Dear Theophilus, 

In this letter I would like to consider some aspects of the background to science and the way we see the world and the way we look at learning.

We have had, in this century, almost all kinds of bitter attacks on man and one of the most savage has been the claim of behaviorism and reductionism. What this does is to reduce thought to conditioned reflex. The success of this with animals has led to its applications to humankind in areas such as advertising. Man is reduced to a reflexive organism that exists to be manipulated. This kind of thinking is closely allied to much of science which sees man as fundamentally explainable through the activity of atoms and molecules. In light of this, scepticism has grown to unacceptable levels and what this shows is that scepticism is itself corrosive and all that it succeeds in is to tear things apart without really offering anything substantive in return.

If we look at the historical development of thought, we will see that originally, thought used a magical and mythical interpretation of the universe. This came to be supported through the agency of authority. Truth was accepted on the basis of authority and anyone who went against this, was persecuted or prosecuted. The last two centuries have seen a call for freedom from authority and anything even remotely touching on authority was suspected.

Starting with the physicist Laplace in the nineteenth century, the goal of science has been to derive ways of explaining the universe completely, deriving everything from the interaction of atoms. In a sense, this was an attempt to replace all of human knowledge, by a knowledge of atoms. Thus, music was merely a vibration of atoms which impinged on the ear and which was interpreted by the brain as specific sounds. There was nothing more to this except some baseless values placed on this through human imagination.

To give you an illustration of where all this led, consider a conference held in 1954 on mechanisms in the human brain. One of the participants, Hebb, made the claim that the existence of consciousness is merely a hypothesis. Kubie, another participant, went even further, saying that there is no such thing as consciousness. When you stop and think about the absurdness of this statement - that a conscious being is making the claim that consciousness does not exist - one is struck by a question: how can this arise? What lurks in the background is an egotistical love of self - ignore or deny what one can't explain.

What underlies this kind of thinking is a fallacious general approach to the universe which sees that higher levels, whatever they are, can and must be explained by lower levels. But the foolishness of this is quite obvious to common sense. The physiology of sound production cannot explain words. Grammar rules do not explain the meaning of sentences. You can't get vocabulary from phonetics. This again is closely allied to the connection between the mind and the physical body. There is a general acceptance by scientists that these are the same thing. If you accept this, then it becomes obvious that the mind is an outgrowth of the body and is controlled by the mechanisms operating in the body. But this is an assumption with little evidence to support it.

Permit me to illustrate what I am driving at through a simple example. Pieces of music written to be performed by an orchestra are sometimes transcribed to be played by a single instrument, often a piano. In the transcription of the music the piano would very obviously be used to represent various other instruments and the differences between the instruments would be possibly conveyed through loudness or through the connectedness or division of notes or through other techniques. If you tried to explain to someone not familiar with orchestration, that this passage represents an oboe, or that passage represents a harp, they would look at you in puzzlement because all that they would hear is a piano and nothing else. This is what happens when you try to explain the more complex by the lower level - we run into serious difficulties in comprehension. What is happening at the lower level can only be understood if we understand what is happening at the higher and we must therefore not be surprised when scientists who are totally ignorant of the spiritual dimension of humanity attribute everything to the lower realm of mere atoms and physical forces.

It is just this desire to explain the higher by the lower level that has spurred a lot of talk recently about artificial intelligence. Some scientists feel that thinking machines could be constructed which would operate the way humans operate. What they forget is that there is an innate discontinuity in creativity which logic simply cannot span. In scientific exploration, as with other areas, there are two major identifiable components. There is the imagination which reviews what is known and organizes this information. This is the preparation aspect of discovery. Then comes intuition which arises not through our efforts but spontaneously. It is this logical gap between intuition, which comes of its own volition, and the solution of a problem or puzzle that faces us. A good illustration of this was the discovery of the quantumization of energy by Max Planck at the beginning of the twentieth century. Everything that needed to be known was there for everyone to observe and study and use. But it was done only by Planck who intuitively grasped the concept that energy does not flow continuously like a stream of water, but is disconnected into tiny packages called quanta. Even when this thought, this discovery occurred to him, Planck did not want to accept it. He thought there was a hidden fallacy in this but it was soon shown that Planck's worries were misplaced. Permit me to give you another example. If discoveries were strictly governed by a strictly logical progression of thought, then any problem, such as the cure for cancer should be feasible. But, because knowledge does have this point of discontinuity, we have to await for someone's intuition to make the discovery as to a cure for cancer or AIDS or other medical problems, for example.

The gaining of knowledge is not quite as objective as we sometimes think. Science, to a large extent, uses imagination, as the arts do, and this is united to a commitment, a faith, as to how the universe behaves. There is a tacit acceptance that physical reality is reachable through the power of thought and logic, especially through the power of mathematics. Thus, we see that when it comes to the universe, scepticism is put on the back burner as scientists unquestionably accept logic and thought as valid and search for meaning and coherence in the laws applicable to the universe.

It is important to debunk the myth of impartiality and objectivity in science. You see facts really tell you very little. It is when facts are put into a context, when facts are integrated into larger bodies of meaning, and this can only be done through the use of imagination, that we make progress and increase our knowledge and this is what lies at the heart of science. This is an important point to be grasped because scientists often ignore it and come out with preposterous claims, unjustified by science's impartiality, touching on human worth and human values. A clear example of this is in the area of morality. Through its myth of detachment, science claims that the universe is amoral. Morality is a human invention and any observation of life will show that nature is totally immoral and is in fact filled with pain and killing. But, here, as in other areas, the scientist is being hypocritical. It seems that certain rules apply to scientists while others apply to the rest of humanity. If you think that I am being too hard, consider the following. Scientists report their results in scientific journals for other scientists to consider. It is assumed that what is reported here is truthful. But, if the basis of the universe is amoral, then why should there be such a concern with truth? Truth, lies, who cares and what difference does it make? It is fine to make all kinds of academic claims about morality and amorality but when it comes to the crunch, scientists make an assumption that morality, behavior, the telling of truth as opposed to lies, does make a difference. Without rules of morality, science itself falls apart and cannot exist.

Another irony is that science has condemned the claim that authority can validate knowledge. It is through experimentation, through observation of the material universe that we expand our knowledge. It is therefore ironic that the laymen receives his knowledge of science through the authoritative pronouncements of scientists. And even among scientists, science has become such an area of specialization, that many accept results not because of first hand observation, but on the basis of authority of those either reporting the results or peers evaluating them.

Some scientists claim that the universe has no aim, no purpose. All that we observe is truly a tale told by an idiot fool of sound and fury signifying nothing. This is held as the noble vision offered by science. And yet, all of science is based on the acceptance of the idea that the universe is permeated with coherence. The underlying assumption, without which science would stop in its tracks, is that the universe is coherent, that it can be logically studied and that the laws of mathematics give us a handle through which we can explore the world. All this flies in the face of the claim that the universe is meaningless.

Theophilus, in this letter I have been more critical than I have been in the past but I think that the absurdity of much that passes as scientific claims has no right to be presented as science. Philosophy, meaning, purpose are not in the realm of science. These are not questions that science should address and it is time that this was made clear to the layman who is awed by the authority of the repeated mantra: "it has been shown scientifically that..."

With this, I leave,

Yours, as always,

Bar-Abbas