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SCIENTISTS & GOD
In the
INFORMATION AGE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 21, 2006
ABSTRACT
Body and soul are not two different things, according to Einstein, but only two different ways of perceiving the same thing. I think he is correct.
Similarly, he claims physics and psychology are only different attempts to link experience together by way of systematic thought. Again, I agree as I went from a chemist to a psychologist in a career spanning over forty years.
The American Indian treated Nature and the spirit as two aspects of the same thing. He had a reverence for Nature and came to live in harmony with it feeling no need to conquer it. Similarly, science and religion look at the knowable, but from different vantage points. Science looks at it from the point of reason, religion from the point of revelations.
We are in the Age of Science. Man has drifted from the idea of God to knowing, or from the spirit to the mind, failing to see they are connected, as matter and energy are the same.
The drift has not only created a breach between man and God, and contributed to environment pollution, but to emotional pollution as well. Man has drifted toward self-estrangement. Science using reason has taught us the limits of energy with the Laws of Thermodynamics, particularly its second law, entropy.
Even so, science would allow the utopian idea to persist that man’s excesses can always be pardoned with miraculous discoveries. We know entropy operates in a “closed system,” meaning energy can be changed from usable (low entropy) to unusable (high entropy), but cannot be created or destroyed.
Complicating matters further, life is an “open system.” Life struggles to do work and maintain order (low entropy) while available energy for work declines and chaos mounts (high entropy), as everything is moving to maximum entropy and stasis.
The earth and, indeed, the universe are in a state of entropy. It is the nature of things. Now, in the Information Age, when we need to see things most clearly and be the best informed, appreciating and being guided by our limitations, we find instead our arrogance and hubris has produced “Nowhere Man,” who dreams of utopia (which literally means “nowhere”) where there are no consequences only a zest for more. It is the reason for this work.
And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put off;
The Sun is lost, and the earth, and no man’s wit
Can well direct him where to look for it
‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone
John Doone (1572 – 1631)
Nature and Nature’s law lay hid in night;
God said, “Let Newton be,” and all was light.
Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744)
For men to learn to love one another, it is not enough that they should know themselves to be members of one and the same thing; in ‘planetising’ themselves they must acquire the consciousness, without losing themselves, of becoming one and the same person.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881 – 1955)
Robert Wright opens his “Three Scientists and Their Gods” (1988) with a note to his readers that the book is not about religion, but about the concept of information. He claims the concept is about meaning and purpose in both the mundane and cosmic sense. Information has become omnipotent, omniscient and ubiquitous from which one might infer that information has become a surrogate for God in cyberspace.
Many contemporary scientists, certainly not all, vary from edgy to ambivalent about God, taking comfort in declaring themselves agnostics. Not so Teilhard de Chardin (1881 – 1955). A geologist and paleontologist, he became a Jesuit priest and philosopher, lectured in pure science at the Jesuit College in Cairo and then became professor of geology at the Institut Catholique in Paris.
Later, he went on paleontologist expeditions in China and Central Asia, but his unorthodox ideas led to a ban on his teaching and publishing. Nevertheless, his work became known and was awarded academic distinctions. His major work “The Phenomenon of Humanity” (written 1938 – 1940) was posthumously published. Based on his scientific thinking, it argues that humanity is in a continuous process of evolution towards a perfect spiritual state. For most scientists, however, God is not a comfortable idea in this the Information Age.
Words and ideas have left their moorings thrown into cyberspace and circulated with the speed of light with terms becoming snuggled into nefarious conclusions. Indeed, beliefs and actions now countermand certainty, order and continuity. We are in a new day.
Physicists speak of light, mass, energy, velocity, gravity, motion, measurement, and time, while politicians constantly harp on about freedom, equality, innocence, and justice. As a consequence, science has become psychobabble, and political speak more spin than bite. Meanwhile, the clergy speak of God, eternity, salvation, and damnation, evil and good as if nothing has changed, least of all Psychological Man. It would appear few are aware, and even fewer are listening.
What exactly does information mean when words and ideas are randomly received and divisively perceived; when complexity boggles the mind and people dance to their own catatonic beat; when there is nothing unknowable to believe or cling to?
Isaiah Berlin (1909 – 1997) sees a distinction between what it takes to believe, and what it means to believe. Most people, he fears, use words as if words are the actual act. The words, “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” (WMDs) turned the world on its head, and led to the preemptive War in Iraq. WMD is a toxic acronym, not a word, but elicits dreadful imagery. Now, Iran has joined the saber rattling with menacing words designed to taunt the world with the status of its nuclear research program. When words are treated as acts, they provoke hysteria and drive people into the dark abyss of paranoia.
Isaiah Berlin finds most people stumble in the dark, even scientists when it comes to words. He finds it exceedingly rare for scientists to be good at analyzing the concepts they use routinely. They assume legitimacy much like the rest of us do. Albert Einstein, Berlin notes, knew the difference between words about words and words about things, or between concepts and the data of experience. That is how he escaped the intimidating shroud of Isaac Newton. Moreover, he understood that no problem could be solved with the same consciousness that had created it.
As a rule, even the most gifted scientists tend to be too deeply absorbed in the activity, in their consciousness, to be able to stand back and examine the assumptions upon which their work and beliefs are based. New information becomes a narcotic inducing them to muddle forward unconscious of the dangers it might set in motion. Such was the case with J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904 – 1967), who directed the Los Alamos Laboratory in the creation of the atomic bomb (1943 – 1945), only to lose his security clearance when he opposed additional development of the hydrogen bomb.
THREE SCIENTISTS
Robert Wright profiles three scientists that display these most human inclinations. Brilliance often works to cover ambivalence. Scientists, as high priests of The Information Age, would prefer to avoid the muddy waters of the divine, as they cause self-conscious embarrassment. Perhaps the divine lies outside the purview of science.
The three scientists profiled are Edward Fredkin, the artificial intelligence and computer prophet, Edward O. Wilson, the entomologist and creator of sociobiology, and Kenneth Boulding, the unconventional economist and systems thinker.
EDWARD FREDKIN
Ed Fredkin (ne’ 1934) is a self-made millionaire and lives on his own island. He is a scientist who startled his colleagues at MIT with his theory that reality consists ultimately not of mass or energy, but of information. He sees the universe as a computer. Somewhere “out there,” he believes is a machine-like thing that actually keeps our individual bits of space abiding by the rules of universal cellular automaton.
There are three philosophical questions he considers fundamental: what is life; what are consciousness, thinking, and memory; and how does the universe work? He answers that DNA, the material of heredity, is a good example of digitally encoded information that determines whether life will be a creature or a plant. A computer-like process takes that DNA information and transforms it into the creature or the plant like moving a mouse across a universal information processor.
He has never encounter a problem that didn’t have a perfectly logical solution, and therefore believes strongly that artificial intelligence (AI) can be mechanized without limit. Fredkin is not the first to insist that DNA consists of information, or that organic growth depends on intricate communication among cells. That said, he argues the computer as an information processor provides one more avenue of modeling reality to cover his three philosophical mysteries, thus completing the picture.
From Fredkin’s earliest memory, he considered himself the smartest kid in his class, and used his friends to prove him wrong challenging them to get a higher grade on a test. He remembers in fifth grade his teacher misunderstood some concept, and the questions she was asking embodied her misunderstanding. His dilemma was: should he give her the answers she expected, which were wrong, or embarrass her with the right answers? He chose to write the correct answers, and then felt compelled to enlighten his teacher. She resisted at first, but finally relented. He got the top grade.
At an early age, his sister, Joan, introduced Fredkin to the Big Questions, such as the possibility that they, and everyone else on earth, were not “real,” but part of a very long dream that God was having, an idea bizarre as it may sound, is close to Fredkin’s present thinking on the subject. They pondered together the paradox posed by two seemingly self-evident propositions: the universe must have an end, like everything else, but it would be impossible for nothing to exist.
In his maturity, Fredkin concluded he existed in a finely mottled universe with the prime mover of everything, the single principle that governs the universe, lying somewhere within a class of computer programs known as cellular automata.
The word “cellular” is not meant biologically when used in this context. It refers to adjacent spaces – cells – that together form a pattern. These cells typically appear on a computer screen. His theory is complex and involves metaphysics as well as physics. When the two are disentangled, Fredkin’s metaphysics leads to a kind of high-tech theology, that is, to speculation about supreme beings and the purpose of life.
The short answer to the question of what Fredkin’s universe is ultimately made of is this: “I’ve come to the conclusion,” he says, “that the most concrete thing in the world is information.”
As with Einstein, Fredkin believes that everything that happens, including all human behavior, is inevitable (fate?); that the future could in principle be precisely predicted, given the present state of the universe and the laws that govern it.
This represents the difference between “determinism” and “indeterminism.”
Isaac Newton (1642 –1727), advocate of determinism, believed if you knew everything in the present, every particle no matter how many, you could predict the future.
Niels Bohr (1885 – 1962) disagreed and came up with his theory of quantum mechanics and indeterminism, and led to chaos theory, the idea that differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output, the so-called Butterfly Effect – the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York. This idea of indeterminacy, which once frightened scientists, is now taken seriously introducing a totally new way of thinking about very small objects.
To illustrate, if we toss a ball into the air, we can follow its precise projection with classical mechanics. This predicts the position and velocity of the ball at every instant during its flight. Not so microscopic matter such as electrons. If an electron were only an exceptionally small ball, its motion would be on a path predicted by classical mechanics, but that is not the case.
Quantum theory has been extremely successful in explaining a wide range of indeterminacy such as how electrons move in materials, like those that travel through the chips in a personal computer. Quantum mechanics is used to understand superconductivity, the decay of nuclei, and how lasers work, among many other things.
Fredkin sees his computer theory on the one hand as a shortcut to using traditional mathematics. He claims you can predict a future state of a system without figuring out what states it will occupy between now and then. In the case of a cellular automaton, however, he admits you must go through all the intermediate states to get to the end, stating: “There is no way to predict the future except to watch it unfold.” This suggests that even if human behavior is entirely determined and entirely predictable, there may be some room for “pseudo-free will” in a completely mechanized world.
This is his take on a Supreme Being: even if there is an all-powerful God, and He is thinking of creating this universe, He can have various ways of doing it, but He has to do every single step with every bit He has, or He won’t get the right answer. Fredkin won’t even allow God to take shortcuts. With this belief, he crosses the line between physics and metaphysics, a distinction that might seem puzzling, but to him obvious. It is a kind of arrogance that has served him well.
EDWARD O. WILSON
More than most scientists, E. O. Wilson (ne’ 1929) thinks about science, about its rules, social implications and where it resides in the human conscience. He looks at the structure of science and its disciplines the way one might view a pyramid. This has led him into the controversial waters of reductionism, and to his theory of “sociobiology.”
For more than a half century, Wilson has been a diligent entomologist, but with sociobiology he ventures into another arena, which he explains with his pyramid of social evolution.
The pyramid commences with invertebrates, such as coral, which occupy the “first pinnacle” of social evolution. These societies of coral demonstrate such a high degree of cohesion to be called an organism.
Ants, along with bees, occupy the “second pinnacle,” which is much less socially perfect. Altruism is common, and the societies are closely knit, but insects nonetheless are distinct beings. They have an identity independent of the colony.
In the “third pinnacle” are the vertebrates, except people. Division of labor is seldom apparent; selfishness is the rule between members; acts of altruism are infrequent; and no one appears to be having a very good time.
The trend from corals through ants to baboons is from less social to more selfish behavior. Wilson extrapolated from this that when individuals are genetically identical, as in the case of corals, they display almost unlimited cooperation and altruism. When related by a degree of three fourths, as with ants, they display cooperation and altruism. But they also display independence and selfishness. When they are related merely by one half, as in the case of baboons, they display much independence and little cooperation or altruism.
Human beings, who have carried complexity to such a level, form the “fourth pinnacle.” They break all the old vertebrate restraints, not by reducing selfishness but rather by acquiring the intelligence to consult the past and to plan the future. Human societies, then, approach the insect societies in cooperation and far exceed them in powers of communication, reversing the downward trend in social evolution of Wilson’s pyramid.
The controversy with sociobiology is centered on the suggestion that since humans are products of natural selection (evolution), evolutionary biologist could shed light on the nature of things, such as aggression, ethics, aesthetics, romance, and religion, clearly inferring genes play a prominent role in the “fourth pinnacle.” Mainstream sociologists have long ignored the possibilities that the genes significantly influenced human behavior preferring to see it as culture and learned behavior. Wilson writes in “Sociology” (1975):
The members of human societies sometimes cooperated closely in insectan fashion, but more frequently they compete for the limited resources allocated to their role-sector. The best and most entrepreneurial of role-actors usually gain a disproportionate share of the rewards, while the least successful are displaced to other, less desirable positions.
Far from being rare, Wilson sees deception and hypocrisy as very human devices for people in conducting the complex business of everyday life. His critics see this as biological determinism. They claim he exonerates society from responsibility for its social problems. Yet, ardent capitalists want it both ways, professing belief in equal native potential of all people, on the one hand, while insisting the blame for poverty is based on the free choice and to be due to indolence on the other. The jury is still out on sociobiology, but it is as indelibly associated with Wilson’s name as relativity is to Einstein’s.
What apparently convinced Wilson of the explanatory power of sociobiology was his internal struggle between religion and science. “I don’t mean I was tempted to return to a fundamentalist view or even an essentially Christian view of the world,” he confesses, “but neither was I ready to accept the view that the religious experience was nothing more than an excited mental state.”
In his youth, he had felt the depth of its appeal, and was certain that religion had biological roots. This convinced him that at some point religion had been good for the genes. The question he could not answer was how. He speculates that religion congeals the identity of the adolescent and instills a sense of purpose that pays off genetically, fueling ambition and channeling it toward investment in the future. He believes the adaptive value of the religious impulse, through selection at the level of the individual, and kin, and even the group level, has earned it a place in our collective genetic heritage.
This is consistent with his placing the social sciences at the top of his pyramidal structure of science, below the social sciences, the biological sciences; below biology, chemistry; and below chemistry, physics. He sees each level of inquiry to rest on the level beneath it in a fairly literal sense, that is, its laws will follow from the laws below. For example, he points out that many of the laws of chemistry have been reduced to the laws of physics. This fails to sit well with many chemists. He cites the case of mathematicians through knowledge of physics can now do some of the work chemists once did with test tubes.
It is in the higher regions of the pyramid of science that reductionism becomes disputable. If biology literally rest on chemistry, could the behavior of, say, a kidney be predicted with much precision from a knowledge of the molecular structures involved? How about the brain? Could laws describing a chimpanzee’s or a person’s behavior be deduced from the laws of organic chemistry? These questions, in addition to being difficult, are loaded with philosophical consequences, and therefore moral considerations, for example, stem cell research.
At the higher levels of organization, reductionism is allied to determinism. This holds that free will is a myth. As previously mentioned, determinism insists that the rest of human history will unfold as inevitably as a cellular automaton, however powerful our illusions to the contrary with our choices. Our inability to predict this predetermined future, or even to predict one person’s behavior on a day-to-day basis, reflects, according to determinists, only incomplete data, and our ignorance of the principles involved.
As bizarre as this may sound, consider the words of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860), who visualizes this concept in a truly literal sense. He points out that when we reach an advanced age and look back over our lifetime, we can see a consistent order and plan, as though a novelist composed our life. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little real moment turned out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So, he asks, who composed this plot? He suggests that just as an aspect of ourselves of which our consciousness is unaware composes our dreams, so, too, our whole life is composed by the deterministic will within us.
Wilson sees a selective connection between human genes and human culture, between the information that shapes us and the information we shape. The thing to remember is that he extrapolates all his hypotheses and theories from the study of insects, ants in particular. In “Genes, Mind, and Culture” (1981), this universe is bridged to explain the human community, a diagnosis that defines plausibility in terms of Ockham’s Razor as it looks for the simplest explanation of how complexity came about without a creator.
One wonders if such a unified explanation is grounded in a detached appraisal, or if some people are born with Ockham epiphany in their brains, that is, being able to see through complexity to the simplest and truest answer. Surely, Fredkin felt deeply the unifying power of a cellular automaton, something visceral that led him to such an epiphany. Perhaps it is more common than we think. Wilson, who seems to believe this, is more modest in his reductionism, but no less certain.
KENNETH BOULDING
Kenneth Boulding (ne’ 1911), devout Quaker, unconventional economist, examines the societal changes wrought by information technology but without the certainty of his colleagues. He sees information processing, not as a god or a deterrent to religious conviction, but as a manifestation of information processing that commenced billions of years ago. Boulding concludes that only in understanding information processing at many levels can we truly grasp the meaning of the Information Age.
Displaying little of the self-assurance of Fredkin and Wilson, while clearly waffling with some of his dictums, he appears an obliging and agreeable man driven by humility. With Quakers, there are no altars, no clergy, and no laity, only people with equal access to God. When the Quaker meeting begins, silence envelopes the room, a silence as impressive as the finest speech. It is home in the spirit without definition, and displays a humility that once was the common climate of emerging scientists in the Age of Faith.
Sometimes Boulding stutters, which makes him less intimidating and more likeable in his erudition. Beneath his crazy quilt of insights and opaque quips is a reasonably coherent body of thought. To one not familiar with his writing, there appears no real purpose to his rambling. The fact is that Boulding has always been a disconcertingly discursive thinker. You can go back and read things he has written thirty or forty years ago – as I did with his book “The Image” (1966) – and you’ll find the same exasperating pattern. You follow a thought for a page or two, and then, just as you are getting a feel for it, it is lost in another thought that will soon suffer the same fate.
It seems, sometimes, as if everything is an aside to him. They range from grand: “Wealth creates power, and power destroys wealth,” to frivolous metaphor: “Hitler and Stalin were pimples on the changing countenance of time.”
It doesn’t help that he dictates his books – he admits as much in the Preface to “The Image” – usually without an outline and seldom with much revision. He doesn’t like to edit his own work. His writing, like his thinking, is notable more for its boldness and intermittent brilliance than for its organization and consistent correctness. His motto is “Don’t get it right, get it written.” This is apparent as he has published more than forty books and hundreds of articles to learned journals across the globe.
Another penchant, which is a product of the architecture of his mind, is to wander freely from one discipline to another and to think on several levels of organization at once. He was first trained as a chemist at Oxford, but had a passion from the beginning for the humanities, which I can understand from my perspective, as it was true of me as well.
It was this passion that led him from the laboratory into economics where he felt the discipline more akin to his passion in studying and reflecting on human behavior. The consequence of this interdisciplinary perspective is that he feels no hesitation in applying physical laws to people: “Ohm’s Law exhibited in its purest form in the study of electricity is also applicable to the flow of money,” or from inanimate to the animal: “The automobile’s a species just like the horse; it just has a more complicated sex life.”
There is playfulness to Boulding’s madness. Free-floating and fragmented thought grows out of a natural quest for unity. This has resulted in something called “general system theory,” of which he is one of its founders.
System theory is not in vogue now, but in the middle of the twentieth century, it was popular with most organizational thinkers. It harbors, as one of its ideals the unification of the sciences, blurring the line between disciplines in both the physical and social sciences. It is not to be confused with Wilson’s reductionism or Fredkin’s determinism. The methodologies differ as well the big issue of determinism versus free will.
Boulding prefers to “go with the flow,” as his spirituality is in his science. He has felt no need to separate science from religion, or God from the complex universe. What amazes Boulding is that the universe’s awareness of itself grows out of randomness.
He points out that random genetic mutations led one-cell organisms to process meaningful information. These random mutations then led these cells to share information so intimately among them, as to constitute multicellular organisms. Random mutations next led the descendents of these organisms, such as ants and primates, to share information also, and thus to carry the processing of information to the social level. Then man came along and one day invented an elaborate artificial information processing and transmitting system, which is now further integrating the most impressive system of information processing ever to appear on this planet.
Boulding finds an intelligence that could create the human species out of thin air less remarkable than an intelligence that could create a universe that would give birth to a process of natural selection, a process that a few self-replicating molecules (bacteria) and a few billion years would lead to a theory of itself. He concludes, “I have gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity, to believe that He created primal forms . . . as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas which He himself had made.”
You sense there is a level of tolerance here (“going with the flow”) that is not apparent in Fredkin and Wilson. He finds the idea of the creator much more complex and a much more subtle process, and therefore beyond comprehension.
Science, for him, need not compete with or try to explain away God, but should be able to live with the idea of God, to treat God as a verb, not as a word, but in acts of faith. He sees the core of religious experience in human potential, and the world as a totality with an important level of variety.
“I’ve often said,” he reflects, “I think of the Catholic Church rather as I do of the blue whale. I’m not a Catholic, and I’m not a blue whale, but I’d feel diminished if either of them became extinct.”
Boulding is able to stand back and examine the assumptions upon which his work and faith are based and not be conflicted.
His unconventional approach to scholarship has generated such questions as: is Kenneth Boulding a charlatan; is he a mush-minded do-gooder who has finessed his way into the academic limelight with his wit and British charm; is all this stuff about the integrative system just so much palaver? I wonder if that caused him to write “The Image” because he addresses the problem with deft skill at both the human and animate level seeing purposeful behavior as a hallmark of living systems.
His hierarchical categorization of reality ranges from static structures, such as rocks, to clockwork structures, such as the planets, which revolve mindlessly with no apparent feedback, no need for information, to things that do process information, such as thermostats, to things such as cells, which process both information and raw matter and energy, to plants, to animals, to human beings, to social systems, and then at the very top, to transcendental systems that are unknowable and beyond comprehension.
This is his hierarchy of evolution. It is directed toward greater complexity, more enriched process information, and more elaborately pursued purpose to where we are now. In the beginning, he muses, complex molecules formed cells, then cells formed organisms, then organisms formed societies, and now under the influence of information technologies, human societies are approaching the intricacy of an organism. Wilson’s ant reductionism has much in common with Boulding’s cultural evolution. He believes everything ultimately points to an integrative system.
He notes the organization revolution grew out of the industrial revolution, and became global after World War II. Many small companies made connection with foreign markets to become multinational corporations. On a personal note, Nalco Chemical Company had gross sales of $50 million and was largely a domestic company in the 1960s. Today sales exceed $4 billion annually. Thanks to the computer revolution Nalco is now networked across the globe, as companies and countries become increasingly integrated.
Boulding wonders, however, at what price? He sees personal freedom, once taken for granted, reduced to nostalgic air. Computers, he reminds us, are making it more difficult to flout the law, eroding societal entropy, whose flip side is liberty.
His point is well taken. The question we are facing is how much order we are willing to sacrifice for liberty, or liberty for order? This concern may seem extreme, but consider the science of surveillance and control in the twenty-first century world, especially since 9/11. It has already outstripped George Orwell’s imagination.
Most corporate workers today work in cubicles tied to computers. These computers are capable of monitoring their productivity, the accuracy and efficiency of their work, the number of times they escape the task at hand to venture unto the Internet, how many emails they send and receive, the content and relevance of these to their work, and how this all compares to their colleagues in the same activity. Performance appraisal has become redundant, an anachronism replaced by the ubiquitous electronic eye.
Boulding finds no reason to be alarmed about personal intrusion into individual privacy. He sees we can have it both ways. Individuality and aggregation are not only compatible but also inseparable. They may come at some loss of privacy but promise improved communications and therefore enhanced community. He sees moving out of the telephone age, continuing through many breakthroughs in information technology, including the microcomputer, to the corporation, and by extension, society as an organism has given man more validity than any other hundred-year period.
This segueing into a collective order requires incremental surrendering of autonomy to bring communities, companies and countries into a realization it is in their mutual interest to sacrifice self-interests for group accord. He sees the process a logical unfolding over the past several centuries: from the Industrial Revolution to the Organizational Revolution to the Control (Information) Revolution. A deeply religious man, he is confident man will find the transcendental wisdom to embrace the challenges and choose the high ground, as another technological revolution will inevitably follow.
ENTROPY
These scientists view religion (The word came from the Latin ligare: “to bind together.”) through the lens of evolution, paying particular attention to its most recent iteration, the Information Age. That finds them also in accord on the value of another explanatory model, the second law of thermodynamics, known as “entropy.”
Entropy states that, generally, structures decompose, matter disintegrates, and gases dissipate; that everything is moving from order to disorder and on to chaos. It is happening to the stars, the earth, and everything on and in everything else.
Evolution follows a similar sequence. As the amount of usable energy declines, and becomes unusable, entropy increases and order is reduced to chaos. This is difficult to grasp, so I hope you will bear with me. Everything is related from the turbulence of weather to the complicated rhythms of the human heart, from the design of snowflakes to the whorls of windswept desert sands. Things change but the amount of matter, energy, and water always remains precisely the same only in a different forms.
Low entropy and high order is a state of activity when an abundance of useful energy is available to do work. Imagine a balloon is heated with helium gas. The helium is able to do work as it is heated expanding to spontaneously spread up and out inflating and lifting the balloon. Once all the spreading out is done, there is nothing left to harness. All the useful energy is working to keep the balloon in flight. A condition of low entropy and high order exists, but this, too, is changing as the helium gas eventually dissipates. When the helium is released to the environment, and the balloon descends, there is a state of high entropy and low order.
The entropy of a system may be crudely defined as a measure of the disorder, or randomness of the system. The amount of entropy in the universe – the randomness and disorder – never decreases, and so just about every time anything happens, entropy increases, as everything is wearing out. It may take billions of years, but the earth is a star that will eventually disintegrate as if it never existed. This is because of entropy.
A common misconception about entropy is that evolution violates it. Life, the flawed argument begins, not only preserves structure, but multiplies it, giving rise to ever more elaborately ordered organisms, from bacteria through earthworms all the way up to people, who in turn produce structures. Since entropy generally erodes structured things, it must, in the realm of life, be suffering at least a temporary setback.
The problem with this logic is that entropy applies only to isolated “closed systems.” The system of life is an “open system.” Life receives its energy from external sources -- the sun, food and other low-entropy sources -- and is free to expel high-entropy waste products into other open systems, such as sewers.
While it is true a growing person is coherently developing structured organs, this gain is more than outweighed by the disorder the person discharges into the environment. It is that disorder – that chaos – that eventually may turn the earth into an ever expanding cosmic dumpster.
It would appear we are all unwitting accomplices to high entropy. Like people sinking into quicksand, we doom ourselves more surely as we struggle to pursue the mesmerizing appeal of progress, polluting the air, and poisoning the land and rivers with our fascination for the products of technology.
Matter is finite; it can neither be created nor destroyed, but only changed. Whatever our view on global warming, it is a fact that Nature is a limited resource.
ENTROPY IN THE INFORMATION AGE
Twentieth century scientists had a solid understanding of entropy. They knew it represented disorder and chaos. They could see the diminishing of useful energy, and they knew entropy was gaining on us. Then an amazing thing happened: precise mathematics intersected with the study of information to introduce us to another surprising phenomenon.
In the middle of the twentieth century, Claude Shannon, a Bell Laboratories engineer, published a paper that introduced the Information Age, intersecting thermodynamics with information. Shannon pondered how he could “encode” information so that it would resist erosion by the “white noise” encountered in telephone lines. Such analysis called for the formulation of a general law of information transmission, and so he invented one.
The odd thing about this formulation is that it was identical to the definition of entropy.
Shannon’s definition stated that the more uncertainty there is about the contents (high entropy) of the message that is about to be received the more information the message contains (disorder and randomness). He was not talking about “meaning,” but about the symbols in which the meaning was encoded.
Consider a glass of pure water. There is little uncertainty as to what any region of the content of the liquid is other than the symbol for it, H2O. Consequently, the content is highly ordered in a low-entropy system.
Now, collect a glass of suspended solids from an industrial plant waste discharge. The content will include some H2O, but also a random assortment of other molecules and compounds. The content would be uncertain, and difficult to verify. As a system, then, this would be high in entropy because of the uncertainty of its exact content and low in unusable energy: you couldn’t drink it. Yet, some enterprising companies have taken the innovative step to convert such waste into usable fuel (auxiliary heat) and thus reduced its entropy.
Given the centrality of uncertainty in the definition of information and entropy, the mathematical resemblance between the two should not be surprising. Entropy is experienced in communication in every day life. For example, presidential politics in the 2004 campaign came down to two sentences varying widely in certainty and entropy:
Senator Kerry: "I actually voted for the $87 billion (to fund the War in Iraq) before I voted against it."
President Bush: "You may not always agree with me, but you’ll always know where I stand."
Undoubtedly Senator Kerry meant to come across sincere, but left the deep uncertainty of not being able to make up his mind, and thus the chaos that might result from his leadership. This is high or positive (+) entropy. On the other hand, President Bush admitted that we might differ with him on occasion, which is a certainty, but that we can trust where he stands, reinforcing this belief, and thus reducing entropy to practically nil. This is low or negative (-) entropy.
So, information can be equated with positive entropy (high), or negative entropy (low). It is a matter of personal preference and how information is presented and perceived. The important point is that regardless of whether a negative or positive sign is attached to the string of symbols representing the information, it is identical to the string representing entropy, because both are quantities of uncertainty.
Norbert Wiener (1894 – 1964) in his book “Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” (1982) wrote: “Just as the amount of information in a system is a measure of its degree of organization, so the entropy of a system is a measure of its degree of disorganization; and the one is simply the negative of the other.”
The entropy metaphor has gained ground in popular and scholarly books and articles on self-development, information theory and cybernetic where information is equated with order, certainty, and by extension, with reference to structure and form.
Maxwell Maltz book “Psycho Cybernetics” (1989) deals with improved personal effectiveness by reducing uncertainty and chaos (entropy) through self-image psychology. Personal confidence and effectiveness are accomplished by a series of image exercises to control one’s action and thus preserve useful energy to grow and prosper.
Daniel Katz and Robert Kahn write of “negentropy,” or negative entropy in their book “Social Psychology of Organizations” (1966). They point out that an open system such as an organization in order to survive must import more energy than it returns to the environment as product. The reason is obvious. Energy input into an organization is in part invested directly as organizational output. Some of the input is absorbed by the organization (entropy) in the chaos and uncertainty of worker performance.
There is inevitable energy loss between input and output. Human organizations take in energy in two forms: people as energy sources, and materials as energy investments. People energy is both direct (making the product) and indirect (designing, organizing, controlling, distributing, and marketing the product). Negentropy (desired negative entropy) represents a surplus of people energy, control of material and production costs, producing quality products, and generating a healthy profit and share of the market.
HAS IT EVER BEEN OTHERWISE?
From this perspective, you can see entropy has always existed in man’s experience if not consciousness. In another sense, man’s perspective has changed from a “God-centered” to “man-centered” universe; from modest men of science to scientists who feel uncomfortable with the idea of God or the trappings of religion, feeling a need to liberate themselves from the irrational and the superstitious. If only, it was that simple.
Enter the existentialists. They reject the idea of a rationally ordered reality, and embrace the idea of subjectively irrational human existence, where decisions, choices, and behavior are executed independently of reason.
Subjective Man, they claim, is motivated, according to the philosophy of irrationalism with feeling, anxiety and irrational impulses overriding whatever rational forces can rally. Existence is not rational, but permeated with an intense sense of being forlorn, abandon and in despair, or the only criteria for knowing truth. They cling to entropy as if it were a meteor soaring them to “Nowhere Land”
Man, no longer with the certainty of a Supreme Being, echoes the words of despair of Albert Camus: “I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the Last Judgment, it takes place every day.”
To the existentialist, the mind of man is incapable of discovering truth through reason, since truth is found only in paradox. From the vantage point of God, truth is rational; from the midst of subjectivity, truth is contradictory, a paradox.
If nothing else were said about the idea of God, this should reaffirm that the pursuit of knowing, which is science, and the pursuit of spiritual knowing, which is the Church, make science and religion inseparable. They may often disagree but the synergy between them provides the context for order and certainty in a climate of chaos and uncertainty. Einstein puts it simply: “Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.”
The Church in modern times has faltered and even appears to have lost its way. Max Weber (1864 – 1920) points out, however, that bureaucracies of long standing, such as the Church, ride the vicissitudes of time on their cumulative negative entropy. Despite the disorder and chaos in the Church, Weber reminds us there is a surplus of useful energy that allows it to carry on. Whatever the criticism, the Church remains relevant in a climate of eroding structures, disenchanted believers, mounting scandals, and escalating uncertainties.
ARRIVAL OF “NOWHERE MAN”
As man has moved increasingly away from the idea of God in the confines of the previous certainty of his Church, he has moved, paradoxically, away from himself. In a strange way, environmental pollution, which is a product of man’s excesses in the name of progress, has been accompanied by emotional pollution in the name of denial of accountability retreating into lifestyle recklessness.
Hedonism, then, is a form of entropy. Nonetheless, it has become highly attractive in a climate of disorder and uncertainty. Sensual excess represents the great escape from self-knowing into self-indulgence. The evidence is overwhelming. Most modern diseases are lifestyle diseases. These addictions can compromise the immune system, shrink the liver, clog the arteries, upset the insulin balance, devour the lungs, and consume the digestive tract, leading to death, which is maximum entropy.
People look for science to be the new God, and to bail them out of their predicament with miraculous drugs. This disabuses them from being interested in putting new vigor into their moral compass. It goes beyond this.
If a person is involved in a single-car accident, then it’s the car’s fault or the road’s fault. If we get fat or suffer harden arteries, it’s the “Fast Food Nation’s” fault. If we become drug addicts, it’s the drug dealer’s fault. If we get lung cancer, it’s the tobacco company’s fault. If we hit a bad patch in life, and have no savings to fall back on, it’s society’s fault. Accountability and frugality are words out of favor today with an entropy driven society because if they weren’t we would have nobody to blame but ourselves.
Twenty-first century man has become “Nowhere Man” in “Nowhere Land,” filled with the hubris and arrogance of utopian (“nowhere”) dreams: living without limits, living out-of-control, and living without moral constraints. It is a high entropy hedonistic bomb.
“Nowhere Man” has forgotten that his mind and spirit are no less critical to his physical well being than his heart and lungs are. True, severe damage can result from the foul air we breathe, but equally true the foul information we process can do comparable damage to our minds. We are not only what eat and breathe, but what we think and dream as well.
Science and God are partners in this enterprise. Science can issue warnings on pollution, but it is the Church that should take measure of our moral and cultural pollution. Instead, it too often takes the stance of the apologist. This is equally true of the intellectual.
Novelist Milan Kundera has produced a novel with an expression that has come to identify our culture and mindset, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (1988). This phase defines what life is like when the burdens of responsibility and consequence are lifted from the protagonists of the novel. These burdens may be unbearable but it is the lightness of experience that cast them off. A society that has lost its moral compass or sense of accountability is rushing toward entropy.
A CASE OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
The war between science and religion took a strange direction in the nineteenth century when Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) claimed the descent of man from apes. Then the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) added an exclamation point to this by proclaiming: “God is dead!” Nietzsche welcomed the death of God as a necessary precondition to the Industrial Revolution where human greatness would finally unfold. The Russian novelist Feodor Dostoyevsky (1821 – 1881) in “The Brothers Karamazov” (1880) has Ivan Karamazov saying, “If God is dead, then everything is permitted.” Western culture would make his words prophetic from the counterculture of the 1960s to the “me” generation of 1980s to the present climate of today.
Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) claimed “modest man” found his mind in science, but I would suggest he lost his head to Nietzsche’s superman. Bacon was describing the scientist of his day. The scientist admitted to the limits of human reason, and felt science would lay bare the true wonder of God’s creation, and ultimately lead to a greater worship of Him. Bacon even saw the Church as the rudder to steer a course to God, as the small vessel of human reason required such s guidance system to the divine.
Incidentally, Bacon is the man who perfected the inductive method (i.e., reasoning from the particular to the general) and set the stage for science to take off. Since his day an endless series of breathtaking accomplishments in science through the use of reason have occurred, only to be reduced to a host of unintended consequences.
Science has made everything appear as possible! Reason in the form of science has eclipsed the divine and now presses forward without reserve. Through discovery of new "Toys of the Mind," science has inadvertently created a new entity, “Nowhere Man.”
Man as a specimen has become a thing to study like an insect, and in work, to manage, label, classify, collate, and program as a dumb beast, which increasingly he resembles.
Whereas the “death of God” led Dostoyevsky to see everything evil was now permitted, the new worshipers of reason believed from the dawn of science that everything good was now possible. Dostoyevsky proved a better prophet than utopian rationalists, while their legacy is personified in “Nowhere Man.”
The grisly horrors of twentieth century wars, African genocide in the twenty-first century, the perpetuation of totalitarian systems of ubiquitous terrorism across the globe, along with the doublespeak of Western democracies, it is apparent “Nowhere Man” has found a home in self-indulgent "Nowhere Land.” As progress embraces South East Asia, China and India, it is clear that “Nowhere Land” is no longer limited to the West.
As the nineteenth rushed into the twentieth century, sociologists and political scientists no longer saw “modest man,” but instead visualized depersonalized man reduced to pie charts and statistical grids. Man became part of random numbers of specialists with reality reduced to "game theory." History, economics, sociology, psychology, and anthropology split off developing complex trees of scores of subsequent disciplines within each branch, with scores of people then working on mundane problems with findings often equally self-evident and mundane.
It is easy to forget that Communism and Nazism were both products of social engineering with dialectical scientific foundations. Nazism preached the eugenics of culture cleansing after the crushing and humiliating German defeat of WWI . The Communists of the Russian Revolution (1917) saw themselves as scientific socialists. The hidden history of Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) was implemented by Lenin (1870 – 1924) and then solidified by Joseph Stalin (1879 – 1953).
What was the mission? To create the utopian “new Soviet man,” eradicate God and capitalism, and spread the doctrine to working people across the planet. Unfortunately, idealism turned to a new kind of totalitarianism with the USSR falling on its own petard of entropy in 1989. When the spirit is denied, whatever the process, Nowhere Man is not far away. Somewhere is where the soul lives, and where the soul lives, life blossoms.
Many well-meaning intellectuals supported communism, which had aptly been described as “the religion of science.” Likewise, Nazi advocates saw its principles as being a science beyond religion. The failure of both was blamed by their respective supporters on the atavistic influence of religion and the forces of irrationality and superstition, not on their self-generating chaos and uncertainty and waste of human capital. Science for these ideologues was to be the panacea to human nirvana.
Men have stepped forward to show the folly in such thinking. Alfred North Whitehead (1861 – 1947) entertained deep reservations about the idea of science as the exclusive account of reality. He wrote, “Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904 – 1967), who supervised the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos (1943 – 1945), took to agonizing over what science had wrought with the bomb. He became beset with doubts about the role of science in the Nuclear Age. This found him against the making of the hydrogen bomb. For criticizing the program, he endured professional rebuke and public scorn, which resulted in his loss of security clearance (1954). Critical of this new god of war, he regressed to being a recluse, a victim of the news media, as it became the new Spanish Inquisition of the modern age.
RETROFITING PAST IMPERFECT/PRESENT RIDICULOUS INTO FUTURE PERFECT
The arguments of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) in the Age of Faith, once thought dead and irrelevant, are being resurrected in light of today’s problems in the Age of Science. Aquinas believed every human being regardless of his or her faith shared in a common humanity through the possession and use of faith. He maintained that reason is the essential quality of humanity:
“It is that without which man cannot be man.”
Aquinas insisted truths of reason did not refute or negate the truths of religion. He argued that philosophy examined the supernatural order in the light of reason, and theology examined it in the light of revelation. Although reason was used in theology, revelation did not fall into the province of philosophy. He concluded philosophy could not contradict theology because truth could not contradict truth. For Aquinas, then, faith and knowledge were not mutually exclusive, insisting that belief took over where knowledge ended.
Within the realm of science, there is a sense of a return to the “modest man” of Bacon. In his book “God and the Astronomers” (1992), Robert Jastrow writes:
“It is not a matter of another year, another decade of work, another measurement, or another theory; at this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation.”
With biogenetics and stem cell research notwithstanding, Jastrow is even more emphatic in the last sentence of his book:
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
Jastrow is not suggesting, nor is it being suggested here that the elegance of empirical science should be curtailed. The quest to know is a beautiful pursuit. It is suggested only that a vast intelligence that could create such a being as man, who is driven to understand the ways nature works, only to discover, once he does, that it was obvious. This led Einstein to reflect: “When the solution is simple, God is answering.”
THE SUMMING UP
Man presses on, not as a god, but imbued with the modesty of knowing. He was subject to a principle, a physical law long before organic laws existed, which we know as entropy, “the second law of thermodynamics.” This law humbles man.
Robert Wright says: “It is entropy that punishes with extinction strands of DNA that fail to surround themselves with walls against entropy.” This provoked Martin Heidegger (1886 – 1976) to say, “As soon as we are born, we are old enough to die.” To survive we must be on a lifelong quest to generate negative entropy, to reinvent, reconstitute, and renew ourselves as our structures deteriorate, and chaos and uncertainty threaten our being. “Body and soul are not two different things,” notes Einstein, “but only two different ways of perceiving the same thing. Similarly, physics and psychology are only different attempts to link our experiences together by way of systematic thought."
Nothing is static. Everything in nature is in a state of dying, to be reborn, live, and then die again. Complexity and simplicity, order and chaos are constant dynamics to life whether we are conscious of them or not. Consequently, when nature is out of balance, so are we.
We are in an Information Age. This information, under the metaphysical laws governing the universe, seems to bring conscious experience to an ultimate synthesis where we are learning “to go with the flow” (as Native American Indians first taught us), while at the same time resisting this flow as if we could. Nature has its own codes as E. O. Wilson has uncovered in his study of ants, which operate in similar complexity to that of man. James Watson and Francis Crick discovered DNA, the information code to our genetics, which has led to new information technology regarding life itself. Einstein expressed the scientist’s quest this way: “I want to know God’s thoughts, all the rest are details.” Einstein also claimed no special gift other than curiosity, and a capacity to stick longer than most others to problems.
As marvelous as scientific discoveries are, Nature is always waiting silently to be discovered, making all the notable discoveries to date shallow by comparison. While we operate in ignorance, the mind of nature continues its will. Kenneth Boulding seems comfortable with this, advocating, “Go with the flow.” The flow he sees as directional and complex, operating on several levels simultaneously with parts being integrated into wholes, and wholes being fragmented into parts.
The American Indians did not see nature and the spirit as two different things but two different ways to perceive the same thing. For Indians, Nature was not protected by systematic thought but systematic action. The Mind of Nature spoke to them. They listened because they understood its language. What can it tell us?
That God and science are not adversaries but partners as man is not separate from nature but part of it, that man’s lot is as much a reflection of the second law of thermodynamics as are the mountains and the valleys, the rivers and the seas, and all life within and about. Theologians on the top of that mountain described by Jastrow are waiting for us all.
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This is taken from Dr. Fisher’s new book TECHNOLOGY THE NEW RELIGION OF “NOWHERE MAN.”
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