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Word Gems exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Augros & Stanciu's George Stanciu, PhD, theoretical physics
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Editor's note: The following is from Augros & Stanciu's The New Biology, chapter one, "Physics As The Paradigm."
“Most biologists today consider biology to be an extension of physics. “Biologist Peter Medawar writes: ‘Biology is not just physics and chemistry, but a very limited, very special and profoundly interesting part of them.’ … “Biologist E.H. Mercer agrees: ‘Most scientists … behave as if they believed that only … convention separate physics from biology … that there is really only one science.’ “This view rests on the argument that science is analysis, and analysis requires the resolution of a subject into its simplest elements… The causes of an individual’s actions arise from anatomy, physiology, and the bio-chemistry of brain mechanisms. These subjects are in turn resolvable to the laws of chemistry and physics. This process of analysis finally stops with high-energy physics, which studies the ultimate particles.”
Editor’s note: Much of materialistic science’s attention today is turned toward particle physics. These nano-entities are seen to be the building blocks of matter, and even of reality itself. “Therefore,” as the reasoning goes, “if we can identify and understand the smallest particles, then, in a giant upward lego-construction, we can understand larger entities – electrons and protons, atoms and molecules, cells and organs. Further, we can make trajectory predictions based on Newton’s laws of motion. Even brain and consciousness can be bridled and tamed as these are nothing more than the effects of the movement of sub-atomic particles.” However, this “upward causation” model of reality is deeply flawed, as we shall discuss.
“Mercer assigns the origin of this scheme for the sciences: ‘Inevitably, the idea spread that all the sciences could be brought together and integrated in terms of particle dynamics using Newtonian methods, and a universal scientific materialism came into being.’
“According to the materialist program, once the simplest particles are reached, all else can be understood by composition. Physicist Heinz Pagels writes: ‘In its crudest form, material reductionism maintains that there is a series of levels. At the bottom level are subatomic particles, and from these the chemical properties of atoms and molecules are obtained. Molecules form living and nonliving things, and from the behavior of molecules and cells it is possible to determine the behavior of individual humans [and] historical events. The claim is that in principle, history is materially reducible to subatomic events.’”
Materialists do not believe in consciousness, free will, virtue, heroism, or courage. Man is just a soulless machine, acted upon, driven, and buffeted by outside forces. Editor’s note: It’s very important in this examination of biological evolution to understand that it fits within a larger scheme, a broad array, of all sciences. Everything in this materialistic mindset is just the result, they say, of the dancing interplay of subatomic particles. In my travels over the years, the most egregious example of such radical materialism I've found to be among university history and politicl science professors. They tended to be the least knowledgeable concerning the quantum underpinnings of reality, and, therefore, probably not surprisingly, the most arrogant, the most pompous, and militant. With a cultish fervor of a tent-revival evangelist, they would preach their anti-humanistic views, centering in "The Great Man Theory," : “In history, there is no such thing as a courageous man, there are no selfless heroes, there are none who by sheer force of effort and willpower accomplish noble deeds. There is no such thing as free will - we're just puppets on a string with no culpability or claim to greatness. No, this is all illusion. What we’re really looking at is merely apparent achievement, just people in the right place at the right time, driven by forces of nature and the currents of history. There is no such thing as consciousness or willpower or virtue or praiseworthiness in any meaningful sense. What we see over the centuries is simply the overt expression of biological evolution in its survival mode, with men as mere pawns of sociological/cultural forces.” Now that we begin to understand materialists’ fixation on subatomic particles as the deepest reality, brash statements of man-as-soulless-machine fall neatly as part of their skewed belief-system. In this vein, we are no longer surprised when materialistic Presidents, reducing humankind to soulless machine, make statements such as “You didn’t build that business!” Augros and Stanciu offer examples from many thinkers in history featuring man as soulless automaton, man as plaything of the evolutionary fates; notables, such as Descartes, Malthus, Karl Marx, Freud, B.F. Skinner, Richard Dawkins; we could go on: These “agree on one thing: man is not an agent in his own right, but is acted upon by inner and outer forces beyond his control. In the full rigor of the mechanistic scheme, man cannot act for a conscious purpose.” Editor’s note: It is odd, is it not, that in all of their talk of “man is a puppet, man has no power to direct himself,” they would exclude themselves from this mindlessness. Because, if they and what they’re selling is just a bit of unconscious flotsam riding on a wave-crest of history’s energy, or biological/sociological vector, why then should we take seriously anything they put forward?
If biology is reducible to physics, which, they say, is the only real science, then we must look to the physicists, the real scientists, to pass judgment on the biologists’ assessment of things. Physicist Freeman Dyson: “Every student of molecular biology learns his trade by playing with models of plastic balls and pegs [representing molecules]… a useful visualization… But from the point of view of a physicist, the models belong to the nineteenth century. Every physicist knows that atoms are not really hard little balls. While the molecular biologists were using these mechanical models … physics was moving to a quite different direction. For the biologists, every step down in size was a step toward increasingly simple and mechanical behavior. A cell is more mechanical than a bacterium. But twentieth century physics has shown that further reductions in size have an opposite effect. If we divide a DNA molecule into its component atoms, the atoms behave less mechanically than the molecule. I few divide an atom into nucleus and electrons, the electrons are less mechanical than the atom.” notice Dyson’s judgment: for a hundred years now, physics, the hero-science of Darwinism, has been moving in an opposite direction to the teachings of popular evolutionary biology! Biologists, Dyson points out, preach that “with every step down in size” there is more mechanism, more Newtonian determinism, more cause-and-effect predictability. But this is gross error! For a hundred years now, quantum physicists have revealed the increasingly smaller world as less mechanical, with Newton’s “laws” no longer in control, and cause-and-effect swept away by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Is this not utterly strange? Biology heaps great praise upon physics as “the only real science,” but by this they mean Newtonian physics, which, for a long time now, has been superseded by more fundamental paradigms of how the universe works! The Darwinists haven’t gotten the memo. It’s a clear case of “dis guy died and nobody told 'em.”
Einstein, too, was not impressed with the purely mechanistic view of the universe; after all, he was the one who overthrew 250 years of Newtonian determinism. “Einstein wrote: ‘Science did not succeed in carrying out the mechanical program convincingly and today no physicist believes in the possibility of its fulfillment.” But Darwinists do. They continue to support a discredited view of physics because it's their "Joker is wild" card, their only hope of offering a coherency to otherwise lame bio-explanations. Biologists spin their theories as if subatomic particles were as deterministic and predictable as planets orbiting the Sun. But no physicist today believes this anymore! Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman: If you believe that atoms are like little solar systems, “then you are back in 1910.” But Darwinists do believe in such rigid precisely-tuned behavior. They teach that with each “step down” toward the very small, particles become more and more mechanistic, more predictable. But the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle utterly guts this notion: Everyone in physics is aware of this: If you know the momentum of a particle, then you cannot know its location. This is so not because we need more accurate measuring devices, but because it’s impossible to gain this information; it’s not in the nature of universe for us to be able to know these things. Why is this so? It’s because at the very smallest levels of reality there are no “hard little bee-bees,” no little solar systems, no movement strictly based upon cause-and-effect. All we find there are quantum possibility waves. Heisenberg: “[In most science experiments] we have to do with things and facts, with phenomena that are just as real as any phenomena in daily life. But the atoms or the elementary particles themselves are not as real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of [hard-edged] things or facts.” Even the word “orbit,” itself, in reference to spinning electrons, is highly misleading. Think of a cloud of buzzing here-and-there mosquitoes, and we’ll be closer to right picture. This is the better view of the very small. It’s not a neat and tidy “little solar system” about which we can make absolute predictions concerning the whereabouts of its particles.
Why is all of this important to our discussion of the origins and workings of evolutionary biology? It’s like watching a tv debate among several politicians, and you’re trying to figure out why people say certain things. However, if they’ve corrupted themselves, sold their principles in an effort to pander, to buy votes, to appeal to base passions, they will carefully espouse certain policies designed to gather power and control over the masses. Without this larger view of motivation and intent, some of their positions might strike one as unusual or out-of- place: “Why would you support that?” But it all begins to make sense once we perceive the underlying totalitarian leanings. It’s about a hidden agenda. Darwinists also have a hidden agenda. They want to stay far away from anything that even hints at a “religious” explanation for the origin of species. This is almost understandable, given Dear Mother Cult's heavy-handed, anti-humanistic ways down through the centuries. We needed to put far away the witch-hunts and the inquisitions and the infallible gurus.
throwing the baby out with the bath-water However, modern science has gone too far and has “thrown the baby out with the bathwater.” Part of the answer in our quest to understand biological evolution will require us to include some measure of Intelligent Design – which will have nothing to do with religion or biblical creationism. In a great turn-about, Darwinists, themselves, have now become the new censors, the new dogmatists, the new oppressive hierarchy, the new self-appointed priests in the temple of knowledge. We’re reminded of Nietzsche’s warning, when you go out to slay a monster, be careful that you don’t become one in the process. radical Darwinists have convinced themselves, few others, that human consciousness – including, love, hope, virtue, joy - is just illusion, an ‘epiphenomenon,’ a secondary result, of the dancing swirl of subatomic particles But it’s not just religion or biblical creationism that radical Darwinists seek to avoid but subtler connections, as well; such as an admission that human beings have a spirit, or consciousness, or free will, or virtue, or the like. These metaphysical elements, too, remind Darwinists of “going to heaven” and “afterlife,” which are deemed to be pie-in-the-sky “religious,” and so this is why radical Darwinists are adamant to insist that man, and all creation, is but soulless machine. And for those who'd like to dig even deeper for an answer, it's really about the fear of death; which we've talked about. Rupert Sheldrake, 2008 interview comment: “These are mainly people who are committed to a kind of militant/atheist worldview. As far as they are concerned, if you allow any psychic phenomena to occur you are leaving a door open a crack and . . . within seconds you could have God back again and, even worse, the Pope. So, I think, for them, it’s almost like a kind of religious struggle. It’s like a crusade.” Unfortunately, for Darwinistic “theology,” the great quantum physicists make “consciousness” front and center in terms of how reality and the universe work. We will discuss this in the next section.
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