Filling The Gaps

Crammed into this past week I was lucky enough to be in several situations that had me contemplating the greatest fragility and complexity of life from a variety of viewpoints. The first was a debate at Intelligence Squared with the topic being “Science Refutes God” (see it here). Truthfully after the greatest debater of our time Christopher Hitchens passed away, this topic is one that I have stopped watching, as no one could do it better. Lawrence Krauss and Michael Shermer being on the pro-side though did convince me that it would be an entertaining evening, which it was. And from the polling the atheists won, which wasn't very surprising to me. Sitting next to me a friend said in regards to the religious side arguing for supernatural interference, and the holy word of the ancient Hebrews, “is this really 2012?”, to which I shrugged. It did seem like a debate that David Hume or Spinoza would have had with some religious leaders in another century. Still the main point remains, and was brought home through a very astute question to both sides: “What would make you change your position on this topic?” The Christians said basically nothing could. It was a matter of faith. Krauss on the other hand made the point that science follows the evidence, and our views as scientists are always changing. If, he said, he walked out of the debate and the stars spelled “you are wrong” in Aramaic, he would indeed be moved by this. The religious side used a very old tactic of explaining that many, in fact most, people have spiritual experiences, as a sort of proof that a consensus makes a truth. This is a bizarre assertion in light of our understanding of science, as people have illusions, old genetic predispositions, hallucinations and many other misleading feelings. Shermer points all of this out nicely. The argument is also intertwined in people’s minds with a moral one, where God is needed for ethics. I find this absurd, as my morals and ethics are strong I think, and those of most of my friends are, and those of secular societies (eg Sweden) are as well. So God really isn't needed to keep us from being bad. Even if the concept of God did make us more moral, it becomes immoral to lie about scientific evidence in order to achieve this. Deception in the name of civility neither works for long, nor is intellectually or ethically acceptable.

Something I think may be newer came up recently as well. It is newer to me at least, as I am only a casual observer of the very disciplined and complicated field of philosophy. In October a group of scientists and philosophers all got together to discuss the topic of “Moving Naturalism Forward.” I was not invited, as the group was especially esteemed, and I am not especially esteemed and would have not contributed anything useful.  Physicist Sean Carroll organized it, and wasn't the only scientist present. Janna Levin, Richard Dawkins, Simon DeDeo, Jerry Coyne, Noble laureate Steven Weinberg and others were there as well. Though the entire thing is 15 hours long, and I haven’t watched all that much of it yet, the sections I did watch seemed especially philosophy focused. This is not surprising as the topics were big ones in the history and present work of philosophy including free-will, morality and meaning. While there were many brilliant philosophical arguments made (I am a big fan of some in the room, especially Rebecca Goldstein), two things surprised me. First was that it seemed decided that scientists need philosophers for some big questions. That may be true, but in a way it is a shame, as scientists should be able to ask their own philosophical questions. This was true of Einstein, Newton, Darwin and just about every other famous scientist we can think of. The philosophers even invoked those names as examples of scientists doing good philosophy, but pointed out that many scientists do not, which is fair enough. Sean Carroll said that he would like philosophers to help understand the implications of Quantum Mechanics, and wishes that they would have done so earlier. That was generous of him I thought, and while I get his point that a new paradigm needs some deep probing, there is no topic more misunderstood by philosophers (at least many) than Quantum Mechanics, so I would in a way prefer that Sean, Janna and the rest of us who use QM, also seek meaning rather than waiting for the philosophical community to weigh in. Actually I think we do, even if that meaning is confined within a specific area of research.

The more upsetting point of these conversations was regarding scientific and philosophical ethical responsibility. Even many of the scientists were swayed by the arguments of Daniel Dennett and others about Free-Will.  I have exhausted the topic in this blog before, so I won’t again, other than to say that as a pure materialist I find that since the rules of everything in the universe are governed by physical reality, so too should humans, including the issue of free-will.  Actually most of the attendees agreed to some extent, though the philosophical argument is nuanced and confusing to a layman of philosophy such as me. The troubling thing was not the ideas of determinism or choice, but that it seemed to me that the agreement was that society could not handle the absence of free –will, whether it was scientifically accurate or not. Dennett and others sited some experiments where people lose a sense of right and wrong when they feel that they have no choice. Coyne disputed these studies, saying that over the long term he would imagine that there is not this effect. Still, there was near consensus that because we do at least feel we have choice, it is better to ignore, or at least put off the scientific possibility that we don’t. This sounds to me a lot like the God argument regarding morals. The suggestion is that morals don’t fall away when we abandon God for a scientific view of the universe based on reason, logic and experiment, but they do if we abandon free-will.  I find this insulting to humanity, and an underestimation in the power of knowledge.

The debate and watching this summit were the bookends of my week- long journey into the understanding of life. In the middle was something very different, and actually had nothing to do with materialism and logic, but rather just about the joy of being alive. It was a Poets House and American Museum of Natural History event which was a conversation between one of my favorite naturalists E.O. Wilson (see a blog I wrote about him here) and the poet Robert Hass, who I had the pleasure of getting to hear and read for the first time, despite his many years of literary fame and success. I immediately wanted to write a blog about the night, but I thought better of it, and instead wrote poetry (some of my poems here. The are admittedly not Hass quality). It seemed that abstraction and metaphor expressed my thoughts better than I could with normal description.

There is one idea that brings this all together for me. It is the title of one of the poems I wrote, and the title of this blog. It is “filling the gaps”. The God of The Gaps is an old expression which is still relevant in many ways. Humans invoke god to fill in the gaps in our scientific knowledge. For some these are also filled by philosophy. For others of us we look to science to fill as many as it possibly can with the understanding that it will certainly fail to fill them all. Rather than creating myths, or even from formalized speculation in the way of logical deductions made by philosophy, I fill these gaps by observing and creating art. Poetry, music, painting and sculpture don’t give concrete answers, but they provide a way to inspire contemplation, learn about ourselves, and visualize aspects of the universe that is still incomprehensible.  I will still read philosophy because it is so challenging and can be enlightening, and I will still do science. What I can’t forget though is what fills those gaps, which is humanities ability to create pictures of truth that we cannot explain any other way.