Physicist Lawrence Krauss, die-hard materialist
Join the National Association of Scholars on Friday, December 8, at 3 pm ET for "Restoring the Sciences: Science Under Attack."The NAS here is attempting to stand against the subversion of the academy, and science in particular, from the assaults on freedom of thought and expression by woke ideology. Increasingly, I'm seeing people like Krauss (and Pinker and Dawkins) assume the role as champions of traditional academic values (reason, merit, free discourse) against the barbarian hordes.
Free inquiry, open debate, and skeptical questioning are the cornerstones of healthy science. But does that describe science today? Arguably, no — those cornerstones are currently being eroded at universities and scientific institutions around the county.
Can scientists pretend that science is immune to the ideologies that have conquered the humanities and are now sweeping through a broad range of disciplines in the science ecosystem? "No," says Dr. Lawrence Krauss. Science is imperiled, and without scientists standing up for core principles, the vibrancy of scientific discovery and scholarship is in danger of following the liberal arts to a post-truth future.
This event will feature Lawrence Krauss, a cosmologist, theoretical physicist, author, and winner of numerous international awards for his scientific research and his writing. He is a passionate advocate of science, and for enlightening the public on the value of science to society, and the importance of defending science's core principles. He is president of The Origins Project Foundation.
To learn more about the event, click here.
And yet, couldn't it be said that precisely because of the materialist ideology that they have been promoting in the name of science all these years, they have helped bring about the state of affairs in the academy that they are now lamenting — in which woke ideology subverts all that they deem precious in the academy and science?
An Offense Against Reason
Scientific materialism is the view that science functions to advance materialism. Darwin is this atheistic ideology's principal prophet.
Is scientific materialism an offense, and if so, what is it an offense against? In fact, scientific materialism is an offense against reason in general and against science as reason's most compelling expression. Scientific materialism is self-referentially incoherent. It's a snake that eats its own tail and in the end consumes itself. This claim is not new and not just from people like me who oppose scientific materialism. Darwin made the point himself when he raised the following doubt in an 1881 letter to William Graham:
With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?C. S. Lewis and Alvin Plantinga have extended Darwin's point. In his book Miracles, Lewis argued that on materialist principles, the mind is the operation of a physical system according to natural laws and thus will proceed with no necessary connection to knowledge or truth.
Plantinga took Lewis's argument further with his evolutionary argument against naturalism. Plantinga noted that evolution, in its conventional materialist sense, by putting a premium on survival and reproduction, did not — and indeed could not — put a premium on knowing truth. And so any beliefs whatsoever that are compatible with survival and reproduction are, from an evolutionary vantage, as good as any other.
In fact, "goodness" has nothing to do with it. Our minds, as evolved brains adapted to changing environments, simply are what they are. It is irrelevant, for instance, to argue that humans spent the majority of our evolutionary history as hunter gatherers and thus we should respect what worked for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The conditions of our existence have changed and we are, on evolutionary grounds, entitled to change with them.
Two Plus Two Equals...?
It really makes no sense, on evolutionary grounds, therefore to remonstrate with woke ideologues for denigrating reason, dismissing merit, or censoring speech. Math, we are now told, is discriminatory because only the privileged are put in an educational setting where they can learn and excel at conventional math. And so, rather than try to raise the math skills of the un- or under-privileged, we are enjoined to treat math as a free play in which all answers are as good as any others (thus we now see taken seriously that 2 plus 2 need not equal 4).
Granted, I'm no fan of the deplatforming, the censorship, the celebration of mediocrity, the inversion of traditional morals, the flouting of conventional sensibilities in which woke ideologues revel.
My point, though, is that woke ideology did not arise in a vacuum but is the logical outworking of a materialistic worldview in which humans are meat puppets evolved through a process that has no foresight or purpose and thus that gives life no greater meaning or destiny. And for people without the advantages (privileges) of a Krauss or Pinker or Dawkins, who do not find their identity in being valiant defenders of reason and science, challenging reason and science has a liberating appeal.
A world of reason is a world of constraints. It's a world in which some things are so and not otherwise, and where if you don't bend yourself to those constraints, you will be broken. There is something liberating about denying constraints. The old Army commercial slogan said "Be all you can be." Woke ideology says "Be anything you can imagine yourself to be."
And What's Not to Like About That?
A Darwinist might respond by saying, "Sure, take that attitude, and we'll be giving you a Darwin award for killing yourself in some incredibly stupid way." But in fact, woke ideology seems to be prospering quite nicely in the academy and culture as a whole. This is why the National Association of Scholars is getting behind the newly formed University of Austin, which it describes as "a new university dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth." Steven Pinker has been a supporter of this new educational initiative.
The organizers of the University of Austin are bypassing the academy and culture as they've known it, seeking to restore what they regard as having been lost. The formation of the University of Austin sounds hopeful and inspiring to those who have been the butt of woke ideology until one remembers that it's because woke ideology has so thoroughly infiltrated the mainstream academy that groups like the NAS are jumping ship from it and needing to found new schools where traditional educational values can reign.
Without meaning to sound facetious, their efforts remind me of the formation of Christian colleges and Bible schools in the early 1900s as it became clear that "liberal theology" had supplanted Christian orthodoxy in the mainstream academy, and that alternative venues were needed if students were going to be in an educational setting where traditional theological values reigned. Reality check: How did that work out? The secular culture steamrollered on, and the Christian schools remained largely marginalized.
I wish the University of Austin success, just as I wish the NAS success. In fact, I'm a lifetime member of the NAS. I first learned of it when a good friend of mine at Northwestern University was denied tenure in the early 1990s by an interim dean because my friend was a member of the NAS. I thought that any organization that could get my friend denied tenure at a school as woke as Northwestern (I'm using the term anachronistically) couldn't be all bad. As it is, my friend ended up on the faculty at Stanford, a step up from Northwestern.
But just as with its promotion of Larry Krauss to defend science, the NAS has a history of undercutting its efforts to promote sound educational value by aligning itself with scientific materialists. Twenty years ago, it had Paul Gross (co-author with Barbara Forrest on Creationism's Trojan Horse) write a critique of intelligent design: "Intelligent Design and That Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy." To its credit, the NAS did allow my colleagues and me to respond to Gross in an extensive "Letters to the Editor" follow-up.
A World Without Design
The world of scientific materialism is a world with no design ultimately behind it. In such a world, things are not as they are because they were intended to be that way, and things don't flourish because they are fulfilling their inherent end. In a world without design, it's not quite fair to say that anything goes — physical laws will limit what can go. But in a world without design, there's no reason to take seriously any constraints on what can go.
Thus, higher education will with a straight face now allow that two plus two equals five, that freedom of speech is an outdated relic, that reason is a tool of oppression, and that merit is a conceit of the privileged. To their credit, the NAS opposes this nonsense. But this nonsense is the legitimate offspring of scientific materialism, not some bastard child, not some subverting of an otherwise pure philosophy.
Woke ideology is not a betrayal of scientific materialism but its logical conclusion once people realize that on materialistic grounds we are here for no reason and have no destiny beyond this brief life, so that the only meaning our life can have is the meaning we give it, the meaning we construct for it. And if conventional educational values like freedom of thought and expression get in the way of that meaning that we are constructing for ourselves, so much the worse for those values.
Closing thought: The National Association of Scholars needs to cast its net wider to include more than scientific materialists among its defenders of science and reason.
Trained as a mathematician, philosopher, and theologian, Bill Dembski is a writer, editor, and researcher whose books and articles range over mathematics, engineering, philosophy, theology, and education. A past philosophy professor, he retired from teaching in 2013. In need of a vacation from intelligent design (ID), he took a break from it between 2016 and 2019, returning to it part-time in 2020. He repudiates none of his work on intelligent design, and may some day make it the main focus of his work again. He has secured the rights from Cambridge University Press of The Decision Inference, and is planning a second edition of that work.
Reader Comments
[Link]
It's been a long time since I read Gurdjieff, but it seems to me, as I recall, he indicated (or said) that the highest realm has only one law.
I think he called it the Law of Love.
This is very paradoxical, or contradictory, of course because normally our 'higher efforts' seem to require the discovery (and construction) of more and more and more laws.
Be sure to read the fine print!
Every bit of it.
Or you will be lost.
ned,
out
The author of myself, the maker of my sex.
My god is my instinct - the survival of the fittest,
My instincts have let me survive in this society of misfits.
My instincts of fear, doubt, lust, hate and greed:
I worship them all, to all I'll concede.
A thousand gods inside me, a thousand desires,
They pull me in all directions, my multiple messiahs.
“Save me from myself, from my true reality.”
Hence, hell is not ONE, but a multiplicity.
But the wokesters couldn't care less about the details, truthfulness or logical consistency of their "arguments", and they are even less inclined to debate with these paragons of reason.
This is because the woke ideology is at its core a Marxism-derived powergrab and nothing else. The adherents do not have arguments, evidence, truth or even logic; they have emotional manipulation, subversion, abuse and brute force.
The only way to combat "wokeness" (a term that has become too broad in meaning to be useful at this point) is to reject every single theoretical basis for absolutely everything they say. So when they try to browbeat you with "equality" (aka social and economical equity - in their view), you need to reject in absolute terms not only the concept itself, but its historical, ideological and literary antedecents in all their forms, offshoots and derivatives.
In short, you need to reject most of academia within social studies, if not all of it. Also, much of philosophy itself needs to go; but in particular German and to some degree French "thinkers".
If you can not say "the human is not a social species" and explain why, then you are likely at risk of being browbeaten into submission. Unless you use their own tactics against them.
As far as I can see, the author's main complaint is that not enough people subscribe to his version of wokeness. He sure isn't arguing from a base of pure reason (fact). Pure reason, applied to unbiased observation is the only definition of fact.
If all the people driving countries and societies over the cliff stopped all of the things they have been doing to achieve their delusional goals, it would make fuck all difference at this point. Critical thinking, the real McCoy, not the woke version, has gone extinct. There are only a few steps left, and they are all on a seriously steep downhill slope covered with mud.
Maybe a very few people with critical thinking/reasoning skills will survive long enough to pass those along to some other simply-lucky survivors of what is coming real soon now, but it is doubtful. If there are any humans left on the planet 50 years from now, they will have to start from scratch, developing basic cognitive skills, then simple reasoning, then logic and so forth. Glad I'm fucking old.
“Critical thinking”... nowadays that seems to mean: have criticising thoughts. It should mean: be critical of one's thinking process itself... all the assumptions, false idols, false images, blind beliefs... in a lot of cases, such mental gravestones are held in place by the dust of the centuries...
As Steiner would point out: 'Materialism' is to say petrification... which at root is Satanic... whilst 'Ideology' is passionate and the opposite of petrification... which at root is Luciferic... “Solve et Coagule”... One state follows another... Passion is followed by Inertia, which is then followed again by Passion, as life continues on its spiral downhill between “conservative” and “liberal” tendencies, materialism and idealism... It's a formula which the elites know and use, and very few people can grasp, except those who have lived life and still remained young.
“The young don't get it”... because they are blind riders on the pendulum of life, and very few have the perspective of that mechanical swing, which is something that most elderly people are instinctively aware of (if nothing more than “how tedious life is”... if an elder knows how to laugh, even if just a single 'haa' of inspiration, then tediousness is overcome)...
“The old don't get it”... which is to say, the majority of the elderly don't understand that there is a hidden hand moving events and changing history.
Some indigenous peoples still live in a society where the young and old work together... the elderly naturally know how to preserve things... the young naturally know how to progress things... The young naturally listen and respect the elderly, not because of some 'moral' reason, but due to instincts and survival itself: they elderly indigenous just know how to survive, they perfected it as each day passes, they are not just thrown into residential homes, but are treated like depositories of real-life practical wisdom. The difference between those indigenous societies and Western society?... There is no hidden hand constantly moving the goal-posts... Due to that hidden hand in society, the old and the young are not able to understand one another, and hence no social cohesion can bind a people together.
People are spitting bullets about racial inequality and gender inequality, but NOTHING is ever mentioned about the enormous inequality between the young and the old... It cannot be mentioned, because there is no other way to explain the disparity, other than the fact that there is a hidden hand, and that Plato's cave was not an allegory to some mental realm... it is really happening... and now each generation gets a different set of shadows and symbols to follow... such as 'woke' for the young, and 'accept the new normal' for the old... then all the 'woke' people in Plato's cave would just get up and replace them instantaneously... much like the author of above article... he snatches the stereotypical and archetypal idol and throws it to the ground, only to pick it back and hold it in place again with his own hands, just to seemingly fill the void, to hide his own lack of imagination.
I agree that the Age of Reason has come to an end... I don't feel sad about it... a new age will inevitably begin... I would say it is the Age of Comprehension... comprehending with the heart... without the head. That “a prioi” of the spirit. It has to be... the only other option is a total loss of harvest for humanity... Though I can't imagine very many people will comprehend... there is no deducing or inducing... one knows or one does not know... as long as a few might know, then there is a future.
I wonder how many people will read this and not comprehend, but 'think' it is just the ramblings of an old man.. they may 'imagine' its written with a tone of tediousness... (the old shadows on the cave wall tell them so)... but it is written with a new hope... looking past the idols where Reason stays and procrastinates.
Dwoods44 “I like the "Glad I'm f*cking old." ” ... As well... I don't know how you interpreted it, but I don't think we need a democratic vote in order to tell us what we each think... let's leave it up to poetic license. To be old and glad is a rare combination these days.
" Critical thinking" is a useless and meaningless phrase. When you are "thinking" it is implied that you are using reason and logic for analysis and making conclusions, but then only where and as necessary. If you are not doing that when you are "thinking", it is just you having disconnected thoughts without any real purpose. Then, it is not actually thought. Instead, it is wisps or roars of emotion cloaked in a few words to pretend it is thought. The word critical is attached to thinking in order to make it seem like it is more important than it can be. Only real thinking is thinking and everything else is emotions wearing a disguise. ~Krampus Maybe. But since you only get one ride here, I really would have liked to see mankind advancing instead of self-destructing. Sad? Not exactly. Disappointed? A fair bit. I have watched thousands of people run as fast as they can away from understanding.
Bob Dylan seems to have captured a lot of the issues. [Link] Lyrics to Everything Is Broken The "hidden" hand is more like one of those apps that lets one put cat whiskers on the people in their photos. The cave wall is actually just the inside of their skulls. On it you can draw anything you want, or more importantly erase anything you want. That's the real hidden hand app feature. You do it, then you get to try and interpret it, if it gets "posted" in your mind. The shadows are (or at least could be) in full color. The real problem is that it's all you , and many, many (most?) people don't want the responsibility of ownership, especially of the emotions that show up. Just who "runs" your mind anyway? Who controls what gets "posted"?
Hmm...
I'd say Descartes has never really been understood: “I think, therefore I am.” If one is not actively questioning reality, inquiring what is THE MOMENT every moment all about, then one is neither thinking, and therefore not being... That applies, not to many, but most. It is absurd that this is not taught in schools at a young age: how to think, question, which first of all requires how to observe reality ... We get taught how to use our legs, how to speak, but that organ of thinking just gets left behind... Instead it becomes a morgue of yesteryear's / yesterday's / yesterminute's effigies. Maybe later in college, one could have the option to study 'philosophy', which is reality is the study of “The Cemetery of Historical Thinking”... sadly by then, the brain is already a junkyard of prejudices and false images.
There is so much human potential, but even cats and savage animals without opposable thumbs are better hunters and catchers of the moment than us.
I'd say the majority of humanity's problems all stem down to three things: a lack of imagination, a lack of will power, a lack of love. Rather than create hundreds of thousands of pointless laws and acts and statutes that only serve to throw human beings into modern dungeons (prisons - they are still dungeons, just with smoother walls and cameras, humanity has never evolved beyond that medieval state of consciousness), “society”'s greatest efforts should be aimed at restoring those three things: how creative one is, how willing one is, how loving one is... And so if society is not capable of doing the job which it claims to be doing, then at least as individuals we have to take on the burden for ourselves. Laziness is the mother of all vices.
I reckon the concepts of 'critical thinking' or 'pure reason' have to be left behind: it's like saying “my air” when really one means “my house”, it kind of distracts one from the focus of the matter. CREATIVE IMAGINATION would be a greater thing to cultivate... That is why so many people with mental health issues often find a remedy with ART THERAPY... for the first time in their life, they are using their brains, allowing space and dimension, measure and rhythm to be used as surgical tools of reality... If one doesn't ever use their lungs properly, it is very probable that one may contract a lung health issue... the same applies for mental health issues. But not just being imaginative thinking of bullshit, but using the imagination to solve real world and real personal problems... the first step is to reconquer that childhood imagination... and way of the artist is often the means to develop what philosophers only daydream of getting.
It's such an incredible view one can get of life... but as you say, most people would prefer an 'app' to do their thinking for them... never has humanity been so close to 'cave-man' consciousness than those who walk around with their 'smart phones'. I often wonder if cave-men only lived in caves, in order not to complicate their rich and fertile imaginative life with nonsense such as possessions and furniture. Just as a child spends its first part of its personal 'history' (which it can't remember) in that mythical imaginative state, so most of human history is found in that 'primitive' state... before 'history' (recording events), there were myths and mystery... With the introduction of 'recorded events', with so many false images and false idols having snared and entrapped human consciousness, that modern scientific Tower of Babel consciousness looks and frowns at real life in motion as if everyone else is mistaken and been led astray.
Most of our thoughts are brought to us through the senses... we see a tree, we think of a holiday we once had, we think of that person we met there, we remember his weird voice, and so on and so on and suddenly we are far out at sea... But, there are SOME thoughts during the day, which have no physical causes: thoughts enter the mind which have no connection with our senses... THOSE thoughts are the ones that our active hunter-gatherer mind should leap at and grab, because they are often brought to us from angels and gods, who themselves are just agents of God.
Obviously the modern un-creative a-theist mind doesn't believe in a Creator... how can it re-cognize something which it has no cognizance of?
A believer went to Buddha: “Does God exist?” he asked Buddha. “No, of course God doesn't exist!” Buddha responded. A non-believer then went to Buddha: “Does God exist?” he asked Buddha. “Yes, of course God does exist!” Buddha responded. Someone later asked Buddha: “Why did they give them different answers?” “Well why on Earth did they ask me! They should find out for themselves!” responded Buddha.