When your dogma requires as much attention as your dog, it’s time to rethink your intellectual pet ownership. In the rethinking, we should look at fundamentalism as it manifests itself in both religion and, yes, maybe also in science.
Ah! Man’s best friend. A critter that wags its tail, settles into predictability, and faithfully protects against threatening strangers: The dog. It becomes one with its owner, the personality of one reflecting the personality of the other. The dog understands the owner’s preferences, even anticipates them, and likewise the owner. The relationship lasts for years. The two species bonded by needs and loyalty, by comfort and security, and by deep emotions give something, one to the other.
Dogma can be like that. We domesticate it, and then we expect it to protect us from intellectual threats. As culture changes, we tend to our dogma, either by defensive measures or subtle changes we impose consciously or unconsciously. It comforts us because we develop an emotional tie to it, just as we relate to pets.
Of course, scientists, if they are worth their apparatus, would dissociate themselves from any form of fundamentalism and dogma. And yet,
Have you ever noticed…
Have you ever noticed the lengths to which some people go to pursue the negation of ideas they don’t favor even when the effort amounts to naught? And have you ever noticed the opposite? That is, have you noticed how owners of dogma, in negating the ideas of others, spend a seemingly inordinate time tending to and defending their own ideas? It’s as though we humans share an occupation centered on dogmas: Working either at chasing others’ dogmas out of our backyards, and/or working at maintaining a fence to keep our dogma corralled.
There are numerous historical examples, such as the geologists of the early twentieth century somewhat disdainfully rejecting Wegener’s “continental drift.” The geology of his day could not admit any variation to isostasy. Then there was the physicist Ernst Mach, who, as John S. Rigden writes, “may have been the last scientist to deny the existence of atoms,” whose existence was demonstrated in Einstein’s May, 2005, paper “On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat.”* Einstein, in turn, did not accept the implication that through “entanglement,” “spooky action at a distance,” as he called it, could occur in a seeming violation of the dogmatic limiting speed of light. It seems that even the brightest among us have difficulty accepting principles that change the intellectual status quo. We get a pet, we become accustomed to the pet, we cherish the pet.
You might argue that we progress intellectually by tearing down the old and constructing the new. That is a valid point. We could say that our ideas work until they don’t, but we have to acknowledge that competing ideas have always coexisted and have “worked” to explain the world as it is. A fundamentalist can go through life just as easily as a humanist. And both, not just fundamentalists, rely on faith of some sort. In that they have something in common; yet, the animosity between the two groups is obvious: Keep your dogma dog out of my yard.
Take atheists and theists. Why the fuss? “Okay, you over here believe; you over there don’t.” So? Make a point if you wish, and then move on. I thought about this when I picked up a recent issue of Skeptic magazine to peruse while I drank coffee at Barnes and Noble. My reading was interrupted by my having to meet my wife, and I was too cheap to buy the magazine on my way out of the store, so I had only a few minutes to skim through an article disproving God’s existence—or should I say, offering the standard disproof in the form of syllogisms and either/or arguments.
As I left the store, I thought of the TV show by Cornerstone Network, Origins. Then I thought of the other TV shows that bear the titles Origin and Origins, the secular versions that offer alternative explanations for our existence, our ethics, and our natural and human history. The atheists would argue that Cornerstone Network’s episodes are based on the intractable dogma of fundamentalism, whereas the secular shows are based on facts uncovered by scientific inquiry. That would seem reasonable from a humanist point of view, but then, regardless of their faith, the Cornerstone people keep pointing out gaps in and debates about cosmic origin science, accusing the scientists of their own reliance on faith.
Thanks, YouTube, the Web, and online streaming for allowing me to see bits (all I had the patience to watch) of the various programs labeled Origins. Let me review the one centered on a literal acceptance of the Bible first. In the episode “Creation to Christ: The Old Testament in a Nutshell,” a two-part video featuring Jay Seegert, dinosaurs are placed on a 6,000-year timeline as are the sedimentary rocks—both fossiliferous and tectonically distorted. ** Apparently, according to Seegert, dinosaurs lived contemporaneously with Adam and Eve, having been created as part of the “land animals” on the Sixth Day, and the fossiliferous rocks were deposited during the Deluge of Noah’s time. Seegert argues that the emplacement of fossils found on tall mountains occurred at the time of the Flood and that the folded rocks occurred while the sediments were still “soft” and un-lithified. Seegert also states that the Bible records an orogeny (worldwide?) shortly after the Flood. I looked through Genesis, but I don’t know where that orogeny is recorded. And while I looked, I stumbled on Noah’s sacrificing animals: “he offered holocausts on the altar.” Hmnn. Seegert doesn’t mention that after Noah saved the animals, he stepped off the Ark, and “he took of every clean animal and of every clean bird” for those sacrifices. Okay. You get the point. Big hole in the dogmatic explanation. Did those animals Noah worked so hard to save go extinct at his altar?
Any humanist/atheist is going to look for the contradictions, the faulty logic, and the leaps of faith required by the Biblical account. In turn, Seegert represents fundamentalist thinking in saying that those humanists/atheists simply take on faith that some soft tissue in a dinosaur bone was able to survive millions of years in the ground or that the discovery of carbon-14 in some dinosaur bone doesn’t disprove their millions-of-years timeline. There’s no corpus callosum to connect the two sides of the issues.
And then there’s the origin of the Cosmos in the dogma of modern science. The Big Bang makes sense in light of the COBE and WMAP images of the microwave background discovered by Penzias and Wilson and Hubble’s discovery of an expansion of the universe. But here again, we run into some gaps in the dogma, enough of them that some have injected eternal universes, virtual particles in a vacuum, an unprovable eternal Universe, or some other mechanism to account for the origin of Everything. For a while, the dogma surrounding the Big Bang was established, but the questions that have since arisen center in part on our inability “to see” the universe as it was before 300,000 years after the Big Bang. That limitation keeps us in the dark and makes formal math our only tool of scientific observation. And in the dark, we tend to speculate and rely on our faith in our speculations when they cannot be experimentally proved.
Now, I go back to the fuss. All the arguing is for naught. Theists and atheists rarely alter their opposing beliefs. Why spend the time in arguing? Why go to the great lengths of publishing magazines or producing videos that devote so much energy to attacking the opponents’ dogmas? Aren’t both sides preaching (or lecturing) to captive and sympathetic audiences (or, preaching to the choir)? Both sides also argue syllogistically. I suppose such arguing has some validity, but in my viewing of both, I see ellipsis marks within the syllogisms.
Finally, in driving to pick up my wife, I wondered how far back humans have relied on dogs and dogma. Apparently, after dogs diverged from wolves, humans started to develop an attachment to them, and dogs, seeing a good deal, decided that life in the encampment was better than life in the wild. Dogmas probably followed closely behind if burial of a dog with a human indicates some religious tendencies in the vicinity of Oberkassel, Bonn in Germany about 14 or 15 millennia ago. Am I taking this supposed faith on faith? Why bury a dog with a human? Is my assumption provable? Does it account for the closeness of the pet and the significance of the joint burial? Am I doing archaeological “science” by assuming or hypothesizing a dogmatic faith in the minds of the ancient people?
Eventually, just as dogs settled into the daily lives of peoples around the world, dogmas did likewise. And then the fuss started. Socrates had to go, Giordano Bruno, too, for questioning the dogmas of their day. In science, the human sacrifices—and career sacrifices—have been numerous, especially when some upstart like an Alfred Wegener comes along to suggest the scientific dogma of the day is erroneous or incomplete.
Eventually, dogmas become so entrenched in science that they quash either by intent or accident the potential for the discovery of alternate explanations. Take string theory, for example. Peter Woit takes the “theory” to task in his Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law. *** There’s a whole theoretical industry built on string theory, so that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, physicists seeking jobs as researchers and professors in “elite” physics departments were more likely to gain employment if their focus was string theory. String theory was becoming the “dogma” of the time. But as Woit notes, “superstring theory is at the moment unarguably an example of a theory that can’t be falsified, since it makes no predictions” (207). Remember Karl Popper’s dictum about falsification. If a science isn’t falsifiable, it ain’t science. So, for all its intricate mathematics, what is string theory if it offers no current possibility for testing? Does it rely on an entrenched dogma? Where’s the connection to what you and I might call experimental science? Sure, the math is impressive, but then it’s math. And I have to ask if we are back to the questions asked by the ancient Greek Pythagoreans and Aristotle: Is mathematics the world reality?
String theorists haven’t been alone in accepting something beyond experimentation. Woit quotes a 67-year-old Einstein, who writes, “I would like to state a theorem which at present can not be based upon anything more than upon a faith in the simplicity, i.e., intelligibility, of nature…” (2). Later in his book, Woit discusses Einstein’s refusal to incorporate quantum mechanics in his attempt to discover a unity through classical field theories. Woit writes, “genius is not protection against making the mistake of devoting decades of one’s life to an idea that has no chance of success” (181). We could say the same for the many geniuses who have proposed a fundamentalist dogma.
Is there dogma in science? Apparently. Is there dogma in religion? Definitely. Are both kinds of dogma comforting? Yes, like pets. All those string theorists doing all those complicated math problems centered on six, or ten, or more than 200 dimensions they’ll never see, and all those cosmologists who accept a holographic universe or a multiverse, branes, and virtual particles they will never see, find comfort in what they are doing. Yes, their math has added a little to the Standard Model, but it hasn't given us the reality they say exists beyond our experience. Their adherence to their favored dogmas and their long-term commitments to extolling their "theory's" qualities imbue them with a comfortable feeling. The "faithful" string theorist will, without a chance of running an experiment, remain faithful to the end of a career. “Here, Fido.” Faithful is a good name for a pet. But maybe the pet owners should also be called Fido. Makes me wonder whether humans, regardless of their leaning toward or away from religion, have become the pets of dogmas.
*Rigden, John S. Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness. Cambridge. Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 72.
**Origins: “Creation to Christ, part 1,” http://origins.ctvn.org/
Ah! Man’s best friend. A critter that wags its tail, settles into predictability, and faithfully protects against threatening strangers: The dog. It becomes one with its owner, the personality of one reflecting the personality of the other. The dog understands the owner’s preferences, even anticipates them, and likewise the owner. The relationship lasts for years. The two species bonded by needs and loyalty, by comfort and security, and by deep emotions give something, one to the other.
Dogma can be like that. We domesticate it, and then we expect it to protect us from intellectual threats. As culture changes, we tend to our dogma, either by defensive measures or subtle changes we impose consciously or unconsciously. It comforts us because we develop an emotional tie to it, just as we relate to pets.
Of course, scientists, if they are worth their apparatus, would dissociate themselves from any form of fundamentalism and dogma. And yet,
Have you ever noticed…
Have you ever noticed the lengths to which some people go to pursue the negation of ideas they don’t favor even when the effort amounts to naught? And have you ever noticed the opposite? That is, have you noticed how owners of dogma, in negating the ideas of others, spend a seemingly inordinate time tending to and defending their own ideas? It’s as though we humans share an occupation centered on dogmas: Working either at chasing others’ dogmas out of our backyards, and/or working at maintaining a fence to keep our dogma corralled.
There are numerous historical examples, such as the geologists of the early twentieth century somewhat disdainfully rejecting Wegener’s “continental drift.” The geology of his day could not admit any variation to isostasy. Then there was the physicist Ernst Mach, who, as John S. Rigden writes, “may have been the last scientist to deny the existence of atoms,” whose existence was demonstrated in Einstein’s May, 2005, paper “On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat.”* Einstein, in turn, did not accept the implication that through “entanglement,” “spooky action at a distance,” as he called it, could occur in a seeming violation of the dogmatic limiting speed of light. It seems that even the brightest among us have difficulty accepting principles that change the intellectual status quo. We get a pet, we become accustomed to the pet, we cherish the pet.
You might argue that we progress intellectually by tearing down the old and constructing the new. That is a valid point. We could say that our ideas work until they don’t, but we have to acknowledge that competing ideas have always coexisted and have “worked” to explain the world as it is. A fundamentalist can go through life just as easily as a humanist. And both, not just fundamentalists, rely on faith of some sort. In that they have something in common; yet, the animosity between the two groups is obvious: Keep your dogma dog out of my yard.
Take atheists and theists. Why the fuss? “Okay, you over here believe; you over there don’t.” So? Make a point if you wish, and then move on. I thought about this when I picked up a recent issue of Skeptic magazine to peruse while I drank coffee at Barnes and Noble. My reading was interrupted by my having to meet my wife, and I was too cheap to buy the magazine on my way out of the store, so I had only a few minutes to skim through an article disproving God’s existence—or should I say, offering the standard disproof in the form of syllogisms and either/or arguments.
As I left the store, I thought of the TV show by Cornerstone Network, Origins. Then I thought of the other TV shows that bear the titles Origin and Origins, the secular versions that offer alternative explanations for our existence, our ethics, and our natural and human history. The atheists would argue that Cornerstone Network’s episodes are based on the intractable dogma of fundamentalism, whereas the secular shows are based on facts uncovered by scientific inquiry. That would seem reasonable from a humanist point of view, but then, regardless of their faith, the Cornerstone people keep pointing out gaps in and debates about cosmic origin science, accusing the scientists of their own reliance on faith.
Thanks, YouTube, the Web, and online streaming for allowing me to see bits (all I had the patience to watch) of the various programs labeled Origins. Let me review the one centered on a literal acceptance of the Bible first. In the episode “Creation to Christ: The Old Testament in a Nutshell,” a two-part video featuring Jay Seegert, dinosaurs are placed on a 6,000-year timeline as are the sedimentary rocks—both fossiliferous and tectonically distorted. ** Apparently, according to Seegert, dinosaurs lived contemporaneously with Adam and Eve, having been created as part of the “land animals” on the Sixth Day, and the fossiliferous rocks were deposited during the Deluge of Noah’s time. Seegert argues that the emplacement of fossils found on tall mountains occurred at the time of the Flood and that the folded rocks occurred while the sediments were still “soft” and un-lithified. Seegert also states that the Bible records an orogeny (worldwide?) shortly after the Flood. I looked through Genesis, but I don’t know where that orogeny is recorded. And while I looked, I stumbled on Noah’s sacrificing animals: “he offered holocausts on the altar.” Hmnn. Seegert doesn’t mention that after Noah saved the animals, he stepped off the Ark, and “he took of every clean animal and of every clean bird” for those sacrifices. Okay. You get the point. Big hole in the dogmatic explanation. Did those animals Noah worked so hard to save go extinct at his altar?
Any humanist/atheist is going to look for the contradictions, the faulty logic, and the leaps of faith required by the Biblical account. In turn, Seegert represents fundamentalist thinking in saying that those humanists/atheists simply take on faith that some soft tissue in a dinosaur bone was able to survive millions of years in the ground or that the discovery of carbon-14 in some dinosaur bone doesn’t disprove their millions-of-years timeline. There’s no corpus callosum to connect the two sides of the issues.
And then there’s the origin of the Cosmos in the dogma of modern science. The Big Bang makes sense in light of the COBE and WMAP images of the microwave background discovered by Penzias and Wilson and Hubble’s discovery of an expansion of the universe. But here again, we run into some gaps in the dogma, enough of them that some have injected eternal universes, virtual particles in a vacuum, an unprovable eternal Universe, or some other mechanism to account for the origin of Everything. For a while, the dogma surrounding the Big Bang was established, but the questions that have since arisen center in part on our inability “to see” the universe as it was before 300,000 years after the Big Bang. That limitation keeps us in the dark and makes formal math our only tool of scientific observation. And in the dark, we tend to speculate and rely on our faith in our speculations when they cannot be experimentally proved.
Now, I go back to the fuss. All the arguing is for naught. Theists and atheists rarely alter their opposing beliefs. Why spend the time in arguing? Why go to the great lengths of publishing magazines or producing videos that devote so much energy to attacking the opponents’ dogmas? Aren’t both sides preaching (or lecturing) to captive and sympathetic audiences (or, preaching to the choir)? Both sides also argue syllogistically. I suppose such arguing has some validity, but in my viewing of both, I see ellipsis marks within the syllogisms.
Finally, in driving to pick up my wife, I wondered how far back humans have relied on dogs and dogma. Apparently, after dogs diverged from wolves, humans started to develop an attachment to them, and dogs, seeing a good deal, decided that life in the encampment was better than life in the wild. Dogmas probably followed closely behind if burial of a dog with a human indicates some religious tendencies in the vicinity of Oberkassel, Bonn in Germany about 14 or 15 millennia ago. Am I taking this supposed faith on faith? Why bury a dog with a human? Is my assumption provable? Does it account for the closeness of the pet and the significance of the joint burial? Am I doing archaeological “science” by assuming or hypothesizing a dogmatic faith in the minds of the ancient people?
Eventually, just as dogs settled into the daily lives of peoples around the world, dogmas did likewise. And then the fuss started. Socrates had to go, Giordano Bruno, too, for questioning the dogmas of their day. In science, the human sacrifices—and career sacrifices—have been numerous, especially when some upstart like an Alfred Wegener comes along to suggest the scientific dogma of the day is erroneous or incomplete.
Eventually, dogmas become so entrenched in science that they quash either by intent or accident the potential for the discovery of alternate explanations. Take string theory, for example. Peter Woit takes the “theory” to task in his Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law. *** There’s a whole theoretical industry built on string theory, so that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, physicists seeking jobs as researchers and professors in “elite” physics departments were more likely to gain employment if their focus was string theory. String theory was becoming the “dogma” of the time. But as Woit notes, “superstring theory is at the moment unarguably an example of a theory that can’t be falsified, since it makes no predictions” (207). Remember Karl Popper’s dictum about falsification. If a science isn’t falsifiable, it ain’t science. So, for all its intricate mathematics, what is string theory if it offers no current possibility for testing? Does it rely on an entrenched dogma? Where’s the connection to what you and I might call experimental science? Sure, the math is impressive, but then it’s math. And I have to ask if we are back to the questions asked by the ancient Greek Pythagoreans and Aristotle: Is mathematics the world reality?
String theorists haven’t been alone in accepting something beyond experimentation. Woit quotes a 67-year-old Einstein, who writes, “I would like to state a theorem which at present can not be based upon anything more than upon a faith in the simplicity, i.e., intelligibility, of nature…” (2). Later in his book, Woit discusses Einstein’s refusal to incorporate quantum mechanics in his attempt to discover a unity through classical field theories. Woit writes, “genius is not protection against making the mistake of devoting decades of one’s life to an idea that has no chance of success” (181). We could say the same for the many geniuses who have proposed a fundamentalist dogma.
Is there dogma in science? Apparently. Is there dogma in religion? Definitely. Are both kinds of dogma comforting? Yes, like pets. All those string theorists doing all those complicated math problems centered on six, or ten, or more than 200 dimensions they’ll never see, and all those cosmologists who accept a holographic universe or a multiverse, branes, and virtual particles they will never see, find comfort in what they are doing. Yes, their math has added a little to the Standard Model, but it hasn't given us the reality they say exists beyond our experience. Their adherence to their favored dogmas and their long-term commitments to extolling their "theory's" qualities imbue them with a comfortable feeling. The "faithful" string theorist will, without a chance of running an experiment, remain faithful to the end of a career. “Here, Fido.” Faithful is a good name for a pet. But maybe the pet owners should also be called Fido. Makes me wonder whether humans, regardless of their leaning toward or away from religion, have become the pets of dogmas.
*Rigden, John S. Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness. Cambridge. Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 72.
**Origins: “Creation to Christ, part 1,” http://origins.ctvn.org/
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