Spirituality In Politics

Is the Self an Illusion? – Part 2

 

    One of the themes of my previous posts was the bizarre stances taken by modern (materialist/ physicalist) scientists — the strange, crazy things they say (1). There were two posts called The Folly of Modern Neuroscience, and Is the Self an Illusion?

    I’ve just come across a great passage which adds to my theme. It’s by W. Macneile Dixon from The Human Situation. I found it quoted in a book called Reincarnation: The Phoenix Fire Mystery (2), where the editors describe him as “a Confucius of the West”, and say that a New York Times reviewer said “perhaps the most important book of its kind which the twentieth century has yet produced”. (I’m definitely going to do some research on him!)

    So here are his thoughts on this issue:

    “The modern and shortest way with the soul or self is to deny it outright. Can we suppose ‘that a ship might be constructed of such a kind that entirely by itself, without captain or crew, it could sail from place to place for years on end, accommodating itself to varying winds, avoiding shoals, seeking a haven when necessary, and doing all that a normal ship can?’ Yes, we are told, in the human body we have precisely such a ship, which handles itself admirably without captain or navigator.

    “You have heard of this curious doctrine, of this psychology which rejects the psyche and retains only the ‘ology’, the science of the self without the self. Thus, in summary fashion, the great authorities deny and dispose of us, and incidentally of themselves. Where we imagine the ‘I’ or self to be, there is only, they tell us, a series of fleeting impressions, sensations, fancies, pains and pleasures, which succeed each other with amazing rapidity, but without any entity over and above them that, as centre, thinks, feels or desires. It is then a mirage or hallucination, this notion of the self. And an interesting and peculiar illusion, which till yesterday successfully played the impostor’s part upon the whole human race, philosophers included. And not only so, but after this prodigious feat of deception, it laid a snare for itself and caught itself out. This illusion, the most extraordinary that ever was, discovered itself to be an illusion”.

Footnotes:

1) I am engaged in a battle against such ideas. Someone who thinks on similar lines as me is Jack Preston King on medium.com. See, for example, his article Are You Spiritual?

2) Joseph Head and S. L. Cranston (eds.), Julian Press/Crown Publishers, 1977, pp1–2. The whole book is a great resource for anyone interested in these matters.

Is the self an illusion?

    This article is a follow-up to The Folly of Modern Neuroscience. Please note that here, when I use the terms neuroscience or neuroscientists, I am referring to the current trend towards materialism and naturalistic explanations, as outlined there, where examples can be found of the type of thing I’m talking about. I am aware that not all neuroscientists think this way – some examples can be found at the bottom of that article. It would be clumsy, however, to keep repeating this each time I use these terms.

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    The position of neuroscience is that our sense of personal identity, the self, is an illusion. I assume that neuroscientists think this because they can’t see a self when they look at a brain down a microscope, or when examining a brain scan. From my viewpoint, they have been led astray by their materialist assumptions, and therefore cannot contemplate the possibility that the self might be non-material, thus is not generated by the brain.                                                                                                                      The existence of consciousness has been described as the most difficult problem confronting modern science and philosophy. It is also known as the “hard problem”; it is hard because no one can explain how a material organ, the brain, can be responsible for things which appear to be non-material  – thoughts and the self.                                                                                                                                                                When a problem seems insoluble, the possibility has to be contemplated that the wrong question is being asked. Perhaps the brain does not create the self. I’ll just mention in passing that the spiritual explanation for the self is that of a soul (or consciousness, if you prefer) incarnating into a body. I’ll put that thought to one side, however, and consider hypothetically the possibility that these neuroscientists may have got it right, and that the self is indeed an illusion.

    Let’s consider meditation from this perspective, an activity practised by humans for thousands of years. Put simply, the goal of meditation is for the conscious self to control and silence all thought, in order to reach a higher state of consciousness. From the neuroscientific perspective, however, this conscious self is an illusion created by the brain. Yet this conscious self has the desire to silence thoughts, the contents of the mind, which are presumably created by the brain. So the brain has created an illusory entity which wants to stop one of the main activities of the brain, the production of thoughts. Therefore one part of the brain is in conflict with another, even though the first one does not really exist. How would neuroscience explain this?

    I’ll turn now to transgender issues. The self is said to be an illusion, yet this self, which has emerged from a body born biologically as either male or female, and must therefore be genetically, psychologically, and logically either a male or female self, nevertheless feels somehow uncomfortable in its body, and feels that it is “really” a self of the other gender, which would also be an illusion. How can neuroscience explain this?                                                                                                                                                        It is interesting to note that on this issue society completely ignores the opinions of neuroscientists. The logical neuroscientific response would be to tell people with transgender feelings that what they are experiencing is nonsense, that their self is an illusion, so there would be no point in transferring to a different gender, since that self would also be an illusion. Society completely ignores this approach, however, and takes the concerns of these people seriously, offering them counselling, surgical procedures, and hormone therapy.

    I’ll now consider the arts, specifically music. Neuroscience invites us to believe that works of sublime genius like Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, and Bach’s B minor Mass, are the creations of an entity which does not really exist. We are therefore led to assume that it must actually be the brain which creates these works. This suggests that an organ which has evolved through a process of genetic mutation and natural selection without any sense of purpose, according to neo-Darwinian theory to which I assume neuroscientists subscribe, has the desire to create and the capability of producing such works. How does neuroscience explain this?

    I hope that these three examples have persuaded you of the ridiculousness of the neuroscientific position. So it is reasonable to ask whether neuroscientists have really considered the implications of their views. Do they not need to get out more, and study real life in the outside world, instead of studying brains in laboratories?.

    In each of the above examples a spiritual explanation is more credible. In the case of meditation, it is the spiritual consciousness (the soul) which wants to silence all thoughts (thus the mind), and return to its higher state of being. It is not clear to me what exactly is happening spiritually in the case of a transgender person. One possible explanation is that the soul has spent several incarnations in bodies of one gender, and unconscious memories remain which suggest to the person that they “really” belong in a body of the other gender. I suggest that the musical examples would be explained more satisfactorily by a real consciousness trying to communicate and express something profound. Neuroscientists are unwilling to contemplate such explanations, because they are addicted to materialism, and their statements can therefore seem absurd to reasonable people.

    I’ll conclude by quoting the words of an extraordinary scientist, Sir John Eccles. He was one of the leading brain scientists of the twentieth century, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1963. There is therefore no doubt about his credentials (or his sanity). In 1977, with Karl Popper, he published a book with an extraordinary title, in the light of the current discussion, The Self and Its Brain (1). A few years later, with Daniel N. Robinson, he wrote The Wonder of Being Human (2). He says that he was primarily responsible for chapter 3, and there, having discussed consciousness, identity, thus the “hard problem” and other alternative theories, he concluded: “Since materialist solutions fail to account for our experienced uniqueness, we are constrained to attribute the uniqueness of the psyche or soul to a supernatural spiritual creation. … It is the certainty of the inner core of unique individuality that necessitates the ‘Divine creation.’ We submit that no other explanation is tenable (all my emphases); neither the genetic uniqueness with its fantastically impossible lottery nor the environmental differentiations, which do not determine (his emphasis) one’s uniqueness but merely modify it”.

This is one of the bravest statements that I have ever come across by a modern scientist. No wonder materialist neuroscientists are at such a loss to explain the self!

Footnotes:

(1) Publisher Springer-Verlag                                                                                                                                                (2) The Free Press, 1984, the quote is on p43

 

Daniel Dennett part 2

 

    In my first post on Daniel Dennett (which I assume here you have read) I restricted myself to mentioning scientists who had written prior to his book, i.e. those whom he could, and perhaps should, have been aware of. I also mentioned only those from scientific disciplines about which there could be no argument about their inclusion – biologists, geneticists, paleontologists, physicists. I also, with a couple of exceptions, chose scientists who, as far as I could tell, had no strong religious beliefs. I was trying to find scientists whose inclusion Dennett could not reasonably challenge.  Here I won’t be quite so strict, but will offer some supplementary material that I think is relevant to the ongoing debate about the truth, or otherwise, of Darwinian theories.

    Beginning with biologists, there are some whom Dennett would reject because they believe in Intelligent Design. To my mind, however, their arguments (which are scientific, and have nothing to do with religion) are at least as impressive as his. Perhaps the best known is Michael Behe, who caused something of a stir with his book Darwin’s Black Box (1). Also interesting are Michael Denton’s Evolution in Crisis (2),  and Icons of Evolution by Jonathan Wells (3). 

    Mathematicians (I believe they count as scientists) have often been highly critical of Darwinism . The argument usually follows the line that the odds against life as we know it having been organised by blind, purposeless forces, are astronomical beyond astronomical. The most striking comment along these lines was made by the astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, who said that the chances that life on Earth just occurred and evolved by chance are about as unlikely as a typhoon blowing through a junkyard and constructing a Boeing 747 (4).              

                                                                                                              The most significant moment historically was the Wistar Symposium in 1966, its proceedings published as Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (5). This was actually a conference of mathematicians and evolutionary biologists where they aired their differences. In the discussions which have followed, the biologists are usually perceived to have lost the argument, making some ridiculous statements in the process.                                                                                                                         There is more to say about Sir Fred Hoyle, who is described as either an atheist or agnostic, astronomer and mathematician. I have just noted his rejection of Darwinian evolution on the grounds of odds. In a book called Evolution from Space, he and his colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe had a chapter called The Evolutionary Record Leaks Like a Sieve, in which they said: “The general scientific world has been bamboozled into believing that evolution has been proved. Nothing could be further from the truth” (6). The whole book is an attack on Darwinian theory as an explanation for life on Earth. 

    From other related scientific disciplines:

    Stuart Kaufmann, complexity theorist, believes that systems tend to arrange themselves in patterns, not as a result of natural selection. He thinks that Darwinism is only part of the truth (7).                                   Hubert Yockey, information theorist, argues that “the information needed to begin life could not have developed by chance; he suggests that life be considered a given, like matter or energy” (8). More recently he has said that “the origin of life in unknowable” (9).                                                       

    Sir John Eccles, neurophysiologist and Nobel Laureate (that should be enough to make him reputable in Dennett’s eyes), argued that “mind had an existence independent of the brain, that the uniqueness of individual personalities did not depend on genetics, and that science had gone too far in breaking down Man’s belief in his spiritual greatness. He considered that we were creatures with some supernatural meanings and endowed with purpose” (10). Together with Karl Popper, he wrote a book with a very interesting title, The Self and Its Brain (11).

    Philosophers are of course not scientists, but the philosopher Dennett feels competent to declaim about scientific matters, so I’ll take the liberty of mentioning the following:                                                             Eric Tomlin is admittedly not a household name, but his career included being Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Nice. He contributed an article on the subject of evolution to The Encyclopedia of Ignorance (12), called ‘Fallacies of Evolutionary Thinking’. In it he said: “The truth is that evolution was an hypothesis which hardened into dogma before it had been thoroughly analysed. Hence it mothered a number of fallacies” (his italics). His major complaint was that Darwin’s theory caught on because it met a need; it was “an attitude favoured by the sophisticated as a vindication of their belief that existence lacked purpose. Darwinism appealed to them because it provided a way to justify their belief”. He argues that this is just wishful thinking, that there is purpose in Nature. He said: “To ascribe (the development of the human brain and nervous system) to the play of blind forces is to suspend rational judgement and to betray the cause of science”. He actually says that it is “crazy” to do so (italics mine). In case we are in any doubt about what he means by that, he goes on to use the words “psychotic” and “schizophrenic” as clarification.
    These are strong words. I’m sure you can see why I have chosen to include this possibly obscure philosopher. His suggestion is that certain people, while claiming to be rational scientists objectively seeking the truth, are suffering from a severe psychological problem, in his words suspending rational judgement, in my language a desperate need to be atheists, who will say or believe anything in order to maintain their stance.

    Here is another significant philosophical moment. In 2004, before Dennett wrote his book, the renowned life long atheist philosopher Antony Flew, who had previously written Darwinian Evolution (13), arguing for it, announced that he had become a deist and a convert to Intelligent Design, saying that he “had to go where the evidence leads” (14).

    Historically, another book worthy of mention is The Great Evolution Mystery, by Gordon Rattray Taylor (15). He was not a scientist by profession, but was educated at Cambridge University, and went on to become Chief Science Advisor to the BBC, and edited its Horizon series. The book is an extensive critique of neo-Darwinian theory, easily understood by a general reader, with many scientific references.                                                                                                                                                                                                                            So, in addition to all the scientists mentioned in my previous post, the above gives you some further ideas of the situation leading up to 2006 when Dennett wrote. The story has continued afterwards:

     In 2008, the physicist Amit Goswami published Creative Evolution: A Physicist’s Resolution between Darwinism and Intelligent Design. In a chapter called ‘God and a New Biology’ he said “every modern biologist – in moments of total honesty – hears the foundation (of Darwinism) creaking” (16). (If only more biologists could be totally honest!)

    In 2012, the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel caused something of a stir when he published Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (17).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            In 2014, www.thethirdwayofevolution.com was launched, bringing together and publicising the work of scientists who find neo-Darwinian explanations inadequate, without resorting to theories of Intelligent Design or any other form of supernatural intervention. Dozens of names are listed there. Even if the website was only created in 2014, many of them had obviously begun their research and published earlier than 2006, when Dennett wrote. So here we have many other reputable scientists whom he chose to ignore. I especially like the articles of Stephen Talbott; see, for example, ‘Can Darwinian Evolution Be Taken Seriously? ‘ (18). Interestingly, Stuart Kauffman, mentioned above, had previously used the same term, saying that we need to look for a “third way” between a “meaningless reductionism and a transcendental Creator God” (19).    

    I could go on, as the list of doubters in both my posts is far from exhaustive. By now, however, I hope I have convinced you, in case there was any doubt, that Darwinian theories of evolution are highly controversial. So from now on, don’t let anyone tell you, contrary to what Dennett said, that science has proved beyond doubt the truth of Darwinian evolutionary theory. If you do hear that, I hope I have provided you with enough ammunition with which to fight back.

Footnotes:

1. The Free Press, 1996                                                                                                                                                           2. Adler and Adler, 1986. There is also an update Evolution Still in Crisis.                                                                3. Regnery Publishing, 2002                                                                                                                                               4. See The Intelligent Universe, Michael Joseph, 1983, p19                                                                                                5. Wistar Institute Press, 1967                                                                                                                                               6. Evolution from Space, Simon and Schuster, 1981. Quote from the Touchstone edition, 1984, p87                   7. See, for example, The Origins of Order, Oxford University Press, 1993                                                                     8. Information Theory and Molecular Biology, CUP, 1992, chapter 9, quoted by Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, p29                                                                                                                                                                                   9. Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life, Cambridge University Press, 2010,  p182                             10. Malcolm Lazarus, in The Spirit of Science, Floris Books, 1998, p12                                                                         11. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983                                                                                                                                         12. R. Duncan and M. Weston-Smith, eds., Pergamon, 1977, quotes p228, p228, p231                                           13. 1984, Paladin Books. Revised edition 1997, Transaction Publishers.                                                                   14. Interview with Dr. Gary R. Habermas, published in the Winter 2005 issue of “Philosophia Christi” the journal of the Evangelical Philosophical Society (www.biola.edu/philchristi)                                           15. Secker and Warburg, 1983                                                                                                                                             16. Quest Books, 2008, p3.                                                                                                                                                 17. Oxford University Press, 2012                                                                                                                                     18. At time of writing this article is still available on the link but, as the website states, will at some point be retired, since it has been updated by another, ‘Evolution and the Purposes of Life’. This later article will obviously be as interesting as the original.                                                                                                               19. Reinventing the Sacred, Basic Books, 2010, p31

 

 

 

Daniel Dennett

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           2009 marked the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and his name was everywhere in the media. Newspapers carried features, and the national treasure David Attenborough presented a BBC television programme in his honour. The public’s imagination was captured; at the Natural History Museum a special exhibition Darwin’s Big Idea on any given day could be sold out.
    Yet in the media there are sometimes references to polls which reveal the percentage of people who do not believe in evolution. The number is usually perceived to be surprisingly high, given that science has now “firmly established evolution as fact”.
    Why are the public so unconvinced? The scientists’ answer may perhaps be expressed in more polite language than this, but the gist of it is that these people are too stupid to understand, and prefer to cling to false hopes that there may be a God, that life may have meaning, and on the whole don’t take the trouble to study the science, and listen to scientists and their compelling arguments.
    An outstanding example of these points is provided by the well-known atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett in this passage from his anti-religion book Breaking the Spell (1). He talks about “…those who don’t yet appreciate just how well established the theory of evolution by natural selection is. According to a recent survey, only about a quarter of the population of the United States understands that evolution is almost as well established as the fact that water is H20 ”. He calls this an “embarrassing statistic”, and continues: “Could so many people be wrong? Well, there was a time not so long ago when only a small minority of Earth’s inhabitants believed that it was round and that it traveled round the sun… But how, in the face of so much striking confirmation and massive scientific evidence, could so many Americans disbelieve in evolution?” He calls this “the widespread misinforming of the population”, and blames priests, whom the people trust more than scientists. He continues: “There are no reputable scientists who claim this. Not a one. There are plenty of frauds and charlatans, though. …. What about the Scientific Creationists and Intelligent Design proponents who are so vocal and visible in well-publicized campaigns? They have all been carefully and patiently rebutted by conscientious scientists who have taken the trouble to penetrate their smoke screens of propaganda and expose both their shoddy arguments and their apparently deliberate misrepresentations and evasions”. He then invites his readers to educate themselves in evolutionary theory and its critics, which he says “should only take a few months of hard work”, and suggests various texts and websites to study.

    Let’s examine his points in more detail.

    It’s strange that a trained philosopher should include in his arguments an appeal-to-authority which, according to the rules of Logic, is considered to be a flaw or fallacy. Of course it is said, quite reasonably, that this fallacy should not be applied to dismiss the claims of experts, or scientific consensus, which is what Dennett is doing here, or at least thinks he is. Surely, however, it is not inconceivable that a scientific consensus just might be wrong. (Click on link for explanation of these points if required – it’s the second page.) As I’ll show below, there are significant experts who disagree.

    “According to a recent survey, only about a quarter of the population of the US understands that evolution is almost as well established as the fact that water is H20”.
    This is of course nonsense. How many scientific papers or books have been published recently arguing the case that the chemical composition of water is not H20? None. And who can even begin to imagine where they would start their argument?

    “There are no reputable scientists who claim this. Not a one”.
    Dennett is such a fanatic that it is possible that his definition of “reputable” is someone who accepts Darwinian evolution, in which case the statement is mere tautology. I’ll put that idea to one side, however, and mention some of the scientists highly critical of Darwinism, whom Dennett, writing in 2006, had failed to notice. I’ll mention some of their qualifications, so that you can decide whether they are reputable or not.

    I’ll begin with biologists and related disciplines, in approximate chronological order:

    D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form . As this year marks the centenary of its publication, this classic book is a good place to start. Stephen Jay Gould, preeminent palaeontologist, describes the author as “perhaps the greatest polymath of our century”, and the book as “the greatest work of prose in twentieth-century science”. Peter Medawar, eminent biologist, says of it “beyond comparison, the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue” (2). In it Thompson argued that the shapes, forms and growth processes we observe in nature are not an arbitrary result of evolution’s blind searching, but are governed by mathematical rules.                                     Douglas Dewar, ornithologist (and admittedly a Creationist, although one producing books and papers of high scientific quality). See especially Difficulties of the Evolution Theory (3), and The Transformist Illusion (4).
    J. C. Willis, distinguished botanist, Fellow of the Royal Society, honorary doctorate of Science from Harvard. His most significant book is The Course of Evolution (5). He believed that plants are impossible to understand through Darwinian processes.
    Dr. W. R. Thompson, biologist, renowned entomologist, Fellow of the Royal Society. See his introduction to a new edition of The Origin of Species in 1956, where he said: “The modern Darwinian palaeontologists are obliged, just like their predecessors and like Darwin, to water down the facts”. He talks about “fragile towers of hypotheses based on hypotheses, where fact and fiction mingle in an inextricable confusion” (6).
    E. J. H. Corner, Cambridge Professor, Fellow of the Royal Society. See his paper on Evolution in Contemporary Botanical Thought (7). In it he states that “to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favour of special creation”. Please note that this does not make him a Creationist, whose beliefs are inspired by the Bible, rather that the available scientific evidence suggests that. Like many who follow in this list, he believes in evolution, but not neo-Darwinian evolution, which he calls a temple where believers worship. He says of Darwinian literature: “textbooks hoodwink” (p97).
    Professor Andrée Tétry, eminent French biologist. See A General History of the Sciences, volume 4, 1966, section on Evolution (8).
    The interesting case of Gavin de Beer, who was a significant, and usually loyal, Darwinian biologist and embryologist. However, in 1971 he published Homology, the Unsolved Problem, which brought up significant material which challenged neo-Darwinian genetic assumptions about common ancestry (9).
    Pierre-Paul Grassé, one of Europe’s greatest zoologists, who had many academic appointments, and was president of the Académie des Sciences (is that reputable enough?), said that Darwinism is demonstrably false, since it clashes with so many experimental findings. His most important book, and savage attack on Darwinism, is Evolution of Living Organisms (10), where he calls it a “pseudoscience”, “depending on frequent miracles”, and that “Darwinists only look at those facts that fit their theory”.
    Dr. Pierre Gavaudan, botanist and cytologist. He worked on carnivorous plants, and concluded that they could not be explained by Darwinian theory. He called neo-Darwinism an “ingenious romance” (11).
    Richard Lewontin, Harvard Professor of Biology, wrote: “The theory becomes a vacuous exercise in formal logic that has no points of contact with the contingent world. The theory explains nothing because it explains everything” (12). He also said that many organisms “appear to have been carefully and artfully designed”, which is both a challenge to Darwinism and “the chief evidence of a Supreme Designer” (13).
    Rupert Sheldrake, distinguished biologist, former Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology at Clare College Cambridge, and his theories of formative causation and morphogenetic fields. See A New Science of Life (14), and The Presence of the Past (15) .
    Brian Goodwin, professor of Biology, wrote a significant book critical of Darwinism, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots (16), which was awarded the Scientific and Medical Network Book Prize for 1995. (This was obviously not enough to make him reputable in Dennett’s eyes!) He suggested that organisms are dynamic self-organizing processes that obey certain principles of order, thus questioning the importance of natural selection and adaptation as the fundamental concepts of evolution.
    In the same year that Dennett wrote, the physiologist and systems biologist Denis Noble published The Music of Life, Biology Beyond Genes (17). His theory of downward causation would horrify a neo-Darwinist.

    I could go on, but hopefully I have made the point. However, here are two of the more dramatic denunciations which Dennett, writing in 2006, had failed to notice.
    In 1981 Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, read a paper at the American Museum of Natural History in New York (18). He said: “…last year I had a sudden realization. For over twenty years I had thought that I was working on evolution in some way. One morning I woke up, and something had happened in the night, and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years, and there was not one thing I knew about it. That was quite a shock, to learn that one can be so misled for so long.” Because of this experience, he decided to ask his colleagues the same question ‘can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing that you think is true?’ “I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History, and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time”. He declared at the same meeting that evolution was “positively anti-knowledge”, saying that “all my life I had been duped into taking evolution as revealed truth”.
    Along similar lines Lynn Margulis, Distinguished Professor of Botany and Geosciences, said that history will ultimately judge neo-Darwinism as “a minor twentieth-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology” (19). According to Michael Behe,  at one of her public talks Margulis “asks the molecular biologists in the audience to name a single, unambiguous example of the formation of a new species by the accumulation of mutations. Her challenge goes unmet. Proponents of the standard theory, she says, ‘wallow in their zoological, capitalistic, competitive, cost-benefit interpretation of Darwin… Neo-Darwinism, which insists on (the slow accrual of mutations), is in a complete funk’ ” (20).

    I’ll move on now to geneticists critical of Darwinism. Perhaps the most famous amongst them historically was Richard Goldschmidt, a first-class geneticist with impeccable credentials, praised even by his intellectual opponents. He concluded, since many species and genera appear suddenly in the fossil record, differing sharply from earlier groups, that evolution did not proceed by small steps, contrary to Darwin’s thinking, and came up with the notorious concept of “hopeful monsters” (21).
    John McDonald, University of Georgia, wrote: “The results of the last 20 years of research on the genetic basis of adaptation has led us to a great Darwinian paradox. Those (genes) that are obviously variable within natural populations do not seem to lie at the basis of many major adaptive changes, while those (genes) that seemingly do constitute the foundation of many, if not most, major adaptive changes apparently are not variable within natural populations” (his italics) (22). (Gene mutation is of course the foundation of neo-Darwinian theory.)
(See footnote 23 for further examples.)

    Physicists are often very critical of Darwinian theories:

    Paul Davies is a well-known figure, writing books for the general public. See The Cosmic Blueprint (24), and a lecture The Cosmic Blueprint: Self-Organizing Principles of Matter and Energy (25). (The use of the word blueprint is suggestive of the term archetype, which was the theory generally believed before Darwin came along.)
    You may not have heard of the late Glen Schaefer, but he was an impressive figure who held degrees in Mathematical Physics and Quantum Field Theory, with a second career in biology and ecology. He said: “All the sources of information that I’m using are from people who have worked at least twenty-five years and are at the head of their fields, and are in print. If you look into those positions, you will find that there is no evidence for evolution (I assume he means neo-Darwinian) and they say so. We believe it because of our education” (26).
    Professor Henry S. Lipson, distinguished member of the Institute of Physics, in communications to Physics Bulletin 1979 and 1980 (27), made the following significant statements:
    “I have.. tried to see whether biological discoveries over the last thirty years or so fit in with Darwin’s theory. I do not think that they do. To my mind, the theory does not stand up at all.”
    “In fact, evolution became in a sense a scientific religion; almost all scientists have accepted it and many are prepared to ‘bend’ their observations to fit in with it.”
    “the only acceptable explanation (for living matter) is creation”.

    See also Lee Spetner, Not by Chance! Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution (28).

    I should note at this point that evolutionary biologists often have a very poor understanding of the quantum physics revolution, if they are even aware at all of its findings. An exception would be Bruce Lipton, who began as a Darwinian biologist, but said that an understanding of quantum physics liberated him from the antiquated worldview on which Darwinism is based. He wrote that “quantum physics is relevant to biology and that biologists are committing a glaring, scientific error by ignoring its laws”. “We biologists almost universally rely on the outmoded, albeit tidier, Newtonian version of how the world works” (29). (Thus in his view biologists on the whole operate from a starting point of ignorance).

    It is clear therefore, contrary to what Dennett says, that there have always been and remain a significant number of reputable scientists who are critical of, even scathing about, Darwinian theory.

    Let me remind you of another statement by Dennett above. He claims that the opposition to the “truth” of Darwinian theory is religiously motivated – priests, Scientific Creationists and Intelligent Design proponents. This is again wrong, since many of the scientists mentioned above are atheists, agnostics or otherwise indifferent to religion, and believe in evolution (but not neo-Darwinian).
    I’ll pick out two striking examples. Professor Lipson, mentioned above, having said that “the only acceptable explanation (for living matter) is creation”, went on to say that the idea was “anathema” to him, “but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it” (my italics). Distancing himself from biblical Creationism, he said elsewhere “in our present state of knowledge creation is the only answer – but not the crude creation envisaged in Genesis” (30).
    Richard Lewontin, who in the quotes above spoke of design, later wrote, in an extraordinarily revealing and refreshingly honest description of the stance of modern science:
    “…we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door” (31).

    The important point is not whether all these dissenting scientists are right or wrong (although I believe on the whole that they are right), rather that Dennett is either choosing to live in a state of ignorance – an ostrich with his head buried deeply in the sand – or is deliberately lying to the public. Whichever is the case, if atheistic neo-Darwinians need to do this in their attempts to convert the public to their point of view, why should we listen to anything they say?
    As for “smoke screens of propaganda”, “shoddy arguments” and “deliberate misrepresentations and evasions” (Dennett’s words in the quote above), in relation to neo-Darwinian advocates and theorists, the Dennett quote being a prime example, the words pot, kettle and black spring to mind. I wonder if he would be prepared to spend “a few months of hard work” studying all the scientists mentioned above.

Footnotes:
1. Viking, 2006. My quote is taken from the Penguin edition, 2007, p60-61.                                                             2. Gould’s foreward to the Cambridge University Press Canto edition, 1992
3. Edward Arnold, 1931
4. Dehoff Publications, 1957. Described by Alan Hayward as ‘one of the most scholarly and effective exposures of the weaknesses of Darwinism ever written’ (Creation and Evolution: the Facts and the Fallacies, Triangle, 1985, p208).
5. Cambridge University Press, 1940
6. Everyman Library No. 811, Dent
7. Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh & London, 1961
8. Thames & Hudson. English translation of La Science Contemporaine II, ed. René Taton.
9. Oxford University Press, 1971
10. Academic Press Inc., 1977, see pp. 6, 103, 50
11. See his contribution to Mathematical Challenges to the neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution,                    P. S. Moorhead and  M. M. Kaplan, Wistar Institute Press, 1967.
12. The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change, p11-12, quoted by Tom Bethell, Darwin’s House of Cards, p124.
13. “Adaptation”, Scientific American, September 1978, pp. 119-130, quoted by Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe or Where Darwin Went Wrong, Pan, 1982, p84, (accurately I hope, as this one is somewhat surprising, given other things he has said).
14. Blond and Briggs 1981, Anthony Blond 1985
15. HarperCollins, 1988
16. Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1994
17. OUP, 2006
18. Evolution and Creation, November 5th 1981
19. C. Mann, (1991), “Lynn Margulis: Science’s Unruly Earth Mother”, Science, 252, 378-381.
20. Darwin’s Black Box, The Free Press, 1996, p26. I assume he is referring to further material from the reference in footnote 19.
21. He wrote The Material Basis of Evolution, Yale University Press, 1940.
See also “Evolution, as viewed by one geneticist”, 1952, American Scientist 40: 84-98. Norman Macbeth summarises his argument: ‘evolution has obviously proceeded from the higher categories to the lower… whereas the Darwinians teach just the opposite’ (Darwin Retried, Garnstone Press, 1974, p139n).
22. “The Molecular Basis of Adaptation”, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 14, 1984, p93,              quoted by Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, The Free Press, 1996, p28.
23. Behe also mentions evolutionary geneticist George Miklos, and University of California geneticist John Endler.
24. William Heinemann Ltd., 1987
25. Transcribed in The Spirit of Science, David Lorimer (ed.), Floris Books, 1998
26. Ibid., p122, in a lecture entitled A Holistic Philosophy of Nature. It would be interesting to know exactly who he was talking about. Unfortunately, because this is a quote from a lecture transcript, rather than a book, his sources are not provided.
27. Especially vol. 31, No. 4, May 1980, pp 138, 337
28. Judaica Press, 1998
29. The Biology of Belief, Hay House 2005 revised 2008, p69
30. New Scientist, Vol 90 No 1253, May 14th 1981, p452
31. In a January 9th 1997 review of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, still available at time of writing at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/01/09/billions-and-billions-of-demons

The Ongoing Influence of Plato

    Plato was perhaps the most significant of the ancient Greek philosophers. In The Republic (part seven, book seven) he offers us possibly the most enduring piece of philosophy ever written, his allegory of the cave. It’s worth checking out the original, but here is a brief summary of the essential idea.

    Plato compares the human condition to prisoners in a cave, chained so that they can only look straight ahead of them and cannot turn their heads. All they can see is a wall onto which are projected shadows of figures who are in reality standing behind them. Since that is all they have known, they take these shadows to be reality, and do not understand that what they are seeing is something emanating from elsewhere, a by-product of a different level of reality.

    Two obvious points can be made about this. Since shadows are non-material, this is a decisive statement in favour of the philosophy of Idealism – what appears to be matter is an illusion; there is nothing but consciousness. Secondly, this is exactly what Eastern religions have been saying for thousands of years; the word they use is maya (1).

    So how important is Plato and his thinking? Is this allegory just some silly story from ancient time that we can comfortably dismiss? Well, the important twentieth century philosopher Albert North Whitehead said that “the European philosophical tradition…. consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” (2). He was perhaps biased as he had Platonic leanings himself, but his comment does stand up to scrutiny. Others who have expressed themselves in similar language are:

    Helena Blavatsky, the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, who said: “Although twenty-two and a quarter centuries have elapsed since the death of Plato, the great minds of the world are still occupied with his writings. He was, in the fullest sense of the word, the world’s interpreter” (3).

    Ralph Waldo Emerson,  a giant from the world of American spirituality, who said: “Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought. … Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato… …and the thinkers of all civilized nations are his posterity, and are tinged with his mind” (4). 

    Turning now to the allegory of the cave, here are a few significant landmarks from history, beginning with what I perceive to be the most important, the quantum revolution in physics. For centuries there had been speculation about the nature of the ultimate building blocks of matter. In the early twentieth century the necessary technology was developed to investigate the question more fully. As soon as the world’s leading scientists were able to understand what was really going on at the subatomic level, the early quantum physicists took a decidedly Platonic (idealist) turn. The most eye-catching quote, which encapsulates the whole idea perfectly, comes from Sir James Jeans: “The universe is looking less like a great machine, and more like a great thought”. He actually uses Plato’s allegory of the cave as the epigram for his book! (5)

    Equally significant are the thoughts of Sir Arthur Eddington who, clearly thinking of Plato, said: “Matter and all else that is in the physical world have been reduced to a shadowy symbolism”. The material world “which seems so vividly real to us is probed deeply by every device of physical science and at bottom we reach symbols. Its substance has melted into shadow” (both my italics) (6). Werner Heisenberg also made the same point: “…modern physics has definitely decided for Plato. For the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word: they are forms, structures, or – in Plato’s sense – Ideas” (7).

    So an interesting question for modern scientists is, how did Plato manage to be over two thousand years ahead of his time? He understood something essential about the nature of reality, presumably without the technology available to twentieth century scientists. 

    Unsurprisingly, Plato remains a strong influence in spiritual traditions. In Theosophy I have already made reference to Helena Blavatsky (see footnote 1). Annie Besant, another leader of the Theosophical Society, also uses the language of Plato:

    “A history only gives a story of the shadows, whereas a myth gives a story of the substances that cast the shadows”.

    “These multifarious workers in the invisible worlds cast their shadows on physical matter, and these shadows are “things” – the bodies, the objects, that make up the physical universe. These shadows give but a poor idea of the object that casts them”.

    “History is an account, very imperfect and often distorted, of the dance of these shadows in the shadow-world of physical matter” (8).

    St. Paul, while using a different image, here seems to be alluding to the same idea: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then (i.e. when the illusion is removed) we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully” (9). This passage has also been translated: “At present all we see is the baffling reflection of reality; we are like men looking at a landscape in a small mirror. The time will come when we will see reality whole and face to face” (10). This makes the connection with the cave allegory more clearly.

    Islam is also comfortable with the idea. The Sufi writer Abu Bakr Siraj ad-Din (Martin Lings) said: “…if a world did not cast down shadows from above, the worlds below it would vanish altogether, since each world in creation is no more than a tissue of shadow entirely dependent on the archetypes in the world above” (11)..

    Other significant moments from history are:

    Philo Judaeus. We know that the Jewish religion can be very isolationist at times. This highly significant Jewish philosopher nevertheless felt the need to accommodate Jewish thinking with Plato. In the words of David T. Runia: “Philo tried to show that Jews need not be ashamed of their heritage, that loyalty to the Law did not entail a rejection, but precisely a deepening of the ideas of Hellenism” (12). 

    The continuation of Plato’s ideas by Plotinus, Proclus, Porphyry and others from the third century onwards, which we now call Neo-Platonism, although these figures would have called themselves merely Platonists.

    The spectacular Italian Renaissance was a rebirth of ancient traditions, especially Greek ones including Plato.

    One of England’s greatest poets William Blake seemed to live in touch with higher levels. The Blake expert Kathleen Raine describes him as a Platonist (13). In these lines from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake seems to be referring directly to Plato’s allegory: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all thing thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern”.

    I have always thought of the artist René Magritte as being influenced by Plato. He is very keen on the idea of an artist’s painting being indistinguishable from the real image it depicts, an idea which obviously has some relationship to the allegory of the cave. I was fortunate to attend an exhibition recently at the Schirn Gallery in Frankfurt, where I saw his painting La Condition Humaine (The Human Condition), which is one of several works by him on this theme. I had obviously seen it before, but suddenly noticed that it looks out from a cave, inside of which is a fire. This immediately reminded me of Plato’s allegory. It was therefore a pleasant surprise when within two minutes I saw a text on the wall describing the influence of Plato’s allegory on Magritte:

    “(Some philosophers regard visual representations) as products of perceptions that are removed from reality and ultimately amount to nothing more than the play of shadows. We have learned to accept them as real through conventions and customs that hold us captive. Magritte depicted Plato’s allegory expressly in many works by isolating and reassembling its essential elements – the fire and the view from an enclosed space such as a cave, a room, or a house”.

    The film-maker David Lynch seems to be heavily influenced by Plato. Of course, all cinema is a brilliant metaphor for Plato’s cave allegory, since the audience is watching images projected onto a screen, images which do not really exist, but have been created previously elsewhere. The audience can become engrossed in the film, and begin to take it for a real story. Lynch takes this idea and pushes it to its limits in his masterpiece Mulholland Drive, which is an attempt to awaken the audience to the reality of a multi-levelled universe via Plato’s allegory. The opening scene shows a soul emerging against a background of shadows on a wall! (14)  (To listen to my song Mulholland Drive, click on youtube. To find the lyrics with pictures, click on graham.pemberton.com)

    The psychologist and neurologist John R. Smythies called his book on the nature of consciousness The Walls of Plato’s Cave (15). The novelist and writer Graham Dunstan Martin calls his very interesting book on the nature of consciousness Shadows in the Cave, and unsurprisingly begins with an account of Plato’s allegory (16). The distinguished mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose called his book on the nature of consciousness Shadows of the Mind (17), in which he said “We shall find ourselves driven towards a Platonic viewpoint of things”, and argued for the existence of Plato’s world of mathematical forms, the underlying meaning of the cave allegory.

    So Plato’s allegory has been an inspiration for spiritual seekers, scientists, poets, artists, and film-makers. Does this have any relevance for modern times? I believe that it does, especially for science and politics. I’ll return to that topic in a later post.

Footnotes:

1. As Helena Blavatsky says: “Life is thus a dream, rather than a reality. Like the captives in the subterranean cave, described in The Republic, the back is turned to the light, we perceive only the shadows of objects, and think them the actual realities. Is not this the idea of Maya, or the illusion of the senses in physical life, which is so marked a feature in Buddhistical philosophy?” (Isis Unveiled, volume 1, preface Pxiii)

2. Process and Reality, Free Press, 1979, p39

3. Isis Unveiled volume 1, preface Pxi

4. Complete Prose Works, Ward, Lock & Co, 1900, p169. Emerson’s essay on Plato gives some insight as to why he is held in such high regard.

5. The Mysterious Universe, Cambridge University Press, 1930, this edition 1947

6. Science and the Unseen World, 1929, this edition Quaker Books 2007, pp21, 23

7. Quoted by Ken Wilber, Quantum Questions, Shambhala, 1984, p51, in a chapter entitled The Debate between Plato and Democritus

8. Esoteric Christianity, Chapter 5 The Mythic Christ

9. 1. Corinthians 13.12, NRSV translation

10. by J. B. Phillips, quoted in Mysticism: A Study and an Anthology, F. C. Happold, Penguin, 1970, p194

11. The Book of Certainty: The Sufi Doctrine of Faith, Vision and Gnosis, Samuel Weiser, 1974. Quoted by Kenneth Oldmeadow, Traditionalism: Religion in the Light of the Perennial Philosophy, The Sri Lanka Institute of Traditional Studies, 2000, p104  

12. Philo of Alexandria and the Timaeus of Plato, E. J. Brill, Netherlands, 1986, p37

13. William Blake, Thames and Hudson, 1970, p49, p113

14. David Lynch is known to be a long-term Transcendental Meditation practitioner. He talks in terms one would expect of stilling the mind and discovering bliss. His inner journey, however, seems to have given him extraordinary insight into the nature of the psyche, as Mulholland Drive demonstrates. Though the film is deemed cryptic and hard to understand, it was nevertheless voted best film of the millennium in a poll of 177 film critics in 2016.

15. 1994, Ashgate Publishing

16. Arkana, 1990

17. Oxford University Press, 1994. I am using the 2005 Vintage edition, p50, and pp 413-417.