Part #5: The Intellectual Beauty of the Cosmos and Physical Reality

"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason

Currently, I am reading A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design by the Nobel-winning physicist, Frank Wilczek, and am also about half way through physicist Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe.

From physicist Frank Wilczek's new book on the nature of the cosmos:
“Thus far our meditation on quantum reality has revealed that the world of everyday matter, when properly understood, embodies concepts of extraordinary beauty. Indeed, ordinary matter is built up from atoms that are, in a rich and precise sense, tiny musical instruments."

"In their interplay with light, they realize a mathematical Music of the Spheres that surpasses the visions of Pythagoras, Plato, and Kepler."

"In molecules and ordered materials, those atomic instruments play together as harmonious ensembles and synchronized orchestras.”

"...ideal beauty…feature color, geometry, and symmetry. Consider, in particular the magnificent plate HH. Here the local geometry of the ambient surfaces and the local patterns of their color change as our gaze surveys them."

"It is a vibrant embodiment of anamorphy and anachromy-the very themes that our unveiling of Nature's deep design finds embodied at Nature's core."

"Does the world embody beautiful ideas? There is our answer, before our eyes: Yes."

"The world does not, in its deep design, embody all forms of beauty, nor the ones that people without special study, or very unusual taste, find most appealing."

"But the world does, in its deep design, embody some forms of beauty that have been highly prized for their own sake, and have been intuitively associated with the divine.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

"Beauty is a vague concept. But so, to begin with, were concepts like "force" and "energy." Through dialogue with Nature, scientists learned to refine the meaning of "force" and "energy," to bring their use into line with important aspects of reality."

"So too, by studying the Artisan's handiwork, we evolve refined concepts of "symmetry," and ultimately of "beauty"-
concepts that reflect important aspects of reality,
while remaining true to the spirit of their use in common language.”

"Concepts live outside of time and, because All Things Are Number, liberate us from it.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“When religion talks about our aspirations and our sense of morality, I do not believe that science can contradict it. However, when religion contradicts science on matters of fact, religion must yield.”

“In short: the space of color information is infinite-dimensional, but we perceive, as color, only a three-dimensional surface, onto which those infinite dimensions project.”

“Two obsessions are the hallmarks of Nature's artistic style:
Symmetry- a love of harmony, balance, and proportion
Economy- satisfaction in producing an abundance of effects from very limited means”

“Dynamical beauty transcends specific objects and phenomena, and invites us to imagine the expanse of possibilities. For example, the sizes and shapes of actual planetary orbits are not simple."

"They are neither the (compounded) circles of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Nicolaus Copernicus, nor even the more nearly accurate ellipses of Kepler, but rather curves that must be calculated numerically, as functions of time, evolving in complicated ways that depend on the positions and masses of the Sun and the other planets."

"There is great beauty and simplicity here, but it is only fully evident when we understand the deep design."

"The appearance of particular objects does not exhaust the beauty of the laws.”

“With this, in a powerful sense, our Question has been answered. The world, insofar as we speak of the world of Chemistry, biology, astrophysics, engineering, and everyday life, does embody beautiful ideas."

"The Core, which governs those domains, is profoundly rooted in concepts of symmetry and geometry, as we have seen. And it works its will, in quantum theory, through music-like rules. Symmetry really does determine structure."

"A pure and perfect Music of the Spheres really does animate the soul of reality. Plato and Pythagoras: We salute you!”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“For us, the great conclusion is this: all the colors can be obtained from any one of them, by motion, or, as we say, by making Galilean transformations."

"Because Galilean transformations are symmetries of the laws of Nature, any color is fully equivalent to any other. They all emerge as different views of the same thing, seen from different but equally valid perspectives.”

“Yet it is beautiful to discover that there's another chapter to the story, where we discover deep unity beneath, and supporting, the diversity of appearance. All colors are one thing, seen in different states of motion."

"That is science's brilliantly poetic answer to Keats's complaint that science "unweaves a rainbow.”

“Yet many creative spirits have found inspiration in the idea that the Creator might be, among other things, an artist whose aesthetic motivations we can appreciate and share-or even, in daring speculation, that the Creator is primarily a creative artist."

"Such spirits have engaged our Question, in varied and evolving forms, across many centuries."

"Thus inspired, they have produced deep philosophy, great science, compelling literature, and striking imagery."

"Some have produced works that combine several, or all, of those features. These works are a vein of gold running back through our civilization.”
―Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“The legendary Danish physicist Niels Bohr distinguished two kinds of truths. An ordinary truth is a statement whose opposite is a falsehood. A profound truth is a statement whose opposite is also a profound truth.”

“The entity we perceive as empty space is a multilayered, multicolored superconductor. What an amazing, astonishing, beautiful, breathtaking concept. Extraordinary, too.”
― Frank Wilczek, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces
--

And other scientists on the beauty of the cosmos and our study of it:

“I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing..."

"First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower."

"At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty."

I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes."

"The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms?"

"Why is it aesthetic?"

"All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower.”
-Richard Feyman
--

“I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.”
―Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God
--

"My views are near those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly. I believe that we have to content ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and understanding..."

"In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views.
I am not an Atheist."

"A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms — it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man."

"I have not found a better expression than 'religious' for the trust in the rational nature of reality that is, at least to a certain extent, accessible to human reason."

"I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe."

"We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books."

"It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects."

"That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God."

"We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations."

"Scientific research can reduce superstition by encouraging people to think and view things in terms of cause and effect. Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality and intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order....
bound up with a deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God."

"If I were not a Jew I would be a Quaker."
-Albert Einstein

In the Light of Science, of the Intellectual Beauty of the Cosmos,

Daniel Wilcox

"Leave the Door Open" or Birth Control?

Historians are puzzled by the extremely low rate of birth in some Quaker communities in New England in the late 1700's. They speculate and ponder on whether this was a natural occurrence, or because of stringent abstinence or a method of very successful birth control.

With all the current tragedies, controversies, disasters, and debates centering in the news, we seldom hear any more of the ethical question of birth control, except from the creedal wing of Christianity, the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

But, historically, and now in the news again, birth control has been a huge controversy.

After the American Revolution, "it seems clear that Quakers had begun to practice some kind of family limitation involving birth control. Such planning did not occur in the generation before 1730..."

"The questions of how and why Quakers began to practice birth control cannot be answered with any certainty."
The Quaker Family in Colonial America by J. William Frost

"Quakers on the whole remained conservative on matters of sexual ethics until the early part of the 20th Century."

"The first open discussion of sexuality by Quakers came in 1924, when a group of British Friends published, "Marriage and Parenthood: The Problem of Birth Control."

"This pamphlet advocated a qualified use of family planning and opposed the idea that the use of contraceptive devices promoted promiscuity."
http://www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/170

from The voice of Whittier College:

"Access to Birth Control Is a Right"

"In the U.S., 68 percent of women who are at risk for pregnancy use a form of contraception. However, the use of birth control by women is still often stigmatized. People who are against the use of birth control argue that it promotes sexual behavior in young women."

"First of all, so what if it does? What’s wrong with that? If women choose to have sex, it’s no one’s business."

"Birth control should be easily accessible so that if they do choose to have sex, they can do so without worrying about the risk of pregnancy."
by Quaker Campus
https://thequakercampus.com/2015/02/26/access-to-birth-control-is-a-right/


"Contraception
Quakers don't have a collective view on the rightness or wrongness of contraception. Many Quakers do use artificial methods of birth control."
http://galwayquakers.com/Quaker-Beliefs-and-Practise

Officially, Catholics leaders still claim that artificial control of the birth of children is morally wrong--
that it is interfering with the natural order, playing God, and contrary to the will of God.

A loving couple ought to welcome as many children as God gives them.

What is intriguing, shall we say shocking, however, is that most Catholics, in contrast to other issues, don't obey this teaching of the Church. 86% of Catholics in the U.S. view artificial birth control as acceptable! That's only slightly behind the 90% of all respondents.

But who then are the 10% rejectors of the "all"?

Probably conservative Mormons and fundamentalists such as the "Quiver-full" movement; both also oppose birth control and emphasize large families as the direct blessing and will of God.

And in contrast, even Roman Catholic leaders at times seem to bend their own rules, or at least their natural law rhetoric.



For instance, the current controversial Pope, St. Francis, said that couples don't have to breed "like rabbits."

On the other hand, many Protestant leaders before the 1960's, also, opposed birth control. An anti-birth control article was published in the Baptist Standard.



One Christian leader, William Bell Riley, called birth control a "menace to humanity." "When the primeval lust of the beast is the basis of union, the divorce mill is sure of its grist," he warned.

Presbyterian Professor James O. Buswell told ministers "not to practice birth control." James M. Gray, President of Moody Bible Institute, also, opposed artificial control.

Moderate Baptist J.C. Massee stated, "Pleasure without children is legalized concubinage" and a "blight."

The infamous Bob Jones Sr., president of Bob Jones University, (which refused to admit "colored" students for many years) condemned, "husbands who hellishly limit the size of their families because they are too damnably mean and selfish to raise children."
Selling the Old Time Religion by Douglas Carl Abrams, University of Georgia Press

"Being pro-life...its about opening ourselves to the risk and mess and uncertainty that accompany any God-sent guest we allow into our lives. The least we can do is leave our doors unlocked."
Agnieska Tennant, an Editor of Christianity Today

And, some leaders still associate birth control with abortionist Margaret Sanger. Professor Albert Molher of the Southern Baptist Convention wrote we have "unwittingly aided and abetted that moral revolution by an unreflective and unfaithful embrace of the contraceptive revolution."
Religion News Service

Molher has stated, "I do indeed believe that the development of the Pill 'has done more to reorder human life than any event since Adam and Eve ate the apple'...sex, sexuality, and reproduction are so central to human life, to marriage, and to the future of humanity."

"The Pill turned pregnancy — and thus children — into elective choices, rather than natural gifts of the marital union. But then again, the marital union was itself weakened by the Pill, because the avoidance of pregnancy facilitated adultery and other forms of non-marital sex."

"In some hands, the Pill became a human pesticide."
http://www.albertmohler.com/2010/04/26/the-pill-turns-50-time-considers-the-contraceptive-revolution/

Since these views are all from religious conservatives, many might think that the whole issue of birth control is only a medieval hold-over.


However, it so happens that the famous atheist psychiatrist Eric Berne, founder of Transactional Analysis, emphasized in his book Sex in Human Loving that openness to procreativity in sexual relations is best. Dr. Berne states that his reasoning is biological.

Contradictorily, some current secular thinkers think that a woman getting pregnant is to be infested, having a "parasite' living in her.
(More later on this shockingly negative, almost nihilistic, view of pregnancy).

Professor Peter Singer supports infanticide, as sometimes moral.

He argues that born infants aren't persons and thus may be killed if the parents choose to do so!

According to this modern ethicist, a professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, some animals have more value than human infants.

So, see like in many ethical topics, humans' attitudes and outlooks toward birth control are very different.

What do you to say about birth control and sexuality and children?

What is your perspective on these very important ethical topics?

Reasons?


My own view is experiential, not especially theological or philosophical.

On both sides of our extended family in the past, the parents having more than a limited number of children seemed to lead to favoritism and neglect of at least one child. I don't think that had to be, but at least it occurs fairly frequently in large families.


When parents are hardworking, and they have a number of children, it seems that not all of their kids can get an equal amount of quality time, attention, and guidance.

Yes, I know there are famous families who claim this doesn't have to be so.

But consider that in one such well-known poster family, the Duggers, where everything was supposed to be wonderful and sacred, it turned out that the happy facade actually hid deep troubles.

How or why one of their older teens could end up molesting his younger sisters isn't clear.

But probably such a large family made unethical actions easier to commit and to hide.

In contrast, recently, I took an elderly woman to the doctor who has 16 children, 48 grandchildren, and 14 great-grandchildren. At 82 years of age, she is still a bundle of joyful energy, said she enjoyed everyone of her children.

It would be insightful if one could interview all of her children and see if they agree. But no doubt there are many happy large families, besides our own example of not.

In my own case, having 3 children while working 60-70 hours a week in my career as a teacher, I found it difficult to give to give each of my children time and interaction.

One of them points out now, that when that he/she desperately needed my time, I was too busy. I deeply regret failing that child.

If I hadn't subscribed to birth control, how could I possibly have been there for 6 or 8 or 10 children?

That's the practical, very real, very important quality point for why birth control is so important--it opens the door for a deep meaningful relationship with each child.

Another hugely important value in this topic is that restricting pregnancies gives a woman better health, longer life, and more time to develop her own talents and interests. A quick review of history will show how no birth control often had disastrous and deadly results for women of the past.

Theological and philosophical questions and reflections will have to wait for a later article.

To be continued--


In the Light,


Daniel Wilcox

The Nature of Reality: Step #1

What is the true nature of Reality? Notice the capital R. I'm not talking about the finite observable present day-to-day temporal world of basic facts which includes humans as one form of primate undergoing evolutionary change.

Rather, I am speaking of the ultimate category of reality of which philosophers, physicists, and cosmologists refer to, and what religious people and mystics say they experience--the ultimate objective source of Being and Becoming.

Where does "all this" come from and eventually go to?

After this cosmos in so many trillions and trillions of years either stretches out space to infinity or implodes back to a singularity, what will still BE?

Why are we here? Are there eternal truths?

Of course some philosophers and scientists declare there is nothing "out" there beyond matter and energy. The cosmos-- maybe universes beyond universes--has no Meaning or Purpose, only IS for no reason.

Scientists such as Richard Dawkins claim that even to think there might be some Meaning behind it all is to be deluded in the worst sort of way. He wrote The God Delusion to try and demonstrate this central non-theistic thesis.

And Stephen J. Gould the famous Darwinian biologist, in a magazine interview, said humankind itself is only a "fluke" of evolution that probably wouldn't show up again if evolution were re-run another time.

Other famous scientists in this chorus of non-meaning include Coyne, Harris, Cashmore, Hutchens, Monad, Dennett, and Provine.

Dawkins' most famous statement against religion and the transcendent is probably his declaration in River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life:

"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so."

"If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored."

"In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice."

"The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."
--

So there is the first option as to the true nature of Reality: Matter, Energy, and Chance or Cosmic Determinism. The natural, indifferent Cosmos itself is all there is.

We humans are an accidental species or "meat puppets" who construct our own illusions.

Then die. Eventually we as a species will go extinct.

In strong contrast, Enlightenment figures argued that consciousness, reason, human rights, justice, equality, and so forth show evidence of the essential nature of existence--the Deity.

And Friends have trusted for 300 hundred years that Ultimate Reality is Loving Relationship, Equality, Purpose--
that at the very center and heart of Reality are eternal truths, everlasting ideals, absolute love.

Some other faiths agree with the Society of Friends. Transcendent Love is the Center of the Cosmos.

Martin Buber, the Jewish mystic wrote a book on God, titled, I-Thou, which speaks of a love relationship between God and each human.

The Baptist minister and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., (despite his own moral failings), strongly held to Ultimate Reality being loving and good and true and just.

In his speech "Rediscovering Lost Values," King said, "The first principle of value is that we need to rediscover is this: that all reality hinges on moral foundations."

"In other words, that this is a moral universe, and that there are moral laws of the universe just as abiding as the physical laws..."

"I'm here to say to you this morning that some things are right and some things are wrong. (Yes) Eternally so, absolutely so."

"It's wrong to hate. (Yes. That's right) It always has been wrong and it always will be wrong. It's wrong in America. It's wrong in Germany..."

"It was wrong in 200 B.C. and it's wrong in 1954 A.D...It's wrong in every age and it's wrong in every nation."

"Some things are right and some things are wrong, no matter if everybody is doing the contrary. Some things in this universe are absolute."
--

No doubt early Friends would have ascribed non-theism to the "ocean of darkness" that threatens humankind. So how is it then that some Friends in the last 40 years have come out stating there is no God to worship, no Ultimate Reality to "quake before"?

They say God is a fiction, a word which does not represent anything real.

It is uncertain why such Friends deny God's existence. We are all doubters to one degree or another, but when humans, especially Friends, claim for certain that there is no God, it is puzzling and distressing.

After all both names--"Friend" and "Quaker"--are in reference to God. And the vital central focus of a Quaker meeting is worship of the Truth, the Light, the Divine.

If there is no One--no Center--to worship, then it would appear that such individuals are consciously choosing to pretend, what other non-theists such as Dawkins term "delusion."

Before I continue with an introduction to the Friends view of worship, let me emphasize that ALL humans are invited to come to commune in worship, even those who don't think there is any Ultimate Reality to live in and commune with. Hopefully, they will encounter the Truth, the Light.

After all, remember what Stephen King that famous Quaker horror writer;-) wrote in his novel, The Stand. In response to an atheist's statement that he doesn't believe in God, the heroic leader in the novel laughs and says, "But that don't matter. He believes in you."

To be continued


In the LIGHT,

Daniel Wilcox