The Old-Time Religion Underlying Disbelief in God.
Sigmund Freud famously described the psychological phenomenon known as projection, in which a person projects their own unacceptable thoughts, feelings, or behaviors onto others. This allows one to avoid recognizing these traits in themselves, and avoid accepting responsibility for their actions. A good example would be a person who is having an affair and thereby accuses their spouse of having an affair, in order to compensate for intense guilt.
Projection is apparent in the scientific community among those who accuse theists of hampering the progress of science by clinging to outdated beliefs. In reality, it is the beliefs which underly atheism which hamper the advancement of science. Nineteenth century scientific orthodoxy was deeply entrenched in a philosophical / religious belief known as materialism, which is not to be confused with the more commonly used definition of materialism which involves desiring fancy objects such as Rolex watches, yachts, $350,000 Italian sports cars, etc.. Materialism is the philosophical stance which considers matter to be the fundamental substance in nature, or the something from which everything else comes. The vast majority of atheists are materialists because admitting that immaterial entities exist leaves one with no logical basis for denying the existence of one immaterial entity in particular (God).
Imagine if you could travel back in time 200 years and tell people that you can instantly communicate with friends miles away using a device which sends messages via waves that cannot be detected by any of the five senses (a radio). The majority of people hearing your story would probably consider you crazy and would label it to be as fanciful as a fairy tale. Many would even mock you. And such people would have the full support of the scientific orthodoxy of the day. Those who look to current-day scientific orthodoxy for truth stand on very shaky ground. Consensus among scientists (scientific orthodoxy) is worse than worthless as a signpost for truth.
Old habits die hard. Old habits of thought die much harder.
Most people are familiar with the saying, “Old habits die hard.” Well, old habits of thought die even harder. Former Cambridge University biochemist Rupert Sheldrake notes in The Science Delusion:
“Contemporary science is based on the claim that all reality is material or physical. There is no reality but material reality. Consciousness is a by-product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Evolution is purposeless. God exists only as an idea in human minds, and hence in human heads.”
“These beliefs are powerful, not because most scientists think about them critically but because they don’t. The facts of science are real enough; so are the techniques that scientists use, and the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in nineteenth century thinking.”
The scientific orthodoxy of the 21st century is nearly as entrenched in materialist philosophy as 19th century scientific orthodoxy. This is despite the fact that materialism becomes more difficult to rectify with the insights of modern science almost by the day. One notable example of how materialism refuses to die, despite being completely irreconcilable with the insights of modern science, involves none other than Albert Einstein. Physicists of Einstein’s day were committed to the belief that the universe was filled with a material substance know as ether. Einstein’s insights were a direct challenge to this materialist stance, and were therefore rejected by the vast majority of scientists without any consideration. As a JSTOR Daily article notes:
With hindsight, it seems as though scientific breakthroughs sweep quickly to universal acceptance. A paper is published and everybody says, “Eureka!” But that’s not necessarily the case. Sometimes scientists have too much invested in the status quo to accept a new way of looking at things. This was certainly true when Albert Einstein‘s 1905 paper on “special relativity” first challenged the British conception of ether. Einstein argued that space and time were bound up together (something he would elaborate on in his theory of general relativity of 1915, adding gravity to the mix of space/time), a complicated idea that contradicted the long-held belief in something called ether.
In the 19th century, ether was the medium that scientists believed filled space. It might be considered the first “dark matter,” an undetectable something theory said should be out there, the explanation for a number of problems having to do with electricity, the movement of light, even the whole concept of “nothing.” It was, according to one early-20th-century physicist, “accepted as a necessity by all modern physicists.” But as Einstein’s theory noted, there was no experimental confirmation for the substance. There was no proof it existed, other than that the scientific establishment had accepted the concept. As Stanley Goldberg reminds us, British physicists had a “theoretical commitment to the ether.” For instance, Lord Kelvin argued in 1907 that ether must be an “elastic, compressible, non-gravitational solid.” However, in the end it didn’t conceptually work well enough.
Still, when Einstein published his work contradicting ether, the only place he seems to have been understood was in Germany, where his theory was “discussed, criticized, elaborated upon, and defended,” writes Goldberg. For the next six years, virtually all the literature on Einstein’s paper came from Germany and three other countries. In France, Einstein was largely ignored until he visited in 1910. In the U.S., a few understood it, but, in general, relativity was ridiculed as “totally impractical and absurd.” In Britain, his theories met with resistance, because relativity was seen as a direct challenge to the widely accepted theory of ether.
As the above article notes, in the beginning only the Germans were willing to publish Einstein’s papers. But the above article does not mention that one German in particular, Max Planck, was crucial to launching Einstein’s career. Without the assistance of Max Planck, nobody would likely have never heard of Einstein because he was a lowly patent clerk (not even a practicing scientist) when he created his Theory of Special Relativity. As the Nobel Prize-winning physicist credited with founding quantum physics and a member of the ultra-elite Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences, Planck was one of the very few people able to recognize the genius of this obscure patent clerk’s Theory of Special Relativity, and then promote it to a larger audience of elite scientists.
Max Planck was well aware of the harmfulness of deeply entrenched and unquestioned philosophical stances such as materialism among groups of scientists. His awareness should be credited for preventing Einstein’s deep insights regarding the nature of reality from vanishing without a trace into the dustbin of history. What became known as “Plank’s Principle” is paraphrased as:
“Science advances one funeral at a time.”
Quantum theory describes the motion of objects at the atomic and subatomic level. One of several quantum phenomena which confound materialism is known as nonlocality. According to nonlocality, it is impossible to isolate an unobserved quantum object, such as an electron, into a bounded region of space. Science writer George Musser discusses nonlocality in an article for Scientific American:
In everyday speech, “locality” is a slightly pretentious word for a neighborhood, town or other place. But its original meaning, dating to the 17th century, is about the very concept of “place.” It means that everything has a place. You can always point to an object and say, “Here it is.” If you can’t, that thing must not really exist. If your teacher asks where your homework is, and you say it isn’t anywhere, you have some explaining to do.
The world we experience possesses all the qualities of locality. We have a strong sense of place and of the relations among places. We feel the pain of separation from those we love and the impotence of being too far away from something we want to affect. And yet multiple branches of physics now suggest that, at a deeper level, there may be no such thing as place and no such thing as distance. Physics experiments can bind the fate of two particles together so that they behave like a pair of magic coins. If you flip them, each will land on heads or tails—but always on the same side as its partner. They act in a coordinated way even though no force passes through the space between them. Those particles might zip off to opposite sides of the universe, and still they act in unison. The particles violate locality—they transcend space.
The impossibility of rectifying materialism with nonlocality is easy to recognize: How can one suggest that nothing exists except material things when the entire concept of location or place is an illusion? Location is a crucial aspect of material objects. As Musser notes above, if you cannot point to an object and say “here it is,” then in what sense can that object be said to really exist as a material thing? But subatomic particles do not really have a location, as nonlocality illustrates.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the title character says to his friend named Horatio,
“There are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, then are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
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