There will never be a Newton for the blade of grass.
I came across that line while reading two weeks ago an article, "Why am I a Naturalist" by Alex Rosenberg, in The New York Times. Rosenberg, the R. Taylor Cole professor and chair of the philosophy department at Duke University, attributed that line to German philosopher Emmanuel Kant.
That line attracted me because I like metaphysics, a branch of philosophy that is simply defined as "beyond physics". Ever a student of life, I like reading philosophy, a passion that I cannot come up with a good reason.
Going back to Kant's blade of grass, Rosenberg explained that what Kant meant was that "physical science could never explain anything with a purpose, whether it be human thought or a flower's bending toward the sun." That suits my way of thinking.
I find science inadequate to explain so many things in life. For instance, we believe that there is gravity, which we know was discovered by Newton, but there is no explanation why there is gravity. That question begs for a series of questions "why" which will lead us to the door of life's many mysteries for which science has no answers.
Passion itself has no explanation. As I have always said, passion is doing what we like to do but don't know why. Asking why I like reading is like asking a poet why he writes poetry or a gourmet why he likes the taste of particular food. Our passion belongs to the realm of the senses and not the domain of physical science.
So I always disagree when scientists use the "physicalist" or materialist approach to any study of anything that involves life - and shut out metaphysics altogether - because that often reduces us to mere atoms. I digress when neuroscience explains emotions in terms of mere neural firings in the brain. It may explain which parts of the brain are activated when we fall in love but it does not explain why we fall in love.
In fact, there is no explanation for life itself, or why most - if not all - living things have the instinct to live. Science says that we have evolved from simple organisms but has no adequate explanation why simple organisms should evolve into complex organisms that we are. The best explanation that I have heard is, like the big bang, we are an accident of time, which is more of a deductive conjecture than a solid scientific explanation.
I follow the blog of Sam Harris, an erstwhile-unknown neuroscientist who shot to fame with his bestselling books "The End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian Nation". Harris, like many other atheists, advocates reason as life's guiding light. His last posts that I have read was about human consciousness, which he admits is a mystery, without conceding any possibility that it is - or could be - divinely ordained.
Several months ago, Harris challenged another neuroscientist David Eagleman, author of the book "Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain" who was featured by The New Yorker, to a debate for his comment that some scientists like Richard Dawkins, an Oxford professor who authored "God Delusion" among other books, are peddling "false certainty".
Harris was riled by Aegleman's advocacy of a movement called "possibilianism", a middle-of-road position between atheism and religion, because it undermines the atheist's cocky attitude against Faith.
Here's Aegleman: "Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion ... With possibilianism I'm hoping to define a new position - one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind."
I subscribe to that idea. Although a Catholic, I entertain other ideas that are not in keeping with the mainstream religious beliefs. I believe in many aspects of evolution, although I take the position of the Intelligent Design movement that it is part of creation and guided by divine hand. I believe in the afterlife but I also entertain ideas that heaven might not be as the Bible says it is.
That goes to say that I don't believe that the Bible is a chronicle of the exact words of God but I believe it is divinely inspired to give us a window through which we can peek into God's mind or nature. I have learned to appreciate reading the Bible by themes on love, charity, honesty, pride, repentance, forgiveness and so on and so forth, instead of taking it literally.
I subscribe to the idea that God is so immense and cannot be defined. That makes me understand some other people's complaint that organized religion has given God human attributes like He is a jealous God or He can get angry. To paraphrase one blasphemous cliche, man has the tendency to create God in his own image. I can imagine God watching us and smiling over our follies.
I believe that there are realities not accessible to the human mind, and entertain the possibility that science could be wrong for using the physicalist methods in its studies. I do not shut out the idea that atoms could a weak link to study cosmic realities. That makes me believe that debates on whether God exist or not have no meaningful purpose, but an egoistic human exercise to showcase each one's intelligence. It falls under the biblical theme of pride.
So why I do believe in God? The answer is that my experience makes me feel God's presence in my life. It is as deductive as Dawkin's belief on evolution sans God, as deductive as Harris's belief on the reality of consciousness, despite neuroscience's belief that consciousness could be a mere illusion created in our cranium. I don't have full faith in reason.
Reason is not unlike faith. To believe in reason, you must have some basis to support it. Atheists believe in reason as a reliable guiding light in life because they have faith in science and human logic, for which I don't have much. In life, which is no less than a gamble, I hedge my bet between reason and faith. In life's journey I use reason as my rudder but faith as my compass.
Science and reason have their own limitations. I cannot use reason or science to explain why Kerima Polotan Tuvera, the editor-in-chief of The Evening Post in Manila where I started my career as a journalist, did not fire me when she learned from my x-ray that I had tuberculosis a month or so after the company hired me as a proofreader.
Instead of firing me, which was the most logical thing to do for a newly-hired employee under probation, Mrs. Tuvera, the spouse of the company owner Juan Tuvera, asked me to get treatment and let the company take the tab. I have no explanation why it happened shortly after I challenged God, during my years of atheism, to strengthen my life when I drifted from one odd job to another because my illness kept me from finding a permanent job.
I cannot find the reason why, when I got burned out and had to resign from Reuters in 1987 because I could no longer compose coherent stories, the Manila bureau of the Japanese newspaper The Tokyo Shimbun looked for a reporter who was not necessarily skilled in composing stories but was only capable of getting good facts for the resident Japanese journalist.
Coincidences have helped me strengthen my faith in God. Atheists may sneer at this but I am sure that coincidences are a universal phenomenon that almost all - if not all - people experience from time to time. There is no need for science to prove this. Any scientist who will make a study to find out if coincidences do happen is as cranky as a Christian who believes that faith will make him survive a headlong dive from a 100-story sky crapper.
Science and religion have similarities. Both have their own dogmas. Both rely on faith in much of what they believe in and both use human logic to justify their own beliefs. To say that all believers are fanatics - if fanaticism means not using reason at all - is a gross generalization. Many believers use reason or logic, usually deductive, to cling to faith.
Many believers don't rely much on science knowing that scientists are just as they are - students of life trying to unravel the mysteries of our existence. Science has its own limits. Despite its ballyhooed successes, science has remained an infant dazzled by the marvels of God's infinite wisdom. Every discovery it makes is always followed by myriads of unanswered questions.
The limits of science provide the reasons why, like Kant, I believe that there will never be a Newton for the blade of grass. Faith begins where science ends. Any scientist who would say that science can unravel all the mysteries in this world sooner or later is not using logic properly but, as Eagleman would say, peddling "false certainty".
.
Please read my previous postings "The boundaries of reason", "When God closes doors", "Love in the age of neuroscience" and "Lessons to learn from the passion of Christ".
I also invite you to visit my other blogs Miscellaneous at http://www.miscellaneous-oddnews.blogspot.com, Viajero at http://www.viajero-funtravel.blogspot.com and Fun in Life
at http://salt-funstories.blogspot.com.
