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Article Template Ethical Record The Proceedings of the South Place Ethical Society Vol. 117 No. 2 £1.50 February 2012 ON RUPERT SHELDRAKE’S ‘DOGMAS OF SCIENCE’ A Materialist’s Reactions to 10 alleged delusions scientists hold (see p 7) 1. Dogs are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms. Fathoming an animal’s complex mechanisms can only enhance one’s appreciation of it as a living organism. 2. All matter is unconscious. Consciousness is an illusion. Not all matter is unconscious – physical brains generate consciousness (ie experience) which is a real, not an illusory, phenomenon. 3. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same. In 1948, respected physicists H.Bondi, F.Hoyle and T.Gold proposed a steady- state cosmology wherein new matter continually appeared – a genuine scientific theory because it was capable of falsification by evidence – it made predictions. 4. The laws of nature are fixed. If, say, the strength of gravity did fluctuate, physicists would naturally seek the ‘law’ that governed the fluctuations…… which law, if found, would not itself fluctuate. 5. Nature is purposeless; evolution has no goal. The shift from barren, Aristotelian teleology (eg as in Genesis) to the fecund, Darwinian mechanism of natural selection is justified by a wealth of evidence. 6. Inheritance is material…….carried in the DNA, RNA etc…… but not in Sheldrake’s ‘morphogenetic field’ which makes no predictions. 7. The image of a tree you see is inside your brain, not out there. Is your phantom limb ‘out there’as well? 8. Memories are stored in brains. Yes, unfortunately – would we could save them all in cyberspace! 9. Telepathy is illusory. I certainly hope so – otherwise our thoughts would be a hackers’paradise! 10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that works. The world awaits discovery of the mechanisms that will destroy cancer. A MODERN DAY CREATION STORY John Rawles 3 THE SCIENCE DELUSION Rupert Sheldrake 7 BOOK NOTICES Norman Bacrac 11 NEW ADDITIONS TO THE HUMANIST LIBRARY Cathy Broad 11 CHRISTOPHER ERIC HITCHENS (1949 – 2011) Jennifer R. Jeynes 12 VIEWPOINTS M Zeki, E Bostle, J Edmondson, F Pirani, D Forsyth 18 MEMBERSHIP SUBSCRIPTIONS FOR 2012 Chris Bratcher 22 ETHICAL SOCIETY EVENTS 24 SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall Humanist Centre 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. Main phone for all options: 020 7405 1818 Fax (lettings): 020 7061 6746 www.ethicalsoc.org.uk Chairman: Chris Purnell Vice-chairman: Jim Herrick Treasurer: Chris Bratcher Editor: Norman Bacrac Please email texts and viewpoints for the Editor to: [email protected] Staff Chief Executive Officer: Jim Walsh Tel: 020 7061 6745 [email protected] Administrator: Martha Lee Tel: 020 7061 6741 [email protected] Finance Officer: Linda Alia Tel: 020 7061 6740 [email protected] Librarian: Catherine Broad Tel: 020 7061 6747 [email protected] Hon. Archivist Carl Harrison Programme Co-ordinator: Ben Partridge Tel: 020 7061 6744 [email protected] Lettings Officer: Carina Dvorak Tel: 020 7061 6750 [email protected] Caretakers: Eva Aubrechtova (i/c) Tel: 020 7061 6743 [email protected] together with: Angelo Edrozo, Alfredo Olivo, Rogerio Retuerna, Cagatay Ulker Maintenance: Zia Hameed Tel: 020 7061 6742 [email protected] New members Thomas Cardy, Birmingham; Kieran Duffy, Cricklewood, London; Girish Ramadurgam, Rotherhithe, London; Ann Rogers, Hayes, Middlesex; Joseph Xuereb, Westminster, London. JAMES HEMMING ESSAY PRIZE, 2012 The subject for 2012 is: No moral system can rest solely on authority. It can never be sufficient justification for performing any action that someone commands it. (A J Ayer, 1910-1989) Discuss. The Prize awards are: 1st Prize £1000; 2nd Prize £500; 3rd Prize £250. The prize money is provided by the South Place Ethical Society. Entries of no more than 1,500 words will be accepted from any student at a UK school or college studying for AS or A2 levels or qualifications at the same level who is 19 or under on 1 April 2012. The essay must be accompanied by a completed entry form and posted to: James Hemming Essay Prize, 1 Gower Street, London WC1E 6HD by 1 April 2012. The James Hemming Essay Prize is administered by the British Humanist Association, New Humanist and the South Place Ethical Society. For more information please visit www.hemmingprize.org.uk SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Reg. Charity No. 251396 Founded in 1793, the Society is a progressive movement whose aims are: the study and dissemination of ethical principles based on humanism and freethought the cultivation of a rational and humane way of life, and the advancement of research and education in relevant fields. We invite to membership those who reject supernatural creeds and are in sympathy with our aims. At Conway Hall the programme includes Sunday lectures, discussions, evening courses and the Conway Hall Sunday Concerts of chamber music. The Society maintains a Humanist Reference Library. The Society’s journal, Ethical Record, is issued monthly. Memorial meetings may be arranged. The annual subscription is now £35 (£25 if a full-time student, unwaged or over 65) 2 Ethical Record, February 2012 A MODERN DAY CREATION STORY John Rawles Author of The Matter with Us (Pen Press 2011) Summary of a Lecture to the Ethical Society, 27 November 2011 There are three controversial aspects of creation which even humanists may have some difficulty in accepting: • the origin of the universe, • the origin of life, and • the origin and nature of consciousness. How can these problematic aspects of creation be incorporated into a scientific creation story without recourse to the supernatural? The Origin of the Universe Prior to the big bang account of the origin of the universe, the prevailing theory was of an eternal, steady state universe. The current ex nihilo big bang theory evokes two questions which seem to require a metaphysical or supernatural answer: What caused the big bang, and what was there beforehand? These questions are misleading, however, and result in part from the metaphorical mathematical language used to describe the event. Mathematics is a language invented and used by humans to describe the experienced world. Just as our verbal language owes its structures to our biology and the way in which we see the world, maths also is grounded in our experience, which is why it works as a descriptive language of the physical world. Much of mathematics, however, is an imaginative construction which has no counterpart in reality, in the same way as imaginary worlds may be created with our verbal language. One particular imaginative leap which concerns us here is to treat zero as a number like any other. As a language, mathematics is particularly good at describing changes involving time and motion, which are experienced as being smoothly continuous, or analogue. But both time and motion are qualitatively different from their mathematical representations, which are discontinuous and digital.* It is this discontinuous digital representation of analogue physical quantities which makes mathematics fundamentally metaphoric. Metaphor is describing something in terms of something very different, like describing nature as number. Another fundamental difference between nature and number is that, while mathematics may describe nature, it does not determine it. The smooth continuous motion of the planets around the sun is accurately described by mathematics, but numbers play no part in directing planetary movement. Although Newton’s universal law of gravitation is expressed as a mathematical equation, numbers play no part in the law’s implementation. *Note. Although at present, in both ordinary and quantum mechanics, space and time co-ordinates are represented by continuous quantities, ie the so-called ‘real’ numbers. {Ed.} Ethical Record, February 2012 3 The big bang presents us with an impenetrable barrier of ignorance as to what, if anything, came before it. Since the big bang, time and space are thought to have varied continuously: the expansion of the universe, which is still occurring, is analogue. But time and space may also have been changing before the big bang, and may have changed while crossing the divide at time zero between before and after, but we cannot know whether or not that is so. This is because although zero is classified as a number like any other, in one respect it is different from all other numbers: one cannot divide by it. This prohibition results in the singularity of the big bang. The big bang is a break at time zero, not necessarily in the continuity of the physical processes underway at that time, but in the continuity of their calculation. Rather than marking its origin, the big bang may be considered as a landmark event in a continuous history of the universe, of which the earlier part is unknown and unknowable. In that case, the question ‘what caused the big bang’ is inappropriate and does not require an answer, least of all a metaphysical one. Light is an emergent property of a system which, to begin with, consisted simply of atoms of hydrogen in the early universe interacting with each other by means of gravity. The mutual gravitational attraction of hydrogen ultimately resulted in the creation of light from nuclear fusion in the sun at the centre of our solar system. This is a bottom up creation story, replacing the top down story of fiat lux. It gives us a completely new perspective on matter itself. Matter is often thought of as being passive stuff, something we do things to, not something unpredictable and creative which does things, spontaneously, all by itself. The Origin of Life When our solar system came into being, the universe was already about ten billion years old, time enough for the hundred or so elements of the periodic table, including carbon, to have been created by repeated passage through stellar furnaces comprised by explosions of supernovae.
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