In2-MeC

Preshov, Slovakia
5 July 2004

Are Academic Scholars like Snakes?

Part One: Assumptions that Go Nowhere

The day before yesterday one of my sannyasi Godbrothers sent me these thoughts about "mundane scholars. "

Mundane scholars may appear open minded as they are open to hearing all kinds of opinions. But actually they are close minded because they are closed to accepting any path as absolute. They are shut off from even the possibility of attaining the absolute truth, due to their conviction that such truth cannot exist. Although they may appear to be open minded, friendly, and sympathetic toward devotees, their congeniality remains only as long as a devotee panders to their relativistic mindset. As soon as a devotee presents Krsna consciousness as it is, as the absolute truth, then the open minded friendliness of mundane scholars ceases and is replaced with rabid disapproval. Thus devotees make friends with mundane scholars at great risk of compromising their own position by being bitten by the snake of relativism. For a mundane scholar, especially a student of Indology or Vaisnavism, is by definition a snake, for he deigns to speak on Krsna and Krsna consciousness without surrendering to Him. avaisnava mukhodgirnam. . .

Some snakes are fortunate to be instructed in transcendental knowledge by the most charming Devotee of all.

Some studies and perspectives of mundane scholars may be useful to devotees, who however to avoid being poisoned must be as expert as snake charmers in controlling snakes. Snakes are either controlled or they bite; a devotee who would deal with mundane scholars must similarly avoid being charmed by their mundane seeming reasonableness, and must rather be clever enough to charm mundane scholars into becoming genuine scholars of the absolute truth. To do so is a great preaching victory, but those insufficiently capable should avoid entering the fray.

Their apparent reasonableness and open mindedness is a sham masking their dogmatic and unreasonable refusal to accept any position as absolute.

Not long ago I published here in In2-MeC a review of several recent books that challenge the standard scientific Weltanschauung (worldview). In my comments I coined a term for that worldview: THEOSOPHS (THe Established, Official Screed Of the Pompous Hierophants of Science).

A good friend of mine who is a regular reader of In2-MeC emailed that book review to his brother, who is an evolutionary scientist of some kind. The brother replied, among other things, that it is not helpful to lump scientists together under such a flippant, catch-all rubric as THEOSOPHS. Scientists, the brother maintained, are people like other people. They are a diverse lot with widely differing opinions.

But all scientists, whatever they may be and believe as individuals, are supposed to have at least one thing in common: that their enterprise "to know" (Latin sciere, from which we get the word "science") firmly belongs to the Western tradition of rationalism. Academics in humanistic "soft-science" fields such as Indology likewise subscribe to that tradition.

So what do all professors of Western scholarship profess? What's the thread of thought common to all of them? Certain assumptions about reality constitute the common thread of thought that weave together all the sciences, hard and soft.

An assumption at the very heart of Western rationalism is that mathematics yields self-evident and certain truth. Hence a human intellect that is schooled to operate with mathematical rigor is not to be doubted. The proper arena of doubt is the world beyond the intellect; it is by "attacking" the external world with rigorous analysis that we should conduct our search for knowledge. An intellect which does not adhere to the rigors of mathematical thought, which seeks truth by means other than analytical investigation of the external world, is irrational.

This is the philosophical centerpiece of Cartesianism, named after Rene Descartes (1596-1650), one of the principal architects of the modern scientific worldview. Writing in The Tragedy of Reason (1990, pg. 74), David Roochnik observes:

There is thus a quite literal type of schizophrenia in the world bequeathed to us by the Cartesians. It is, on the one hand, hyper-rational: it seeks to extend the perview of mathematical physics throughout the universe. On the other hand, it relegates the world in which the physicist himself dwells [i. e. the identity-realm of our personal nature] to the junkpile of the irrational. We who know so much are prohibited from knowing ourselves.

After assuming what the only valid means to knowledge is, Western rationalism then imposes other assumptions upon the the external world. On pages 8-9 of a book entitled The Fire in the Equations (1994), Kitty Ferguson lists five such assumptions. These are:

1) the universe is rational (i. e. at its bedrock are laws understandable to human reason);
2) it is accessible to the senses;
3) it is contingent (i. e. its existence depends upon certain conditions);
4) it is objective (i. e. it is really "out there");
5) it is unified.

Some of these assumptions are in deep conflict with one another. But that's for later. The point we are concerned with now is a simple one: that to be a professional scholar in the Western sciences, one must load the program of these assumptions into the logical apparatus of one's mind. What these assumptions amount to is a conviction that it is possible, if we work at it, for human beings to know everything about the universe.

Yet at the same time it would certainly be wrong to argue that every last scientist on the face of the earth expects the scientific method to one day raise humanity to cosmic omniscience. In a 1992 interview, Paul Feyerabend, an influential Austrian philosopher of science with a background in physics, said:

You think that is one-day fly, this little bit of nothing, a human being--according to today's cosmology!--can figure it all out? This to me seems so crazy! It cannot possibly be true! What they figured out is one particular response to their actions, and this response gives this universe, and the reality that is behind this is laughing: "Ha ha! They think they have found me out!"

This big thing, out of which everything comes, you don't have the means. Your language has been created by dealing with things, chairs, and a few instruments. And just on this tiny earth! God is emanations, you know? And they come down and down and become more and more material. And down, down at the last emanation, you can see a little trace of it and guess at it.

On the other hand, one of the big voices for evolutionary science, the English biologist Richard Dawkins, emphatically disagrees with colleagues like Feyerabend. "Some people enjoy wallowing in a nonthreatening squalor of incomprehension. I want to understand, and understanding means to me scientific understanding!"

All right, then. We've just seen proof that scientists have starkly different opinions about where science is taking us. Diversity ki jaya! But wait a minute: does that really mean anything? After all, there's the saying:

Philosophers can be divided into two classes: those who believe that philosophers can be divided into two classes, and those who don't.

If a scientist is a scientist, he is in the same boat with other scientists even if he disagrees with them. The boat is the scientific method, which is geared to axiomatic, metaphysical assumptions. Take these assumptions away, and there would be no science left for Feyerabend and Dawkins to differ about.

So in science we have a method that purports to figure out the whole world, practiced by persons of different opinions as to whether that purport will ever be realized. To say the least, this seems a bit fuzzy. I think Werner Heisenberg, one of the leading lights of quantum physics, made the best sense out of the fuzz:

The exact sciences start from the assumption that in the end it will always be possible to understand nature, even in every new field of experience, but that we may make no a priori assumption as to the meaning of "understand".

Now, I hate to sound like I'm making a quantum leap in logic (vanishing from one point and reappearing out of nowhere at another point), but I think this supports what my Godbrother argued at the top of his essay:

Mundane scholars may appear open minded as they are open to hearing all kinds of opinions. But actually they are close minded because they are closed to accepting any path as absolute. They are shut off from even the possibility of attaining the absolute truth, due to their conviction that such truth cannot exist.

Let's try to understand this by teasing out the logical core of the statements of Heisenberg, Dawkins and Feyerabend.

Heisenberg's point is that while science is an expedition aimed at absolute knowledge, no scientist is permitted by science to proclaim before the expedition is over what that absolute knowledge will turn out be. He couldn't be a scientist if he did that.

For all Western scholars the question of what exactly lies at the end of the search for knowledge is open. That open-endedness is retained even as they argue about science as the means to that end.

Dawkins says, "It's one thing to say it's very difficult to know how the universe began, what initiated the Big Bang, what consciousness is. But if science has difficulty explaining something, there sure as hell is no one else who is going to explain it. "

Feyerabend seemed to be in disagreement, arguing, "People should not take it for granted when a scientist says, 'Everybody has to follow this way'". Still, Feyerabend affirmed that the techniques of science have their use in gaining knowledge, since they are "tools, and tools can be used in any way you see fit"; and he was adamant he was not anti-science, since he used those tools himself.

So what's to be ultimately understood by the use of these tools?

Dawkins says whatever it is, scientists can't explain it, at least right now; he's convinced that in the future nobody else but scientists will be able to explain it. Feyerabend allowed science some exploratory room at the lowest level of emanation, but he saw no hope that science will come to understand the origin of emanation.

Employing reductionism, which is essential to science, we may simplify what Heisenberg, Feyerabend and Dawkins have told us to this sutra: "We don't know. "

Moreover, nobody knows. "It cannot possibly be true", said Feyerabend, for a human being to attain absolute knowledge. "You don't have the means. " Here he was not talking only about Western scientific means. "Your language has been created by dealing with things. " All language, then, is mundane and oriented only to material objects. In seeming contrast, Dawkins holds out more hope than Feyerabend for science attaining absolute knowledge. But he admits science hasn't attained that knowledge now. He is positive nobody else will ever do it.

Dawkins and Feyerabend may disagree on so many other points, but they agree that science has not arrived at the absolute truth. Neither of them is certain that it ever will.

Let us return to the assumptions embedded in the scientific mindset and give them a more careful appraisal. We'll see that it's these assumptions that foil any hope of certainty. One is that the world can be known through the senses. Another is that the world is objectively real. But to say the world is objectively real is to say it is independent of and indifferent to sense perception. Since the time of Hume and Kant, Western philosophers and scientists have been wrestling with the question of whether the data received by our feeble and imperfect senses at all puts us in touch with the Ding-an-sicht, the world itself. As I showed in the 3-part article on atomic theory some days ago, many prominent quantum physicists do not believe that sense data is reality.

And so Heisenberg said that even if science manages one day to lay bare all of nature to scientific inspection, it is not certain what scientists will understand. The question will remain: is any of this nature we are perceiving with our senses actually real? Even if there is no more data anywhere in the universe to be discovered, that mountain of data amassed by science will not amount to an absolute truth that all scientists will be able to agree upon. This is because the only means to knowledge that scientists--indeed, all of Western man--trusts is: the untrustworthy senses.

In Truth--A History (1997, pg. 123), Oxford historian Filipe Fernandez-Armesto makes a few good points about Western man's reliance upon the senses for knowledge:

Dependence upon evidence of our senses seems ineluctable to modern westerners. In our jurisprudence, "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" is the evidence of our personal witness. Hearsay is not admitted, only facts impressed directly by observation or sensation. Though other societies may have preferred to rely on messages from a truth-world, conveyed by ordeals or oracles, our courts could hardly accept, as a defense against the charge of perjury, the claim that this world is illusory. Yet, on this scale, trust in our sensory receptors is a late and peculiar condition, of which most human societies, for most of history, seem to have been free.

For many Western people, then, if there is to be anything like absolute truth, it must be established by personal witness (direct observation of the senses), not by hearsay (spoken sound vibration). It's a bias peculiar to European-American civilization, and it is quite recent. This bias is rooted in a conviction that if truth emanates from a truth-world (e. g. Vaikuntha), that would mean this world we live in is illusory. And that just goes against a basic tenet of Western knowledge: that our world is objective and real. Hence the insistence that truth be proven by sense perception is an a priori denial that a transcendental truth-world exists.

The speculative argument of philosophers, "This world is real," "No, it is not real," is based upon incomplete knowledge of the Supreme Soul and is simply aimed at understanding material dualities. Although such argument is useless, persons who have turned their attention away from Me, their own true Self, and unable to give it up.

--Srimad-Bhagavatam 11. 22. 34

Part Two, The Poison of Relativism, follows tomorrow.

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