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Ethical Record Vol The ISSN 001 4-1 690 Ethical Record Vol. 89 No. 9 OCTOBER 1984 EDITORIAL presently alive. Words and Meanings Take five items (of interest in themselves), plucked at random THE SPOKEN WORD ZIPS around the from your editor's recent listening, world (aided by the innumerable viewing and reading. Certain words new technologies) at an ever-in- creasing tempo. Stopping long used here and in the rest of the enough to make sure we understand editorial are given in SMALL CAPITALS to underline our need to what we say becomes more difficult. know what is meant. (The same, of course, applies to the written or printed word.) Billy Graham is on tour in the In this month's Ethical Record USSR—will have or will be the Viewpoints section has many addressing 23 main audiences. items of interest in this respect; He has declared that he wishes the words we bandy about in South to increase TRUST between the Place seem to need much more superpowers to enable PRO- thought than we supposed. And GRESS towards nuclear dis- what people actually mean is in armament. He also is said to urgent and continual need of have announced that there was clarification; as are the supposed "more RELIGIOUS FREEDOM (in qualities of understanding and the Soviet Union) than the humanistic outlook of leading West supposed". figures in the fields of philosophy, On the Pope's second day in science, politics and literature— Canada, addressing, it is both those from the past and Continued on page 15 CONTENTS Coming to Conway Hall: Alfred Ayer, David Berman, Fenner Brockway, Govind Deodhekar, Ellis Hillman, William Horsley, Nicholas Hyman, Leslie Jones, Ludovic Kennedy, John Padel, Frank Ridley, Barry Till, Audrey Williamson . 2 The Coming Concerts: The Alberni, Allegri, Hanson, Locrian and Roth String Quartets, Ian and Jennifer Partridge . 3 Determined But Unpredictable: Richard Scorer . 3 Short Items: The Race Between Education and Catas- trophe; Women Composers; Lord Byron; Men and Women Merely Players; Poland . 5-8 Viewpoints: Ray Lovecy, George Walford, P. Ross, Albert Standley, II. J. Blackham, Colin Mills, G. F. Westcott, David Ibry 9-13 Arthur Schopenhauer: Sam Beer . 13 The Open University Humanist Society . 14 The views expressed in this journal are not necessarily those of the Society. Microfilm and reprints available—details on request. PUBLISHED BY THE SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY CONWAY HALL, RED LION SQUARE, LONDON WC1R 4R1 Telephone: 01-242 8032 (Answering machine out of hours) SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Appointed Lecturers: H. J. Blackham, Lord Brockway, Richard Clements, OBE, T. F. Evans, Peter Heales, Harry Stopes-Roe, Nicolas Walter Hall Manager: Geoffrey Austin (tel. 01-242 8032) Secretary: Jean Bayliss (Wed-Fri, tel. 01-242 8033) Honorary Representative: Ray Lovecy Chairman General Committee: Fanny Cockerell Deputy Chairman: Betty Beer Honorary Registrar: John Brown Honorary Treasurer: Ben Roston Honorary Librarian: Editor, The Ethical Record: Peter Hunot COMING TO CONWAY HALL Sunday Morning LECTURES at 11.00 am in the Library October 7. AUDREYWILLIAMSON. King Richard III — a Quincentenary Mystery. October 14. JOHN PADEL.Shakespeare's Sonnets—Telling Fact from Fiction. October 21. BARRYTILL. The Place of Adult Education in Contemporary Society. October 28. JEREMYCORBYN. The Denials of Freedom and Centralisation of Power that is continuing in Britain. November 4. FENNERBROCKWAY. Is Disarmament Possible? November II. DAVID BERMAN.Mietzche's Three Phases of Atheism. Sunday FORUMS at 3.00 pm in the Library October 7. JOHN WILDE. Eliminating Poverty and Unemployment. October 14. FRANKRIDLEY. Mahomet v Jesus Christ—Invasion of Islam. October 28. WILLIAMHORSLEY. Economics. November 4. LESLIE JONES. William Morris—From the Earthly Paradise to News From Nowhere. November 1 I. ELLIS HILLMAN.The Earth is Flatter Than you Think. Sunday Social—in the Library at 3.00 pm. Tea at 4.30 pm Sunday, October 21. GOVIND DEODHEKAR(DEV) will speak on: My Recent Visit to the Soviet Union. INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS London University Extra-Mural Cotuse A 24-session class will be held weekly on Tuesdays from 7.15-9.15 pm in the Library at Conway Hall commencing on October 2, 1984. The tutor will again be N. HYMAN,RA., and the title of his course is: Zones of Tension and Hope on a Shared Planet 1945-1984. 1984 VOLTAIRE Memorial Lecture—in Conway Hall Monday, October 8 af 7.00 pm. LUDOVIC KENNEDY.An. End to Belief? Chairman—SIR ALFREDAYER. (See leaflet with this issue.) 2 Determined But Unpredictable By RICHARD SCORER Summary of his lecture to SPES on Sunday July 15, 1984 ONE MIGHT ATTEMPT A SHORT-CUT LO an answer GE the question of deter- minacy by remarking that the human brain is only a tiny part of the universe and can therefore contain only a superficial view of its reality because the information required to represent the reality is far beyond the capacity of the brain to understand. Determinacy, meaning "being deter- mined by a chain of causation" is not really in doubt, as we shall see; but the question is whether we can ever discover the details of the chain. Is it helpful to say that through science we can, in principle, discover the laws of causation and thereby predict the future given the requisite present circumstances? Hermann Bondi recently wrote on the theme "Why mourn the passing of determinacy?" But doubt in the existence of an all pervasive chain of causation has not in the least been shaken : what has happened is that those who believe in the existence of forces operating on the physical world which are in some sense outside or superior to physics have latched on to the other meaning of determinacy and imagine that physics has discovered how APE vs BCS—Evolution or Creation? APE (Association for the Protection of Evolution) has challenged the Biblical Creation Society (BCS) to a debate on : Creation or Evolution (focussing on the evolution of birds and archeopteryx) Speakers: GERALD DUFFET for BCS and MIKE HOWGATE for APE, and contributions from the floor. In the chair: Norman Bacrac. Place: Conway Hall. Time: 2.30 pm. Date: Saturday, October 27, 1984. Tea: at 4.30 pm. October Concerts at Conway Hall at 6.30 pm—£1.20 Sunday, October 7. Allegri String Quartet. MOZART, BARTOK, BEETHOVEN. Sunday, October 14. Ian and Jennifer Partridge. SCHUBERT (Song Cycle). Sunday, October 21. Locrian String Quartet. MOZART, ELGAR, BEETHOVEN. Sunday, October 28. Hanson String Quartet, Andrew Marriner. MOZART, BEETHOVEN, BRAHMS. November Sunday Concerts Sunday, November 4. Alberni String Quartet. MOZART, HAYDN, BEETHOVEN. Sunday, November 11. Roth Quartet. MOZART, SOSTAKOVICH, BRAHMS. RESERVED SEAT TICKETS. A ticket of admission to the 11 Concerts from October 7 to December 16 which entitles the holder to a reserved seat up to 6.20 pm can be obtained from the Honorary Treasurer, 129 West Hill Road, SW18 5HN (stamped, addressed envelope, please) or at Conway Hall before each Concert, price £6.60. 3 non-physical influences can play a part in determining events, making them seem unpredictable and arbitrary. What Heisenberg did was to show that there are severe limitations on the accuracy with which we can know details on the atomic scale of the physical world. Therefore, whether there was a rigid chain of causation or not, we could not know the details which would be required to make a prediction of the future state. Many physicists asserted that the random motion of the atoms could influence human-sized events, such as the weather, at a later time. Mathematicians had shown that certain possible states of the atmosphere were unstable so that something below the level of detection could be the influence that tipped the system one way rather than another. This, however is fallacious, or at least irrelevant because the scales are never so finely balanced. Furthermore, because of the utter complexity we are unable to handle influences which are well above the level of detection with the accuracy required for prediction. Maxwell's "Demons" Do Not Exist A more serious argument which preceded this one was that the laws of physics are "only statistical" and are therefore open to violation. Neverthe- less no-one has ever produced a case of violation and shown that it was the cause of something unusual. Events at the atomic level, such as the motion of the molecules of a gas, cannot conspire to cause the laws of physics, in this case the gas laws, to be flouted. This is not really a case of the statistical probability being so low as to be negligible for practical purposes. That probability is actually zero: Maxwell's "demons" which he invented for the purpose of theoretical discussion had the ability to recruit an excess of one category of molecules into a conspiracy to violate the statistical (so- called) laws of physics; but they do not exist. The laws fail only when the portion of gas under consideration contains very few molecules. The description of the motion of the atoms as "random" merely means that we have no way of predicting what a particular one will do because we cannot specify the condition of its environment adequately. That does not mean that its motion is therefore freed from the normal process of causation. The uncertainties of atomic physics have nothing to do with features of the world which we perceive at the human-sized level. And supposing that spirits or other non-material influences were able to operate at the level of individual electrons there is no way in which that could change events at the human-sized level. Causation and Determinacy Reign Supreme At the other, cosmological, extreme prediction is of little interest. Science at present is spending its time on understanding how the universe as we know it came to be like it is.
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