Part 2: What's the Matter?

Heard of the 2 brilliant cosmologists, a husband and wife, arguing?

Bothered by all the dissonance in their life, he asked, “What’s the Matter?”

She responded, rolling her eyes, “Nothing!”

Angrily, he answered, “Don't start at the beginning again! It's observable to me! You don’t seem to have any Energy anymore.”

She said, “On the contrary! Energy never goes away; it’s all that Matters!”;-)

In Part 1 of The Coral Reef of the Moral Code (January 5th), I spoke of how “In many ways waking to moral consciousness is like a tiny new coral life at the top of the great barrier reef off the coast of Australia. Each tiny new human being lives atop all the ethical realizations and accomplishments of millions of humans who’ve lived before he/she came into being.”

So then why do so many humans—especially the well-educated, the brilliant, the scientific--think that ethics are subjective, relative, even illusionary, based only on a “misfiring” of natural selection, that no human being has free will/alternative choice, that we can’t choose rightly or wrongly?

For most scientists, it comes down to their convincement that only Matter and Energy are eternal or that Matter/Energy popped into existence from Nothing, a vacuum-state via a “Singularity”.

In my opinion this wrong understanding of ethics comes about because of a category error. To use a simplistic analogy, the brilliant individuals are treating science like it's the only true method, the only hammer, and everything else is a nail;-(). But science isn’t all of life; rather the marvelous, successful procedure of the scientific method only deals with life at one level and from one perception—the observable, measurable, and testable. For example, it's true that technologists, no matter their worldview can create using atomic energy.

BUT what they create is based on their differing ethics! One scientific group creates atomic weapons which slaughter thousands of civilians in horrific death, another scientific group creates an atomic power plant that gives light to millions of people.

Which will it be? Darkness and destruction or light and creativity?

This is where the areas "outside" of science come into play.

Ethics, truth, beauty, conscious awareness are beyond science's limited expertise. They are the foundation upon which science "sits." As the skeptic Hume intoned, a person can’t get “ought” from “is”, and science is the study of what IS, not the study of what Ought to Be.

When scientific thinkers try and reduce all human consciousness to brain synapse, and ethics to “misfirings” or instinctive adaptions, we are left with a materialistic determinism that those very same individuals don’t live out in their personal lives, never could, nor would want to. If they did it would take away their ability to choose, would destroy their marriages, mal-form their children, and end human society as we know it. And they would lose all sense of beauty and goodness and justice and truth.

Heck, there wouldn't even be any basis to trust the scientific method, if ethics are actually subjective, because science itself is based on the ethical code of honesty and that it's possible to find what is true.

Yet the famous scientist Francis Crick did write, “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” (The Astonishing Hypothesis, 1994)

That’s like saying all great literature is only squiggles on paper! To reduce ethics to nerve cells and associated molecules is like reducing printed language to only visible markings, or claiming that a Van Gogh painting is only mixed chemicals on fabric!

Of course, language is encased in squiggles, and painting in chemical markings—but the wonderful literature and art of the ages, and all the brilliant discoveries of technology, etc. aren’t only squiggles and markings!

Neither are all the ethical truths of the moral code only firings or mis-firings of brain synapses because of undirected, purposeless, meaningless natural processes.

A brain surgeon/researcher may be able to locate the part of the brain where the ethic "empathy" is physically observable, but that doesn’t mean those cells are all there is to the truth of unselfish caring. The cells only encase a sense of Goodness, Beauty, and Justice for we primates so we can comprehend and seek the Transcendent.

In the end, it’s not Matter and Energy that matter, but the Divine Transcendence from whom existence has been created—in whom we live and move and have our being/becoming.

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

For Valentine's Day, a romantic poem: 2 hands

2 hands


two hands warm together

after a fine guitarist’s set;
hidden music
muses
through the spheres

out in the audience
hidden in the middle, two arms
under a table with two full glasses
ignored

two hands commune
caressing
as if the one

and only touching
on earth,
before the fall

for an hour and a half

embodied, that
warm embrace of their fingers
and palms

close slow dancing

ever and ever

no palming
but sheer magic
one body, one spirit



by Daniel Wilcox

previously published by vox poetica magazine
June 2013

“Don’t know much biology, don’t know much trigonometry…”

The other night while lapping at the Church of the Swimming Pool, trying to swim out of despair into hope, the lyrics of this classic old, good listenin’ song came back to me—a blast from the past by lyricist Sam Cooke.*

Tragically, the singer’s life turned down into the stygian darkness and ended at the early age of 33, in a similar way that the Christian religion is again diving into the abyss theologically. When current Evangelical leaders and denominations (is that demon-ations?) claim that infants at conception are “in essence, evil” and “devil worshipers,” and that there is no hope for billions of us humans who were foreordained to eternal damnation, etc…

And when Christian leaders claim that if you disagree with their theological determinism, it’s because you are a heretic and a sinner, and ever so ignorant…

In the midst of battling against such an ocean of darkness and despair,
my heart
cries out,
to ABBA, Father,

Don't know much about theology
Don't know much about a creedal book
Don't know much about the Greek I took

But I do know that I love you (Yes, God so Good!)
And I know that if others love God, too
What a wonderful world this would be...


In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox



*"Wonderful World"

Don't know much about history
Don't know much about biology
Don't know much about a science book
Don't know much about the French I took

But I do know that I love you
And I know that if you love me too
What a wonderful world this would be

Don't know much about geography
Don't know much trigonometry
Don't know much about algebra
Don't know what a slide rule is for
But I do know, one and one is two
And if this one could be with you
What a wonderful world this would be…

Sam Cooke