11.23.08
Is deep evolution beyond the limits of knowledge?
There is a something ominous in the Darwin debate: one senses that neither side has the answer, and that we are going to end with the collapse of both religion and Darwinism/science as reliable guides to the evolution question. People in general culture need to seize the issue from this deadlocked debate of madmen, and prepare the general culture for the collapse of trust in either version (which could however continue forever based on the propaganda budgets of the respective parties).
In fact as we study the eonic effect we discover in history a strong resemblance, speaking of historical-evolutionary dynamics, of the Kantian phenomenon/noumenon distinction.
We have to wonder if the Darwin debate isn’t due to this: we cannot achieve phenomenal knowledge of the deeper dynamics of evolution.
A Certain Strangeness: Beyond Space and Time?
Our crude widget model has stumbled onto something remarkable, a resemblance to so-called ‘transcendental idealism’, a scheme tailor-made to rescue Newtonians in distress, but considered now to be an outmoded form of thought. Almost against our will our model forces this on us, due to the two levels it generates in its analysis, and the stunning match to the discrete freedom sequence. Remarkably we have an ‘off the shelf’ philosophic software for just this situation, the critical system of Kant. We tie together all the loose threads of our discussion with a look at his thinking in the endnote section.
Our data has, at first, a strangeness to it in the way it treats discontinuity, jumps between periods and regions, and operates on fuzzy intervals. In fact, it is a consequence of the data we are confronted with, no way around it, and is not indulgence in the fantastic. Examine the data of the Axial Age, for example. Fantastic or not, the data speaks for itself. There is no ‘flat history’ solution to the strange properties we discover there. One reason we are about to discover for this initial sense of oddity is that we may be detecting a system operating behind the scenes, and perhaps one that is beyond the matrix of space and time. Although we can’t establish this formally, we should launch a preemptive strike against the suddenly metaphysical speculations that will arise here, and that will provoke some metaphysical spree on the subject of history and eternity. The latter concept has no scientific foundation, and is speculative, period. That doesn’t mean it is wrong, only metaphysical. Transcendental idealism is the ony way to both embrace and yet discipline this kind of ‘ran off the meter’ once we attempt to include anti-causal thinking in our model.
Stephen P. Smith said,
November 23, 2008 at 10:14 pm
It is only science that must face not having an answer.
Religion does not need to explain what becomes self evident, as religion is not about explaining. Science is about explaining. Spirituality has to do with feeling and self evdence, and religion grew out of spirituality.
Evolution cannot be explained independent of substance for the simple reason that explanation is abstract and substance is concrete. Substance can only be caricature, and when pressed the caricature fails. Darwin’s theory running on a computer will find itself disconnected from substance, and hence it won’t do what people say it can do.
I don’t think you are giving people like Wilber and Cohen enough credit in providing a workable aternative to what will take us beyond fundamentalism on both sides. The “New Age” caricature won’t work anymore.
Last night, the liberal PBS had a special program with Deepak Copra. And this is most remarkable for a secular media outlet to give air time to a spiritualist. It was not the first time I seen an example like this on PBS. A few months about there was a PBS special on Taoism and Wayne W. Dyer. This is the same contradicted PBS that pushes Darwinism. But what is not appreciated is that secularism is found being a breeding ground for spiritualists that hunger for meaning and spiritual significance.
The secularist first fool themselves into believing that Darwin’s evolution is consistent with Copra’s vitalism. But having accepted Copra’s vitalism the seeds that will deconstruct Darwin have been planted.