O'NEILL'S PHILOSOPHY PAGE

Absolute Paradox

There is a paradoxical passion in the Understanding that 'wills the collision and,without understanding itself, wills it's own downfall.'

Note that SK Uses 'will' and 'passion', rather than expected phrases such as 'reasons to', etc.

This is a moment of self-discovery,when (39) the I who thought she knew herself "now no longer is sure whether she is a more curiously complex figure than Typhon"' etc.

There follows the riff on whether this person would be interested in trying to demonstrate the existence of the unknown, whom SK calls 'god'.

Should he?

SK/Climacus thinks that all such demonstrations can only try to develop the concept of the kind of unknown we are dealing with; they cannot prove existence even tho they pretend to, and they make the logical mistake of imagining that they have proven God when all they have done is make an argument recommending how we should think of Him, aka the Unknown.(40)

I can reason from existence but never to it. And this entails that I can never prove that an individual exists but only argue that an already sciatic individual is of this sort or that. Napoleon's deeds never prove Napoleon but only a great general.

He moves (42) to a consideration of what God's alleged works can demonstrate. If we remember the caveat that we cannot prove existence then tHe shape of the present world does not prove or disprove God but could demonstrate the sort he is. But this hardly works because as Hume noted the pattern is screwy and always leaves room for anxious revision, to endless downgrades and upgrades, until we tend to smooth the edges and fit events to the preconceived concept.(42)

He makes the further point that as soon as we let Go of the demonstration it springs into existence - I mean, the unknown, the god, does, not smoothly and not as a result of the demonstration but as an independent non-controllable event, what he calls a leap. Things just exist, no matter what we try to think about them. They are not, then, and this is important, expressions of a concept or the embodiment of an idea but present in themselves, whatever they are, even if they are the unknown.

This is a reaffirmation on a different context of SKs privileging of the moment. Existing things become present at a certain moment. And the moment cannot be pre-determined. if the god has not already made herself present in existence then she cannot be made to exist by demonstration.
Further, all demonstrations, inasmuch as they cannot demonstrate existence,are deeply questionable because they are really conceptual guesses about the essence of an unknown.

Now, (44-45) we get a brilliant riff on knowing and not knowing, being and nonbeing, the upshot of which is that the unknown is a frontier ,"which is expressly the passion's torment, even though it is also it's incentive."

Unknown = Frontier = the absolutely different. (44)

Then we get the next riff, top of 45, on how the understanding deals with the thinking of the absolutely different, which it ultimately does within itself. "It cannot absolutely transcend itself and therefore thinks as above itself only the sublimity that it thinks by itself."
In consequence, "If the unknown is not solely the frontier, then the one idea about the different is confused with the many ideas about the different."

Transformer

RICHARD RORTY
ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND TRANSFORMATIVE PHILOSOPHY
(1999)

1. Platonists, Positivists, and Pragmatists.

Introduction

ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND TRANSFORMATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Many analytic philosophers do not like to think of their discipline as one of the humanities. They regard their own brand of philosophy as the disciplined pursuit of objective knowledge, and thus as resembling the natural sciences. They view the humanities as an arena for unarguable clashes of opinion. Philosophers of this sort prefer to be placed, for administrative purposes, as far as possible from professors of literature and as close as possible to professors of physics.

That is why, in the tables of organization of US universities, philosophy departments are sometimes found in the Division of Social Sciences rather than the Division of the Humanities. It is also why beleaguered non-analytic US philosophers sometimes try to rally under a banner inscribed “humanistic philosophy”. When analysts and non-analysts get on each other's nerves, academic administrators sometimes try to solve the problem by splitting the department in two—creating one department for the analytic “techies” and another for the non-analytic “fuzzies”.

The antagonism between analytic and non-analytic philosophy is tediously familiar to all us insiders. But references to that split often puzzle non-philosophers. They have no idea what the fuss is about. They are quite unclear about what distinguishes analytic philosophy from other brands, what problems analytic philosophers spend their time talking about, and why American philosophy departments are often content to have figures like Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault taught elsewhere in the university
(by the political scientists, or the professors of comparative literature, or the intellectual historians, for example).

I shall devote most of this lecture to the history and the sociology of analytic philosophy within the US academy. This will supply the background for my claim that the analytic philosophers have completely failed to do what they most hoped to do: put philosophy on the secure path of a science. But I shall conclude by saying that the analytic philosophers who have done most to undermine the scientistic pretensions of the movement have made a permanent, very valuable, contribution to philosophy. The moral of my lecture will be that both the failure of analytic philosophy and the history of its autocritique give additional reasons to abandon, once and for all, the very idea that philosophy can be made into any sort of science. Both help us replace the assumption that philosophy should add bricks to the edifice of knowledge with the thought that philosophy is, as Hegel said, its time held in thought.

There is often said to be a “crisis” in the humanities departments of American universities. But people who say this usually have in mind the excessive political correctness which is still sometimes found in US departments of literature. American philosophy departments had their last crisis back in the 1940’s and 1950’s—the period during which analytic philosophy accomplished its takeover. There has been no dramatic generational shift since then, except for the sudden emergence, in the 70’s, of feminist philosophy as a new area of specialization. Whereas the aftermath of the radicalism of the 60’s had a profound impact on several disciplinary matrices elsewhere in the university, it left American philosophy largely unaffected. Many analytic philosophers were politically active, but this activity usually did not lead them to change either their professional self-images or their reading habits.

Analytic philosophy may crudely be defined as an attempt to combine the switch from discussing experience to discussing language—what Gustav Bergmann called “the linguistic turn”—with one more attempt to professionalize the discipline by making it more more scientific, The linguistic turn is common to all twentieth-century philosophy--as evident in Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas and Derrida as in Carnap, Ayer, Austin and Wittgenstein. What distinguishes analytic philosophy from other twentieth-century philosophical initiatives is the idea that this turn, together with the use of symbolic logic, makes it possible, or at least easier, to turn philosophy into a scientific discipline. The hope is that philosophers will become able, through patient and cooperative research, to add bricks to the edifice of knowledge. So there will no longer be philosophical schools, but only philosophical specialities.

Prior to the linguistic turn, Edmund Husserl had made a similar attempt. His exhortations to scientificity and teamwork sound much like those of Carnap and Reichenbach a few decades later. But in Being and Time Heidegger managed to package Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean thoughts in a jargon that made them sound like respectable philosophical doctrines, rather than mere literary conceits. By imposing a quasi-Kantian, professional-sounding form on Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean content, Heidegger helped make it possible for philosophers to be much more interesting to literary intellectuals than either Carnap or Husserl thought they had any business to be. He thereby founded the tradition that analytic philosophers refer to as “Continental philosophy”-a tradition which, in the US, is studied in many humanities departments, but not usually in the philosophy department.

Carnap and Husserl both thought that Plato was on the right track when he preferred the mathematicians to the poets. But whereas Husserl’s initiative was nipped in the bud by Heidegger, Carnap’s hopes for scientificity, and his suspicion of Heidegger and of literary types who take Heidegger seriously, are alive and well today in American philosophy departments. Such hopes and suspicions help explain the Blimpish outrage displayed by many American philosophy professors when they learned that Cambridge University was about to offer Derrida an honorary degree.

Between 1945 and 1960, analytic philosophy took over most of the important American philosophy departments. Emigré logical empiricists such as Carnap and Hempel replaced Dewey and Whitehead as the heroes of the younger generation. This replacement produced a striking, thorough-going, change in the graduate curriculum of these philosophy departments, and in the self-image of the Ph. D’s who graduated from those departments.

Before analytic philosophy took over, the study of philosophy in both anglophone and non-anglophone countries had centered around the history of philosophy. Anybody who taught philosophy was expected to be able to talk about the relative merits of Plato and Aristotle, Hobbes and Spinoza, Kant and Hegel, Nietzsche and Mill.

That was of course not all you were supposed to do: you also had to take part in current debates in the journals. But nobody in this period had any doubt that philosophy was one of the humanities. For advanced training in philosophy did not differ all that much from advanced training in departments of literature: one read canonical texts, developed views about their relative merits, and tried to stitch them together in interesting new patterns. Up through the forties, university teachers of literature and history in the US usually had some idea of the interests and views of their colleagues in the philosophy department, and conversely. This had ceased to be the case by 1965.

As a graduate student of philosophy in the years
1950-54, I found myself caught between two quite different sorts of teachers: those who, like McKeon and Hartshorne, expected me to develop views on what was living and what dead in the thought of various great philosophers and those who, like Carnap and Hempel, expected me to be familiar with current journal articles: in particular, articles centered on attempts to provide what were then called “rational reconstructions” of various parts of culture—for example, the testing of scientific theories. One of the hot topics we discussed in Hempel’s philosophy of science seminar was the Raven Paradox—the fact that familiar accounts of “the logic of scientific confirmation” had a counter-intuitive consequence: the existence of any non-black non-raven confirms the proposition that all ravens are black.

I spent some years, and a portion of my rather schizophrenic dissertation, worrying about a related problem: that of nomologicality. A true non-nomological generalization such as “All the coins in my pocket are silver” does not license the counterfactual claim “If this penny were in my pocket it would be silver”. A true nomological generalization such as “All ravens are black”, on the other hand, does license the counterfactual claim that “If this bird were a raven, it would be black”. But it is harder than one might think to specify what makes a generalization nomological.

My dissertation was a comparison between three treatments of the concept of potentiality: those offered by Aristotle, by the 17th-century rationalists, and by Hempelian/Carnapian philosophy of science. So I spent two-thirds of my dissertation research reading commentaries on great dead philosophers and the other third reading up-to-the-minute journal articles offering exciting new analyses of subjunctive conditional sentences. My dissertation research left me, if you will forgive the awkward metaphor, stranded between the ebbing wave and the rising tide. By the time I had finished with graduate school and military service, it was 1958. By then it was clear that if you did not know about analytic philosophy you were not going to get a good job. Looking like a promising young philosopher at Princeton, where I got a job in
1961, was almost exclusively a matter of talking the new talk—of keeping up with the current journals and getting on the right preprint circuits. If you were hoping to get tenure, as I was, there was little percentage in being in being historically minded.

This was partly because of the influence of Willard van Orman Quine. Quine was Carnap’s best student, the arbiter elegantarium of analytic philosophy, and everybody’s ego-ideal. He was openly scornful about the study of the history of philosophy. In his own student years, Quine had made a point of reading as few of the canonical texts as possible, and he recommended this practice to his students at Harvard. He believed the history of philosophy to be just as irrelevant to current philosophical inquiry as is the history of physics to current research in that field. Quine admired Carnap for having, when asked to teach an introductory course in Plato, responded that he would not teach Plato, because he would teach nothing but the truth.

Quinean attitudes of this sort were widespread at Princeton. The Princeton students dutifully competed with one another in argumentative skill and dialectical acumen, rather than in acquiring a wide range of learning. We excused one of our cleverest students from the foreign language requirement on the ground that it would be unfair to let an idiosyncratic genetic disability—lack of Sprachgefuehl—delay the brilliant career this student was destined to have
(and which, in fact, he went on to have). No such compassion would have been shown to a student who claimed that his genes made it impossible for him to master symbolic logic. Toward the end of my time at Princeton, around 1980, the philosophy department abolished the foreign language requirement for graduate students altogether. That step would have been unthinkable thirty years before (and was, in fact, later reversed.).

By 1980 the difference between students trained in anglophone departments of philosophy of the Harvard/Princeton type and those trained in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and most other European countries (outside of Britain and Scandanavia) had become very great indeed. The latter students typically knew both Hegel and Heidegger reasonably well. They had views about the relative merits of the grand geistesgeschichtlich stories those two men told, as well as about how to interweave such stories with various equally grand stories about the history of art and literature on the one hand, and the history of social and political institutions on the other. Some anglophone students also had read these two philosophers and had views about such stories, but such students were atypical, and often marginalized. Again, some students in non-anglophone countries were intensely interested in analytic philosophy, and prepared to follow Quine’s advice about ignoring the history of philosophy. But they too were atypical, and often marginalized.

Most of these deep differences persist today. There is still a big difference between young people aspiring to become philosophy professors in anglophone and in non-anglophone parts of the world. The greatest difference is in their differing notions of what it means to be a philosopher--in the self-image and the ambitions which an advanced student of the subject acquires. It is this difference which makes it very unlikely that there will be a rapprochement between the analytic tradition and a tradition that still trains students by shepherding them through the canonical Plato-to-Nietzsche sequence.

Among anglophone philosophers, sheer argumentative ability—of the sort typical of forensic litigators--matters most. It is still most important to be what my Princeton colleagues used to call “quick in the head”. Elsewhere, on the other hand, it is still most important to be learned---to have read a lot, and to have views on how to pull the various things one has read together into some sort of story, a story which draws a moral. That is why non-anglophone students of philosophy on the Continent usually have little problem chatting up, and being chatted up by, students of literature and history. Philosophy graduate students in the US often have a problem doing this.

The anti-historicism of analytic philosophy has, however, not prevented the study of the history of philosophy from making something of a comeback in the US. There is far more first-rate work being done in this area by American philosophers nowadays than twenty years ago. But it is typically work that avoids Geistesgeschichte. Rather, it sticks to a particular figure or period, and points no world-historical moral . It has few points of contact with the concerns of people who take seriously Hegel’s and Heidegger’s stories about the Plato-to-Kant sequence.

This study of the history of philosophy is, however, equally far removed, however, from the concerns of the so-called “core” areas of analytic philosophy. It owes very little to analytic philosophy, and is continuous with historical work done before Russell and Carnap proposed the paradigm-shift which revolutionzed anglophone philosophy. The historians of philosophy in American philosophy departments are, so to speak, “analytic” only by courtesy. Whereas in the first flush of analytic enthusiasm there were some awkward attempts to make Aristotle a sort of proto-Russell or proto-Austin, and to make Kant a mixed-up proto-Strawson, nowadays there is often little difference between commentaries on canonical texts written by philosophy professors and those written by political scientists or intellectual historians.

As with the history of philosophy, so with moral and political philosophy. John Rawls would have written the same book even if Russell and Carnap had never lived, and even if the linguistic turn had never been taken. Insofar as writers like Rawls or Charles Taylor or Peter Singer use “methods” they are the same “methods” used by Sidgwick, Mill and T. H. Green. The linguistic turn has made no difference to their inquiries. The only effect which the dominance of analytic philosophy has had on these fields is to relegate the history of philosophy, moral philosophy, and political philosophy to the margins of the philosophical curriculum. The central position in American philosophy departments is now occupied by the so-called ‘core’ specialities—metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind.

The presumed centrality of these areas encourages students to think work in other areas of philosophy as soft and wimpy. The hard “core” consists precisely in work which is not only wildly different from anything done by professors in literature or history, but whose point is obscure to anyone who is not a philosopher by profession. The “core” status of this work is due to the fact that this is the part of philosophy which still seems to offer hope of achieving definitive, quasi-scientific results—of attaining knowledge, as opposed to mere opinion.

To give you a feel for the sort of thing that hard-core analytic philosophers take seriously, consider the following example. It was pointed out by Edmund Gettier in 1962 that there was a flaw in the traditional definition of knowledge as justified true belief—the definition first put forward by Plato. Gettier noted that you could have a justified true belief which would nevertheless not count as knowledge, simply because it was caused in the wrong way—caused by irrelevant events. For example, if I believe that somebody in my department now owns a BMW, but believe it to be Jones, who told me last month that he owned one, then I may have a justified true belief. But, because Jones sold his BMW yesterday, my belief is only true because it was another of my departmental colleagues, Smith, who bought it from Jones. Because my justified belief was caused by the wrong thing, so to speak, I do not know that a colleague owns a BMW, even though one of them in fact does, and even though my belief that one of them does is justified.

Getter's observation has given rise to what are called “causal theories of knowledge”. Such theories try to specify what kind of causal link obtains between knowings and objects of empirical knowledge. Those interested in such theories go on to discuss whether such links exist as well in the case of mathematical and moral knowledge. Such inquiries tie in with Kripke-inspired causal theories of reference. These are theories about how what we are talking about is determined not by what we say about it, but rather by causal linkages between our use of certain words and the things those words were originally used to name.

There is much debate among analytic philosophers about the value of such theories—about whether we need either a theory of knowledge or a theory of reference, about whether Getter's discovery is of any philosophical interest, about whether causal theories can ever be made to work, and about what they would be good for if they did. But a student of analytic philosopher is expected to have views on all these topics, if only to be sure of passing the “epistemology and metaphysics” section of the Ph. D. qualifiying exam. You will get more points in my profession for having a novel argument relevant to these topics than you would get from, for example, publishing a comprehensive history of moral philosophy in Europe from Montaigne to Kant.

Such a history was published a few years ago by Jerome Schneewind, who teaches philosophy at Hopkins, Fifty years ago, when Lovejoy, Jaeger, Cornford, Gilson, Wolfson, and Kemp Smith, were still names to conjure with, a long, learned, original, and imaginative work in the history of philosophy such as Schneewind’s THE INVENTION OF AUTONOMY would have been heralded as one of America’s most important recent contributions to philosophy. Nowadays, however, it will probably find more readers outside of philosophy departments than inside. The majority of American teachers of philosophy will remain unaware of its existence.

The main reason for this distribution of prestige is, once again, that analytic phliosophers would like, above everything else, to feel that they are adding bricks to the edifice of knowledge. Analytic philosophers are of course not as suspicious of historians as they are of literary critics. For they acknowledge that historians who confine themselves to ascertaining which events actually occurred do offer knowledge rather than mere opinion. . But because historians of philosophy like Lovejoy or Schneewind are concerned with trends rather than events, they are often classed with the opinion-mongers. They are thought of as looking more like literary critics than real philosophers, professional philosophers, ought to look.

This is because telling a story about trends is an invitation to the next generation of intellectual historians to tell another, competing, story about the same trends, just as setting up a literary canon invites the next generation of critics to revise that canon. By contrast, the explanation of a macrostrural physical phenomenon by reference to detailed microstructural arrangements typically does not invite the next generation to offer a competing explanation. For the first explanation is often agreed to have added a brick to the edifice of knowledge, making it unnecessary to revisit that spot on the wall. That sense of definitiveness and finality is what analytic philosophers yearn for. Such a sense is obviously not achievable by a book like Schneewind’s.

The contrast between analytic and non-analytic philosophy roughly parallels C. P. Snow’s contrast between the scientific and the literary cultures—the, hard-soft, or techie-fuzzie, contrast I mentioned earlier.. Most people who go in for what the analytic philosophers call “Continental philosophy” are willing, and often eager, to fuzz up the boundaries between philosophy, intellectual history, literature, literary criticism, and culture criticism. They are relatively indifferent to the results of the so-called hard sciences. They see every reason why philosophy professors should read THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS and little reason why they should subscribe to SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN.

The typical reader of Heidegger and Derrida views the hard sciences as handmaidens of technological progress, rather than as providing windows through which to glimpse reality unveiled. Such a reader will agree with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche that Plato and Aristotle were mistaken in thinking that the pursuit of objective truth is the most worthwhile, and the most distinctively human, activity of which we are capable. Most such readers will agree with Nietzsche that what the Greek philosophers missed was the priority of art and literature to science and mathematics—the need to view science through the optics of art and of life.. Plato envisaged a science-centered education, whereas Nietzsche envisaged an art-centered culture, one in which we acknowledge that the poets determine our ends, and that the scientists merely provide means to realize these ends.

This line of thought is nicely summarized by Kierkegaard’s insistence that what we call “objective knowledge”, whether it is of mathematical theorems or of physical facts or of the occurrence of historical events is merely “accidental” knowledge. The bricks that make up the edifice of human knowledge are irrelevant for the only purpose that really matters. That purpose is to transform what Kierkegaard calls “the existing individual”. “All knowledge,” Kierkegaard writes, “which does not inwardly relate itself to existence, in the reflection of inwardness, is, essentially viewed, accidental knowledge; its degree and scope is essentially indifferent… Only ethico-religious knowledge has an essential relationship to the knower.”

The paradigm case of existential transformation for Kierkegaard is becoming a New Being in Christ. But this is obviously not the only example of acquiring what Heidegger called authentic existence—a life whose goals are not simply taken over from one’s culture or one’s tradition, but which are the result of an idiosyncratic, alienating, ecstatic encounter with something or somebody new. This is the sort of encounter Plato had with Socrates, Pico della Mirandola with Plato, Romeo with Juliet, Hitler with Wagner, Quine with Carnap, Harold Bloom with Blake, and many idealistic young people with social movements such as Marxism, feminism, fascism, and gay liberation.

Clearly, not everybody in the humanities is looking for existential transformation. Nor are all non-analytic philosophy professors. But the existence of the phenomenon of existential transformation is as important for the humanities as the phenomenon of consensus among knowledgeable experts is for the scientific culture. If there were no such phenomenon, there would be no literary culture, just as there would be no scientific culture if attaining consensus were not a familiar and expected product of conducting laboratory experiments.

This does not mean that the chief products of humanities departments are books which effect existential transformation. Rather, the principal product of those departments are contributions to Geistesgeschichte: stories about past transformations, especially narratives connecting many successive transformations in social and individual self-images. These are stories about, for example, how the Greeks got from Homer to Aristotle, how literary criticism got from Dr. Johnson to Harold Bloom, how the German imagination got from Schiller to Habermas, how Protestantism got from Luther to Tillich, and how feminists got from Harriet Taylor to Catherine MacKinnon. These narratives tell us how human beings managed to change their most important self-descriptions. All such narratives are endlessly contestable, and endlessly revisable in the light of more recent changes. So the very idea of a last, definitive historical account of any of these transitions is as silly as the idea of a last, definitive, Bildungsroman.

Such narratives, when woven together with one another, and with a reader’s own unwritten Bildungsroman, offer that reader a sense of what Hegel called the course of the World-Spirit. Books which weave together many such narratives, and which imbed a moral within the design of the resulting tapestry, perform the task which Hegel called “holding our time in thought.” That phrase was one of Hegel’s many definitions of philosophy. It seems to me a plausible definition of what the humanities departments of our universities hope to do for their students. By telling stories about past transformative encounters, members of these departments hope to put students in a better position to have similar encounters of their own, encounters some of which may help shove the World-Spirit along..

Holding one’s time in thought is to the humanities what puzzle-solving is to the sciences. One of the chief satisfactions of being a natural scientist, even a very minor-league natural scientist, is that you may solve a puzzle, at least a minor-league puzzle, once and for all. A great scientist is one who solves a great big, long-standing puzzle—why the planets move in ellipses, for example, or the microstructure of radioactivity, or the physical realization of genetic coding. A very great natural scientist may solve puzzles in a way that transforms our whole sense of how things work. This is why Einstein is sometimes referred to as a “philosopher-scientist”. His achievement conforms to Wilfrid Sellars’ definition of philosophy as an account of how things, in the largest sense of the term, hang together, in the largest sense of the term.

But a very great philosopher, someone like Plato or Hegel , may do the same sort of thing that Einstein did. So may a very great religious writer like Kierkegaard or a very great poet like Shakespeare. The things being made to hang together in a new way are different , but the largeness is comparable. In the scientific case the relevant things are non-human objects (including pieces of human beings such as neurons or genes). In the humanities, they are human things—human institutions, lives, character-traits, achievements, and so on. Great, but not very great, historians, literary critics, and philosophers stand to people like Kant and Shakespeare as run-of-the-mill Nobel Laureates in physics stand to Einstein. They do not effect transformations, but they facilitate the next round of such transformations. Whereas the physicists build up to the next transformation by solving puzzles, the humanists build up to it by telling stories about how past transformations do or do not hang together.

Comte and Marx, for example, were trying to hold their time in thought, when they spun retrospective narratives in support of their respective suggestions about how the cruel inequalities that had survived the French Revolution might be corrected. . So were the Renaissance humanists when they offered suggestions about what Christendom might become, now that we had become able to appropriate the wisdom of the ancients.

The greatest non-analytic philosophers of our century, Dewey and Heidegger, spent a lot of their time telling stories about decline and about progress, stories which led their readers to reconceive themselves and their surroundings. The potentially transformative reconceptions these two men offered obviously cannot be described as providing us with new knowledge. Yet to call them suggestions for change in opinion is equally misleading. For those who follow Kierkegaard in distinguishing the existential and important from the objective and relatively trivial are right to brush aside questions about consensus and certainty. They are also right to have no interest in the knowledge-opinion distinction. . When one switches professions, spouses, lovers, or religions one does not ask for either certainty or consensus about the rightness of one’s choice. Nor is it in point to do so when choosing between Dewey’s upbeat narrative of our ascent to social democracy and Heidegger’s downbeat narrative of our descent into mindless technological gigantism.

To illustrate the difference between a history-centered kind of philosophy which has no problem about its relation to the other humanities and the kind of philosophy which considers history inessential, let me recur to Schneewind, whose book I mentioned earlier. In a seminar covering the material of the book, a student who was bewildered by his approach asked Schneewind anxiously “But you do believe, don’t you, that there is a body of objectively correct moral knowledge which moral philosophers are asymptotically approaching?” When Schneewind said that he believed nothing of the sort, the student was genuinely perplexed as to what the point of writing a history of moral philosophy was supposed to be. This perplexity would not, I suspect, have been found in an American philosophy student of fifty years ago.

I cite this anecdote in order to suggest how deeply ingrained in the culture of analytic philosophy is the ideal of the pursuit of non-time-bound, unrevisable, truth. If you have this ideal before you, what goes on in departments of literature and history is bound to seem beside any possible philosophical point. Conversely, if you agree with Kierkegaard that knowledge of such truths is trivial by comparison with “ethico-religious” transformation, then you will have little interest in analytic philosophy. Because most readers of philosophy do agree with Kierkegaard, analytic philosophy has few readers outside anglophone philosophy departments. Most of the other professors in anglophone universities neither know nor care what goes on in the philosophy department. Insofar as they think about it all, they dismiss that department as having been taken over by “technicians” whose work is of no interest to non-specialists. .

Many analytic philosophers would go along with the view of philosophy put forward by David Lewis, one of the most respected and admired of contemporary American philosophers. His system-building and puzzle-solving abilities, as well as his argumentative acumen, are the envy of his colleagues. But he has as little interest in the history of philosophy, and in whether his students are familiar with this history, as did his teacher Carnap,. Lewis writes that “One comes to philosophy already endowed with a stock of existing opinions. It is not the business of philosophy either to undermine or to justify these opinions, to any great extent, but only to try to discover ways of expanding them into an orderly system. A metaphysician’ analysis of mind is an attempt at systematizing our opinions about it. It succeeds t the extent that (1) it is systematic, and
(2) it respects those of our PR-philosophic opinions to which we are firmly attached.” (Lewis, COUNTERFACTUALS, p. 88)

Philosophers who agree with Lewis often have little patience with those who, like Kierkegaard, hope that reading a philosophy book may, by undermining or justifying our present opinions, permit self-transformation. Kierkegaard’s claim that only the ethico-religious really matters is the antithesis of Lewis’s view of what philosophy is good for. The difference between the two men is, as I have already suggested, the difference between telling stories, especially stories of redemption or of decline, and solving puzzles.

Lewis is the archetypal philosophical puzzle-solver. His solutions to puzzles are original and brilliant, and they fit together into a truly beautiful system. But those who think that philosophy should concentrate on dissolving traditional puzzles rather than on solving them typically do so because they hope that such dissolution will help us replace a worn-out jargon with a new, transformative, way of speaking and thinking. Such people will see Lewis’ system-building as having merely aesthetic value. The sort of philosopher who finds Heidegger useful, precisely because of his attempt to get rid of all the presuppositions common to Plato and to analytic philosophy, is especially likely to take this view.

If analytic philosophy is to retain any hope of realizing its dream of scientification and full professionalization, then there must be meanings which stay fixed despite changes of usage, and intuitions which remain platitudinous despite cultural change. It is essential for this movement that historicism have its limits-that not every way of speaking and thinking be up for grabs, not every philosophical problem be a candidate for therapeutic dissolution.. For if all ways of speaking and thinking are potentially replacable, then the analytic puzzle-solvers will always be in danger of finding themselves parochial, time-bound, obsolete.

This is the principal reason why, within contemporary analytic philosophy, holism, contextualism, pragmatism, and historicism are viewed with so much suspicion. For the more meanings, concepts and intuitions seem to be at the mercy of history, the less hope there is that philosophy will someday attain the secure path of a science. Historicism in philosophy is the chief enemy of professionalization. Fear of deprofessionalization has come to play, among the analytic philosophers, a considerable role in the choice of substantive philosophical views.

I myself am a convinced holist, historicist, pragmatist, and contextualist. I do not believe that there are any little analyzable nuggets called “concepts” and “meanings” of the sort that the analytic philosophers’ job description requires. My first impulse, upon being told of a philosophical puzzle, is to try to dissolve it rather than to solve it: I typically question the terms in which the problem is posed, and try to suggest a new set of terms, terms in which the putative puzzle is unstatable.

This sort of behavior may account for the fact that I am often characterized as an “end-of-philosophy” philosopher. But I am not. Philosophy cannot possibly end unless cultural change ends, and, like everyone else, I hope that such change will continue. Given cultural change, there will always be people trying to put the old and the new together. Plato tried to put the best features of Hesiod’s Olympians together with the best features of axiomatic geometry, Aquinas tried to put Aristotle together with Scripture. Dewey tried to put Hegel together with Darwin, Annette Baier tries to put Hume and Harriet Taylor together with Freud.

All these people are appropriately called philosophers, both on Sellars’ and on Hegel’s definitions. They were all trying to make human things hang together in a large, wholesale, way, and also to hold their rapidly changing times in thought. The reason philosophy always buries its undertakers is not that there are deep permanent, puzzles which pop up like jacks-in-the-box in every epoch and in every culture, but simply that the times keep changing. Such change always makes it hard to see how things hang together, because it forces us to describe new phenomena in terms which were designed for use on old phenomena. The useful philosophers are the ones who think up new terms, and thereby make old vocabularies obsolete. .The invention of such terms cannot be made the goal of a program of scientific research. So what I do hope will come to an end is the attempt to set philosophy on the secure path of a science.

If such attempts do come to an end, however, analytic philosophy will not be regarded by intellectual historians as having been a waste of time. On the contrary, I believe that they will see analytic philosophy as having produced powerful new considerations in favor of historicism and against scientism. Nothing has so become analytic philosophy as its constant self-criticism—its habit of chipping away at its own foundations, calling its own pretensions into question. Receptiveness to such autocritique as permitted analytic philosophers such as Kuhn and Putnam to formulate far deeper criticisms of Russell and Carnap’s attempt to put philosophy on a scientific footing that any that have been produced outside the analytic movement. The reaction against logical positivism which has dominated analytic philosophy for the last forty years should not be seen as a tempest in an anglophone teapot, but as a substantial contribution to world philosophy.

If historians are to appreciate the magnitude of the achievements of analytic philosophy, they would do well to brush aside the self-serving rhetoric which the analytic philosophers unfortunately continue to employ. They can safely disregard the claim that analytic philosophy exhibits an unusual, and perhaps unprecedented, degree of clarity and rigor. They should attend, instead, to the internal dialectic of analytic philosophy. Thanks to what Hegel called “the cunning of reason”, this dialectic has enabled analytic philosophy4rs to explain more clearly than ever before why clarity and rigor are relative to cultural circumstance.

In the forty-odd years since analytic philosophy took over, no more agreement has been achieved among American analytic philosophers than was achieved among the neo-Kantian philosophers in Germany during the second half of the nineteenth century, or among the pre-analytic American philosophers who discussed the relative merits of James, Russell, Bradley, Whitehead and Bergson. The Russell-Carnap attempt to use symbolic logic to put philosophy on the secure path of a science has been as complete a fizzle as was Husserl’s attempt to use the phenomenological epoche for that purpose. Analytic philosophers are as quick to divide into schools, each dismissive of the other's importance, as were the scholastics of the fourteenth century.

This sort of scholasticism is hard to avoid when a profession has no responsibilities except to itself. What counts as a real problem in, for example, jurisprudence, is

a matter on which society as a whole has opinions. But society has no opinions about what counts as a philosophical problem. That is why, ever since philosophy became professionalized in the time of Kant, philosophers have spent at least half their time explaining why their colleagues’ problems are unreal.

What one acquires as a graduate student in an analytic philosophy department is not a set of methods or tools, but simply familiarity with the various language-games presently being played by the faculty of that department. These are language-games which may well be viewed with contempt by the analytic philosophers at the next university down the road. Nevertheless, familiarity with such language-games is what constitutes initiation into the profession. In this respect, graduate training is precisely the same process for students of David Lewis or Donald Davidson as it for students on the other side of the abyss--disciples of Albrecht Wellmer or Gianni Vattimo, for example. In all four cases, you acquire what suspicious outsiders call pointless jargon and what convinced insiders call indispensable tools.

When in 1950 I sat starry-eyed at Carnap’s feet, I actually believed that by the end of the twentieth century philosophers around the world would be bedecking their articles with quantifiers, talking the same ideally perspicuous language, trying to solve the same puzzles, adding bricks to the same edifice. But during my years at Princeton, watching the winds of doctrine veer about, and last yearns urgent new philosophical puzzles wither and die in the blast, I realized this scenario was unlikely to be played out in even a single university, much less on a global scale. Still, the realization that my Princeton colleagues no more agreed about when a brick had been added to the edifice of knowledge than about what counted as an important philosophical problem did not diminish my growing conviction the best of the analytic philosophers have done a lot for the transformation of the human self-image.

In various books and articles I have tried to tell a story about how the linguistic turn in philosophy both made it possible for the heirs of Kant to come to terms with Darwin and encouraged an anti-representationalist line of thought which chimes with Nietzsche’s perspectivalism and with Dewey’s pragmatism. This line of thought, running through the later Wittgenstein, as well as through the work of Sellars and Davidson, has given us a new way of thinking about the relation between language and reality. Thinking in this way may, at long last, do what the German idealists vainly hoped to do: it may persuade us to end discussion of tiresome pseudo-problems about the relation of subject and object, and of appearance to reality.

These analytic philosophers, I would argue, can help us get philosophy back on the Hegelian, historicist, romantic, path. This is the path that nineteenth-century neo-Kantians , Husserlian phenomenologists, and the founders of analytic philosophy all hoped to block off. The story I have tried to tell elsewhere about how analytic philosophy tried and failed to avoid taking this path culminates in the claim that human beings can, with the help of Wittgenstein, Sellars and Davidson on the one hand, and Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida on the other, get away from the old idea that there is something outside of human beings—something like the Will of God, or the Intrinsic Nature of Reality—which has authority over human beliefs and actions. It is a story about how certain intuitions we inherit from the Greeks can be undermined and replaced, rather than systematized. Whether or not one accepts or likes this story, it is a story of transformation, a story of the sort that Kierkegaard could acknowledge as having ethico-religious import (even though its import is radically atheistic).

My story, in short, is not about how to avoid analytic philosophy, but rather about why you need to study certain selected analytic philosophers in order fully to appreciate the transformative possibilities which the intellectual movements of the twentieth century have opened up for our descendants. The disciplinary matrix of analytic philosophy, despite the hollow defensive rhetoric with which it resounds, is one with which future intellectual historians will have to become familiar, just as they have had to become familiar with the disciplinary matrix of German idealism.

German idealism too produced a lot of hollow scientistic rhetoric, but it did shove the World-Spirit along. So, I have argued, will the line of holist and contextualist thinking that led Wittgenstein from the TRACTATUS to the INVESTIGATIONS, that persuaded Quine to mock the analytic-synthetic distinction, that led Sellars to abandon the Lockean idea of pre-linguistic awareness, and made Davidson repudiate the very idea of a conceptual scheme.

Students of the history of philosophy in the twenty-second century will, I predict, have to struggle through the technicalities that litter this train of thought, just as today’s students have to struggle through the technicalities of Kant’s CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. . For all its pretentious architectonic and its Rube Goldberg-style solutions of pointless pseudo-puzzles, Kant’s book has turned out to have transformative, ethico-religious, effects. We think about ourselves differently because Kant wrote what he did. For all its pseudo-scientistic pretensions, and despite the countless dead ends it has backed itself into, twentieth-century analytic philosophy will also have transformative effects, and so will put our descendants in its debt.

Analytic philosophy may not have lived up to its pretensions, and may not have solved the puzzles it thought it had. Yet in the process of finding reasons for putting those pretensions and those puzzles aside it helped earn itself an important place in the history of ideas. By giving up on the quest for apodicticity and finality that Husserl shared with Carnap and Russell, and by finding new reasons for thinking that that quest will never succeed, it cleared a path that leads us past scientism, just as the German idealists cleared a path that led us around empiricism. The anti-empiricist lesson of German idealism took a long time to learn, and so may the anti-scientistic lesson of analytic philosophy. But someday intellectual historians may be able to see these apparently opposed movements as complementary.

Richard Rorty

November 10, 1999

KIERKEGAARD PREFACE NOTES

New Preface Comments

page 113

We now move to the top of page 113, right after Kierkegaard has opened up the possibility that, even though the understanding seeks the truth and is designed to give the person self-knowledge, it is afflicted with a paradox which is built into its very nature. The understanding, it seems, is drawn inexorably to precisely its opposite, that is that which it cannot understand. And Kierkegaard asked the question, "But what is this unknown thing against which the understanding, in its paradoxical fashion, collides, and which, in addition, it disturbs even a person's self-knowledge?"

 

    Kierkegaard's answer seems odd. He says that this unknown thing is, tautologically, "the unknown". His job now is to tell us what it means for something to be unknown, which appears to be an ontological question rather than an epistemological one. I mean by this that Kierkegaard is suggesting that the reason why the unknown is not some inherent defect in our capacities, but rather something about that which is unknown.dear God first says that what is unknown cannot be another person because we know what people are; Kierkegaard seems to have no truck with Descartes's idea that we cannot know their minds. Second, the unknown cannot be a thing in the world because, contrary to what we might believe, Kierkegaard is optimistic about our capacity to know objects in our experience. He is by no means a skeptic. So, since neither other people or objects in the world can be inherently unknown, or maybe more precisely unknowable, although Kierkegaard never uses that word, he suggests, in a move reminiscent of what Aquinas did when offered proofs of God's existence, that "let us call this unknown God".

 

    Kierkegaard now gets even more interesting. He says that the word "God"space "is just a name we give it". This kind of sentence is wide open for interpretation, and even wider open for misinterpretation. The problem here is that the first thought for many of us is that Kierkegaard is being a relativist. I mean that it sounds as if Kierkegaard is saying that there's some unknown thing which we can give any name at all in the sense that what is unknown might be something we feel, some "higher power" or other vague spiritual" presence that makes up much of what people today called spirituality.space that this is not remotely what Kierkegaard means. He makes it clear that he thinks that the unknown exists, and is a real thing separate from our feelings or experiences about it. But he does this in his typically backhanded way by arguing that the understanding, when confronted with this unknown thing for which it has a passion but which also destroys its hegemony, is not something that the understanding wants to prove, or, more precisely, should want to prove. Kierkegaard's diction here is interesting. He says that "it can hardly occur to the understanding" to try to prove the existence of God. This seems to fly in the face of philosophical history, because people have repeatedly tried to use the understanding to do exactly this.

 

    Any road, despite this history, which Kierkegaard willfully disregards, he then offers two very interesting arguments about why the understanding cannot possibly be interested in trying to prove God's existence.

 

    The first argument goes this way. First, if God does not exist it's impossible to prove that he does. There is a suppressed assumption here. If there is an unknown against which the understanding comes, in which the teams in the understanding of nature to seek precisely because it is unknown, it would make very little sense of this unknown were to be nonexistent. Therefore, inside this argument is Kierkegaard's not so secret assumption that the unknown, or the existence of the unknown as the focus of the understanding, is in a way a variation on Anselm's ontological argument. Second, space and consistent with what I just said, give your heads that if God does exist it would be equally foolish to try to prove that he does, because the very activity of trying to prove that God exists presupposes is possible to prove that he exists, which suggests that we believe that God does exist. Or, to be more precise using Kierkegaard's diction, if we set out to prove the gods existence is real we have to assume that are already is. I have a question. Is Kierkegaard emphasizing the issue of believing in God, or the ontological question of God's existence here? I'm not sure.space enough of this argument is that I wouldn't even begin the business of trying to prove that God exists if I thought for a moment that it was possible that he did not exist, because in that second case the whole enterprise would be a waste of time, so if it would make no sense to undertake in the first place. But since people do undertake to prove that God exists, they must be assuming that he already does.

 

    The second argument is quite different. This focuses on the idea that if the understanding comes up against the unknown, the unknown really exists. If that is so the question is not whether we can prove the unknown's existence but rather whether or not the unknown is God. the problem here is that one is not proving anything. Rather, what one is doing is trying to develop a concept of what the unknown, which already exists might be. But to develop the I key of the unknown as God seems unfortunate, as Kierkegaard calls, because to develop the content of a concept of the unknown scenes of contradiction in terms.

 

    The whole enterprise of time to prove that something to just stretched Kierkegaard is very difficult, but more seriously that one cannot do because in order to prove that something exists. What is firmly convinced that we must always already believe or know that it exists. Every argument for the existence of any X necessarily devolves into "a further development of the conclusion I drew from my assumption that the thing about which the question is asked exists."

FIRST KIERKEGAARD

When we read SK (Kierkegaard) we have to be very very careful because, like any really good philosopher, he can lend himself to a smart, plausible reading that is deeply misleading. I know that this sounds mighty suspicious of me but I am convinced that most readings of the Big Guys/Gals fill me with trepidation.

So, in this spirit, let's proceed to look at SK' Fragments.

We start with his analysis of the project of philosophy. He begins, as Climacus, with Socrates and Plato, and with the Meno and the Phaedo. Here Climacus first sketches out, with some precision if not textual length, a very insightful reading of what Plato was intending.

SK/Climacus takes this as indicative of the philosophical project in general, at which I will get in a moment.

What does Plato say? He argues that the question, 'Can we learn the truth?', is central to philosophy, and it is, for obvious reasons. If we cannot learn the truth then there is nothing for philosophy, which is a search for wisdom, to do. If we always already knew the truth philosophy's job would be done before it began. But if we do not currently know the truth there must, pari passu, be a problem, namely that although we might be able to learn the truth, we do not at the moment know how to learn it, and therefore cannot currently know whether any of the beliefs we have are true or not. (This, by the way, is also close to where Descartes begins his Meditations 2,000 years later, with the question of how he can trust his current beliefs if cherished beliefs he once honestly held to be true have now been proven false.)

Plato's question, If I do not now know the truth how can I possibly learn it? If I do not possess the truth then I cannot know when I am presented with it, and so no one can teach me how to discern it. The problem hinges on the relationship between having the truth and then having the condition that allows me to recognize it.

I must somehow have the condition, the inner ability to discern what is true from what is nontrue, before I can learn the truth but I cannot learn this condition any more for example than my dogs can learn the condition of thinking of things in terms of property lines or political divisions like cities and towns. No matter how well and clearly and often I explain counties and states to Bella and Coltrane they will understand nothing because they do not previously possess the condition for knowing these things.

Plato's very clever answer to this seemingly unanswerable conundrum, a conundrum that must have an answer or people would never know that such a thing as truth existed, and they do, is that human beings must always already be is possession of the condition that makes learning truth possible. That is they must already know what the truth is, and what truths there are, and they must always have known.

Thus the wise person or teacher cannot actually teach in the sense of telling people something that they do not know -- this is for Plato an impossibility -- but he/she can remind the learner of what she already knows. Thus, being a philosopher does not consist in finding out the truth but in helping others to bring it back, and in organizing and naming correctly what has been brought back.

The assumption here has to be that everyone is always in the truth and that the temporary condition of not knowing this can be overcome by the learner. 
Under this description -- and this matters terribly to Kierkegaard -- the occasion under which one gets reminded of the truth is not important in itself because it is accidental to getting the truth. The historical instant may have sentimental importance but is not metaphysically crucial. One can miss this moment but catch the next and nothing is lost because the truth is always timelessly there and therefore any occasion can lead to it. Plato's view of truth entirely devalues history, or momentary existence, and also devalues the individual as the one who learns the truth because the truth that one learns or recalls is not one's own individual truth but the truth in the most general sense, which belongs in exactly the same way to everyone who remembers it.

This is one of the unnoted tensions in Plato's Phaedo, his dialogue about the immortality of the soul. Socrates interlocutors, Simmias and Cebes, are not so much skeptical about whether the soul survives the death of the body -- they admit that Socrates has proven his case -- but are to the end of the piece dispirited by the fact that the soul whose immortality so cleverly and so often proves is an impersonal one with no reference to the thoughts and feelings of the individual who dies. What survives is Reason, the Truth, not me as an historical. accidental individual. And it is this that Kierkegaard is interested i and which Plato never takes up.

NOTES ON CUP

 

At the end of the historical section, SK argues that the appeal to all the people and all the centuries has zero meaning for the decision of the existing individual; there is no probative force here, no pro; on the contrary, the terrorism of all those disapproving dead ‘argue’ against disbelief, but in a purely rhetorical way.

But SK’s point here is the one he keeps making, namely that the truth, objective or historical, of Xy is not the point at all, partly because this can only at best be an approximation, which is not what is called for here, but most decisively because Xy demands in its heart and essence that the prospective believer not prove it but choose her own personal relationship to it. Think of the most radical possible version of James’s will to believe, then add that what is made true by the belief is in itself a paradox, something that cannot be proven to be either historically or objectively true, and you get closer to what SK wants.

The second position is what SK calls the ‘speculative’; the nub is this: (VII, 37)

Xy = an historical phenomenon AND “the Q of its T therefore becomes a matter of permeating it with thought in such a way that finally Xy itself is an eternal thought.”

Here then one admits Xy’s historicity but then assumes (in a position that says it makes no assumptions) that this historical event must ‘hide’ within itself a timeless conceptual core, a rational truth that needs no further arguments because it is through and through self-evident – proves itself – once we get clear what it is.

So, this position begins w/o presuppositions in the sense that it need not rest on whether the documents that found Xy have truth w/o exception; rather, the point is that within these data lies a deeper truth untethered to historical accident.

 

But for Sk it does make an assumption, namely that Xy is “given”, by which SK means that XY is always already there as the air we all breathe, the assumption being that the Xn proposal is always available to any intelligence independent of either history (which is its accidental cloak) or choice/inwardness. Reason is universal; so, therefore, must be the truth of XY.

But he goes further; one’s mundane embarrassment about not being XN, which leads one to say that she is XN, has no bearing on the speculative thinker because in a sense that thinker does not really care whether anyone is or is not in the ordinary course of things a XN. No; he is only interested in whether XY bears a speculative truth. He has become so speculative that Speculation, not his individual existence, is all that counts, and his choice, his eternal happiness, his relationship to faith, are all irrelevant asides to the activity of impersonal, general Speculation. He stands beside, outside, his individual humanity in order to speculate.

 

Here we come to an extremely important SKian principle: quidquid cognoscitur per modum cognoscentis cognoscitur.

This here mean: ‘Whatever is known is known in the mode of the knower.’ This means that if you want to know something you have to approach the act of knowing it in the right way; since faith depends on inwardness and subjective decision, trying to know whether XY is true purely by using speculative, i.e., impersonal, reason, leads exactly nowhere.

Here is how Mr. K puts it – and please note the phrase, ‘not where there is no object(an imperfect and undialectical distinction)’

“With the infinite, passionate interest in his eternal happiness, the subjective individual is at the extreme point of his exertion, the extreme point, not where there is no object, . . . , but where God is negatively present in the subjectivity that with this interest is the form of the eternal happiness.”

This deserves some exegesis.

SK means that the right way to approach the XN ‘proposal’, which is after all an offer of eternal happiness to a being whose whole existence is time, can only be when the individual feels an ‘infinite, passionate interest’, that is, when the I experiences, rather than thinks, an unlimited interest, an interest that exceeds body and time, which is ‘passionate’, that is accepting and essentially PASSIVE, something one undergoes or suffers, when that is one is in Lina Wertmuller’s terms, ‘swept away’, in a manner akin to what happens in erotic love.

To feel this interest is an ‘exertion’, a hard task, something one does as well as feels. At its extreme, one is as far away as possible from objectivity; in a way one loses the very object one desires because one is so deeply inside oneself – driven there by a passion that cannot correspond to any historical fact or theoretical speculation – driven by a passion that the world and thought cannot answer – that the object of that passion exists in its depth not as historical or conceptual but as a “negative presence’, the impossible answer to one’s infinite interest that can only exist in one’s subjectivity. This does not mean that there is no object or that it is a projection or a fantasy or a delusion but that the object is paradoxical and cannot exist in its true form in either history or thought.

hERE’S THE THING: in SK’s day speculative thought, as in our day perhaps science talk, claimed to have ‘grasped the necessity of the historical.’ This means that if XY is historical then speculative thought can also claim to grasp its ‘necessity’, its rational inevitability, in which case everyone should be XN w/o ever having to make a personal decision because in this case XY’s truth would be rationally self-evident. 

But for SK the whole point is that XY is NOT necessary, in fact is the opposite of that, something that a reasonable person would choose AGAINST because, precisely, the proposal, far from being necessary, is inherently paradoxical, and, moreover, has nothing to do with rational necessity and everything to do with the eternal happiness (non-necessary) of the existing individual.

 

NOW ON TO LESSING

 

This section might seem puzzling until one understands that what interests SK about Lessing in this connection is that Lessing says nothing about his relationship to God!

See VII 49

“he also had enough skeptical ataraxia and religious sense to discern the category of the religious. [HOW CLOSE IS ALL THIS TO DERRIDA’S ‘IL N’Y VA PAS’ IN APORIAS?]”

“But now to the result! Wonderful Lessing! He has none, none at all; there is not the slightest trace of any result.”

 

REASON?

“GOD, HOWEVER, CAN NEVER BECOME A THIRD PARTY when He is a part of the religious; this is precisely the secret of the religious.’

What can this mean? It can mean and does mean that the relationship with God is entirely inward and subjective and therefore God can never become the subject of a conversation about Him because any such conversation takes a distance from the infinite inward passion and must necessarily misrepresent God as an object, something to be discussed, rather than as an irreducible presence.

What does analytic phil analyze?

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PHIL 250 SYLLABUS

WELCOME TO PHIL 250: THE SYLLABUS!

SYLLABUS PHIL 250

SYLLABUS: PHIL 250 TWENTIETH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY

MAY TERM 2010

MEETS MON, WED, TH 1 P.M. - 4 P.M.

LAR 123

KEVIN O'NEILL

101 BEKINS HALL

EXT. 8655/ 909 748 8655

CELL 310 729 3623. YOU MAY TEXT ME AT THIS PHONE

EMAIL: koneill41@coemgenis.com

OFFICE HOURS  NOON TO ONE, TUESDAY AND THURSDAY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CLASSICS OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY. ED. ROBERT R. AMMERMAN. HACKETT, 1990.

WHAT IS ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY? HANS-JOHANN GLOCK. CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 2008.

NOTE: I EXPECT YOU TO READ GLOCK THROUGHOUT THE MONTH. HE WILL BE REFERENCED IN THE FINAL.

PLEASE FOCUS ON THESE SECTIONS: CHAPTERS 1, 2 AND 5. (PP. 1-60, PP. 115-150).

COURSE DESCRIPTION

THIS CLASS WILL STUDY THE CLASSIC FOUNDING TEXTS OF THE DOMINANT PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT OF THE 20TH CENTURY, ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY. WE WILL READ THE EARLY FORMULATIONS OF BERTRAND RUSSELL, G.E. MOORE, A.J. AYER, AND LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, AS WELL AS THE LATER EXTENSIONS OF THE MOVEMENT BY JOHN WISDOM AND GILBERT RYLE.

EACH CLASS MEMBER WILL BE EXPECTED TO ATTEND CLASS MEETINGS ON MONDAY, TUESDAY AND THURSDAY, 1 P.M. TO 4 P.M. SINCE THIS IS AN INTENSE STUDY ENDING IN A COMPREHENSIVE FINAL I EXPECT EVERYONE TO BE AT EVERY SESSION. IF YOU MUST BE ABSENT PLEASE LET ME KNOW BEFOREHAND SO YOU CAN MAKE UP THE WORK. MORE THAN TWO ABSENCES WILL RESULT IN A SIGNIFICANT DROP IN YOUR GRADE/EVALUATION.PLEASE DROP THE COURSE IF YOU FEEL YOU CANNOT HONOR THIS COMMITMENT.

THERE WILL BE NO PAPERS OR JOURNALS OR PRESENTATIONS. THE ENTIRE GRADE FOR THE COURSE WILL DEPEND ON THE RESULTS OF A FINAL COMPREHENSIVE EXAMINATION IN WHICH YOU WILL BE ASKED TO INTERPRET PASSAGES FROM THE THINKERS WE WILL READ, AND TO ANSWER MORE GENERAL QUESTIONS ABOUT THEIR WORK.  THIS EXAM WILL BE TAKEN ON THURSDAY, MAY 27 AND WILL BE DONE IN BLUE BOOKS, OR ON YOUR LAPTOP IN CLASS, WITH THE RESULTS SENT TO MY EMAIL ADDRESS.

CALENDAR

MAY 3 INTRODUCTION - WHAT IS ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND WHAT WILL WE BE STUDYING? FIRST CLOSE READ AS A GROUP.

MAY 5 BERTRAND RUSSELL, ON WHAT THERE IS , PP. 25-34

MAY 6 GEORGE EDWARD MOORE  ON A PROOF OF THE EXTERNAL WORLD, PP. 68-84

MAY 10 RUSSELL - ON DESCRIPTIONS, PP. 15 -24

MAY 12 MOORE - A DEFENSE OF COMMON SENSE, PP. 47-67

MAY 13  A.J. AYER, THE ELIMINATION OF METAPHYSICS AND THE PRINCIPLE OF VERFICATION, PP. 85-107

MAY 17  QUINE TWO DOGMAS OF EMPIRICISM, PP. 196-213

MAY19   MOORE ON WITTGENSTEIN, PP. 233-265

MAY 20 MOORE ON WITTGENSTEIN, PP. 265-284

MAY 24 RYLE THE MYTH OF DESCARTES, PP. 296-314

MAY 26 REVIEW

MAY 27 FINAL EXAM

 

The Point of Subterranean Forces

We have written about Darwin, Marx and Freud and argued that in each case these thinkers suggested that impersonal forces more fundamental than individual personality or history determined the shape that the surface of individual identity assumed. The idea in each case is that whatever we think we are, and however free we feel, what we directly experience as our personalities is an aftereffect, a result, an outcome, rather than something original and unique. If these guys are right then my emotional life – my every day, immediate, vivid feelings, or lack thereof, my interests, hopes, and choices, are all functions of the forces that made me who I am. There is no transcendence here – that is, nothing about me that is not the result of those forces. Or, if there are elements in my personality that are not clearly traceable to the work of these forces, such elements are random, peripheral, unimportant and necessarily produced by other, less understood or important, forces. The idea is that there is nothing in human identity and personality that was just put there intact by God or that was just there to be discovered in just pristine innocence by introspection.
For Marx, Freud and Darwin we are the product of the non-I all the way up and all the way down. There is no part of personality that is not a function of forces. I recently read Lehane's Shutter Island, not a great contribution to American literature but an example of what I have been writing: in the novel Lehane makes it clear that his protagonist is entirely a function of forces beyond his knowledge and control. I will not go further because that would spoil the film or novel.

If this is true then we become naturalists as far as identity is concerned. That is we believe that human beings are the product of natural forces – our bodies, the environment, our genes and physiology and trauma – and that we cannot then either construct our personalities as if we were artists, as some postmoderns might argue, or discover/reclaim an already – made self that lives above all physical conditions – a soul or a thinking thing. There is no construction and no discovery, only cause and effect, and who we are is 100% an effect.

We agree with this in daily life when we see people who have been diagnosed as suffering from this or that psychological or psychogenetic disability – schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism – and we believe that their personalities really are the effects of their internal chemistry or genetic makeup. For this reason we see their actions in a very different light than the actions of someone we consider in possession of her faculties and thus of her identity. I: f Susanna does not take her meds and drives her Hummer into the dorm lobby, we are more understanding than if Chad, who is 'normal' but got drunk, did the same thing. We accept that there are people with personality-altering conditions and we treat them differently, assuming that have different kinds of identities that are not the effects of chemistry or genetics. Our three naturalists disagree: as far as they are concerned we are all like schizophrenics, 'victims' of chemistry, genetics, environment.

HAWKING AND THE BIG BANG

Stephen Hawking, the Big Bang, and God

Henry F. Schaefer III

Professor Henry F. (Fritz) Schaefer is one of the most distinguished physical scientists in the world.  The U.S. News and World Report cover story of December 23, 1991 speculated that Professor Schaefer is a "five time nominee for the Nobel Prize." He has received four of the most prestigious awards of the American Chemical Society, as well as the most highly esteemed award (the Centenary Medal) given to a non-British subject by London's Royal Society of Chemistry. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Moreover, his general interest lectures on science and religion have riveted large audiences in nearly all the major universities in the U.S.A. and in Beijing, Berlin, Budapest, Calcutta, Cape Town, New Delhi, Hong Kong, Istanbul, London, Paris, Prague, Sarajevo, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Sofia, St. Petersburg, Sydney, Tokyo, Warsaw, Zagreb, and Zürich.

For 18 years Dr. Schaefer was a faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley, where he remains Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus. Since 1987 Dr. Schaefer has been Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Center for Computational Chemistry at the University of Georgia.

 

The views presented in this lecture are neither supported nor opposed by the University of Georgia. These notes were printed and paid for privately, and not in any way at the expense of the University of Georgia.

The Big Bang

Cosmology is the study of the universe as a whole - its structure, origin, and development. The subjects cosmology addresses are profound, both scientifically and theologically. Perhaps the best way to define cosmology is in terms of the questions that it asks. Hugh Ross does an excellent job of stating these questions in his important book The Fingerprint of God (Second Edition, Whitaker House, 1989):

1. Is the universe finite or infinite in size and content?
2. Has the universe been here forever or did it have a beginning?
3. Was the universe created?
4. If the universe was not created, how did it get here?
5. If the universe was created, how was this creation accomplished, and what can we learn about the agent and events of creation?
6. Who or what governs the laws and constants of physics?
7. Are such laws the products of chance or have they been designed?
8. How do the laws and constants of physics relate to the support and development of life?
9. Is there any knowable existence beyond the apparently observed dimensions of the universe?
10. Do we expect the universe to expand forever, or is a period of contraction to be followed by a big crunch?

Let me begin by noting the relationship between my own research as a quantum chemist and the field of cosmology. On November 5, 1973, my research group published its first paper on interstellar molecules, the molecules that exist in those relatively empty regions between the stars. Our paper appeared in the journal Nature and was titled "Theoretical Support for the Assignment of X-ogen to the HCO+ Molecular Ion." The motivation for research on interstellar molecules has largely derived from the suggestion that these are the elementary materials from which life might have originated. My research group has continued its interest in interstellar molecules over the years, with many of our papers being published in the Astrophysical Journal, considered by some to be the premier journal in the field. Our most recent paper in the field, titled "Ion-Molecule Reactions Producing HC3NH+ in Interstellar Space: Forbiddenness of the Reaction between Cyclic C3H3+ and the N Atom," appeared in the November 10, 1999 issue of the Astrophysical Journal. Three more recent astrophysical papers involving my research group are in various stages leading to publication.

The idea that the universe had a specific time of origin has been philosophically resisted by some very distinguished scientists. Hugh Ross has done an excellent job of summarizing this resistance. Ross begins with Arthur Eddington (1882-1944), who experimentally confirmed Einstein's (1879-1955) general theory of relativity in 1919. Eddington stated a dozen years later: "Philosophically, the notion of a beginning to the present order is repugnant to me. I should like to find a genuine loophole." Eddington later said, "We must allow evolution an infinite amount of time to get started."

Albert Einstein's response to the consequences of his own general theory of relativity may be reasonably interpreted to reflect a possible concern about the peril of a confrontation with the Creator. Through the equations of general relativity, we can trace the origin of the universe backward in time to some sort of a beginning. However, to evade this seemingly inevitable cosmological conclusion, Einstein introduced a cosmological constant, a "fudge factor," to yield a static model for the universe. He longed for a universe that was infinitely old. In fairness, Einstein later considered this to be one of the few serious mistakes of his scientific career. However, even this concession must have been painful, as Einstein had a strong conviction that all physical phenomena ultimately should be accounted for in terms of continuous fields everywhere (see Max Jammer's 1999 book Einstein and Religion).

Einstein ultimately gave at best reluctant assent to what he called "the necessity for a beginning" and eventually to "the presence of a superior reasoning power." But he never did embrace the concept of a personal Creator, a compassionate God who cares for men and women and children.

To understand the intensity of the objections to the idea that the universe had a beginning, an excursus may be helpful. Again following Hugh Ross, let us note the five traditional arguments for the existence of God. These arguments may be found in Augustine, and they were of course further elaborated by Thomas Aquinas. This may seem an unlikely starting point for our topic, but I think you will see as we proceed that these arguments keep coming up. I am not going to take a position on whether these arguments are valid, but I will state them, because throughout current discussions of cosmology these arguments are often cited:

1. The cosmological argument: the effect of the universe's existence must have a suitable cause.
2. The teleological argument: the design of the universe implies a purpose or direction behind it.
3. The rational argument: the operation of the universe according to order and natural law implies a mind behind it.
4. The ontological argument: man's ideas of God (his God- consciousness, if you like) implies a God who imprinted such a consciousness.
5. The moral argument: man's built-in sense of right and wrong can be accounted for only by an innate awareness of a code of law - an awareness implanted by a higher being

So then, why has there been such resistance to the idea of a definite beginning of the universe? Much of it goes right back to that first argument, the cosmological argument. It may be useful to break down the cosmological argument into three parts:

1. Everything that begins to exist must have a cause;
2. If the universe began to exist, then
3. The universe must have a cause.

You can see the direction in which this argument is flowing - a direction of discomfort to some physicists and others knowledgeable about these matters. Such a person was the Princeton physicist Robert Dicke, advocate of the infinitely oscillating theory of the universe, of which we will say more later. Dicke stated in 1965 that an infinitely old universe "would relieve us of the necessity of understanding the origin of matter at any finite time in the past."

In 1946 George Gamow (1904-1968), a Russian-born American physicist, proposed that the primeval fireball, the "Big Bang," was an intense concentration of pure energy. It was the source of all the matter that now exists in the universe. The Big Bang Theory predicts that all the galaxies in the universe should be rushing away from each other at high speeds as a result of that initial event, which some have described as a singular explosion. A possible future dictionary definition of the hot big bang theory encompasses the idea that the entire physical universe, all the matter and energy and even the four dimensions of time and space, burst forth from a state of infinite or near infinite density, temperature, and pressure.

The 1965 observation of the microwave background radiation by Arno Penzias (1933-) and Robert Wilson (1936-) of the Bell Telephone Laboratories (regrettably partially dismantled following the breakup of AT&T) convinced most scientists of the validity of the Big Bang Theory. Further observations reported in 1992 have moved the Big Bang Theory from a consensus view to the nearly unanimous view among cosmologists: there was an origin to the universe, perhaps 13-15 billion years ago. My former Berkeley colleague Joseph Silk and his coworkers gave a brief summary of the evidence for the Big Bang Theory in their February 17, 1995 review paper in Science magazine:

The hot big bang model is enormously successful. It provides the framework for understanding the expansion of the universe, the cosmic background radiation, and the primeval abundance of light elements, as well as a general picture of how the structure seen in the universe today was formed.

Many scientists have been willing to comment on the philosophical consequences of the Big Bang Theory. For example, Arno Penzias, co-discoverer of the microwave background radiation and 1978 Nobel Prize recipient in physics, stated to the New York Times on March 12, 1978:

The best data we have (concerning the big bang) are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.

When asked more recently (in Denis Brian's 1995 book Genius Talk) why some cosmologists were so affectionate in their embrace of the steady state theory (the idea that the universe is infinitely old) of the origin of the universe, Penzias responded: "Well, some people are uncomfortable with the purposefully created world. To come up with things that contradict purpose, they tend to speculate about things they haven't seen."

Perhaps the most amusing statement in this regard came from Cambridge University physicist Dennis Sciama, one of the most distinguished advocates of the steady state theory of the universe. Shortly after he gave up on the steady state hypothesis, Sciama stated: "The steady state theory has a sweep and beauty that for some unaccountable reason the architect of the universe appears to have overlooked." Of course we theoretical scientists have an abundance of excuses for why our cherished theories sometimes fail. But the notion of blaming our failures on the "architect of the universe" is very creative.

It is an unusual day when newspapers all over the world devote their front page headlines to a story about science. But that is exactly what happened on April 24, 1992. Announced on that date were the results of the so-called "big bang ripples" observations made by the cosmic background explorer (COBE) satellite of NASA. These ripples are the small variations in the temperature of the universe (about 2.7 degrees Celsius above absolute zero) far from heavenly bodies. These observations were remarkably consistent with the predictions of the Big Bang Theory. The particular item that the London Times, New York Times, etc. seemed to pick up on was a statement by George Smoot, the team leader from the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. He said, "It's like looking at God." For obvious reasons, this headline captured the attention of thinking people throughout the world. In the euphoria that followed, Stephen Hawking described the big bang ripples observations as "the scientific discovery of the century, if not all time."

A somewhat more sober assessment of the big bang ripples observations was given one week later in the Los Angeles Times by Frederick Burnham, a science-historian. He said, "These findings, now available, make the idea that God created the universe a more respectable hypothesis today than at any time in the last 100 years."

George Smoot, leader of the COBE team of scientists, and I were undergraduate classmates at M.I.T. We both arrived in September of 1962 and graduated in June of 1966. I do not remember meeting George Smoot, but his last name was famous within the M.I.T. community from the first day of our freshman year. However, the fame of the name Smoot was not such as to suggest that George would become one of the world's most famous scientists 26 years following his graduation from M.I.T. Social fraternities were very popular during our years at M.I.T. In fact, about one-third of the undergraduate student body lived in these fraternities, which were located across the Charles River from M.I.T. Students were encouraged to join a fraternity in the week before the beginning of their freshman year. One of the "better" fraternities was named Lambda Chi Alpha. I visited Lambda Chi Alpha, but chose instead the best fraternity at M.I.T., namely Sigma Alpha Epsilon. For those of you who believe that American social fraternities excel primarily in drunkenness and debauchery, let it be noted that it was a full ten years later that I became a Christian.

Returning to the story, in 1958 Oliver R. Smoot, Jr., a new member of Lambda Chi Alpha, is said to have consumed an excessive amount of a common chemical reagent, namely ethyl alcohol. In a semi-conscious state, this Smoot, 5'7" tall, was rolled across the Harvard Bridge by his fraternity mates numerous times. On the next day, the Harvard Bridge was smartly adorned with Smoot markers. At every ten Smoots (an interval of about 56 feet) brightly painted markers noted the achievement. The total length of the Harvard Bridge was boldly proclaimed at both ends to be 364.4 Smoots plus one ear. During the 1963-1964 academic year, my fraternity decided that Smoot was getting far more credit than he deserved. One of our members, Fred Souk, declared that he was fully the equal if not the better of Smoot in every respect. So we went out in the dark of night, painted out the Smoot marks, and replaced them with Souk marks. Fred was a bit taller than Smoot, so the total number of Souks did not quite match the old Smoots. As it turned out, this action enraged the members of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. The Souk marks were obliterated the very next night, and replaced with the venerable Smoots, which continue to this date to be repainted regularly on the Harvard Bridge. I must confess to some surprise that when I read George Smoot's semi-autobiographical popular book about the big bang ripples, titled Wrinkles in Time, I found no mention of the most celebrated achievement associated with his name, the immortal Smoot marks. However, on his web site George Smoot acknowledges that Oliver R. Smoot, Jr. is "a distant relative." Apparently, the only Smoots ever to attend M.I.T. were Oliver R. Smoot, Jr., George Smoot, and Oliver's son Stephen Smoot.

Not everyone was ecstatic about the Smoot observations that revealed the so-called "big bang ripples." Certainly, those who had argued so strongly and passionately for a steady state model of the universe did not appreciate the interpretation of these results. The latter group included most prominently two senior scientists, Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-), the British astronomer, and Geoffrey Burbidge (1925-), a distinguished astrophysicist at the University of California at San Diego.

We may continue to probe the philosophical implications of these big bang ripples observations by assessing a statement of Geoffrey Burbidge (made during a radio discussion with Hugh Ross) concerning these matters. Burbidge discounts the most obvious interpretation of the new experiments. He remains a strong advocate, in the face of seemingly overwhelming evidence, of the steady state theory. Remarkably, Burbidge stated that the COBE satellite experiments come from "the First Church of Christ of the Big Bang." Of course George Smoot took strong exception to this statement. In his popular 1993 book Wrinkles in Time Smoot does write cautiously "There is no doubt that a parallel exists between the big bang as an event and the Christian notion of creation from nothing." Burbidge did say something in the same interview that is indisputable, however. He predictably favored the steady state hypothesis and claimed that his view supports Hinduism and not Christianity. That is correct, because the steady state theory of the universe, were it to be true, would provide some support for the never ending cycles of existence taught by orthodox Hinduism.

Hugh Ross, an astrophysicist turned generalist, has written very persuasively on this topic. He again brings us to the philosophical implications. Ross states in his book The Creator and the Cosmos (Third Edition, Navpress, 2001) that:

By definition, time is that dimension in which cause and effect phenomena take place. If time's beginning is concurrent with the beginning of the universe, as the space-time theorem says, then the cause of the universe must be some entity operating in a time dimension completely independent of and pre-existent to the time dimension of the cosmos. This conclusion is powerfully important to our understanding of who God is and who or what God is not. It tells us that the creator is transcendent, operating beyond the dimensional limits of the universe. It tells us that God is not the universe itself, nor is God contained within the universe.

Perhaps some readers are inclined to say "So what?" If you fall into that category, may I remind you that well more than one billion people on this planet believe either that God is the universe itself or that God is contained within the universe. If the Big Bang Theory is true, it creates serious philosophical problems for these world views. Some scientific discoveries do have profound metaphysical implications. An entire book on this subject, titled The Dancing Universe, (1997) has been written by Dartmouth College physics professor Marcello Gleiser. Without displaying any theistic sympathies, Gleiser confirms much of what Ross states above. His flow chart on page 303 labeled "A Classification of Cosmogonical Models" is of special interest. Gleiser asks the question "Is there a beginning?" to provide a primary sorting of world views. On the left side of Gleiser's diagram a positive answer to the above question leads via a particular path to creation by the sovereign God of the universe, as described in Genesis. On the right hand side, a "no" answer in regard to a beginning leads by another path to a rhythmic universe, as perhaps exemplified by the dance of Shiva in Hinduism. The resistance of several streams of Hinduism to the Big Bang Theory was recently highlighted at a symposium sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, D.C. (April 1999). In prepared remarks Hindu philosopher Anindita Baslev of Aarhus University in Denmark quoted from the ancient texts of her religion and summarily dismissed the discussions of big bang mechanics as "cosmological speculations."

Following the remarkable financial success of Stephen Hawking's 1988 book A Brief History of Time, a number of distinguished physicists have tried their hands at the same literary genre. In this context I would like to quote from a book that I do not necessarily recommend to the general reader. This particular book is by a brilliant physicist, Leon Lederman, a Nobel Prize winner and also a gifted and dedicated educator. Lederman's book is called The God Particle and although the title sounds very appealing, the best material is in the first few pages. The remainder of the book is largely a case for the building of the SSC, the Super Conducting Super Collider, a proposed massive particle accelerator near Waco, Texas that was torpedoed by the U.S. congress some years ago. Therefore, reading the book today is a bit of a Rip Van-Winkle experience. But the first section is wonderful; it is in fact a good summary of what I have attempted to say in this lecture thus far. Leon Lederman states:

In the very beginning, there was a void - a curious form of vacuum - a nothingness containing no space, no time, no matter, no light, no sound. Yet the laws of nature were in place and this curious vacuum held potential. A story logically begins at the beginning. But this story is about the universe and unfortunately there are no data for the very beginning. None, zero! We don't know anything about the universe until it reaches the mature age of a billionth of a trillionth of a second - that is, some very short time after the creation in the Big Bang. When you read or hear anything about the birth of the universe, someone is making it up. We are in the realm of philosophy. Only God knows what happened at the very beginning.

In candid moments, outstanding cosmologists make statements rather similar to that quoted above. For example, Stephen Hawking states that "The actual point of creation lies outside the scope of the presently known laws of physics." M.I.T. professor Alan Guth, critical contributor to the "inflationary" understanding of the Big Bang Theory," is often considered to be the American counterpart of Hawking and has said analogously "The instant of creation remains unexplained."

Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking is probably the most famous living scientist. The tenth anniversary edition of his book, A Brief History of Time, is available in paperback and I strongly recommend it. The book has sold in excess of 10 million copies. For such a book to sell so many copies is essentially unheard of in the history of science writing. For the past five years I have used A Brief History of Time as the centerpiece of a course that I teach for a select group of 15 University of Georgia freshman. For balance, the class also studies the novel That Hideous Strength, the third book in the C. S. Lewis space trilogy. My course falls in the "Get to know the professor" category that is becoming popular in large public universities to offset the sense of anonymity that many entering freshmen feel.

An excellent film (1991, director Errol Morris) has been made about A Brief History of Time, and we enjoy the film every year in my freshman seminar. There has even been another good book (A Reader's Companion, Bantam, 1992) made about the film. Hawking has a wonderful sense of humor. He displays it in the foreword of the Reader's Companion, stating "This is The Book of The Film of The Book. I don't know if they are planning a film of the book of the film of the book."

I want to begin our discussion of Stephen Hawking by saying something about his scientific research, without getting bogged down in details. Hawking has made his well-deserved scientific reputation by investigating in great detail one particular set of problems: the singularity and horizons around black holes and at the beginning of time. Now, every writer in this general area is convinced that if you encountered a black hole, it would be the last thing you ever encountered. A black hole is a massive system so centrally condensed that the force of gravity prevents everything within it, including light, from escaping. The reassuring thing is that, despite what our children see on the Saturday morning cartoons, no black hole appears to be in our neighborhood. That is, the closest black hole to planet earth is far more distant than could be traveled in the lifetime of a human being using conventional rockets.

Stephen Hawking's first major scientific work was published with Roger Penrose (a physicist very famous in his own right) and George Ellis (not as famous as Penrose and Hawking, but still very well known), during the period 1968-1970. They demonstrated that every solution to the equations of general relativity guarantees the existence of a singular boundary for space and time in the past. This landmark is now known as the "singularity theorem," and is a tremendously important finding, being about as close as we can get to a mathematical rationalization for the Big Bang Theory. Later, of course, Hawking began to carry out independent research, both by himself and with his own doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows. As early as 1973, he began to formulate ideas about the quantum evaporation of black holes, exploding black holes, "Hawking radiation," and so on. Some of Hawking's work is radical, exploratory, and even speculative in nature. However, by any reasonable standard Stephen Hawking is a great scientist. Even if time shows some of his more radical proposals to be incorrect, Hawking will have had a profound impact on the history of science.

The scientific centerpiece of A Brief History of Time would appear to fall in the speculative category of his research. In fact, I think it is fair to say that the scientific centerpiece of A Brief History of Time was not considered one of Hawking's most important papers prior to the publication of the book in 1987. I am referring to the "no boundary proposal" that Hawking published in 1984 in work with James Hartle, a physics professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Using a grossly simplified picture of the universe in conjunction with an elegant vacuum fluctuation model, Hartle and Hawking were able to provide a mathematical rationalization for the entire universe popping into existence at the beginning of time. This model has also been called the "universe as a wave function" and the "no beginning point." While such mathematical exercises are highly speculative, they may eventually lead us to a deeper understanding of the creation event. I postpone my analysis of the no boundary proposal for a few pages.

Hawking is certainly the most famous physicist in history who has not won the Nobel Prize. This has puzzled some people. Many people automatically assume that Professor Hawking has already won the Nobel Prize. Yet as of this writing (late 2001) he has not. This is probably because the Swedish Royal Academy demands that an award-winning discovery must be supported by verifiable experimental or observational evidence. Hawking's work to date remains largely unconfirmed. Although the mathematics and concepts of his theories are certainly beautiful and elegant, science waited until 1994 for rock solid evidence for even the existence of black holes. The verification of Hawking radiation or any of his more radical theoretical proposals still seems far off. In this context, we must recall that Albert Einstein was wrong about a number of important things scientific, especially quantum mechanics; yet we recognize him as one of the three great physicists of all time, along with Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell. I should conclude this section by noting that a number of Nobel Prize Committees have shown themselves to be composed of rather savvy people, capable of compromise. So I would not be surprised to see the old gentlemen in Stockholm find a way to award the Nobel Prize in Physics to Stephen Hawking. Perhaps Hawking could share the prize with those responsible for the first observations of black holes.

And God

Those who have not read A Brief History of Time may be surprised to find that the book has a main character. That main character is God. This was the feature of the book that the well known atheist Carl Sagan found a bit distressing. Sagan wrote the preface to the first edition of the book, but was less famous than Hawking by the time of arrival of the tenth anniversary edition, in which Sagan's preface does not appear. God is discussed in A Brief History of Time from near the beginning all the way to the crescendo of the final sentence. So let us try to put Hawking's opinions about God in some sort of a context. The context is that Stephen Hawking seems to have made up his mind about God long before he became a cosmologist.

Not surprisingly, the principal influence in Stephen's early life was his mother, Isobel. Isobel Hawking was a member of the Communist Party in England in the 1930's, and her son has carried some of that intellectual tradition right through his life. Incidentally, Hawking's fame is now such that he felt obligated to endorse one of the candidates in the 2000 United States presidential election. By the time he was 13, Hawking's hero was the brilliant agnostic philosopher and mathematician, Bertrand Russell. At the same age, two of Hawking's friends became Christians as a result of the 1955 Billy Graham London campaign. According to his 1992 biographers (Michael White and John Gribben), Hawking stood apart from these encounters with "a certain amused detachment." There is little in A Brief History of Time that deviates in a significant way from what we know of the religious views of the 13-year-old Stephen Hawking. However, we must note that in public questioning Hawking insists that he is not an atheist. And I am told by eyewitness observers that in recent years Stephen Hawking has appeared "once or twice a month" in an Anglican church with his second wife.

Perhaps the most important event of Stephen Hawking's life occurred on December 31, 1962. He met his future wife of 25 years, Jane Wilde, at a New Year's Eve party. One month later, Hawking was diagnosed with a debilitating disease, ALS or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known in North America as Lou Gehrig's disease. He was given two years to live at the time. That was nearly 40 years ago. I have seen three chemistry professor friends die of this terrible disease. My three friends lasted two, three, and five years, respectively, the last surviving on an iron lung for his last tortuous year. By anyone's estimation, the preservation of Stephen Hawking's life is a medical miracle. And he is a man of great personal courage.

At this point in his life, 1962, Stephen was by all accounts an average-performing graduate student at Cambridge University. I hasten to add that even average doctoral students at Cambridge, still one of the five great universities in the world, can be very good. Let me quote from his biographers, White and Gribbon, on this point:

However, there is little doubt that Jane Wilde's appearance on the scene was a major turning point in Stephen Hawking's life. The two of them began to see a lot more of one another and a strong relationship developed. It was finding Jane Wilde that enabled him to break out of his depression and regenerate some belief in his life and work. For Hawking, his engagement to Jane was probably the most important thing that ever happened to him. It changed his life, gave him something to live for and made him determined to live. Without the help that Jane gave him, he would almost certainly not have been able to carry on or had the will to do so.

They married in July of 1965, somewhat past the expected date of Stephen Hawking's death. The fact that three children followed is indisputable evidence that Stephen was not dead. Hawking himself said in an interview shortly following the publication of A Brief History of Time that "what really made a difference was that I got engaged to a woman named Jane Wilde. This gave me something to live for." Jane Wilde is an interesting person in her own right. I think she decided early on to pursue an academic discipline as far as possible from her husband. She has a doctorate in Medieval Portuguese Literature!

Jane Hawking is a Christian. She made the statement in 1986, "Without my faith in God, I wouldn't have been able to live in this situation (namely, the deteriorating health of her husband, with no obvious income but that of a Cambridge don to live on). I would not have been able to marry Stephen in the first place because I wouldn't have had the optimism to carry me through, and I wouldn't have been able to carry on with it."

The reason the book has sold more than 10 million copies, i.e., the reason for Hawking's success as a popularizer of science, is that he addresses the problems of meaning and purpose that concern all thinking people. The book overlaps with Christian belief and it does so deliberately, but graciously and without rancor. It is an important book that needs to be treated with respect and attention. There is no reason to agree with everything put forth in A Brief History of Time and you will see that I have a couple of areas of disagreement. It has been argued that this is the most widely unread book in the history of literature. I first began to prepare this material for a lecture in December 1992, because I was asked by a friend (John Mason) in Australia to come and speak on the subject. John wrote to me, "A great many people in Sydney have purchased this book. Some claim to have read it." So I encourage you to join the students in my University of Georgia class and become one of those who have actually read A Brief History of Time.

Stephen Hawking has made some eminently sensible statements on the relationship between science and Christianity. For example, "It is difficult to discuss the beginning of the universe without mentioning the concept of God. My work on the origin of the universe is on the borderline between science and religion, but I try to stay on the scientific side of the border. It is quite possible that God acts in ways that cannot be described by scientific laws." When asked by a reporter whether he believed that science and Christianity were competing world views, Hawking replied cleverly "Then Newton would not have discovered the law of gravity." Dr. Hawking is well aware that Newton had strong religious convictions.

A Brief History of Time makes wonderfully ambiguous statements such as, "Even if there is only one possible unified theory (here he is alluding to the envisioned unification of our understandings of quantum mechanics and gravity), it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" In a similar vein Hawking asks "Why does the universe go to the bother of existing?" Although Hawking does not attempt to answer these two critical questions, they make wonderful discussion topics for university students, and I have enjoyed using them for this purpose.

Hawking pokes fun at Albert Einstein for not believing in quantum mechanics. When asked why he didn't believe in quantum mechanics, Einstein would sometimes say things like "God doesn't play dice with the universe." On one such occasion, Niels Bohr is said to have responded "Albert, stop telling God what He can do." Hawking's adroit response to Einstein is that "God not only plays dice. He sometimes throws them where they can't be seen." Of course, I like Hawking's response very much, having devoted my professional career to the study of molecular quantum mechanics.

For me (and for Hawking's now distinguished student Don Page; more on Professor Page later) the most precious jewel in A Brief History of Time reflects Hawking's interest in the writing's of Augustine of Hippo (354-430 A.D.). Hawking states "The idea that God might want to change His mind is an example of the fallacy, pointed out St. Augustine, of imagining God as a being existing in time. Time is a property only of the universe that God created. Presumably, God knew what He intended when He set it up."

The first time I read A Brief History of Time, admittedly not critically, for the first 100 pages or so I thought, "This is a great book; Hawking is building a splendid case for creation by an intelligent being." But things then begin to change and this magnificent cosmological epic becomes adulterated by poor philosophy and theology. For example, Hawking writes on page 122 of the first edition, "These laws (of physics) may have originally been decreed by God, but it appears that He has since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not now intervene in it". The grounds on which Hawking claims "it appears" are unstated, and a straw God is set up that is certainly not the God who is revealed in time and space and history. What follows is a curious mixture of deism and the ubiquitous "god of the gaps." Stephen Hawking thus appears uncertain (agnostic) of his belief in a god of his own creation.

Now, lest any reader be uncertain, let me emphasize that Hawking strenuously denies charges that he is an atheist. When he is accused of atheism, he is affronted and says that such assertions are not true. For example, Hawking has stated "I thought I had left the question of the existence of a Supreme Being completely open. . . It would be perfectly consistent with all we know to say that there was a Being who was responsible for all the laws of physics." Stephen Hawking is probably an agnostic or a deist (a believer in an impersonal god) or something in between these two positions, his recent church attendance notwithstanding. He is certainly not an atheist and sometimes does not even appear very sympathetic to atheism.

One of the frequently quoted statements in A Brief History of Time is, "So long as the universe had a beginning, we would suppose it had a creator (the cosmological argument). But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?" Hawking's most famous statement is contained in the last paragraph of A Brief History of Time. Perhaps attempting to balance the quotation just cited, Hawking writes "However, if we do discover a complete theory. . . . . then we would know the mind of God." As a person who has dedicated his professional life to science, I am personally sympathetic to this statement. John Calvin was correct is stating that "All truth is God's truth." But I think Professor Hawking is claiming too much here. I would modify his statement to say that if we had a unified, complete theory of physics, we would know much more about the mind of God. To claim to know God comprehensively is beyond the capability of any human being.

The Anthropic Principle

I feel the necessity to say something here about the anthropic principle. One statement of the anthropic principle would be that there are a number of fundamental constants (for example, the mass of the electron) or derived scientific parameters (for example, the dipole moment of the water molecule), any one of which changed just a little bit, would make the earth uninhabitable by human beings. In this regard a book that I strongly recommend is Hugh Ross's The Creator and the Cosmos. Ross has a substantial discussion of the anthropic principle and demonstrates why many physicists and astronomers have considered the possibility that the universe not only was divinely caused, but in fact divinely designed.

One such person is Amherst College astronomy professor George Greenstein (a pantheist or something similar), who makes this statement: "As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency, or rather Agency, must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially created the cosmos for our benefit?" Personally, I fear that Greenstein has gone, relative to Hawking, a little too far in the other direction. I do not think we have indisputable scientific proof of the existence of God. But I am convinced that we do have, in the big bang understanding, some very good evidence for the existence of the transcendent God of the universe.

Others have commented, sometimes inadvertently, on this evidence. A book I recommend is Dreams of a Final Theory by Steven Weinberg (1933- , Nobel Prize in Physics, 1979, and considered by many to be the greatest physicist of the last half of the twentieth century). Although Steven Weinberg is a staunch atheist, Chapter XI of his book is titled "What About God?" Therein Weinberg tells a story related by the Venerable Bede (672-735), English theologian and historian of the Middle Ages. In the story, a speech is made before King Edwin of Northumbria in favor of the adoption of Christianity. In this speech the term "banqueting hall" is used to describe the ordinary existence of human beings on planet earth. Weinberg's perceptive comment on the speech is, "It is an almost irresistible temptation to believe with Bede and Edwin that there must be something for us outside the banqueting hall." There must be something beyond strict reductionism or materialism. This view is echoed in the New Testament. For example, St. Paul wrote, "Ever since the creation of the world, God's eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things He has made" (Letter to the Romans 1:20). This is essentially what Steven Weinberg is attempting to describe - that almost "irresistible temptation" to believe in God.

It is relatively unusual that a physical scientist is truly an atheist. Why is this true? Some point to the anthropic constraints, the remarkable fine tuning of the universe. For example, Freeman Dyson, a Princeton faculty member, has said, "Nature has been kinder to us that we had any right to expect." Martin Rees, one of Hawking's colleagues at Cambridge, notes the same facts. Rees recently stated "The possibility of life as we know it depends on the values of a few basic, physical constants and is in some respects remarkably sensitive to their numerical values. Nature does exhibit remarkable coincidences." Science writer extraordinaire Paul Davies adds "There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. . . It seems as though somebody has fine tuned nature's numbers to make the Universe. . . The impression of design is overwhelming." Some scientists express surprise at what they view as so many "accidental occurrences." However, that astonishment quickly disappears when one sees purpose instead of arbitrariness in the laws of nature.

Against powerful logic, some atheists continue to claim, irrespective of the anthropic constraints, that the universe and human life were created by chance. The main argument seems to be "Since we human beings are here, it must have happened in a purely reductionist manner." This argument strikes me a bit like the apocryphal response of a person waking up in the morning to find an elephant in his or her bedroom. The individual in question concludes that this is no surprise, since the probability of the elephant being in the bedroom is a perfect 100%. Obviously this is a philosophical rather than scientific response to the situation.

A reply to this argument has been developed by the philosopher/historian William Lane Craig. The atheist's argument states that since we're here, we know every element of the creation must have happened by strictly material forces. Craig's philosophical counterargument, as reported by Hugh Ross, goes like this: Suppose a dozen sharpshooters are sent to execute a prisoner by firing squad. They all shoot a number of rounds in just the right direction, but the prisoner escapes unharmed. The prisoner could conclude, since he is alive, that all the sharpshooters missed by some extremely unlikely chance. He may wish to attribute his survival to some remarkable piece of good luck. But he would be far more rational to conclude that the guns were loaded with blanks or that the sharpshooters had all deliberately missed. Not only is life itself overwhelmingly improbable, but its appearance almost immediately (in geological terms), perhaps within as short a period as 10 million years following the solidification and cooling of our once-molten planet, defies explanation by conventional physical and chemical laws.

The No Boundary Proposal

Let us return to Hawking's no boundary proposal - the idea that the universe has neither beginning nor end. By treating the universe as a wave function, Hawking hopes to rationalize the universe's popping into existence 12-15 billion years ago. Critical to Hawking's research in this regard is the notion of imaginary time. The concept of imaginary time is a powerful mathematical device used on occasion by theoretical chemists and physicists. I remember clearly the day in the autumn of 1965, during my Complex Variables class as a senior at M.I.T., when I learned that the result of contour integration was two pi i times the sum of the residues. For me, it was about as close to a revelation as I had received up to that time in my life. My closest colleague at Berkeley, Professor William H. Miller, in 1969 used imaginary time to understand the dynamics of chemical reactions, and it made him a household word in the world of science. The use of imaginary time is indeed a powerful tool.

Indulge me while I attempt to convey the essence of how imaginary time is exploited in theoretical physics and chemistry. One approaches a well defined problem, with all variables necessarily being real. This means, for example, real positions for all particles, real velocities, and so on. Real problems begin with all quantities real. Then one undertakes a carefully chosen excursion into the complex plane, making one or more variables complex. Subsequently we do some really cool things mathematically. Finally, all the variables revert to real values, and we find that something important has been mathematically derived that would have otherwise been impossible to prove.

Hawking and Hartle's no boundary proposal begins by adopting a grossly oversimplified model of the universe. Then the authors make time imaginary, and prove in their terribly restricted model that the universe has neither beginning nor end. The flaw in the exercise is that the authors never go back to real time. Thus the notion that the universe has neither beginning nor end is something that exists in mathematical terms only. In real time, to which we as human beings are necessarily attached, rather than in Hawking's use of imaginary time, there will always be a singularity, that is, a beginning of time.

In an obviously contradictory statement in A Brief History of Time, Hawking actually concedes this point. What we are seeing in this situation is Hawking versus Hawking. I view the following statement as Hawking speaking in his right mind: "When one goes back to the real time in which we live, however, there will still appear to be singularities . . . In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down" (first edition, page 144). Only if we lived in imaginary time (not coming soon to a neighborhood near you!) would we encounter no singularities. In real time the universe was created ex nihilo 12-15 billion years ago.

With some trepidation, I will venture further. A case can be made that the Hartle-Hawking "no boundary proposal" is only of marginal scientific interest. The reasons for this conclusion might include: (a) the theory is a mathematical construct that has no unique empirical support; (b) the theory makes no verifiable scientific predictions that were not achieved earlier with simpler models; (c) the theory generates no significant research agenda. The primary purpose of the theory seems to be an attempt to evade the cosmological argument for the existence of God, via the claim that nature is self-contained and effectively eternal.

Science is primarily concerned with facts, not motive, and thus a complete scientific description of the creation does not necessarily rule out a providential account at the same time. William Paley's famous design argument suggests that if you are taking a walk in the woods and find a watch on the path, you should not conclude that the watch just assembled itself - despite the fact that we can take the watch apart, look at every single part and completely understand how it works. We look at the watch on the path and prudently conclude that it was designed by some higher intelligence.

In A Brief History of Time, Hawking states, "If the no boundary proposal is correct, He [God] had no freedom at all to choose initial conditions" This statement strikes me as a leap into irrationality. Why does Hawking find, within the functioning of the universe, aspects that appear to him to be limitations of God's power? This stems not from any attitude of an infinite God, but rather from the attributes of finite man. Namely, we as human beings are able to scientifically discern characteristics of the Creator only as they are related to that which is created, that which we can observe. This limitation of ours immediately reduces what might be infinite to the finiteness of our existence. Of course, Biblically, there is no problem in accepting divine constraints to divine options, if the Creator chooses to run the universe according to His stated and established laws. Divine tenacity to His own laws is, of course, the very essence of the Biblical God.

Another of Hawking's controversial statements needs to be addressed. Although it is not original with him, Hawking states: "We are such insignificant creatures on a minor planet of a very average star in the outer suburbs of one of a hundred billion galaxies. So it is difficult to believe in a God that would care about us or even notice our existence." I take a different position. In his recent writings, Hugh Ross has demonstrated that our solar system, and in particular planet earth, are in fact quite peculiar in several respects. Further, there is no plausible evidence to date that life exists elsewhere in the universe. Human beings, thus far, appear to be the most advanced species in the universe. Maybe God does care about us! Stephen Hawking surveys the cosmos and concludes that the principal characteristic of humankind is obscurity. I consider the same evidence and conclude that human beings are special. I must be quick to add that a Christian world view does not exclude the possibility of life, even sentient life, elsewhere in the universe. Precisely this possibility is addressed by C.S. Lewis in his two science fiction novels Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra.

Before moving on, two related issues need to be addressed. The first concerns the infinitely oscillating model of the universe, which posits a ceaseless sequence of big bang/big crunch pairs. This model, popularized by Robert Dicke, makes the universe effectively eternal. The infinitely oscillating universe model, as noted above, comports nicely with Hinduism's dance of Shiva. Since the hypothesized period between the present big bang and its imagined big crunch would be just one of an infinite number of such periods, any problems relating to the time scale that might be needed for evolution are resolved by the conclusion that our interval must be "just right." On many occasions when I have presented this lecture, the Q&A time includes a question concerning this cosmological model. Actually, this issue was resolved in 1983 in a critical paper by Alan Guth (best known for his pioneering work on the inflationary features of the Big Bang Theory) appearing in the influential journal Nature, volume 302, beginning on page 505. The title of Guth's paper tells the story: "The Impossibility of a Bouncing Universe." Therein Guth showed that even if the universe contained sufficient mass to halt the current expansion, any collapse would end in a thud, not a bounce. Incidentally, the weight of opinion among cosmologists has shifted over the past five years to the position that, short of direct intervention by God, the universe will continue to expand forever.

The second and perhaps most recent attempt to evade the (theistic) logical consequences of the fine tuning of the universe (anthropic constraints) is the proposal that there are an infinite number of universes. This proposal has been given wide attention through the popular 2000 book by Martin Rees entitled Just Six Numbers. Rees's logic flows something like this: (a) he concedes that a universe like ours is overwhelmingly improbable; but (b) we know that God doesn't exist, or if He does He had nothing to do with the design of the universe; (c) thus there must be a near infinite number of universes; (d) ours just happens to be the universe that is just right for human life. Since no evidence for other universes is provided, Rees's argument is less than convincing, particularly for those who are prepared to consider the possibility of the existence of a personal God. The Rees proposal might be broadened a bit by adding that other universes might have their own forms of intelligent conscious life, very different from what is observed on planet earth. One could go further and state that there is no need for life in the proposed other universes to be based on carbon. John Polkinghorne has responded to these ideas as follows:

Those who make such a claim are drawing a very large intellectual blank check on a totally unknown bank account. Consciousness seems to demand very great physical complexity to sustain it (the human brain is the most complicated physical system we have encountered). It is far from persuasive that there are many alternative routes to the generation of such complexity.

In his paper in the April 2001 issue of the journal Science & Christian Belief, Rodney Holder critiques the postulation of the existence of many universes as an alternative to design. Holder states some of the problems associated with the postulate of an infinite number of universes;

1. the existence of infinitely many universes depends critically on parameter choices;
2. the probability that any universe in an ensemble is fine-tuned for life is zero;
3. the physical realization of any ensemble will exclude an infinity of possibilities;
4. the hypothesis is untestable and unscientific;
5. The hypothesis is not consistent with the amount of order found in our universe, nor with the persistence of order.

In completing this discussion, I note that a Christian world view does not exclude the possibility of other universes. One of the great hymns of the Christian faith in fact begins with the words "O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all the worlds Thy hands have made." However, a plausible scientific case for an infinite or near infinite number of universes has yet to be made.

A Broader View

Does everyone agree with Stephen Hawking concerning the metaphysical consequences of recent cosmological discoveries? Certainly not. Alan Lightman, a MIT professor with no obvious theistic inclinations, states in his book Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists (Harvard University Press, 1990), "Contrary to popular myths, scientists appear to have the same range of attitudes about religious matters as does the general public." This fact can be established either from anecdotes or from statistical data. Sigma Xi, the scientific honorary society, conducted a systematic poll a few years ago which showed that, on any given Sunday, around 41 percent of all Ph.D. scientists are in church; for the general population the figure is perhaps 42 percent. So, whatever influences people in their beliefs about God, it does not appear to have much to do with having a Ph.D. in science. It is true in science, as well as in essentially all other professions, that after income levels reach perhaps $50,000 per year (in North America), further increases in salary may be correlated with higher percentages of agnosticism. In his 1998 paper in Nature Edward Larson showed that for incomes above $150,000 per year, belief in God falls off significantly. The same trend holds, for example, for lawyers at these income levels. This finding, of course, is consistent with the words of Jesus on the difficulty of a rich person entering the kingdom of heaven.

There are many prominent scientific counterexamples to Stephen Hawking. One is my former colleague at Berkeley for 18 years, Charles Townes (1915-). Townes won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 for discovering the maser, which led quickly to the laser, surely one of the most important scientific advances of the twentieth century. In a statement from his recent book Making Waves (American Physical Society, 1995) Professor Townes takes dead aim on Hawking. Charles Townes states "In my view, the question of origin seems to be left unanswered if we explore from a scientific view alone. Thus, I believe there is a need for some religious or metaphysical explanation. I believe in the concept of God and in His existence."

Arthur Schawlow (1921-1999) was another Physics Nobel Prize winner (1981), honored for his work in laser spectroscopy. Schawlow was a professor at Stanford until his recent death and did not hesitate to identify himself as a protestant Christian. He stated, "We are fortunate to have the Bible and especially the New Testament, which tells us so much about God in widely accessible human terms." I view this statement as uniquely scientific, knowing that Professor Schawlow was convinced that his discoveries in laser spectroscopy were telling him something about God's handiwork. However, unlike the New Testament, Schawlow's research was difficult to express in "widely accessible human terms."

The other chaired Professor of Theoretical Physics at Cambridge (Cambridge is very stingy about handing out Professor titles; most tenured faculty members retire at the rank of Senior Lecturer) for much of Hawking's career was John Polkinghorne, a nuclear physicist. He left the chair of mathematical physics at Cambridge in 1979 in order to train for the ordained ministry of the Church of England. Upon ordination, Polkinghorne became a parish priest for five years. He returned to Cambridge in 1986 as Dean of Trinity Hall and subsequently President of Queens' College. I am very familiar with the grounds of Queens' College, as it is immediately adjacent to St. Catherine's College, where I stay in Cambridge courtesy of my longtime collaborator, Professor Nicholas Handy. John Polkinghorne's statement of belief is straightforward: "I am a Christian believer and believe that God exists and has made Himself known in human terms in Jesus Christ."

Probably the world's greatest living observational cosmologist is Allan Sandage. Sandage works in Pasadena, California at the Carnegie Observatories. In 1991 he received the Crafoord Prize, given by the Royal Swedish Academy every six years for cosmology and worth the same amount of money as the Nobel prize (there is no Nobel prize given for cosmology). Sandage has been called "the grand old man of cosmology" by the New York Times and is viewed as the successor to his mentor, Edwin Hubble (1889-1953), who is considered the father of modern cosmology.

At the age of 50, Sandage became a Christian. In Alan Lightman's book, Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists, Sandage states "The nature of God is not to be found within any part of the findings of science. For that, one must turn to the Scriptures." When asked the famous question regarding whether it is possible to be a scientist and a Christian, Sandage replied, "Yes. The world is too complicated in all its parts and interconnections to be due to chance alone. I am convinced that the existence of life with all its order in each of its organisms is simply too well put together."

Of Hawking's two earliest collaborators (1970, the singularity theorem), Roger Penrose seems to be some sort of an unconventional theist, while George Ellis is a Christian. Ellis is Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. In the book Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature, Ellis states his position with respect to ultimate questions:

• God is the creator and sustainer of the universe and of humankind, transcending the universe but immanent in it;
• God's nature embodies justice and holiness, but is also a personal and loving God who cares for each creature (so the name "father" is indeed appropriate);
• God's nature is revealed most perfectly in the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, as recorded in the New Testament of the Bible, who was sent by God to reveal the divine nature, summarized in "God is Love;"
• God has an active presence in the world that still touches the lives of the faithful today.

One of the scientists closest to Stephen Hawking and prominent in the movie about A Brief History of Time is Donald Page. Page is Professor of Physics at the University of Alberta, where he hosted my lecture on this topic in July 1997. Our discussions following my lecture lasted for four hours spread over three days. Don Page has had an excellent physics career in quantum cosmology in his own right, but he began to achieve fame as a postdoctoral fellow with Stephen Hawking. The Hawkings were not financially well off in the years prior to publication of his best selling book and needed some help to keep going. So Don Page went to live with the Hawkings for the period 1976-1979.

Page describes these years in the book (the book about the film about the book!). He said, "I would usually get up around 7:15 or 7:30 AM, take a shower, read in my Bible and pray. Then I would go down at 8:15 and get Stephen up. At breakfast, I would often tell him what I'd been reading in the Bible, hoping that maybe this would eventually have some influence. I remember telling Stephen one story about how Jesus had seen the deranged man, and how this man had these demons, and the demons asked that they be sent into a herd of swine. The swine then plunged over the edge of the cliff and into the sea. Stephen piped up and said, 'Well, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would not like that story, would they!'"

Page has stated, "I am a conservative Christian in the sense of pretty much taking the Bible seriously for what it says. Of course I know that certain parts are not intended to be read literally, so I am not precisely a literalist. But I try to believe in the meaning I think it is intended to have." Expressing the universal goal of theoretical physicists for simplicity in their methods, Page makes an interesting connection to the spiritual world: "If the universe basically is very simple, the theological implications of this would need to be worked out. Perhaps the mathematical simplicity of the universe is a reflection of the personal simplicity of the Gospel message, that God sent His Son Jesus Christ to bridge the gap between Himself and each of us, who have rejected God or rejected what He wants for us by rebelling against His will and disobeying Him. This is a message simple enough even to be understood by children."

My final example is Chris Isham, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London. The superb popular writer and former research physicist Paul Davies has described Isham as "Britain's greatest quantum gravity expert." This is high praise indeed when one considers that Stephen Hawking's research area is quantum gravity. I had the pleasure of chatting with Professor Isham for a while when I gave this lecture at Imperial College in May 2000. Alluding to the philosopher Paul Tillich, Chris Isham states "The God of Christianity is not only 'the ground of being.' He is also Incarnate." Essential therein "is the vision of the Resurrection (of Jesus Christ) as 'the new creation out of the old order' and . . . the profound notion of the 'redemption of time' through the life and death of Jesus Christ. I think it will be rather a long time before theoretical physics has anything useful to add to that." Let me be quick to extinguish one possible interpretation of Professor Isham's last sentence. By no means is Chris Isham belittling the importance of theoretical physics. Isham has committed his entire professional life to the pursuit of theoretical physics. Isham is passionate about theoretical physics. Isham is rather saying that what he has found in Jesus Christ surpasses anything that physics could hope to provide in terms of ultimate meaning.

The Limits of Science

A statement that I think gives some balance to this discussion was made by one of my scientific heroes, Erwin Schroedinger, after whom the most important equation in science is named: the Schroedinger Equation. I have spent a good bit of my professional life trying to solve this equation for atoms and molecules. Toward the end of Schroedinger's career he began to write more expansively. His 1942 book What is Life? is thought to have inspired an entire generation of molecular biologists. The statement I would like to quote comes from Schroedinger's 1954 book Nature and the Greeks. In it he takes a dim view of what we might call scientific imperialism. The Schroedinger statement in question is:

I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives us a lot of factual information, puts all of our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.

Although science is an inspiring pursuit in its proper domain, and a genuine delight to me and others, it is not the whole story. Jane Hawking commented on this aspect of her husband's work following the publication of A Brief History of Time. She said "Stephen has the feelings that because everything is reduced to a rational, mathematical formula, that must be the truth. He is delving into realms that really do matter to thinking people and, in a way, that can have a very disturbing effect on people - and he's not competent."

In a similar vein my longtime friend and Berkeley faculty colleague Phillip Johnson states

The irony of the situation is that Hawking"s professional life currently is devoted to telling a story about the cosmos in which the elements that make his life interesting - love, faith, courage, and even creative imagination - disappear from view. Aspiring to know the mind of God, he can imagine nothing more interesting than a set of equations governing the movement of particles. A unified field theory would be a major scientific accomplishment, of course. But to Hawking it is just a step toward a distant but attainable goal of what he calls "a complete understanding of the events around us, and of our own existence." The way to this goal does not seem to require reading the Bible or Shakespeare, living in a variety of cultures, experiencing art, climbing mountains, or falling in love and having children. All it involves is "the intellectually challenging task of developing better approximation methods."

Although Phil does not seem to appreciate the great affection with which persons such as Hawking and I hold equations, there is much that is worthy of consideration in Professor Johnson's analysis.

Richard Feynman states in his 1990 book, The Character of Physical Law, that "Everything in physical science is a lot of protons, neutrons and electrons [parenthetical remark by HFS - and don't we love them, especially electrons!], while in daily life, we talk about men and history, or beauty and hope. Which is nearer to God - beauty and hope or the fundamental laws? To stand at either end, and to walk off that end of the pier only, hoping that out in that direction is a complete understanding, is a mistake." I would have to say that, at least in the final sentence of A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking has walked off one end of Feynman's pier.

Where Do We Go from Here?

In his book The Fingerprint of God, Hugh Ross seeks to construct a bridge between cosmology and matters of ultimate importance. With minor modifications, I wholeheartedly concur. Having presented the opinions of many others in this lecture, the following represents my own position:

1. The big bang represents an immensely powerful yet carefully controlled release of matter, energy, space, and time within the strict confines of very carefully fine-tuned physical constants and laws which govern their behavior and interactions. The power and care this explosion reveals exceed human potential for design by multiple orders of magnitude.
2. A Creator must exist. The big bang ripples (April 1992) and subsequent scientific findings are clearly pointing to an ex nihilo creation consistent with the first few verses of the book of Genesis.
3. The Creator must have awesome power and wisdom. The quantity of material and the power resources within our universe are truly immense. The information, or intricacy, manifest in any part of the universe, and (as Allan Sandage has well stated) especially in a living organism, is beyond our ability to comprehend. And what we do see is only what God has shown us within our four dimensions of space and time!
4. The Creator is loving. The simplicity, balance, order, elegance, and beauty seen throughout the creation demonstrate that God is loving rather than capricious. Further, the capacity and desire to nurture and to protect, seen in so many creatures, makes sense if their Creator possesses these same attributes. It is apparent that God cares for His creatures, for He has provided for their needs.
5. The Creator is just and requires justice. Inward reflection and outward investigation affirm that human beings have a conscience. The conscience reflects the reality of right and wrong and the necessity of obedience.
6. Each of us falls hopelessly short of the Creator's standard. We incur His displeasure when we violate any part of God's moral law in our actions, our words, and our thoughts. Who can keep his or her thoughts and attitudes pure for even an hour? Certainly not me. If each person falls short of his or her own standards, how much more so of God's perfect standards? For many years I sought to get a "passing grade" with God by comparing myself with other sinners.
7. Because the Creator is loving, wise and powerful, He made a way to rescue us. When we come to a point of concern about our personal failings, we can begin to understand from the creation around us that God's love, wisdom, and power are sufficient to deliver us from our otherwise hopeless situation.
8. If we trust our lives totally to the Rescuer, Jesus Christ, we will be saved. The one and only path is to give up all human attempts to satisfy God's requirements and put our trust solely in Jesus Christ and in His chosen means of redemption, namely, His death on the cross.

The above outline is, of course, just an outline. To fill in the outline of this bridge over the troubled waters of human experience, the reader may turn to my lecture entitled The Ten Questions that Intellectuals Ask about Christianity. Several of these questions arise persistently during Q&A times following the present lecture on cosmology.

Copyright © 2001 by Henry F. Schaefer III. All rights reserved.

BIG BANG THEORY

 

http://www.big-bang-theory.com/

Big Bang Theory - The Premise
The Big Bang theory is an effort to explain what happened at the very beginning of our universe. Discoveries in astronomy and physics have shown beyond a reasonable doubt that our universe did in fact have a beginning. Prior to that moment there was nothing; during and after that moment there was something: our universe. The big bang theory is an effort to explain what happened during and after that moment.

According to the standard theory, our universe sprang into existence as "singularity" around 13.7 billion years ago. What is a "singularity" and where does it come from? Well, to be honest, we don't know for sure. Singularities are zones which defy our current understanding of physics. They are thought to exist at the core of "black holes." Black holes are areas of intense gravitational pressure. The pressure is thought to be so intense that finite matter is actually squished into infinite density (a mathematical concept which truly boggles the mind). These zones of infinite density are called "singularities." Our universe is thought to have begun as an infinitesimally small, infinitely hot, infinitely dense, something - a singularity. Where did it come from? We don't know. Why did it appear? We don't know.

After its initial appearance, it apparently inflated (the "Big Bang"), expanded and cooled, going from very, very small and very, very hot, to the size and temperature of our current universe. It continues to expand and cool to this day and we are inside of it: incredible creatures living on a unique planet, circling a beautiful star clustered together with several hundred billion other stars in a galaxy soaring through the cosmos, all of which is inside of an expanding universe that began as an infinitesimal singularity which appeared out of nowhere for reasons unknown. This is the Big Bang theory.

Big Bang Theory - Common Misconceptions
There are many misconceptions surrounding the Big Bang theory. For example, we tend to imagine a giant explosion. Experts however say that there was no explosion; there was (and continues to be) an expansion. Rather than imagining a balloon popping and releasing its contents, imagine a balloon expanding: an infinitesimally small balloon expanding to the size of our current universe.

Another misconception is that we tend to image the singularity as a little fireball appearing somewhere in space. According to the many experts however, space didn't exist prior to the Big Bang. Back in the late '60s and early '70s, when men first walked upon the moon, "three British astrophysicists, Steven Hawking, George Ellis, and Roger Penrose turned their attention to the Theory of Relativity and its implications regarding our notions of time. In 1968 and 1970, they published papers in which they extended Einstein's Theory of General Relativity to include measurements of time and space.^{1, 2} According to their calculations, time and space had a finite beginning that corresponded to the origin of matter and energy."³ The singularity didn't appear in space; rather, space began inside of the singularity. Prior to the singularity, nothing existed, not space, time, matter, or energy - nothing. So where and in what did the singularity appear if not in space? We don't know. We don't know where it came from, why it's here, or even where it is. All we really know is that we are inside of it and at one time it didn't exist and neither did we.

Big Bang Theory - Evidence for the Theory
What are the major evidences which support the Big Bang theory?

• First of all, we are reasonably certain that the universe had a beginning.
• Second, galaxies appear to be moving away from us at speeds proportional to their distance. This is called "Hubble's Law," named after Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) who discovered this phenomenon in 1929. This observation supports the expansion of the universe and suggests that the universe was once compacted.
• Third, if the universe was initially very, very hot as the Big Bang suggests, we should be able to find some remnant of this heat. In 1965, Radioastronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered a 2.725 degree Kelvin (-454.765 degree Fahrenheit, -270.425 degree Celsius) Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB) which pervades the observable universe. This is thought to be the remnant which scientists were looking for. Penzias and Wilson shared in the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery.
• Finally, the abundance of the "light elements" Hydrogen and Helium found in the observable universe are thought to support the Big Bang model of origins.

Big Bang Theory - The Only Plausible Theory?
Is the standard Big Bang theory the only model consistent with these evidences? No, it's just the most popular one. Internationally renown Astrophysicist George F. R. Ellis explains: "People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations….For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations….You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that. What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that."⁴

In 2003, Physicist Robert Gentry proposed an attractive alternative to the standard theory, an alternative which also accounts for the evidences listed above.⁵ Dr. Gentry claims that the standard Big Bang model is founded upon a faulty paradigm (the Friedmann-lemaitre expanding-spacetime paradigm) which he claims is inconsistent with the empirical data. He chooses instead to base his model on Einstein's static-spacetime paradigm which he claims is the "genuine cosmic Rosetta." Gentry has published several papers outlining what he considers to be serious flaws in the standard Big Bang model.⁶ Other high-profile dissenters include Nobel laureate Dr. Hannes Alfvén, Professor Geoffrey Burbidge, Dr. Halton Arp, and the renowned British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, who is accredited with first coining the term "the Big Bang" during a BBC radio broadcast in 1950.

Big Bang Theory - What About God?
Any discussion of the Big Bang theory would be incomplete without asking the question, what about God? This is because cosmogony (the study of the origin of the universe) is an area where science and theology meet. Creation was a supernatural event. That is, it took place outside of the natural realm. This fact begs the question: is there anything else which exists outside of the natural realm? Specifically, is there a master Architect out there? We know that this universe had a beginning. Was God the "First Cause"? We won't attempt to answer that question in this short article. We just ask the question: