ONCE MORE, DEAR KERNAN, INTO THE BREACH

As I continually run into my frustration with people who want to relativize the debate between science and religion, I find this analysis of the situation by Kernan enlightening. He faced the breakdown of the standards of truth while teaching at Yale and Princeton.

from IN PLATO’S CAVE, p. 273:

“... postmodernism also brought to history... what Gertrude Himmelfarb called, ‘radical skepticism, relativism, and subjectivism that denies not this or that truth about any subject but the very idea of truth as something to aspire to even if it can never be fully attained.’ It became increasingly hard to know what value except disputation the historian could claim for his or her work if facts had become a ‘fetish’ and all methodology ‘problematic’.”

But on the same page in my pen and paper journal, at the top of the page, I come across this reassuring comment by E. O. Wilson:

“The laws of physics are in fact so accurate as to transcend cultural differences.” (CONSILIENCE, p. 49)

“...transcend cultural differences....” Unless, I should add, you’ve the brain of an apish fundamentalist. I can only mock their density. We must laugh them into their kingdom come.


AND, ANYHOW, LET THERE BE LIGHT

In a blinding flash, E. O. Wilson shows again and again how science is trustworthy to the senses of the sensible, as opposed to being only relative truth, and how untrustworthy less hard sources of knowledge can be to the search for truth. When I continually come across these ideas in the writing of scientists, I am amazed at the impenetrable density of the fundamentalist’s gray matter:

“Visible light, we have learned, is not the sole illuminating energy of the universe, as prescientific common sense decreed. It is instead an infinitesimal sliver of electromagnetic radiation, comprising wavelengths of 400 to 700 nanometers (billionths of a meter), within a spectrum that ranges from gamma waves trillions of times shorter to radio waves trillions of times longer. Radiation over most of this span, in wildly varying amounts, continually rains down on our bodies. But without instruments we were oblivious to its existence. Because the human retina is rigged to report only 400—700 nanometers, the unaided brain concludes that only visible light exists.

“Many kinds of animals know better. They live in a different visual world, oblivious to part of the human visible spectrum, sensitive to some wavelengths outside it. Below 400 nanometers, butterflies find flowers and pinpoint pollen and nectar sources by the pattern of ultraviolet rays reflected off the petals. Where we see a plain yellow or white blossom, they see spots and concentric circles in light and dark. The patterns have evolved in plants to guide insect pollinators to the anthers and nectar pools.

“With the aid of appropriate instruments we can now view the world with butterfly eyes. Scientists have entered the visual world of animals and beyond because they understand the electromagnetic spectrum. They can translate any wavelength into visible light and audible sound, and generate most of the spectrum from diverse energy sources. By manipulating selected segments of the electromagnetic spectrum they peer downward to the trajectories of subatomic particles and outward to star birth in distant galaxies whose incoming light dates back to near the beginning of the universe. They (more accurately we, since scientific knowledge is universally available) can visualize matter across thirty-seven orders of magnitude. The largest galactic cluster is larger than the smallest known particle by a factor of the number one with about thirty-seven zeroes following it.

“I mean no disrespect when I say that prescientific people, regardless of their innate genius, could never guess the nature of physical reality beyond the tiny sphere attainable by unaided common sense. Nothing else ever worked, no exercise from myth, revelation, art, trance, or any other conceivable means; and notwithstanding the emotional satisfaction it gives, mysticism, the strongest prescientific probe into the unknown, has yielded zero. No shaman’s spell or fast upon a sacred mountain can summon the electromagnetic spectrum. Prophets of the great religions were kept unaware of its existence, not because of a secretive god but because they lacked the hard-won knowledge of physics.” (CONSILIENCE, pp. 46-47)