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This is an article that continues my dislike of modern atheism. Most people fail to understand my dislike. Do I dislike the anti-religious stance? No. Is it the militancy of their convictions? Sorta but not exactly. An apt parody is this: "The immutable truths that I believe are valid because I believe in science and rational thought." Scientists are human, too. They are error prone and are just as irrational as anyone else. You might say that over time such irrationality will 'come out in the wash'. Unfortunately I have little faith in group thinking (truth by commonality), and the notion that it will lead society to discovering deeper truths about the universe. Truth is not always the most popular idea. I've observed enough of the scientific community, particularly in my own branch of science, to know that the most popular idea isn't always the 'best' but the one that receives the most propaganda and hence becomes the most popular.
The weakness One area where science currently fails is to explain why the universe exists. Science does a good job of describing how the universe has evolved, possibly from a Big Bang, until now. We might even be able to figure whether the Big Bang was preceded by a Big Crunch, then conclude that the universe might have undergone many cycles like this. Perhaps it has always existed. Fascinating. The sorta thing that keeps me awake at night... oh it's 1:50 am, figures. What if the universe is one of many in a multiverse? Ok, that requires a bigger stretch of imagination but not unthinkable. Andrei Linde suggested at a recent conference that if Inflation happens then it necessitates the existence of a multiverse. As I said, I find that fascinating but one problem: it still doesn't answer why any of that is true. All of the above may have been borne out of rational thought and hardwork but science (currently) lacks the final piece to make it the all-encompassing holder of truth: the concept of transcedentalism. The good news is that science does not need it to still provide accurate descriptions of the universe. Science can still provide truths but all that rests upon one principle: that the universe is a closed system. Which also renders it predictable. A consequence is that we can never know what is outside of the universe, it almost becomes a meaningless question to ask "What is outside of the universe (or multiverse)?" and similarly will most likely fail to prove or disprove the existence of God. Wisdom of the Internet I've copied/pasted the following dialogue from a forum to further my point: Person 1: "I think I am a chicken!"
Person 2: "I'm quite sure you're not a chicken. You are a human being."
Person 1: "That's a matter of opinion and you should be more respectful of my beliefs. You believe militantly that I'm not a chicken."
Person 2: "Well... you're not."
This is not a good analogy to use. Theism deals with a transcendent entity and hence is neither provable nor disprovable by scientific means. Erroneous self-identification as poultry is, however, fairly easily provable or disprovable by scientific means. The God Principle In order to prove or disprove something we need to be sure to clearly define what it is we are ptalking about. This is another key weakness of arguments from theists and atheists alike. People have different ideas about what God is, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that people will disagree about whether God exists or not. I want to put all theistic concepts of God to one side and ignore them for the time being. Why? This article is only concerend with the incompatibility of science and transcendentalism, or atheism and phenomenology. Science will be complete once it can explain how the universe works. To do this it must reduce phenomenology to zero, or almost zero. Every process and every constituent of the universe must be understood in order for science to be complete. Whether this is possible is another debate. However, as I said above, science still cannot provide the answer to why the universe exists. It even struggles to answer why the universe is as it appears -- (eg.) we still don't know why the speed of light has the value that it does. Once science has answered all other mysteries of the universe except for the primal 'why' question then it will be complete. The non-primal 'why' questions as I'm calling them (speed of light value) can possibly be answered by science but it isn't necessary. Phenomenology will be as close to zero as it can get and the universe will be understood in a self-consistent rational manner. The keystone in all of this is that science doesn't need to answer "why the universe exists" in order to be consistent and true. The unexplained mystery of why can be attributed to something transcendental, that would be the only place where phenomenology is invoked. That place or process is what science should accept as the 'God Principle'. All other sources of explanation have been exhausted, so there can only be one further explanation.
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