and feeds the information to a nerve. According to many scientific explanations, according to the vistas that most scientists have set for themselves, there is nothing to the sound we hear. In a cruel, ironic pun, we could say that according to the scientists we hear less than Beethoven. Acoustics tells us the music we hear is only small changes in air pressure. Neurologist will tell one that the emotions we sense are merely electric vibrations. Psychologists would argue that we find pleasure in the sound because we have been culturally conditioned to it, or because we link it to some pleasurable sensation in childhood. Yet, common sense tells us differently. It tells us that the music is not just skin-deep but probes, as my Anaximenes epigram intuits, our souls and in doing so embraces the universe. That's what common sense dictates.
Scientists, however, find common sense anathema. Stephen Jay Gould, the scientist we will be dealing with extensively in the first chapter has been one of the most stringent and vocal opponents of common sense. In one of his most recent books, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, attacks E. O. Wilson's appeal to common sense:
Nothing could be more antithetical to intellectual reform than an appeal against thoughtful scrutiny of our most hidebound mental habits -- notions so "obviously" true that we stopped thinking about them generations ago and moved them into our hearts and bosoms. Please, do not forget the sun really does rise in the east, move through the sky each day and set in the west. What image could be more visceral than earth's central stability and the sun's subordinate motion?
Gould's argument does not lack validity. Many of the scientific discoveries since the Renaissance have belied what we thought about our rank in the world. However, we don't think it impossible to argue that geo-centricity as well as the debate against evolution were more theological attacks than "visceral" reactions to the premises those two theories put forth. We should also not forget, that as more and more things are known about our universe, as we understand more and more about the atom and its particles, many of the concepts discussed by pre-Socratic philosophers first and some Epicurean writers later have been confirmed. Without particle accelerators Democritus had a decent understanding of the atom as the basic particle. Physicists are confirming many of the Augustinian insights on time. In short, we should not confuse common sense with dogma.
Gould is a fine word-smith and a better sophist. When scientists argue for the use of common sense, they are not arguing for a return to superstition, but for the use of one's intuition to guide the "thoughtful scrutiny." Standing at the bleachers (outsiders to, but close followers of science) we think that common sense and intuition have guided some of the greatest scientific discoveries. From just cursory acquaintance with Einstein's working method, it would be impossible to deny this. And we also think that common sense helped Darwin and Wallace, Newton and Maxwell; only institutions, in their attempt to canonize and sanitize their icons keep dressing great scientists in the cloth of pure logic and reason. Einstein might have been speaking figuratively when he claimed that he was trying to understand God's ways. Still, if anything has driven science has been the certainty that the cosmos is not just a mindless, accidental system; life is not just a protein chain growing more and more elaborately as time goes by.
It is not that the universe is not a system where chance had and still has a great hand. It is not that life is not a protein chain. Those are true facts. However, they are paltry, incomplete. We are not detractors of evolution or of any of the current scientific theories. However, we believe that however accurate the scientific theories are, the puzzle that the various sciences have been trying to piece together since the Renaissance is nowhere near complete. Furthermore we will argue that the paths many scientists have taken to piece the puzzle together are too influenced by ideological trends - deconstruction, cultural criticism, neo-colonial studies - which might actually hinder the completion because the questions these trends encourage are the wrong ones.
In the first three chapters we will deal with the state of the sciences, exposing what is known and showing the way some of the most prominent scientists have interpreted these findings. The first chapter will be about evolution; the second and third about physics. In the second half of the book, we will deal with some alternative views to those of the scientists in the first half. We will deal primarily with Teilhard de Chardin. Unlike most books, that offer similar information, however, ours will attempt to address the very holes in the puzzle and offer prospective and prescriptive pathways to a solution. We will not do this on my own. In fact this book is scattered in libraries, in the work of many scientists that unfortunately have been shunned by contemporary scientists because of their views.
