SCIENCE IS THE BEST THING HUMAN BEINGS HAVE GOING FOR THEM BUT IT IS NOT ENOUGH!

I tell you this book, The Passion of the Western Mind, Understanding the ideas that have shaped our worldview is a masterpiece.

In the book, Professor Tarmas gave us a review of the origin and trajectory of Western philosophy and science. This is a must-read book, if you have not read it, please endeavor to read it. It gave the reader a summary of Western religion, philosophy, literature, and science. The language is simple prose hence it is an easy read.

He began by reviewing the Greek world that gave birth to what we now call Western philosophy, and reviewed Plato and Aristotle and progressed to Roman philosophers, the little there were; Romans gave us practical men who understood military and governmental matters but not philosophers; he then talked about the fall of the Roman empire, the rise of the Roman Catholic Church and its dampening effect on philosophy, the dark ages that resulted when thinking was eschewed, then the Renaissance, the rebirth of Greek thinking in the Western world.

The Renaissance gave rise to the modern university (Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Bologna, Heidelberg, etc.) and segued to the French Enlightenment.

He reviewed the giants that insisted on using pure reason to solve human problems, such as Rene Descartes, Blaise Pascall, Denis Diderot, Voltaire, Jean Jacque Rousseau, Henry Bergson, Saint Simione, August Comte, and the impact of these folks on English thinkers whom he reviewed, such men as Francis Bacon, George Berkely, David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Mill, John Stuart Mill, and the German idealistic philosophers, such as Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, George Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Frederick Nietzsche, Ludwig Feuerbach, and the few American thinkers such as William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Thoreau.

He reviewed events in the Western world that shaped our world, such as the Reformation of the Catholic Church and those who led it (Martin Luther, John Calvin, etc.), the Industrial Revolution that began in Britain around 1746, and spread to Germany and France, and eventually to the USA.

The rise of Urbanization following the invention of the factory system.

He then dealt at length with the scientific revolution and reviewed the literature on the giants of that revolution, men such as Nicolas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Christian Huygens, Isaac Newton, John Dalton, Robert Boyle, Thomas Young, Charles Darwin, James Clark Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann, J. J. Thompson, Henri Becquerel, Marie and Piere Curie, Max Plank, Albert Einstein, Ernest Rutherford, Neil Bohr, Louis Broglie, Werner Heisenberg, Emil Schrodinger, Paul Dirac, Max Born, Wolfgang Pauli, James Chadwick, Lise Meitner, Otto Hahn, Alexander Friedman, George Lemaitre, Edwin Hubble, Fred Hoyle, George Gamow, John Wheeler, Murray Gel-Mann, Eugene Wigner, Stephen Weinberg and the other physicists whose findings changed our world view.

Professor Tarnas’s book is a tour de force of who is who in Western physics and chemistry and biology. His point is that these men gave the world ideas that have made it a different place.

I am not here to merely review his excellent book but to look at his take on science. He believes that science has reached a crisis point and that folks are losing interest in their hitherto naïve belief that science will solve all their problems. This gradual realization that science is very good in understanding physics, matter, space, and time and not so good in helping us to answer the most important questions in our lives, such as who are we, where we come from, where we go to when we die or is death the end of us has taken away science’s innocence.

Sciences' inability to answer the question of human consciousness, whether it is an accident and if it is, how did matter produce a self that understands matter, well, there are questions that science seems unable to understand, at this time, anyway, and that has led some folks to despair of the exaggerated expectation they had from science and return to nihilism.

I am going to talk about this problem because it lies in my area of interest, the interface of philosophy, psychology, and physics (science).

Let us first get a clear picture of what science is and is not. Science is not the theories posited by scientists but the process through which they got those ideas about phenomena. The scientific method is what science is, not the conclusion of science itself.

The scientific method, most scientists agree, means positing a hypothesis that one observes and that anyone who chooses to do so can observe, verify, test, experiment on, and then reach certain conclusions that can be replicated anywhere in the world by anyone following that methodological approach to phenomena.

Consider. Water is composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. To find out perform an experiment that demonstrates that the hypothesis is true. We can boil water and see it turn into steam and the steam, gas, can be separated into hydrogen and oxygen. We see two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen.

But have we understood what water is? Of course, we have not. The atoms found in hydrogen and oxygen and all the ninety-two elements in nature, plus the twenty synthetic ones, found on Chemistry’s periodic table, are composed of electrons that circle a nucleus, a nucleus that contains protons and neutrons.

The number of electrons, protons, and neutrons in an element tells us what kind of element it is. Hydrogen, for example, has one electron and one proton (some of its isotopes have one or two neutrons). Helium has two electrons, two protons, and two neutrons; carbon has six electrons, six protons, and six neutrons; nitrogen has seven electrons, seven protons, and seven neutrons; oxygen has eight electrons, eight protons, and eight neutrons…the numbers of the particles inside atoms keep increasing until you get to the heaviest element, uranium with ninety-two electrons, ninety-two protons, and one hundred and forty-six neutrons.

Protons and neutrons are held in the nucleus of atoms by the strong nuclear force and can be broken by the weak nuclear force; the force of electromagnetism attracts the electron to the nucleus, and the force of gravity operates in there, preventing electrons from collapsing into the nucleus.

We can break atoms into their elementary particles of electrons, protons, and neutrons. We can go further, with additional heat energy breaking protons and neutrons into quarks and quarks to light; electrons are light with negligible mass and with heat will be reduced to light.

So, what then is water? Water is a phenomenon that begins as light energy but somehow transforms into hydrogen and oxygen.

As Albert Einstein told us in his famous equation, energy and matter are the same phenomena in different states.

You can transform energy into matter and transform matter into energy. So, where did matter and energy come from (and anti-matter)?

Physics takes us to the state of singularity, the light energy that 13.8 billion years ago, came out of nowhere and nothing and exploded into photons and photons immediately combined into quarks and electrons; quarks combined into protons and neutrons. Neutrons and protons combine into nuclei.

400, 000 years later, nuclei captured electrons and formed atoms (hydrogen, helium, lithium, the simplest atoms; heavier atoms were formed inside stars; anything beyond iron was formed during supernova when stars explode and die).

The universe transited from plasma to hydrogen atoms in gaseous form. Over millions of years, hydrogen separated into clumps and gravitational pulls pressured each clump inwards and the heat produced led to the fusion of hydrogen into helium, and stars are born.

A star is a clump of hydrogen in whose core hot temperature and pressure lead to the fusion of hydrogen to helium. Light and heat are the by-products of this nucleosynthesis. That light escapes from the star and we see it on earth as stars.

There are trillions and trillions of stars; stars are grouped into galaxies and galaxies contain billions of stars. Some stars have planets orbiting them.

Our Milky Way galaxy contains over two hundred billion stars. At the tail end of this spiral galaxy, where it is neither too hot nor too cold, the Goldilocks region, is a star called Solar, Sun; it has nine planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto), asteroids, and comets orbiting it.

On one of those planets, Earth somehow water formed (brought to it by frozen comets).

In the oceans of the water on planet Earth, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, potassium, magnesium, iron, phosphor, sulfur, and copper (altogether sixty-four elements) gathered, and light from thunder brought heat that combined them into the material from which biological life forms emerged.

First, single-celled organisms formed. Those are combined into multicellular organisms, in plants and animals, and eventually in human beings. Charles Darwin thought that pure evolution produced human beings.

The stars are expanding due to dark energy and dark matter slows the expansion (dark energy constitutes 73% of the universe and dark matter constitutes 23% of the universe, and we do not know what this 96% of the universe is) but in trillions of years, the stars and galaxies will be so separated from each other that all the stars explode, die, and shatter into elements, and the elements decay to their constituent particles and the last particle to decay will be protons.

Thus, in time, all material things will decay to energy and cold light, and the universe will end in a Big Chill. This is what science says.

How does what science say about the future of the universe make you feel?

It makes one feel that our lives are the products of accidents, chance, and randomness, hence a meaningless and purposeless existence.

Do you like to feel that way or does something in you tell you that we are not merely the product of accidents, and if not, what are we?

Science does not have an answer for us, so grind your teeth and live a meaningless existence. Your ancestors believed in magic, and gods, and those gave them hope for living but science has destroyed our gods, so we have nowhere to derive hope. We cannot return to magic, or can we?

CRITICISM OF SCIENCE

But before you give up and commit suicide do read Karl Popper's book on Conjectures and Refutations, written in the 1930s. Has science explained anything to us?

Let us see. We do posit conjectures on the nature of things and some of those conjectures seem to explain aspects of the world.

Who is interpreting phenomena? Us. Are we objective or are we projecting our views to phenomena?

We have not answered the ontological, epistemological, and metaphysical questions that philosophy tries to answer.

In the 1960s Thomas Kuhn told us that science has paradigms of reality that our present mind can accept but this is not all there is to reality.

Paradigms do change. All that we today call science, in the future may change, and we discard them, and new paradigms are formed.

If so, is there such a thing as an objective reality or is reality what we say that it is, a scientific construct, a social construct, or an individual’s construct?

If objective reality does not exist, how do we know that George Berkeley was not correct in saying that the world is a kind of dream in our minds?

How do you know that what you call the external world exists apart from you? At night you sleep and dream and see a world that looks like the day world. Are you sure that the day world is not also a dream? Are you sure? Where is your proof? The night dream is a solo dream by the individual; the day world is a shared collective dream by all of us (?).

We do not know anything for sure or do we, how do you know that we know things for sure? I do not know what the truth or reality is, do you? You do not know what reality is unless you take your deluded ideas as reality.

Has science then answered key questions for us or are we fooling ourselves? Who is fooling whom?

Yes, science has given us impressive gadgets, such as telephones, televisions, refrigerators, smartphones, computers, automobiles, trains, airplanes, artificial intelligence.

There is no doubt that science is useful because it has improved our physical lives. This blessing is mixed.

Science improving our lives and prolonging them has given us overpopulation. There are now over eight billion people on Earth and growing. Can we feed them, or will too many people trying to eke out food from the soil exhaust the soil, and the world turn into a desert? Like the dodo bird, we may all die off from the good that science did to us!

We are polluting our environment at an alarming rate; will the damage to the climate bring our end? Consider the ozone layer that moderates the impact of the sun on Earth, if it is destroyed would the Earth not be fried, and we die off?

Understanding the nucleus of atoms led us to devise nuclear weapons. We now have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times. Is this good? Has science not given us a mixed blessing?

People sense all this and are no longer blindly enchanted with science; many people have chosen to return to pure magic and primitivity.

Romanticism does not change the trajectory of our lives; you may read beautiful poetry on reality but that does not change our lives; we are born, live for a hundred years and die and our bodies decay to the elements that composed them, which decay to subatomic particles which decay to light.

But where did that initial light that transformed to matter come from and where did consciousness come from? Physics cannot answer those questions; therefore, folks are back to square one. They now see science as a mixed blessing and yearn for the past, the old when their ancestors believed in magic and lived happily and died from assorted bacteria, viruses, and fungi. Are we any better than our ancestors?

When the French Enlightenment, that is, emphasis on rationalism, removed all the traditional props that gave life false meaning, such as religious illusions about life, folks despaired and found solace in art; they returned to romanticism, to literature that is soothing to the mind.

Art makes our bleak, impersonal world seem beautiful to look at, but art does not change the ugliness of existence; it merely makes it beautiful to look at.

We are at a similar stage in our cultural evolution. We had found some promise in science and went with science, and it improved our physical lives but now science does not make our lives better than magic made the lives of our ancestors better.

Make no mistake about it, soon, science and technology will give us the means to travel to the exoplanets, to other galaxies, to every part of the universe and indeed enable us to travel to the past and future and in time enable us to travel to other universes (the concept of multiverse posits that there are infinite universes).

All these are means of entertaining us; they are like toys that depressed children employ to make them temporarily forget their underlying depression (psychiatry fills their brains and bodies with anti-depression medication and other psychotropic medications that fry their brains, and destroy their livers and kidneys, and shorten their lives).

So, where do we go from here?

The individual is just going to have to try to figure out a way to make his life meaningful. I find solace in the philosophy of existentialism.

Existentialism asks people to do what they have an aptitude for and have an interest in doing; this enables people to forget the desperate nature of human existence.

In sum, science gives us answers on material things, and, to my mind, this is the best thing that has happened to us, but it is not enough because man does not live by bread alone.

Doubt, despite Descartes's romanticism of it, gives us anxiety; certainty gives us peace of mind. But where do we find certainty? There is one thing for sure, science does not give us certainty, not even on matter, space, and time for all it says is temporary.