Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
The Sun in UV
This is a science-related post about the sun, probably better written about by DarkSyde, but I want to make a slightly sidewise philosophical point.
I remember reading a story years ago in which the main character, a kid, first learned about the fact of internal organs. As the story told it, prior to that he’d assumed that he was solid inside like a potato. It stuck in my head because so much of what we have thought about the world, in the childhood of human history, came from just this kind of mistaken theorizing.
We looked at the surface of things and made up hopeful stories about what we saw ... because we had little choice. Even given the basic concepts of science, you probably can’t DO science without a large population, some sort of education system, writing, and a progressively advancing set of sophisticated tools.
And yet ... even though we have some wonderfully advanced science today, and the hopes of better still (we have a good chance for cures for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, cancers, in my lifetime, for instance, if the research is unimpeded), we are plagued by aggressively-religious, anti-Enlightenment people who still insist on seeing only the surface of things.
They consider the sun and think only of “Let there be light.” Presented with complexity, they see potato-like solidity. And they demand the rest of us honor that view.
But look at this beautiful and nightmarish image of the sun, taken in ultraviolet light.
That brilliant ball in the sky is different – infinitely, wonderfully, violently different – from ANYTHING dreamed up by our hopeful ancestors. The same can be said about reality in general.
Looking back on those ignorant ancestors in the light of this ultraviolent sun, I see them – some of them – as forced into a comically sad and yet noble quest for the kind of knowledge we can generate today. They – some of them, the best of them – did the best they could with what they had. To me, discoveries such as this honor and ennoble their stumbling steps.
There was a long period in the history of knowledge in which a fanciful belief about the sun being Apollo’s chariot might have been defensible. Then came an era, ours, in which it was possible to KNOW things, true things, about the sun. In this era, Apollo’s chariot becomes a fondly-remembered myth ... or an active, stubborn, viciously ignorant lie.
Just so with the current fundamentalist anti-evolution movement. When facts become known, the people who oppose the learning and knowing of those facts are, in my opinion, the enemy of everything good about the human species. Their lies turn the noble quest-for-knowledge of our ancestors – the chief saving grace to millennia of tragic suffering – into a futile comedy of never-ending ignorance and squalor.
I think of a former “simple ball of light in the sky,” and I look at this picture, which reveals the sun to be complex, incredible, scary and DEEP, and I see a difficult-to-convey parallel with the difference between the way we see anti-Enlightenment fundamentalists – perhaps silly, perhaps annoying, but dismissably weak and probably temporary – and their true nature.
Which is ... scary, complex, probably permanent, and vastly, deeply, deadly dangerous.
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Sun Thoughts
This post comes a day or two after I read the story in Ovid's Metamorphoses of Apollo reluctantly letting his son Phaethon drive his sun chariot, because he had agreed to do anything to prove he was the boy's father. Phaethon is not strong enough to control the horses, and the wild ride ends in the scorching of the earth, destruction of crops, famine, threats to the stars, and the eventual death of the boy. It is followed by an extended period of darkness because Apollo, in his grief, does not want to drive the chariot any more.
I find the story as fascinating as the awesome picture of the sun you linked to. My reaction to the picture is one of awe at a mystery that transcends my ability to understand the facts about the sun. The story speaks of father-son relations, love, the vulnerability of the world in the face of nature that can suddenly change course. Farmers in ancient Rome and Greece may or may not have thought that a being - Apollo - was in a chariot pulling the sun up and down; I have no doubt, however, that they were very aware of the cycles of nature, sun, clouds, earth, etc., in ways that we cannot approach because their lives depended on it so directly. And the story suggests that they may also have been aware of destructive powers, natural or human, that could have equally sudden and irrational impact on their daily lives.
I think of fundamentalism, whether religious, political, social, or otherwise, as a state of mind determined to eliminate mysteries from its tiny world. Fundamentalists want only answers; questions scare them. And if you suggested that any question worth the name most likely has multiple answers that comfortably co-exist in their contradiction, they would probably wet their pants.
I think there are also fundamentalists in science, who want only one answer. Science has produced some amazing results in the last several centuries, and it has provided fascinating windows into some of our greatest mysteries. But if the scientific enterprise shuts down because it has found what it believes to be the answer, then I think it is in danger of becoming fundamentalist and irrelevant.
Huh?
Can you suggest an example of a "fundamentalist" in science? I'm curious because I'm not sure what you mean.
I notice these days that "fundamentalist" is an insult. I've seen religious people protest being labeled fundies, and I've seen the epithet hurled at atheists as a deliberate slur.
And yet, near as I can tell, the term in its most recent meaning originated with religious people. The ones I'm familiar with, certain southern Christians, labeled themselves as fundamentalists as a way of saying that other Christians were slackers who had wandered from the original meaning of the Bible. Fundamentalists imagine themselves as the REAL christians, the ones devout enough to get back to the fundamentals of their holy text.
In this meaning, I've said many times that there can be no fundamentalist atheists, since there is no holy text of atheism. (Good luck getting that across to idiot godders looking for someone to hate.)
Also in this meaning, I can't think that the word can be applied to scientists.
It smells somewhat of that bit where godders say atheism is a religion. Which is basically saying "Atheism is every bit as much an unsupported fantasy as the stuff *I* believe."
Back to your comment:
"I think there are also fundamentalists in science, who want only one answer. Science has produced some amazing results in the last several centuries, and it has provided fascinating windows into some of our greatest mysteries. But if the scientific enterprise shuts down because it has found what it believes to be the answer, then I think it is in danger of becoming fundamentalist and irrelevant."
I'm grappling with this in my head and getting no traction. I can't imagine what it means. The "results" science has produced, compared to the next best thing, are more than "amazing" -- they are earthshaking, stupendous, life-changing, life-and-death beneficial, and brilliant.
Compared to, say, religion, the difference is as profound as a bright sunny day on a mountain vista compared to the darkness of a coal mine. (With a teeny bit of a subtext that there ARE some good things you can get out of a coal mine ... if you work like the dickens to bring them out of their deep, surrounding darkness.)
Talking about science as "in danger of becoming fundamentalist and irrelevant" really kinda scares me, I have to tell you.
The only time I know of when the scientific enterprise has shut down is when godders got involved and demanded an end to the research, teaching or use of scientific knowledge. And I'm not talking about Galileo. It's happening today, right now, and the people doing it are in the White House and Congress, on TV and the radio. And they’re gaining ground.
The danger to us of the deliberate shutting down of science – by people who really are a bunch of dangerously thoughtless fools – is far greater, in my estimation, than any danger fundamentalist scientists, if there ever could be such a thing, might pose.
That can't happen
You said, "I think there are also fundamentalists in science, who want only one answer. Science has produced some amazing results in the last several centuries, and it has provided fascinating windows into some of our greatest mysteries. But if the scientific enterprise shuts down because it has found what it believes to be the answer, then I think it is in danger of becoming fundamentalist and irrelevant."
But it can't happen. Because when that circumstance occurs, and I agree that it does, it ceases to be science and becomes a fraud.
... and yet people still
... and yet people still manage to say, with a straight face, that science takes all the wonder out of life.
(Though I should speak up a bit for ordinary people who aren't inquisitive about the standard set of things smart people like to learn about. They often know quite a bit about the world around them. So while I might know a few more facts about the sun, my car's engine is still pretty much a potato to me.)
First, that is an awesomely cool picture...
And I love your take on it. It's a great symbol of the hard-won knowledge of our species. The mathematical and physical constants, antibiotics, stem cells, quantum-effects engineering, and even the knowledge to give electrolytes to children dying of dysentary - each unimaginably valuable.
Each bit was extracted from a universe which has no interest in man (or in fact, any interests at all that we know about) but also collected against the destructive opposition of fearful people who wanted the answers to be much simpler than they really are. They're willing to throw away all the treasure for potato answers.
I can imagine Galileo being told to retract his assertion that the sun had spots, and all the generations of man who toiled under the sun's heat without imagining this terrible splendour was right above their sweating heads. What a travesty it would be to go back to that.
Something that has always shocked me
Is people's utter lack of curiosity about the world in which they live. How many people know what the source of the sun's energy is? How many even know that it's a big ball of plasma or that the stars are like the sun only more distant? This is to say nothing of how many people could name the four primary fources of the universe. Their lack of inquisitiveness is simply breathtaking and I wonder. Is it because of how they were raised? Is it because of an inborn trait? Some combination of both? Of the two I'd favor the inborn trait. I was not raised in a family of scientists, but I have always wanted to know how things worked (at least in a general way), but frustratingly most of the rest of my species does not seem to share this desire. I don't know why and I find it rather depressing in the main.
Oh, and that uv picture of the sun is the wallpaper on my computer. I change it almost every day to the astronomy picture of the day. Our universe is a beautiful place. I wish that we reflected its beauty a little better.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html