In my previous post, I ended with the question of whether science was compatible with democracy. Today I want to elaborate on the problem, and perhaps address the comments left by "dmm".  If science is something like a hobby, then a democracy is a great place to do it, for as long as I pay my taxes and don't diminish my neighbor's property value, I can just about do anything I want in my garage.  However, if science is more like a national defense program, it becomes infinitely more complicated, should I want, for example, to build a suitcase nuke in my garage. In truth, it is someplace between these two extremes. The Department of Energy tightly controls and funds fundamental research in particle physics, whereas NASA is involved in just about every aspect of space physics. Perhaps the connections are historical, when nuclear fission and then fusion were state secrets of the War Department, and when satellites were tools of Cold War intelligence.

But solid state physics has always been blatantly commercial. A NYC professor I know holds a patent for making transparent transistors on glass, otherwise known as flat panel displays. He spends 6 months of the year travelling to places like Sony's research facilities in Japan, or LuckyGoldstar facilities in Korea to direct large projects. Commercial contributions to my research, on the other hand, summed to the grand total of $33 this year, collected from royalties on 5 copies of a book I coauthored a while back. If it weren't for government funding there wouldn't be enough space scientists to field a basketball team.

So does that make space physics a branch of the federal government? In 1945 the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Vannevar Bush, made the audacious claim that science was the "endless frontier", combining the indominatable American spirit and its "manifest destiny" into a scientific mission for conquering ignorance forever.  Sixty years later ignorance seems to be making a determined defense, and most research universities have become branch offices of the federal government. It's far from blatant, yet subtle controls are everywhere. If the feds, as was true of the Clinton administration, think nuclear is a four letter word (of three syllables), why research into third generation nuclear power plants comes to a standstill. Not because some edict was made, or scientist "gagged", but because funding just sort of drifted elsewhere, and like an army of Wimpies, scientists followed the money scent wherever it led.  Oh sure, there are scientific panels and recommendations, strategic plans and roadmap activities. But at the end of the day, only those recommendations that fit within the administration guidebook get funded. Like North Korean diplomacy, all this activity is intended to look as if it is science-directed, but in truth it all ends at a government goal.

As an example of this, consider the history of extraterrestrials. To the Greeks, anything moving had a mind or a will, so the the planets were clearly extra-terrestrials of great importance. But the advent of Christianity emptied the heavens of all but angels and God, and the sphere of the Moon became the boundary for biology.  Giordano Bruno was a educated (but lapsed) Dominican priest in those heady years of the 16th century Enlightenment. Encouraged by Copernicus and the rebirth of materialism, he affirmed that the universe was homogeneous, the Sun was simply one more star, and all stars with their own planets. forming an infinite number of solar systems.  Comets were like stars, each comet a world, a permanent celestial body, formed of the four elements. In his search of a tenured position, Bruno holds the dubious distinction of joining and then being excommunicated by just about every European religion--first Catholics, then Calvinists, Anglicans and finally Lutherans--before returning to Italy to apply for a position at Padua. He lost out to one Galileo Galilei, and a bad situation got worse when someone noticed he was on the Inquisition's "most wanted" list, and was burned at the stake in 1600.  Therefore believing in extraterrestrials does have its drawbacks, though in defense of the Inquisition, there were 130 other heresies Bruno also wouldn't recant.

Bruno's ideas didn't go away, and over the subsequent centuries belief in extraterrestrials waxed and waned from doubt to certainty. In 1877 Giovanni Schiaparelli described lines faintly observed through the telescope as "canali", and so was born the persistent myth that there are canals on Mars. In 1938  Orson Welles broadcast a production of the HG Wells novel "The War of the Worlds" wherein belligerent Martians invade earth, and thousands of listeners panicked and tried to flee NYC. So at NASA, when the Apollo era exploration of the Moon ended, the next destination was picked to be Mars. The two Viking spacecraft that landed in 1976 were first baked and scrubbed to avoid contaminating the surface of Mars, and included a suite of experiments deployed to search for life. One was a mass spectrometer designed to bake a scoop of soil and sniff for that "burnt toast" smell of life. Another was a specially prepared petri dish, designed to grow Martian bacteria. As a control, one petri dish was sprinkled with pristine soil, and another with baked soil.

The results? The million dollar nose didn't smell a thing (and some have suggested it had a bad case of clogged sinuses), but the petri dishes were a blooming success. Growth was found, controls were negative, the experiment was repeatable, and positive on both Viking landing sites. And here is where the story gets interesting, and relevant to our discussion of democracy. After an initial jubilent press release, prominent scientists such as Carl Sagan discounted the results, saying "extraordinary theories require extraordinary proof", and the fact that only one experiment showed life was not extraordinary enough. (Subsequent testing on engineering prototypes discovered that the petri dishes were 100,000 times more sensitive than the nose, even were the nose to have clear sinuses.)  Since then, all NASA Mars missions have carried a disclaimer that experiments that search for life will not be funded.  NASA press releases have heavily censored speculation of extraterrestrial life, even censoring proposals that would use existing instrumentation. To this day, most planetologists assert that life has not been detected on Mars, and that Mars probably never ever had life on it since it probably never had liquid water.

What is going on? Clearly the "endless frontier" terminated in a government bureau. But why would that require censure of a scientific theory or experiments? Well since only NASA could go to Mars, and NASA made its preferences known, those in the scientific community who wanted a ride had to adapt, self-censoring anyone who claimed otherwise. A year ago, I would have had a hard time explaining self-censorship to a critical audience, since Americans pride themselves on their independence and objectivity, but name one daily paper in the US that carried images of the Mohammed cartoons, despite having ample historical and legal rights to do so.  So this is where the matter of extraterrestrial life rested, despite 30 years of ongoing NASA Mars missions, until the European Space Agency sent their own probe to Mars. Suddenly we are hearing about water detected below the surface, ice flows, frosty craters, methane gas released into the atmosphere, and biological activity. As Detroit discovered in the 70's, there's nothing like overseas competition to shake up the existing paradigm.

Can there really be life on Mars? As surely as there is life on Antarctica. It isn't about to kill us all with heat rays, but Mars' methane, Titan's amino acids, Europa's rhodopsin, comet Tempel-I's clay all indicate that life truly can be everywhere. Bruno was burned for being a heretic, in part for believing that ubiquitous life is incompatible with Church doctrine, perhaps the censorship of the planetary community comes from the belief that ubiquitous life is incompatible with Darwin's doctrine. Yet recent papers suggest that comets are balls of ice that become bags of water as they approach the Sun, becoming perfect incubators for spreading life throughout the solar system. We may never learn where or how life began, but surely we can study its spread without fear of incineration!

What lessons can we draw from all this? Science is a cultural and social endeavor, despite its efforts to describe an objective and real material world. As science becomes more and more expensive, (the Viking landers cost $1bn in 70's dollars), it can only be done by governments of wealthy nations, wedding science to society while losing much of its objectivity and independence, if it ever really had them. Scientists, then, must choose between lucrative, but socially directed careers, or impoverished but intellectually free hobbies. If they are lucky, they might be able to do both. But if not, each scientist must live with his or her choices, sleeping in the Procrustean bed of their own making. There are many causes for our dyspeptic tempers, only let us not blame the night's poor sleep on the magic bed.

I had the privilege last week, of having lunch with a few scientists that work in or near NOAA's lab in Boulder, CO. The conversation drifted to the blog Junk Science by Steve Milloy, and thence to my colleague, John Christy, who works in my building.  If you ever wanted to read the science or understand what the greenhouse effect is, there's no better source than their Greenhouse Primer. Well both men are famous for being staunch opponents of global warming, and the conversation dismissed their work with winners like "Isn't Junk Science funded by oil companies?" "Yes, and didn't I hear that Christy finally admitted that global warming was occurring?" Then the topic of conversation drifted into other nefarious conspiracies of Republican administrations.

Now there were several things that disturbed me about this conversation. These are all scientists whose work is paid for by the federal government. Yet they were quite willing to assign conspiracies theories to the operation of government research. If anyone should know how federal conspiracies work, it would be these people, all relatively high up on the management ladder.  Further, they had blithely assumed, without any explanation at all, that tainted funding produced tainted research. This requires that scientists lack all ethical training, and/or behave as cynical opportunists. Again, if anyone should know the ethics of scientists it would be these people. Finally, and perhaps least distressing, both statements were false, and could easily be disproved with just a few minutes on the web.

Being a scientist, I know how easy it is to jump to conclusions, make bad assumptions, and otherwise get the facts hopelessly confused. I've done it myself on many occasions, and am always grateful to those who correct me. However I had the suspicion that this was not a matter for gentle correction. I bit my tongue and spent the remainder of the day in a blue funk. For if ad hominem arguments, and "tainted motives" become the standards for evaluating scientific theories, then God help the US of A. Do any of us have pure motives? Do any of us live a blameless life? Then how can research progress at all? Should we not all trade in our lab coats for cassocks and join the new Inquisition?

But this last post on the 4 stages of theory, got me thinking that this new Committee for the Purity of Science, was perhaps damning in a different sort of way. Rather than a demand for ideological purity and a reinstatement of torture for the apostate, what was really going on was projection. These scientists were saying in effect, "We think Milloy and Christy are behaving as we are. We know how we got to our positions of power and privilege, and we suspect they are using the same techniques."  Taken as projection, including the Bush Derangement Syndrome symptoms on display later in the meal, one can only feel embarassed for these people.  Far from being a new Inquisition, it is, perhaps a Freudian Confessional, a plea for someone to help them before they hurt themselves, and hurt their field of science.

That thought cleared the red haze from my eyes, and I began to note something else. Of all topics to use for the Ideological test, why pick global warming? For one thing, it might as well be the Black-Scholes economic theory of stock options for the clarity and evidence and understanding involved. (Did you read that primer above? Were you surprised how little you actually knew about greenhouse gasses?). For another, it was a scare story with a 30-100 year fuse, surely one could find shorter fuse disasters to worry about: AIDS, world overpopulation, famine, bird flu for heaven's sake. Why global warming?

A paper by MIT climatologist, Richard Lindzen, explained it to me.

"Such weak predictions feed and contribute to what I have already described as a societal instability that can cascade the most questionable suggestions of danger into major political responses with massive economic and social consequences."

The whole point of global warming, is not saving the planet, but providing excuse for economic and social changes that transfer power and prestige. Lindzen focusses on the avaricious opportunists in the scientific community, though perhaps the more sinister are the power-hungry IGOs.  It is essential, then, that global warming NOT be a soluble problem, or else the solution might shortcircuit the desired social changes. Greenhouse gas is a red herring, a plausible story, a Reichstag fire, a Chicken Little tale with global consequences.

And that reminded me of another red herring, the Young Earth theory that the world (and universe) is only 6000 to 10,000 years old. Popularly known as "creationism", the view is relatively recent, as documented by Ronald Numbers in The Creationists.  as it took hold within the Fundamentalist subculture around 1960 with the arrival of Whitcomb & Morris' book, The Genesis Flood. What is novel about the young earth doctrine, is that no major denomination or religion had ever used it as a measure of doctrinal purity or doctrinal importance. Yet suddenly, it became a litmus test for orthodoxy. In the grand scheme of things, could one's savior or salvation or sanctification depend on the dating of the book of Genesis? Yet Henry Morris was adamant as he travelled about the country in the church speaking circuit, "It's a question of whether you believe the Bible is inerrant or not."

And that was the key. Seminaries were cranking out plenty of smooth-talking preachers who used all the right words with all the wrong meanings. Fundamentalists wanted a test, a doctrine that was so abhorrent to liberals that they could immediately ascertain ones conservative credentials. At the heart of this doctrine was the rejection of 200 years of geology and science. A progressive would sooner defend the flat earth than this absurd position. And so was born the "young earth" litmus test.

In much the same way, global warming performs all the same functions that a young earth doctrine does. It separates UN believers from UN detractors, it redirects funding and attention to itself and away from historical faultlines of oceanography versus meteorology versus geology, uniting them all behind a common banner. It separates Democrats from Republicans, big government fans from libertarians. It identifies get-along, go-along scientists from the recalcitrant sort, no matter what their specialty. It is the jihad that gives meaning to dry textbooks, purpose to an otherwise purposeless pursuit of knowledge, possessing the seriousness and self-importance of a Communist cell meeting.

In this way, global warming and young earth theories have been smashing successes. What better way to find out if a Christian is a liberal or a conservative, what better way to find out if a scientist is a Republican or a Democrat? But as theology or science, neither is of any great importance. There will never be a "Church of the 6000 year Earth" or field of "Hyperthermoclimatology". Once these tools have served their purpose they will be discarded for the latest litmus test, much like the "Infra/supra lapsarian" debates of two centuries ago, or the Piltdown Man hoax.

So in the spirit of Procrustes, let us not focus on the questionable tactics of a highwayman bent on murder and robbery, but rather on his magic bed. What separates real science from bandwagon politicking? What should we be focussing on, if we wish to avoid Lindzen's social instabilities? How can science interact with society without contamination from power politics? Is peer-reviewed science compatible with democracy? What has gone wrong in America?

Many people have commented on the four stages of a new scientific theory, so that I don't know who originated the observation. At first a new theory is treated as nonsense, obviously untrue, unworthy of comment. The second stage is when a theory has gained enough adherents to be dangerous, a misrepresentation of the facts that must be immediately corrected. The third stage is when a theory is probably true, but irrelevant or inferior in explanatory power and cannot replace the current paradigm. The fourth stage is when it is obviously true, and we knew it all along.

Just today, a colleague read about a paper of his that had been summarized in EOS, the weekly trademagazine of the American Geophysical Union. In the paper, they announced matter-of-factly, organisms extracted from the deep ice of Antarctica were relevant to the organisms that may inhabit Mars or Europa, a moon of Jupiter. Well this colleague has been reprimanded on more than one occasion for making that analogy, and for almost a decade has been publishing in conference proceedings because mainstream journals will not accept his papers. Suddenly, in the pages of EOS, while not a "peer-reviewed" journal, is certainly more than a conference proceeding, his theory surfaces as something we knew all along.

"Congratulations," I told him, "you have now made it to the fourth stage of a new theory!"   Well, I was being optimistic,  because  he has yet to get this paper in  a  *real* peer-reviewed journal, and it may be more difficult than it looks. But the rehabilitation of his theory has clearly begun.

In the same way, EO Wilson, a "foaming-at-the-mouth" materialist in the same vein as Richard Dawkins, is proferring an olive branch to "evangelicals". (This is the book that Scientific American recommended as an alternative to those religious books by Gingerich and Collins. New Scientist even carries a podcast promoting the book. If they will bury the hatchet, Wilson would like to save the planet from destruction by uniting forces with Christians. He even begins his book "Dear Pastor..."  Is he serious? What exactly does he have in common with evangelicals, or have in mind (if he has a mind)? Here's a book review that appeared in Nature, by a paleobiologist, one Simon Morris:


This proposal of Wilson's does not appear to be the behavior of a victor, rather, it is when the battle is going badly, when the arrogance of quick victory gives way to the realization of protracted bloodshed, that such treaties are proposed. Wilson does not yet fully fathom the immensity of the looming defeat of materialism, the tidal surge toward post-modernism; he still thinks he can use bluster and past battles as cover for his biassed appeal. So much so, that if I had to put a number on it, Wilson is between stage 3 and 4 on the new theory trajectory, willing to admit that religion might be a bit more important than he thought, but still not obviously correct.

Morris, the academic at Cambridge and in contrast to the editors at Scientific American, has the British education to pick Wilson apart, demonstrating perhaps that "scientism" is more prevalent in the States. Such a devastating critique hardly needs my help, yet Wilson, and the editors of SA, keep repeating the meme, laughable in its multiple misconceptions, that won't go away; they keep saying that evangelicals, through their apocalyptic faith in the 2nd coming, are ignoring the looming apocalypse of global warming, species extinctions, etc etc. To understand all modernists better, and perhaps even evangelicals, this meme bears analysis.

First off, "evangelicals" are not "fundamentalists". They have been saying this for upwards of 50 years. Fundamentalism, coming from the title of a series of articles around 1910, defined the fundamentals of the Christian faith as a response to German liberalism which apparently had no such factual foundations. German liberalism, in turn, was a submission to Enlightenment rationalism, agreeing that Christianity could never be in conflict with science because Christianity made no factual claims, only emotional, spiritual, ethical or moral claims. So Fundamentalists occupied the high ground of non-negotiable facts that were essential to orthodoxy: the historical deity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, the existence of the immortal soul, the blood atonement for sins, the inerrant and inspired word of God, etc. The pain of holding on to these rocky facts in the gale force winds of Enlightenment skepticism, turned their hands into rigid claws, and every issue became a black-or-white question about belief. They turned inward, and stopped trying to engage the world, developing a whole subculture with its own language and rituals and newspapers and talk circuits, including a great deal of attention to the 2nd coming of Christ when their trials would finally be over.

By 1950, Billy Graham, Carl F H Henry, and similar Christian leaders wanted to reach out to the abandoned world of mainstream Christianity, even if it was tainted by German liberalism. They called themselves "evangelicals" and emphasized the need to contact, to evangelize both the nominally Christian and the unchurched. Schools such as Wheaton College aligned themselves as evangelicals, taught the theory of evolution, and prepared students for medical schools. The prided themselves on engaging the world on its own terms, and distanced themselves as much as possible from their believing but backward fundamentalist brothers. Just this year, many evangelicals including the president of Wheaton College signed a statement that global warming was a serious problem that warranted evangelical concern and response.

So the first mistake in the meme that evangelicals ignore global warming because of the 2nd coming, is confusing evangelicals with fundamentalists. But even if we change the wording to be fundamentalists, the meme is still wrong. The second coming does not remove the Genesis mandate to be stewards of creation. Fundamentalists are no more inclined to trash their environment than, say, Catholics or gangsta rap listeners. In fact, taking a global perspective, the worst environmental disasters appear to be in countries that are strongly materialistic: Russia has produced 97% of the radioactive leakage, Red China has the largest loss of farmland to erosion, Romania has blackened square miles with industrial pollution, and on it goes. So claiming that Christians have a greater motivation for ignoring the environment is a complete fiction, worse, it is projection.

And this then is the real problem with the meme. We always accuse others of the sins we know best. We accuse new theories of the sins and failings of the old theory. We project. So this meme of evangelical avoidance is precisely what modernists do. Since global warming is the apocalypse of tomorrow, we can stop trying to solve poverty, AIDS, and malaria. We can stop trying to raise the standard of living in sub-saharan Africa, or promote literacy in China. We can ignore the rising crime rates, the falling birth rates, the uncontrolled immigration in the West. Why? Because global warming is the apocalypse now.

Sadly, these other more useful things that the UN or USAID could do with the money spent on global warming summits are neglected because of the 2nd coming of an inter-glacial. And the materialist feels bad about it, so this is what he accuses Christians of. Once Christians, motivated by love for fellow human beings, actually do solve world poverty, world peace, world AIDS (Uganda is a good object lesson for all three), then, and only then will Wilson and other materialists suddenly find that they can fully embrace stage 4: we knew it all along.

In the Editors preface to the October 2006 edition of Scientific American, and then later in the book review sections, SA provides a perfect example of what is lacking in materialism, why post modernism has made such headway. If I had to put a single word on it, it would be hubris, the overweaning arrogance that tempts the gods. Here are large chunks from the article with some comments of my own thrown in:
             
   
If you were to evaluate the editors on their attitude toward Gingerich and Collins, would it be perhaps,
a bit condescending?  And what is the reference for this mythological statement (laughable in its multiple misunderstandings) about global warming and "evangelicals"?  And whom do the editors think are the better judges of science, science journalists or scientists?  And what exactly separates an "earnest testimony" from truthful observation? And why is the universe dispassionate? And why is "meaningful design" only detected by "heartfelt convictions" and not by the same standards as "dispassionate universe"?

If the editors, by dint of great effort, managed to sound somewhat reasonable, albeit amused and condescending in the introduction, the reviewer was under no such obligation. Here's the book review.

Peculiar, peculiar.

Here the Pope calls the Reformation irrational, and John Piper defends the Pope, spending all his time arguing that there is an approach to Islam. Are we, as in Protestants, de facto uniting with papists? Where is the Protestant outrage? Why is it only Catholics, such as Fr Fassio, (head of Ave Maria College), who point out that the Pope isn't playing nice with Protestants either? And Piper isn't exactly a crypto-Catholic or nominally reformed. Am I the only one who thinks this is more than a fluke or coincidence, but a
growing trend?

And finally, after Piper tells us the proper approach of Christians toward Islamic hatred, perhaps you can explain CS Lewis' commentary on violent evil found in his novel "Perelandra" where Ransom attacks Weston. Was Ransom violating Piper's rulebook? When, as in Ananias and Sapphira, does the Church stop playing nice? Is St John's admonition to the church of Thyatira to be taken literally? I'm afraid I just don't buy what Piper is selling, I happen to think Ferdinand and Isabella were really doing the Lord's work.

I read the piece on Calvinism in CT. I think we are all sort of converging on the same answer. Some of us are just not admitting it.

If you go back to Luther and Calvin, doctrine was everything. The Pope and Luther excommunicated each other and really meant it. Lutherans and Calvinists and Catholics all slaughtered each other over doctrine, suggesting that they weren't about to engage in some Episcopalian "listening process".

Fast forward 500 years. Suddenly "truly reformed" people like John Piper are defending the Pope. The Pope is "listening" to Muslim scholars. No one is excommunicating anyone else, except maybe Nigerian and American bishops, someday, perhaps, soon even. The only people NOT listening are Islamic jihadists. What's the scoop?

We're all post-modern now.

Except of course, those who never became modern in the first place.

Like most movements, Post-Modernism won't be properly defined until we are in post-post-modernism. So you will find lots of people, pro and con, who say that post-modernism is the denial of absolute truth. This isn't really correct. For one thing, it is self-referential, and might as well be stated "my statements are false". So that dog really won't hunt.

The Cretan philosopher who got quoted by St Paul, said essentially the same thing, and judging from Paul's response, was accused of another. So what exactly is Post-Modernism?

Remember how Pietism was essentially a reaction against the Dogmatism of the 16th and 17th centuries? People said, "Look, doctrine doesn't matter. How you live your life is what matters." It isn't that all those Wesleyan Methodists became Unitarians (though they are on their way today), they really did have some doctrine, whether they admitted it or not. Rather, they were reacting against something that they felt was a greater danger.

We do this all the time. The reason we need to get out of Iraq isn't because Islam is a great religion, or even that "more people are dying from the occupation than are killed by Iraqis", but because, (pause) "Bush is a greater danger than Osama."  This is classic
Skinner behaviorism. Our behavior is shaped by a reaction to outside forces, rather than a rational decision of what future we want. Well, I could go on this vein for quite a while, but every self-help book and expensive personal coach does the schtick better than I.

Let me get back to Post-Modernism, which is a reaction to--you guessed it--Modernism. Now a unregenerate Modernist would say "Modernism brought us wealth, health, cell phones and the Internet, what's there not to like? Do you want to go back to the Dark Ages with outdoor toilets, no central heat (or air), and the Plague?"

And the Post-Modernist, if you can pry him away from his computer keyboard (where he is some wizard avatar with a long sword in a internet game with 1000 other players weilding knives), long enough to get an answer, will say "No, I don't want to literally go back. But I don't like your smugness either. Has your vaunted technology solved the problems of poverty, sorrow, disease, or death? Where's my Jetson's robotic maid? Where's my Brave New World soma? Where's my habitable Moon station?"

The problem isn't Truth, it is what Truth represents. The problem isn't doctrine, it is what doctrine represents. The problem isn't intellect, it is what intellect represents. These are all "meta" questions, because they don't answer the questions Modernists pose, they ask what is the purpose of those questions.

When your doorbell rings, and some college-age kid sticks a clipboard under your nose and asks "What do you think about the war in Iraq?", if you, like me, want to grab his shirtfront and bring his nose a little closer to my mouth and say "And what do you think about polls that ask about halitosis?", then you know what I'm talking about.

Modernists have gotten way too big for their britches. And when you attempt to correct a modernist, they drag out some blinking-in-the-sun white-lab coat savant idiot to back them up. If you persist, they smile sweetly and ask "Why, is it important to you?", and then go on to explain that of course you feel that way because you've never had the opportunity they had to go to Harvard.

Being unable to reason with these guys, and in fact, having the Modernist claim without irony that reason is always on his side, causes most people to argue, "Reason be damned, I'll believe what I want." And this defense, as weak as it is, has become the hallmark of Post-Modernism. Rather than see it as a denial of Reason, see it rather as a denial of arrogance.

This is an opportunity far more than it is a disaster. We must change our apologetics techniques, we must change our "Evidence that demands a Verdict" playbook, but it also  means we can go back to what we do best, demonstrating humility.

And that is what Piper is doing, whether he admits it or not. That is what the Pope is doing, quite different from the Reformation Popes. And that is what Islam is not doing, and probably never will.

Welcome to The Procrustean!

 The title is a reminder of the highway robber "Procrustes" who was slain by Theseus. He had a "magic bed" that fit everyone who stopped at his inn, but when the traveller tried it out, he found that Procrustes method of fitting was to stretch a short person, or chop off the feet of a taller one to fit. Thus a "Procrustean Bed" is a rigid, arbitrary rule enforced upon us. This blog is a reminder that we force all of our experiences and data through a vicious filter when it comes in, and a equally merciless filter when it goes out. Perhaps, unlike Theseus, we should spend more time examining the bed, and less the practitioners. In so doing, we may find not only the secret of the magic bed, but a restful nights sleep.

Cosmologists have inherited the "high priest of science" mantle from High Energy Physicists when the SuperConductingSuperCollider was cancelled by President Clinton in 1993. Science and Nature are reputable journals that both carried stories about the tumult in the field. This is an email exchange about Cosmology referring to two articles that appeared in Nature ("Our Place in the Multiverse" 9/14/06) and Science ("A 'Landscape' Too Far?" 9/11/06).


It is hard to follow the logic of these guys because they are being illogical. There are two entertwined issues in this discussion, one about science (cosmology) and one about metaphysics (religion). Now let me just say from the outset, that I believe Kant is completely, utterly wrong, deceptive, and evil, when he separated the world into two domains: noumenal and phenomenal. This division has robbed religion of any experimental proof, and robbed science of any purpose. The evidence that this division is artificial and evil can be found in exactly these cosmologies that Silk wants to talk about. He wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants the universe to be both accidental and overdetermined so that  not a nanogram of purpose can be found in it. And he can't. So he muddies the water so you don't know which he's talking about.  The is not novel to Silk, it's been going on for 300 years or more. A very thorough book on this illogical juggling act of scientists was written by physicist-philosopher Benedictine monk, Stanley Jaki "God and the Cosmologists" and is well worth reading.

Okay let's break it down.

Point 1) A universe that blew up from the big bang, (never mind how), can have 3 outcomes: (a) the explosion was so great that the stuff never comes back together, but expands indefinately--the "open" universe; (b) the explosion was so weak that after some finite time, the whole mess collapses into a big black hole again--"closed"; or (c) a knife-edge balance between the two--"flat".

Now as you might imagine, "flatness" is a matter of perspective. If you wait another billion years or so, you can see if we are turning the corner into collapse or infinite expansion. To say it another way, "flatness" is exponentially dependent on time: Today's knife-edge balance point, was yesterday's I-beam pivot, and tomorrow's sub-atomic pivot point. So that means, and I'm indebted for this calculation to Stephen Hawking, that the "flatness" we observe today requires a balance between expansion and gravity (or matter density) at time t=0 of one part in 10^60. Since there are an estimated 10^80 protons in the observable universe (treating all matter as if it were a proton), that means a difference of 10^20 protons determined whether we see this universe, or a black hole. In other words, a grain of salt would have disrupted the big bang.

Well, why do we need a flat universe anyway? Because one that expands too fast never has a chance to form galazies and stars and carbon and oxygen and iron and people, and one that expands too slowly would be well on its way into a black hole already. Either extreme is not conducive to life.

So just from these statistics, the universe appears highly "contingent", which is what philosopher's call a free choice of a purposeful intellect. (Dembski makes this point in numerous places.) Physicists hate to use the technical language, and call all such contingencies "apparent" via something they refer to as  "The Anthropic Principle", which is supposedly an observational bias toward contingency. Philosophers  say it's a meaningless principle, since it doesn't remove ontological contingency, which would exist  whether anyone was there to observe it or not. Physicists don't get it, but they don't exactly feel  comfortable with AP either, and would rather they didn't have to invoke the mumbo-jumbo.

So to eliminate that contingency we have 2 options: (a) either the "choice" was in fact random; or (b) the "choice" was in fact pre-determined. These are the two options that Joseph Silk is so desperate to prove "scientifically".

Point 2) Silk, like many in cosmology, want to do both at the same time. I don't really understand this schizophrenia, sort of like a lemming with acrophobia. But let's humor him, and allow him to try. However, realize at the outset, that what drives this theory is a philosophical aversion to contingency, which is neither experimentally nor theoretically required. It is a metaphysical motivation. Not that this isn't science, lots of good physics discoveries were metaphysically motivated, but it illustrates why Kant is totally wrong.

Okay, lets start with the oxymoron "multiverse". By definition a "universe" is "all there is". So what then can be more unique than a universe? And are these "multi-verses" talking to each other? IF so, are they just part of a bigger universe? And if they don't talk to each other, then their existence is completely and utterly conjectural and not science! So how can one have evidence of a "multiverse"? The short answer, "one can't".

So whatever evidence Silk wants to draw on, has absolutely nothing to do with the conjecture of 10^500 multiverses. So why make the conjecture? Because any small probability, multiplied by a big enough number, will result in a probability of one. To get rid of contingency, the multiverse assumes there are a sufficiently large number of random universes such that the probabilty of ours is a certainty. That's neither science nor scientific, that's what is called "blind faith". For lack of a better word, I call blind faith in Chance the "un-God".

My argument against such silliness, is the Star Trek "borg" argument. "Okay," I say, "suppose that we have all these random universes. In one of them, the speed of light is blindingly fast, say a billion times our universe, and consequently Silicon computers have evolved that are billions of times faster than ours, and in fact, intelligent. While solving the QCD problem, the "borg" has figured out a way to communicate between multi-verses, and is now intent on uniting the combined intellect of the intelligent universes. So far they have succeeded, oh say, a few quadrillion times (leaving only 10^488 universes without intelligence), and are now interested in taking over our Universe. Wouldn't our perception of such interference make the "borg" look like god? So all you have done in multiplying universes is to make the existence of "god" not just likely, but inevitable. In that case, contingency is necessary, and your initial assumption which drives you to 10^500 is disproven."

Point 3) So delete the title and the references to "multiverse" from Silk's article, it has nothing to do with the rest of his arguments, and in fact, detracts from them. That leaves the arguments that the contingency is removed if the universe is, in fact, open.

Here the argument is that an open universe is not terribly contingent, since roughly half of all random big bangs will result in an open universe. OF course, that doesn't negate Hawking's calculation that at this stage of the expansion, some 13.7 billion years along, the probabilities are still 1:10^60, but that's a detail Silk ignores.

Why doesn't Silk get excited about closed universes, after all, the other half of all random big bangs should give closed universes? Well, a closed universe isn't eternal. And despite a spate of poorly argued reasons for big bangs leading to big crunches and back to big bangs, there's not a lot of hope that such cycling will occur without violating the Laws of Thermodynamics (think of it as the Flubber theory of Big Bangs). Eternality is the other way that unprobable things can be made probable, such as the spontaneous generation of life. So Silk is willing to put his entire bet on "open universes". This is an experimentally verifiable thing, one just has to calculate the General Relativity "curvature" of space-time. Closed universes are curved "inwards", open ones are curved "outwards". Several experimental techniques have been used to evaluate this, including density of galaxies further back in time (red shifted), or brightness of Type I Supernovae as a function of red-shift (they look dimmer than they should) and so forth.

Just to make a mess of such calculations, Einstein briefly used a "Cosmological Constant" which was sort of  the compressibility of the vacuum. Einstein wanted an eternal, static universe, and didn't know how to offset the gravitational attraction. So he invoked this repulsion of the vacuum, that has since been called "Dark Energy". When others convinced him that an explosion could negate gravity nicely, he abandonned this term, calling it the "biggest mistake of my life". Now it's back in vogue, because big bang modellers can't get agreement between galactic density clustering and gravity to work. They've even got time-variable "dark energy" which might make the universe speed up or slow down its expansion, hence things like "the inflationary universe". Using all the adjustable parameters in their models, fitting the distribution of galaxies, gives a ratio of 75% dark energy, 25% gravitational matter, flat universe, with visible matter only accounting for some 10% of the needed 25%. In other words, more question marks than answers, and no one has a clue what "dark energy" means.

Still, Silk is ready to measure the curvature of space, fit it to some parameterized model, and claim that because his model fits the data, "it had to be that way", and the contigency is removed. I remain unmoved. In fact, I'd rather spend the money on more pressing scientific goals, like whether the Earth's magnetosphere is reconnecting or not. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out a way to prove the existence of Un-God, so I don't get the press of Dr. Silk.



> 1) I'm with you on Kant.

I just read a marvelous, I mean marvellous speech that the Pope gave yesterday,  He's on the same page with me, and I'm not even a philosopher! Sometimes don't you wish you had been born Irish? The Pope makes the same point about Kant.

> 2) Isn't the idea of "the multiverse" a projection of stuff the string-theory guys ...

Okay, string theory.

It really isn't a theory, and it has sort of gotten away from strings, but here goes. Newton's mechanistic materialism assumes that a point is the simplest fundamental building  block, so atoms look point-like, time (in brief nanoseconds) is point-like, photons are point-like etc.  It really wasn't Newton, but goes back at least to Democritus and Epicurus who, in typical Greek fashion, decided 0-dimensional points were undifferentiatable, indivisible, fundamental units of reality. This is the message we physicis teachers (and high school teachers) have been trying to evangelize for the past 200 years. You should note several things about it though:
 a) it goes back to 500BC
 b) Aristotle and Plato were unconvinced
 c) Augustine trashed it
 d) It didn't get resurrected until about the 16th century by a semi-atheist scholars who hated Jesuits
 e) It slowly gained credibility through 18th & 19th century as a result of chemistry (rising wraith-like out of a much richer alchemy)
 f) It was people like Maxwell and Boltzmann who used it so effectively in what became known as Statistical Mechanics (which re-derived Thermodynamics from atom-theory) around 1870-1890 that finally turned us all into Democritean materialists.
 g) A mere 40 years after this triumph came the deconstruction of Quantum Mechanics in the 1930's that denied most of the fundamental assumptions of atomism and materialism.  *All* the weirdo mysteries about QM are all a result of un-point-like behavior. And it hasn't been integrated into our "physics metaphysics". They always teach QM *after* young pupils are indoctrinated in atomism, and it is taught "as if it were not really true".

So back in the 1980's, some bright kid comes up with the idea that maybe the fundamental thing at the heart of the Universe is not the 0-D point, but the 1-D, string. Then all the heavier mass building blocks of mesons and baryons and quarks are just vibrations on the string. Since energy = mass, you'd just have to vibrate it a bit harder to get to the next higher mass.

There's a very similar ansatz that Niels Bohr made in his Nobel Prize description of the hydrogen atom (in the ten years leading up to the full blown QM theory), where he has the electron being a wave on a string around the atom. Since the wavelength is proportional to the mass of the electron, only certain integer numbers of wavelengths will allow "standing waves" around the nucleus, and lo-and-behold, those are the experimentally determined, quantized energy levels of the hydrogen atom.

So I'm trying to give you the metaphysical flavor of string theory. It's sort of radical for scientists, in that it departs from Democritean atomism (don't ever let scientists tell you they are progressive and open-minded, they're some of the most stick-in-the-mud conservatives around!), but it's palatable because, well, 1-D strings are a bit like 0-D points especially when they're really really small, and the deviation isn't so far from materialism that it would get you crucified as an Aristotelean or creationist or something. (Read the attached file, especially the meaning of the "Can I have your desk?" quip.) But there is one drawback, and that is, the math is frighteningly messy.

So for 30 years these guys have been slogging through this horrible math of vibrating modes on n-dimensional strings. Like Niels Bohr, they're hoping that the calculation will result in a sequence of masses that just happens to match what physicists observe. And it hasn't. At first they needed some 23 degrees of freedom (or 23-dimensional space) to get the masses right (think of that as 23 adjustable parameters). After ten years of hard work, they got it down to 11 degrees of freedom, and came up with kooky reasons why 7 or 8 of those dimensions are "rolled up" and invisible to mortal men. After 15 years of work, one of the leading mathematician/physicists wins the Fields Prize (which is the Mathematician's equivalent of the Nobel Prize), which tells you that string theory impresses more mathematicians than physicists.

There has been no experimental prediction or verification from 30 years of work by 100's of our brightest physicists to date.  The only vaguely physical result to come out of all this effort, was a "proof" that Black Holes have entropy as Stephen Hawking wanted, since one can model the boundary of a black hole (event horizon) as an n-dimensional string (known as a D-brane, not to be confused withM-branes).

So why are people blathering that string theory leads to Multiverses? We're back to this invisible "rolled up dimensions" that supposedly link string theory to physics. If at some QM level, say 10^-24 meters, where a string is to an atom what an atom is to you, this is the scalesize where all those "rolled up dimensions live" in the "quantum foam" of "virtual particles", then time and space become a bit fuzzy (sort of like this entire discussion), and maybe "Voila!" another Big Bang materializes out of the vacuum fluctuations by a string hiccupping, and an entire universe is born in one of those "rolled up" dimensions, which we can't see, of course. Since this might be happening in every inch of that 10^-25 space in our 10^25m -sized universe, why we would could have 10^150 universes (taking the cube) and those could be happening, why every 10^-34second (that's the Planck time) in our 10^17s-old universe, and we're up to 10^200 big bangs since our own went off! But wait, each of those universes can have its own Big Bang too, so its a series (10^51 in the first atto-atto-second, 10^50 ten atto-atto seconds later... combine the series with the above calculation, and Whoa! that's 10^500 minimum, assuming of course we're the first Big Bang on the block with nutty cosmologists.

So what do I make of the breathless Science article about religious dissent among the high-priesthood of physicists? The issue that I discussed in my last post were the two ways to eliminate contingency a.k.a. "anthropic principle".  One was to introduce chance (hence the 10^500 multiverses), and the other was making it necessary, say, by having a theory of everything (TOE) that in 11 dimensions one must have this particular universe. The string guys are saying (in this article) that even with string theory, they have too much freedom to pick any dark energy they want. Remember, "dark energy" is one of those adjustable parameters cosmologists invoke to fit their model to the observations. And the string guys are saying, "sorry, we can't predict that either, it's still contingent". In other words, EVEN 10^500 UNIVERSES DONT REMOVE CONTINGENCY!

And my answer is "Yawn".

You think your ability to handle exponential arithmetic proves how intelligent you are, and how impossible it is to imagine that the contingent universe was created? You think that like Voltaire if you shout loudly enough , "Can God make a rock bigger than He can lift?" you've disproved God'e existence?  You irritate me, boy.

The real question you should ask is "Can God make an arrogance He cannot correct?"

> 3) I like the idea of the blind faith in chance as the "un-God".

I stole it from Fr Edwards, the APCK priest down in Montevallo. He referred to PECUSA (now TEC) as the "Un-Church", basing it on CS Lewis' Perelandra where the antagonist is the "Un-Man".

> 4) The Borg thing is wacky, but no wackier than the "argument" it's parodying, I suppose.

Hah. Philosophers love wacky counter-arguments. You only need one, you know, so make it memorable.

> 5) Didn't people discover, relatively recently, that the expansion of the universe ...

That was this Type Ib Supernovae argument. The idea is that every Type Ib is exactly the same size as every other one. It relates to something called the Chandresakahr limit, where if a star has more mass than 1.4 solar masses it collapses into a black hole. Then a white dwarf in a binary pair of stars is sucking matter from the other star, and when it hits the magic number it goes Boom!. Therefore, astronomers argue, every Type Ib Supernovae has exactly the same brightness, and if we map brightness versus red shift, we can calculate how far away they were when they blew up some billion years ago. If that doesn't come out a straight line, then the Universe has been accelerating. (An alternative explanation is that dust between us and the supernovae is making it dimmer, but the astronomers say that they are really, really sure that nothing that simple could be taking place. My prediction: in 3 years they're going to do a recalibration, but by then it won't matter, the theorists will all be solidly working on warp drive big bangs.)

> 6) What are the implications of the magnetosphere thingy that you mentioned...

Van Allen was truly a grandfather of my field, discovering the magnetosphere and more importantly, teaching his students the joy of discovery. Although Van Allen never got the Nobel Prize (since geophysicists aren't really part of the club), he ranks up there with my all time Nobel Prize hero, John Bardeen, who not only got 2 Nobel Prizes, but put his graduate students on the papers that won the two Nobel Prizes, thereby sharing them with (gasp) his own graduate students. (BCS-theory stands for Bardeen, the prof, Cooper, the post-doc, and Schrieffer, the grad student. All 3 were awarded.) Van Allen was that kind of a guy.

Are there any implications for metaphysics in my subfield of space physics? None that I'm aware of. Reconnection is the fancy name for saying that magnetic fields sort of move around and aren't "frozen-in" the flow, as Alvfen's MHD theory of "Magneto-Hydro-Dynamics" would suggest. Hannes Alfven is the only geophysicist I know that got a Nobel Prize, perhaps because he was also Swedish.

> 7) I just read that they've found the two most distant galaxies from us...

Hmm. I'm not aware of that news report. They determine the distance to distant galaxies by their red-shift, which are also very faint. Perhaps they are saying that they are surprised there aren't more.  The density of galaxies at different stages of the Big Bang, of course, is precisely what all those cosmology types are supposed to predict with their "dark energy" theories. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if their predictions don't work out, given their aversion for contingency and their penchant for silly ideas, like "dark energy" for example.


Well, actually I did. Though I thought recalibration of the standard candle supernovae would come about by dimming of light, this one suggests that it is the inherent brightness that was greater. So be it.
 
The fact of the matter is that few Type Ia's get this careful scrutiny. So look for a whole lot of new analyses on old data, some backpedalling on Cosmological constants, and yet another theory of "how it all happened by accident. Really, it was just an accident. (tears begin to well up). Don't you believe me?"

It is most peculiar how the entire Protestant response to the Pope's speech overlooks the fact that he called the Reformation "irrational". Even people like John Piper  seemed to like it, defending the Pope and suggesting similar ways to evangelize Muslims.

Yet conservative Catholics, such as Father Fessio, (head of Ave Maria College) all comment that this broadside from the Pope was addressed against Protestants too. The favorable Protestant response is intriguing.  Perhaps it recognizes, for the first time, a common enemy. That is, everyone, and their brother, has an opinion of "Why Islam is violent". The reasons span the field from Ralph Peters "The problem with Islam is the Middle East" (he argues that something in the water there drives them mad), to the racist "it's the Arabs", to the liberal  "they're victimized by Israel", to the religious "they're cursed infidels".

So the Pope takes a stab at it, and talks about Reason. Yet the Pope intends to address much more than Islam, he is addressing Post-Modernism  and Protestantism as well, he even numbers his points to prevent the listener from missing it. Point 0 was Islam (circa 1391), point 1 is the Reformation (circa 1530), point 2 is German liberalism (circa 1830), point 3 is Post-Modernism (circa now). (Pragmatically, there isn't much difference between 2 & 3, so I'd just lump them together, even if they use metaphysics slightly differently.)

So it was, after all, the Post-Modernist press that grabbed the speech, translated the juicy bits into English (or Arabic) and fed them to the sharks of Al-Jazeera. Think of it as Post-Modern outrage. (I mean, did you really expect them to try to rationally defend their own position?)

It was only then that the Muslim press took up the hue-and-cry, scenting blood, and everyone is talking about it. But I'm still awaiting the Protestant rage, given that the Pope said the Reformation was irrational. He couldn't have said a more inflammatory thing if he had called it adulterous or fascistic.

My understanding of the political (and psychological) dynamics of the conflict is that there is indeed a Culture War going on, but it is between the 3 categories that the Pope outlined:
 Secular Modern & PostModern vs. Religious "fundamentalist" Islam vs. Christianity

If I had better graphics, I would show these three views overlapping with a Venn diagram. So I will abbreviate. Overlap between Secular & Islam: SI, overlap Secular & Christianity (SC), etc. Here's a picture

    S       (SI)        I   
    (SC) {SCI} (IC)
                C

There is some skirmishing within Secularists between Modernists and Post-Modernists. However this should be seen as mere squabbling, because once the real threat of "theocracy" is raised, a united front is lifted. (First Things had a nice review of the spate of "theocracy-panic" in the MSM.) The best example of this is in the "evolution vs theism" debates, where the press would have you believe that evolutionists are happy scientists blithely working together under a unifying system of beliefs that explain everything of any importance. The significance of "Intelligent Design", as Dembski will gladly tell you, is not that it supports Christianity or Islam or even Theism, but rather that it demolishes this "united evolutionary front" that is like the Emperor's New Clothes, purely imaginary. Then we can begin to make some progress in biology again. Okay, that's why I lump Modernists with Post-Modernists, just like I lump yellow-dog Democrats with left-coast moonbats, though they have nothing in common but a hatred of Bush.

So in this three-way culture war, there are strange alliances and bed-fellows that perplex many. Why is it, for example, that S use gay-rights to beat up on C, yet ignore the subject when dealing with I? Back to Venn diagrams. There are 7 positions one can take, and 4 alliances one can make. Hence the political positions are neither binary nor one-dimensional. Keeping track of which position and which alliances a particular article supports or condemns is a useful tool, for one can also use these shifting alliances to probe the underlying assumptions and firmly held beliefs. For example, is gay-rights more or less important than free speech--would it be okay to gag a speaker who opposes gay-rights? How about free exercise of religious rage versus gay rights? How about free speech versus religious rage?

I think of it as a Cultural version of "rock, paper, scissors". If Islam is the rock, then Christianity is the paper, and Secularism the scissors. As a Church, we seem to have crumbled under the onslaught of secularism, yet know immediately the core problem with Islam. As a seculary society, we are happy with marginalizing Christianity, yet seemingly cannot marginalize Islam. An Islamic block of nations can easily outsmart the MSM (Danish cartoons, Lebanese war), yet lose territory in Nigeria to evangelicals.
A similar 2D approach to politics is on the web called "the shortest political quiz" (posted by a libertarian), which tries to classify American politics into two axes "big vs small government" and "social conservative vs liberal". See http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html

So I would take these 3 different cultural views and rank them on two axes:  Rational vs Irrational, and Self vs God. The categories become:

 I + S = Post-Modernism
 R + S = Modernism (German liberalism, mainstream protestantism)
 I + G = Islam
 R + G = Christianity

Perhaps I should work this up into a Quiz and post it.

So the Pope's sermon is addressing these categories. He's telling both PostModerns and Muslims that they must be rational. Curiously, however, he's telling Modernists (which is what I take to be his audience for the Reformation slur) that they are irrational too. Why? Because to be selfish is to ignore outside advice, to ignore traditions, to promote one's own intellect even when, rationally speaking, there is no reason to suppose that it is superior.

Now this is where I get to my problem with the Pope's speech. The Reformation that I studied emphasized intellect almost too much. The Church I face today, (along with our society) worships the intellect. Thus we are told that Bill Clinton should be forgiven his many private failings because he is a brilliant man. We are told that George W Bush should be punished despite his many public successes because he is a stupid man. In other words, we are told to filter the data through a grid of "intelligence", so that the success of an idiot is not success, while the failure of genius is not a failure. I can give examples from science (Einstein) or theology (Schori) too, but I'm sure you can find some good examples in your experience. When you think about it, intelligence is a somewhat subjective (but not entirely, read "The Bell Curve"!) thing, so we are being told to subjectivize our objective data, to evaluate the content of a speech by the person who made the speech. In logic, this is known as the "ad hominem" argument, and is the principal way to tell a Democrat (or wannabe) from a Republican.

So having been exposed to decades of this sort of ad hominem subjectivity, it is a little scary to hear the Pope use "rationality" as his basis for attacking the Reformation. After all, wasn't that the whole reason the Reformation devolved into the atheistic Enlightenment? And supposing that we agree with the Pope and convert to Catholicism, might we not end up attacking Catholic theology for being "irrational" as well? Is the Pope's authority in the RCC based on his superior rationality or something else?

Well the Pope knows all this, and so he builds his argument around the Greek word "logos", the John 1:1 verse: In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God." Logos means a lot more than rationality, since the Stoics, following in Plato's steps, packed it all kinds of connotations of Reason, Meaning, Purpose, and Seed, and in fact, it is usually translated "Word". For words (and rationality) possess another thing besides "reason" they possess purpose, a certain "self-awareness", a certain "self-referentiality", a thing I've taken to calling "the sacred", "the holy", "the image of God". This is a deep subject, with a long history. In logic, it was the paradox that stopped Betrand Russell cold, for if I write "this statement is false" is that a true or false statement? In computer science it was the proof by Turing that a computer that allowed the output to modify the input was unpredictable. In electronics it is the question of stability of circuits with feedback. In physics it is the "Einstein non-locality" problem of quantum mechanics, that a particle can be in two places at the same time. In psychology it is the question of where "self-awareness" comes from. In math it is Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem showing that math itself is always incomplete. In style it is "retro chic". In biology it is the "apparent purpose" of random evolution. In religion it is the name that God gave Moses "I am the I am". As you can see, I'm having a hard time quantifying it, so you'll just have to let me use sloppy language for this whole thing, but I think this is what the Pope was going after. So if this is the direction of his criticism, what is he saying about the Reformation?

Well, let's try to force everything into this Procrustean bed and see if we learn anything. If "logos" is the wisdom that comes  through self-awareness or God-awareness, then the axis marked "Self <--> God" is really the difference between "Linear vs Feedback", "objective vs subjective", "Determined vs Designed". The selfish man is incapable of thinking about others, or taking their point of view. The selfish scholar is incapable of understanding his opponents objections. The selfish historian thinks his century is the smartest, what CS Lewis calls "chronological snobbery". The selfish scientist believes that he can control all the factors in his theory or experiment so that the outcome is entirely predictable, so for example, global warming is not only obviously true, but obviously preventable.

On the other hand, the self-aware scientist, the scientist that knows he is part of a feedback loop, the scientist that knows  God, will never assume he is infallibly correct, or that the future is predictable, or that his century knows best. Rather he has a certain humility not only about his abilities and technologies, but about certainty and methodology itself. The God-aware scientist knows that God doesn't lie, and that there is a reality that exists external to himself, so that when experiment and theory don't line up, he neither dismisses the experiment nor the theory, but allows both to be redefined in a self-aware, self-consistent, God-aware, God-consistent manner.

The critique of the Pope, then, is that the Reformers thought they could "purify" the theology of the church by using the methodology "sola scriptura", seemingly unaware that their methodology assumed a linear transition from scripture to Church theology with no feedback involved. Yet because there was feedback involved, the Protestant church today would be unrecognizable to any of the Reformers of the 16th century. They assumed that "semper reformata" would iteratively correct any sinful deviations from orthodoxy, seemingly unaware that their own reforming technique might need reforming. They claimed "sola fide" which expressed a faith in faith, without recognizing that there might be a response from the object of that faith that affected the faith itself. Or to say it equally opaquely, that naming a feedback loop, recognizing a self-reference in no way removes its primary function even upon the person naming it. This is the Catch-22 of life, and recognizing it is a Catch-22 does not diminish its impact, as Yossarian found to his dismay.

Here are some stories that might help illustrate the problem. Two philosophers are going to a conference. They rented a car at the airport, and one of them is reading the rental papers that say they will be charged if any of the lights are not working. So the driver says to the passenger, "check the turn signals, will you?", and the passenger walks around to the back of the car. "Are they working?", asks the driver. The passenger says, "Yes, No, Yes, No..."

Here's another one from my freshman year as I stood in my college mailroom watching a classmate drop a letter from a former highschool sweetheart in the trashcan, unread. How does one delicately communicate a "get lost"  message to a girl, I wondered, for if you deadpan it, the girl will say "He's taking me so seriously, he must be interested", but if you say it lightheartedly, she will say "but he's joking about it, he must be interested." Is there no other way than just willful avoidance?

Or one more. Conspiracy theory suggests that my enemy knows I will identify him and anticipate his destructive actions, so if he is desirous of going undetected, he will attempt to accommodate my knowledge of his behavior by modifying his actions. But if I am aware of his deception, then I will not fall for it, and will modify my own actions... This can obviously be continued ad infinitum, which makes it easy to prove everyone or anyone is my enemy. Are all conspiracy theories false then?  No, for just because I am paranoid doesn't mean that they aren't out to get me. So then all conspiracy theories are equally true and equally false, which is again a conspiracy to paralyze me into inaction. How can I escape this mental illness, this body of death? (Romans 8).

So you see, humility is seeing all the many ways that we interact with ourselves, and with God. It is never one way, it is never deterministic, it is never black-and-white. Objectivity is always approximate, knowledge always limited, certainty always qualified. Note that this is not Post-Modernism, which states that Reality is never knowable, that Certainty is never obtainable. On the contrary, the God-aware person knows that there is Certainty, there is Reality, there is Truth, it just isn't within ourselves or within our grasp. We don't possess the Truth, any more than we possess Certainty or possess Reality, rather we dialogue with it, we befriend it, we acknowledge it, and we submit to it.

This, I think, is what the Pope meant by Logos. Now I would respond to the Pope, does the Catholic Church befriend the Truth, or possess it? Does the RCC acknowledge Redemption or mete it out? Does the Church define her Groom, or the Lord His Bride?