Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 12 November 2002

Believing and Knowing

Fuller calls his first real chapter, “Believing and Knowing”. He tells us the difference between belief and knowledge, then says we are wrong to think it! Knowledge is said to be positive, certain, trustworthy, objective, often widely held, factual and definite. Belief is not positive, uncertain, unreliable, personal, fictional and only possible. These notions are wrong. Fuller explains that they are refuted because knowledge has “boundaries and limitations”! Scientists make suppositions, have expectations, and have discovered that some things can never be known. Are you following? No! You are not alone, but Fuller has nothing more to add, at this point.

Now, just in case a Christian should be reading this, let us be clear. Knowledge is indeed prescribed by boundaries. The point of them is that whatever is known is true within them. The point of science is to find out what truth is, if it is possible. If it is not possible for science to find it out, then so far we have no reason to think that any other method can.

Fuller turns to materialism. Materialism simply means the hypothesis that the world is real. It is made of matter not ectoplasm or spirit—whatever that might be. Fuller now comes to the central tenets of this chapter of his book. From the writings of nineteenth century scientists, Fuller finds five characteristics of a material world that they then took to be essentially true. This is a crude ploy. The nineteenth century ended before queen Victoria died more than a hundred years ago. Why then should Fuller pick the beliefs of Victorian scientists to attempt to refute? The reason is that he thinks he has a chance of doing it, and, if he succeeds to some degree, the noddy-brained Christian reader will think that the clever theologian has therefore refuted science. It really is quite pathetic. Is it any wonder that Dawkins questions this foolishness?

Determinism

Nature is orderly and works according to laws that can be determined. Newton’s laws of motion are an example. Many more such laws have been found by science and work excellently allowing accurate and reliable predictions to be made. It is these predictions that have allowed technologists and engineers to make the astonishing things we all take for granted today, from mobile phones to jumbo jets, from antiseptics to safe medication and keyhole surgery. Without these scientific inventions life for many westerners would be inconceivable.

Fuller, though, does not want to argue about modern science, because he cannot win. He wants to keep science restricted to what Laplace said. Laplace died in 1827! Laplace speculated that a knowledge of the position and momentum of every particle in the universe would determine its entire history from birth to death. Laplace is called the French Newton, because he extended the work of Newton on the planetary motions and published his work in five volumes called Celestial Mechanics. This was the book that invited the enquiry from Napoleon, “Where is God in it?” and the reply from Laplace that he had no need for that hypothesis. It has always made Christians hate him.

Laplace had showed that the motions of planets in complete detail could be traced by using Newton’s laws, so his extension of his work to all particles was a reasoned speculation. It is obviously, though, not a scientific statement because there is no way that it can be tested. The data could not be collected on every particle in the universe to test it. Fuller, however, seems to think that by arguing against this supposition by Laplace that he is saying something about science. It says a great deal about Fuller and theology, but nothing at all about science. Quite hilariously, this so-called theologian uses twentieth century science to refute Laplace’s supposition, thus proving how clever he and theologians are. The simple explanation is that he is a fool, and the slightly more refined one is that he is gulling his simple-minded readership. Uh! Oh! There we go! Intemperate language. Scientific fundamentalist about.

So, Fuller trundles on to tell his readers why Laplace’s supposition is false. He does not do it by bringing in the deep and lasting thoughts of two millennia of the worlds greatest theologians. Nor does he consider that even nineteenth century scientists knew that laws had boundaries. Napoleon’s and Wellington’s gunners knew it all right because they quickly found that the flight of cannon balls did not follow Newton’s laws. Newton’s laws apply in a vacuum, not in a medium like the air which offers resistance to the flight of the projectile which has to be taken into account.

Fuller does not want to think of this. He tells us that measurements are subject to errors and these accumulate making any prediction like that supposed by Laplace impossible. It is true, of course, but irrelevant to what Laplace had supposed because his supposition was that we did have the data. As we have seen, he knew it was impossible to collect such a vast amount of data but supposed it could be known. If it could, then the history of the universe would be delineated.

Fuller meanders on with his imagined refutation by talking about billiard tables and a load of balls. The billiard ball example is taken from a “magisterial” work by Arthur Peacocke, Theology in a Scientific Age, that sounds just as stupoid as Fuller’s own book. This too is recommended to Oxford theological students.

What does Fuller conclude?

Laplace’s vision is quite beyond our powers to attain.

It took the theologian a lot of balls, deep thought and sweating brows to reach a conclusion that was transparent from the proposition. He had not noticed that Laplace was specifying information that was from the outset “quite beyond our powers to attain”. An irreverent scientist can pretend for the sake of a supposition that he knew what only God could know. Perhaps theologians do not like such presumption, but that is unfortunate for them. Doubtless Laplace, who is reported to have been a believer himself, was hoping to show that God was the Prime Mover—He set everything going then went away to cultivate His transcendental garden. It was a popular notion of the time among some theistic scientists, but rejected now as quite unneeded.

There is more to Fuller’s ignorance. He tells us that even the presence of an electron at the far side of the universe would throw his balls out of coherence within a short while. He agains shows that he had not noticed that Laplace had assumed that all of the momenta as well as positions were known at the outset, and so the pulls and pushes of the gravitation and electrical charge of the electron was already included in the data. This really is pathetic and shoddy thinking.

Still, he refuses to stop showing himself up. Laplace’s supposition is also confronted with a theoretical problem, as well as the practical ones that only he, but not Laplace, noticed. Well, theologians have no choice but to reject the real world, so most of what they do is theoretical, is it not? Here they should shine. What then is the theory they have come up with? Oh! It is not a theological theory. It is a scientific one. Right! Not theological but scientific!

What Fuller has discovered in his tortuous travels is that the position and energy of sub-atomic particles cannot be known simultaneously, according to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. It is not something that Laplace can be blamed for overlooking because it was not formulated until 100 years after he had died. Fuller though, is so clever that he can use it to prove that Laplace is a typical scientist—a fundamentalistic dunce. Even God could not have known the position and the momentum of particles separately, so Laplace’s supposition is indeed refuted theoretically, but it is science that discovered this limitation of Newtonian mechanics, as it has discovered everything else important.

What are we to conclude on determinism? The aim has been to leave the reader with the idea that scientists in their arrogance can be refuted by the reasoning of cleverer Christian theologians, but the theologian has used the age old apologetic ploy that fools no one except Christians—the straw man. Laplace is the straw man standing for scientists in general. What he supposed possible is refuted, not by idiotic ideas thought up by theological dunces, but by a later discovery of science. What Laplace supposed was possible, given the data, is not possible, because, quite apart form the physical impossibility of collecting data for the whole universe, which Laplace knew about, it is theoretically impossible to collect it in the simple way Laplace expressed it.

Has Fuller shown anything about science in all this? He has shown that a mathematical genius who died in 1827 did not know what a brainless theologian knows in 1995, when he had the simpleton’s boldness to publish things he knew nothing about, ex-scientist or theologian though he claims to be.

Induction

It was once thought that science worked simply by the process called induction. Scientists made observations and induced some law to explain them. It was argued thus by John Stuart Mill, and David Hume before him, so carried some force, but already before the nineteenth century was out, scientists had abandoned the idea. Since Fuller is writing a century later he can tell us that scientists do not work like this. He thus contrives to be a great intellect. It turns out to be marvellously easy, and a wonderful discovery of theology, that by citing what scientists believed between 100 and 200 years ago, the theologian can refute them, giving himself apparent kudos while apparently proving scientists to be fools by using the discoveries they have subsequently made. It certainly says a lot about Christianity’s pursuit of truth. The gawpers who fill the platters in church must read it with awe.

Already in the nineteenth century Whewell was advocating hypothesis and deduction as the process by which science really worked. Induction, or inference, was used to a small degree in that some observations are necessary before any hypothesis can be made, so an initial hypothesis is inferred from some initial data. Thereafter, deductions that can be tested are made from the hypothesis, and the process becomes hypothetico-deductive. Induction, such as it is, is part of experimentation—the interpretation of data to confirm or refute the current hypothesis, and propose a new one if necessary.

Karl Popper in the twentieth century relieved scientists of the task of having to prove they were right. Popper showed that no hypothesis could be proved. Some limitation might be found for any hypothesis eventually. So, hypotheses could only be shown to be false. If a hypothesis was formulated that could not be shown to be false by some test, it was not scientific. It was just a belief. Meanwhile, all hypotheses that served their purpose and had not been falsified by experimentation, were true. They were working, so even though they could not be proved forever true, they were true within their scope, and that was what was required of them.

If ever some circumstances were found for which the hypothesis was not true, it was not invalidated within the scope it had previously enjoyed. Again Newton’s laws are like this. They have not been falsified within their scope of application—at the macroscopic level—but they do not work at the microscopic level of sub-atomic particles, or at speeds near the speed of light. So scientists do not have to feel uncomfortable because they cannot prove to a Christian or anyone else that a theory is true. So long as it can be, but has not been, proved false, and is usefully making accurate predictions within the scope for which it is useful, then it is true.

Theologians do not seek to test the foundations of their beliefs. Their aim is to make their belief seem coherent. Fuller, and other theologians like him speak of finding common ground with science, but constantly they teach counter-science. Thus Fuller, once supposedly a scientist, wonders whether science actually finds out anything about the world. He thinks that the discoveries of science—what is often called science—are delusions. There is “really” no order in the universe at all.

Quite where that leaves humanity and its salvation theorists is for them to say, but they are inviting us to believe that all of the wonders we see about us are really a delusion and everything is “really” utterly random. It does not seem to deter them from using their cars and mobile phones—mere illusions, apparently. Is Fuller willing to demonstrate for us that he believes that electricity is an illusion—by holding a live wire, for example? You do not see the theologians standing by a high cliff, or on top of a multi-storey car park, wondering whether gravity is merely an illusion. They are not considering testing it in some dramatic way.

The vast corpus of observations and hypotheses that constitute science cannot hang together unless it reflects something real. We can come across illusions which fool our senses, but they can be tested because they are real. Conceivably, and this is perhaps what the theologian means, the whole of reality could be temporary like the froth thrown up by a breaking wave, but it is still real however temporary it might be.

Consumed by a burning idiocy, Fuller tells us Popper must be wrong because scientists do not spend their time trying to falsify their best hypotheses. Indeed they do not, and, if Popper argued this then he was wrong. Popper’s criterion was that a hypothesis should be falsifiable, not that it must be falsified. Science would be extremely easy if it were a matter of proposing false hypotheses. Scientists leave this waste of time to theologians.

A scientific hypothesis is proposed precisely so that explanations can be given and predictions can be made. Hypotheses that do this lead to fresh discoveries and are called fruitful. This property is part of the evidence that an hypothesis is true. Like a correctly placed piece in a jigsaw puzzle, it shows where other pieces go. An hypothesis might seem valid in explaining some data, but progress cannot be made with it. Then often another scientist—an essential feature about science is its openness—realises that the hypothesis is a hindrance and is inadequate, and finds a new one. It is an idea of half-wits that scientists themselves must falsify their own ideas. Such a science would be a futile pastime. What would be the point of spending a lifetime trying to refute an hypothesis that is true? It would be a lifetime wasted. It is the use of hypotheses that eventually shows up their limitations, not some gormless exercise in trying to disprove them.

It is not uncommon for scientists, especially elderly ones, to defend outdated hypotheses against better ones emerging, usually proposed by the younger generation. It is less likely to happen in experimental science like physics, where a definitive experiement can be devised, than it is in historical sciences, where data have to be searched for and often are not clear cut. Scientists are human beings. Unlike Popes, they never present themselves as infallible. Humans often find it is difficult to abandon a worn out but comfortable pair of slippers. In short, they get too attached to an hypothesis that is no longer the best. Unless they can give it up, they might as well retire. Theologians are not in the same situation. Their slippers are 2000 years old and well worn out but they refuse to throw them away, full of holes as they are.

Rationality

Scientists are not rational. This is Fuller’s new discovery, but it did not come from a theologian, but, would you believe, a scientist called Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn thought about how science was conducted and decided that much of it is normal and non-controversial, using the hypotheses already established to solve particular problems such as diagnosing illness, analysing the constitution of things and gathering data for monitoring.

In any field of science, the currently accepted corpus of data and hypotheses Kuhn called a paradigm. What happens on occasions is that the paradigm gets increasingly unworkable and eventually a new hypothesis is proposed at a fundamental level. A recent example is the proposal that dinosaurs were not cold-blooded lizards but were warm-blooded—more like birds. Such hypotheses cannot simply be decided. The evidence is contradictory, but the new idea points in new directions. Things previously that seemed irrelevant now are relevant and by looking at them closer, the two contending hypotheses are eventually decided. Commonly, as seen above, older scientists will tend to be orthodox, and back the traditional view, while younger scientists tend to back the newer view.

We are not talking here of people just with different opinions seeing who can shout loudest or longist, like the medieval theologians called Schoolmen. This argument depends upon evidence, and both sides are stimulated to gather evidence for their own view. What happens is that one side begins to yield as one after another among the experts decide that they cannot maintain their position in the face of the evidence, and cross over to the other. Most often, the new hypothesis prevails. Only because the old one was rocky was it necessary for the new one to be put forward, but, necessarily the new one challenges deeply established ideas. The dialectic leads to a new hypothesis that might be less than the original challenger, but explains the data better than the old one. In the dinosaur case, for example, some dinosaurs were only semi-warm-blooded, keeping their heat simply by being large, not because they used homeostasis.

In all the main essentials scientists do not dissent from what Kuhn describes. Theologians however do not have evidence and depend upon citing authority. Since scientists accept Kuhn, he has become a scientific authority and theologians can dissect his works for sentences to use to confront scientists. Needless to say, although scientists accept Kuhn overall, they feel no obligation therefore to accept every word that Kuhn utters. Fuller has the theologian’s approach, and here he begins quoting Kuhn:

“Paradigm choice can never be unequivocally settled by logic and experiment alone”. In other words during a crisis period, science itself may actually be said to proceed at other than a rational intellectual level. The choice of a new paradigm can be influenced by all sorts of things, aesthetic taste, ideological stance, intuition, and so on.

Fuller wants us to believe that the choice of a scientific paradigm is arbitrary, or partly so. He uses the words “science itself” to suggest that all science is rendered irrational by irrational choices of paradigm. Yet no paradigm effects the whole of science. The Copernican revolution and the replacement of Newtonian mechanics by quantum mechanics, both cited by Fuller, did not alter whole swaths of science, and quantum mechanics is irrelevant to all of the science that does not deal with minute particles.

That however is the minor sleight of hand. It is plain from Fuller’s final quoted sentence that he is talking about individual scientists, and science is not determined by individual scientists—not even scientific paradigms. Kuhn is as clear as can be that scientific paradigms are arrived at by an extended debate of all those able to present evidence and with suitable expertise. In such a debate, the features Fuller highlights are immaterial to the outcome. Fuller should get out of the lecture theatre and back into the pulpit where he can talk whatever tripe he likes and be loved. Better still he could rejoin the choir. He is singing to the gallery.

The features he mentioned might indeed influence any single scientist devising a hypothesis, or perhaps even small groups, but they cannot withstand the criticism of a large group of peers in the relevant field. Scientists freely admit that intuition and aesthetics help them arrive at conclusions, and doubtless ideology does too, but any idea put forward must be the best one available to do the job. Arbitrary factors do not come into it. If they did, one would have to argue that there are always a large number of competing hypotheses, any of which can be arbitrarily chosen. That is not the case.

You will notice that Fuller is still answering the nineteenth century scientists with twentieth century answers. He wants to look smart to the ignorant, and evidently does not care that he looks ignorant to everyone else. He proves this by wondering why Einstein’s hypothesis that explained the photoelectric effect did not involve little angels kicking out electrons from the metal surface in pique because the light had woken them up. You have to keep reassuring yourself that this is not a spoof, but Fuller means it all seriously. He actually calls them fairies not angels, but angels are Christian fairies, so he should have said angels to be consistent. Fuller thinks it arbitrary that the angel hypothesis was not considered. He must think that Maxwell’s demon was real.

He is aware of criteria that scientists do use in choosing between alternative theories. The main one, he does not mention, is that there are not thousands of theories battling it out. A key criterion is simplicity, parsimony, or Occam’s Razor. William of Occam got so fed up with the theologians called Schoolmen making up whatever they liked to explain the mysteries of Christianity that he proposed his “Razor” to cut out the unnecessary ones. It is probably one of the few things that science took from theology.

There are rarely many simple hypotheses to explain a set of observations, though doubtless many could be devised if complexity was no object. Often the entities used in a theory are already prescribed by the scientific situation. Constants and relevant factors, like say viscosity and temperature, are given, so the proposed hypothesis is restrained by these givens. Then again, hypotheses are not conjured up from scratch but make use of hypotheses that already work. Moreover, workers in a field will be the first to have the chance of offering a hypothesis, and will publish it with their observations. Provided that the explanation is well-founded and works by making adequate predictions, then other workers will not challenge it. Nevertheless it does happen. Einstein explained heat capacity but it was not adequate, and Debye offered a better explanation. This openness of science helps to ensure that it is not arbitrary as Fuller implies, though he should know better.

Sometimes the word elegance is used, and perhaps this is what Fuller meant by aesthetics. Humanity is part of Nature and it should not be surprising that what we have evolved to suit should seem elegant to us. What is elegant is what pleases us, and that is how we imagine Nature is. Nevertheless, Einstein’s theory of heat capacity is elegant but incorrect. Debye’s is less elegant, because more complicated in taking into account a better model of reality, and therefore is correct. Use of accepted science and fruitfulness have been noted. Both are criteria for use in these matters which are fairly self-evident and not arbitrary.

Fuller is deranged to pretend that science proceeds by a neatly prescribed sequence of experiment and interpretive logic, although these are obviously a considerable part of it. Pioneering science is done at the limits of our instrumental and theoretical capabilities, so why should the procedure be imagined as being smooth and faultless. Remember, science is open, and, in the pioneering fields, scientists are competing to be the first in the new ground. It means that work done is assiduously checked by rivals, either to expose it as faulty, or to develop it to gain an advantage.

Results sincerely gathered might not agree in different labs through unchecked systematic errors, and the exchange of results allows different schools to improve their instruments until they do tally. Meanwhile they are seeking explanatory hypotheses. When early results come out, each lab will probably have their own ideas about how they should be explained. With the publications of the data, independent theoreticians can consider them and perhaps propose better hypotheses.

Watson and Crick explained the x-ray data of Wilkins and Franklin, and so discovered the double helix. A likely hypothesis is not automatically accepted. It was important in the instance of the helix, what was on the inside and what was on the outside of the helix, sugars or phosphates. Watson and Crick were worried that the great American chemist, Linus Pauling would beat them to the answer. In short, this is Popperism in action. The theoreticians try to improve on other hypotheses and in so doing they are falsifying them.

Eventually a likely hypothesis gets broad agreement and is used in labs everywhere. If it proves fruitful, then it is considered correct. This is just what happened to the double helix of Watson and Crick, and now it is backed up by such a mass of evidence that there is no doubt at all that it is correct. Everyone is obliged to come on board, even if they had been firmly opposed earlier, or to retire.

The process is not necessarily tidy, but its very openness and the multiple contributions of different scientists often from all over the world, is what guarantees that it is objective and not arbitrary. Only evidence is relevant. Opinion is of no interest to anyone, unless it has a bearing on the evidence. It is therefore the precise opposite of theology where opinion is all that matters, and there is no such thing as evidence.

Intuition is important to individual scientists working on a problem. It is the unconscious working of the mind, and is valuable only for minds that have something in them. Most professional scientists will have had the Archimedes experience, but whatever the flash of gestalt is, it has to match the evidence or it is worthless.

Objectivity

Turning to objectivity, Fuller gleefully finds that scientists are all subjective beings. It seems a surprise to him. He seems not to have expected that the objectivity of science is a function of the enterprise as a whole not necessarily of the scientists themselves. No scientist can do anything but work subjectively, despite training that emphasises trying to be sufficiently detached from the work not to be tempted to fiddle it. So properly trained scientists are taught to be scrupulously objective in recording what they observe and not what they want to observe. Scientists report their work in a more or less standardised format, in such a way that any other interested worker can follow and repeat precisely what has been done. If the second worker repeats the work precisely, the results should be the same, within the bounds of experimental error. That is the basis of scientific objectivity. Scientists who try to publish bogus results in this system would be exposed.

For some reason, Fuller spends some time relating a story about a man called Schrödinger who had a cat. No one knew whether the cat was alive or dead, and Fuller seems to think this has some bearing on objectivity. He also speaks about Kekulé dreaming about the structure of benzene—an example of scientific intuition. Fuller seems to think that an explanation that appeared in a dream could not be rational and therefore proves science is not. Since the religious stories of Christianity are full of such dreams, he presumably thinks the theology is irrational too for accepting such nonsense, but the difference is that answers dreamt by scientists still have to match up with reality.

Kekulé is said to have dreamt of a lot of snakes some of which he saw biting their own tails. This gave Kekulé the clue that benzene was a ring of six carbon atoms. Fuller seems to think that Kekulé published a paper saying that benzene consisted of snakes biting their tails. Fuller would have dreamt of tiny angels biting their toenails. He would have thought it prejudiced if this was not considered as a valid hypothesis. Physical methods such as electron diffraction show that benzene does not consist of snakes or angels, and Kekulé was right when he took his dream to be a clue and not literally true. The report he made was perfectly rational, but poor Fuller just cannot get it. He is the one who seems seriously irrational in his book. Despite that, this cacophony of nonsense is taught at Oxford funded by a grant from the Templeton Foundation, a Fort Knox of Christian gold.

Reductionism

Reductionism seems to be considering the whole to be no more than the sum of its parts. Everything is, of course, the sum of its parts but the operative words here are “no more than”. Fuller thinks scientists are reductionists, yet even a theologian ought to be able to see that, if it were true, scientists would have little to do. His authority is not any theologian but a twentieth century anarchist called Paul Feyerabend. Eclecticism is not the right word for this man’s theology. Desperation probably is.

Feyerabend was generally considered to be deranged even by his peers, but is much admired by theologians because he has a lot to say against science. Since he openly states that Voodoo is no worse than science, most scientists would suggest such a man should have been given a chair of theology at Oxford and invited to give courses financed by the Templeton Foundation in the overlap between Christianity and Voodoo from which Christianity might hope to benefit. Feyerabend, from a quotation supplied by Fuller, seemed to dislike scientists because they “insinuate” things, think they are infallible, think they have the key to truth and think they have the only one. It sounds from this as if he really meant Christians but there is no doubt about who he did mean. He is also intemperate in language, but Fuller is ready to forgive him this as an ally.

Fuller likes him because he seems fond of asserting things with no evidence, which is not surprising because he did not believe there was any such thing as scientific method, so he was someone a theologian could deal with. Feyerabend was a libertarian but, unlike some of them, he has nothing to say and he says it at great length. “Do what thou wilt”, was the motto of Aleister Crowley, the occultist given the epithet, the Great Beast, by British tabloids. Feyerabend updates this, from the seventeenth century language Crowley likes, to modern colloquial, but it amounts to the same: “Anything goes”. Is Fuller slyly telling us something about the antics of modern theologians? Anyway, Fuller likes him because he has a “holistic” view of science. More hilarity for the Hilary term.

Science reduces everything to its parts. That is the nineteenth century attitude that Fuller is still hoping to beat into submission with the arguments, as ever, of twentieth century scientists, and a few seriously cracked pots. Of course, science is reductionist in the sense that nothing can be understood until its constituent parts can be. When the parts are noted and understood, their relationship with respect to each other is determined, and then how they effect each other and ultimately there is a chance of seeing how the whole works.

We have seen that Christians are self-deluded, and they readily accept here that scientists do not realise that the whole works at all. Their theological gurus, like Fuller, tell them that scientists are reductionists and they believe them. They invite their sheep to think that a scientist does not understand that an assembled watch does something that the separated cogs and wheels do not do, namely continuously tell the time. That is stupid enough, but the sheep nod and baa their assent. It is an infantile ploy of insecure people, but it has the desired effect on the uncritical self-admirers called Christians. By pointing out this devasting revelation, theologians hope to get some glory. Peregrinus lives! Halleluyah!

The poor nineteenth century dolts who had not mastered clairvoyance could not know about the twentieth century EPR experiment which seems to show action at a distance in elememtary particles, but Fuller is so clever that he does know it! It is a peculiar, and as yet mysterious phenomenon in quantum mechanics, although David Bohm’s formulation of quantum mechanics might explain it. As yet, it is unexplained because it is at the frontier of scientific exploration, and might lead us into an entirely new land. Fuller mentions it because it shows that science is full of surprises, something that scientists do not realise but Christians do.

Fuller has found a falsification of the nineteenth century straw man he set up. Unfortunately, the straw man was just that, an effigy and not even what many nineteenth century scientists believed, but he has falsified it by his devastating use of twentieth century science, as usual. A twentieth century theologian who has never discovered anything worthwhile finds that through the genius of twentieth century scientists, and the holy gift of hindsight, he can project himself as smarter than nineteenth century scientists, without whose endeavours he would never hae had a chance of getting a PhD. and without the Enlightenment that preceded them, he would have been living in an anchorage begging for scraps from passing serfs instead of submitting for the unholy gold of Sir John Templeton.

Theological Perspectives

Having demolished the silly ideas of the nineteenth century scientists, one might have thought he was now about to advance to the twentieth century to demolish the scientists of this century next, but these are his unwitting allies, and it would spoil the illusion that he can demolish science if he moved to science that he not only could not demolish but needed to give the illusion that he could demolish an older generation of scientists. So, straightway, he turns to what he calls “theological perspectives”. Will he now tell us the wonderful contributions theology has made to human wellbeing? Er, no! He will tell us how his “refutation” of nineteenth century science makes twentyfirst century theologians feel better.

• If the world is not fully determined in the way of the Laplace supposition, then Christians are actually choosing salvation when they use their free will to be Christians.
• Because scientists cannot make positive assertions of what is true, the theologians are justified in talking about things of which no valid assertions can be made at all.
• Theology is not rational, and theologians are desperate therefore to show that science is the same
• Theology is entirely subjective, and theologians are desperate to show that science is too.
• Science is accused of being reductionist as an empty insult, but also so that theologians can claim that religion is holistic in some way.

Fuller notes that our knowledge of God is only partial. The part that we know is what God is not. He sees some similarity here with the criterion of falsifiability of scientifically valid hypotheses. Perhaps he means that if we know what God is not, then what we do not know is what he is. We do not know that God is not the devil, but that cannot be the theologian’s intention. The point about a scientific hypothesis, it cannot be stressed too much, is that it makes predictions that can be tested.

No hypothesis about God can be tested, except those that demonstrate He is not real, or does not exist at all. God, according to Matthew, tells us to take no thought of the morrow, and to ask and it shall be given us. These are testable commandments that God in the form of the Son has issued to His Christian supporters. Only a few of them obey them and they depend upon the fact that most do not. Thus the majority have to disobey their God to allow the minority to get away with being idle. If these commandments are meant to apply to all Christians, then none of them would work or plan for the future. God will provide. No one believes it. As a test of God, the majority of Christians refute it.

Where theological statements can be tested, they fail, and otherwise they must be arbitrary. Theologians have no novel criteria for the truth of a theological statement. Scientific statements have to meet the criteria of testing against real evidence. Do theological statements have to meet the criteria of testing against unreal evidence? They are “true” because high ranking clergy say hey are true. Religion is based on authority and nothing else, and authority is used only for self-aggrandisement in this world.

Even many believers realise that their belief is utterly unrational. Theologians cannot deny it, and their aim is to show that the rational pursuit of science is actually not so rational. Fuller concludes that both science and theology are a bit of both reason and unreason. Even if science concedes to theology that it does have to put up with some irrational elements as a plainly human and therefore fallible endeavour, the question is one of degree. Theology is essentially irrational whereas science is essentially rational. The irrationality of science comes at the level of the individual scientist whose contribution to the whole is tiny, but the very core of theology is irrational. It is irrational to believe that imaginary entities are real.

Science involves subjectivity in the same way and necessarily because it is mainly an individual enterprise, but whatever it propounds as scientific must work in reality and be repeatable by others. Christianity is entirely subjective. Fuller says Christians have lots of evidence for their faith but they cannot explain it. He means it is entirely subjective, and therefore entirely psychological. No one can see someone else’s pink elephants.

Fuller’s conclusion is that knowledge and belief are opposite ends of a scale. The knowledge end of it is labelled “full” and the belief end is labelled “empty”. Science is filling its end of the scale with knowledge. Theology is filling its end of the scale with nothing.

That is the end of the chapter, but he adds a couple of annexes, or diversions, as he calls them.

Is God Real?

Apparently Don Cupitt thinks God is a religious idea, meaning there is no God outside the human imagination, a God that scienists can accept. Someone called Anthony Freeman identifies God with the totality of his values and ideals. No scientists would object to this either except to wonder why it has to be called God. No doubt this game of saying what individual people regard as God that is not God as it is normally understood could go on for a long time. That is the nature of theology. It is what anyone cares to think.

Most professional Christians will not wear any such dilutions of the traditional supernatural God. What Cupitt thinks is imaginary and Freeman thinks is a collection of personal values, Fuller calls an “objective reality”. N T Wright says knowledge is never independent of the knower, though it is about realities that are independent of the knower. Thus, there can be no such thing as common knowledge, the very thing that science aims to establish. This Christian is again trying to make out there is no such thing as objective knowledge, allowing space for God—objective reality as He is—to get accepted as a subjective experience. But, how do Christians all get to believe the same thing if there is no knowledge independent of the knower. Maybe it is a clever way of explaining the multiplication of Christian sects, a feature that God forgot to allow for. These are all different theologians’ tricks of expediency. Anything will do that will permit some conception of God that the sheep can accept.

Reductionism Revisited

In the second annex, Fuller goes further into reductionism. He agrees that what he calls methodological reductionism is necessary for science, and he has no objections to it. He means, what we have already described as the need to analyse in order to synthesise. He adds ontological reductionaism, that things are “nothing but” their parts, and epistemological reductionism, that all knowledge can be reduced to physics. Fuller is tilting at windmills.

No scientist believes that generally anything is “nothing but” its parts, unless “its parts” are defined widely to include their relationships and interactions with each other too. In other words, a lighted match is not just an unstruck match and a matchbox—its two parts—but it is also the interaction of one with the other—its three parts, not to mention the oxygen in the air. Water is hydrogen and oxygen, but these two gases can coexist without chemical combination as long as there is no additional source of energy, so water has oxygen, hydrogen and energy as its component parts. In fact the reaction releases energy, so only the tiniest spark is needed to set off the explosion.

Some people might think that all knowledge could be reduced to physics—in principle—but no one thinks it will be done, certainly in a feasible time scale. Scientists are concerned with what can be done in practice. If only principles are concerned, then it is the realm of philosophy. Repeatedly, we have noted that science is rooted in reality and it is tried and tested in it. Even theoretical physics addresses real problems, and abstract mathematics answer questions in unusual real life situations.

Nevertheless scientists, despite what Christians and their other detracters like to say, are imaginative people, and they are as entitled as any philosopher or theologian to speculate. That is what Laplace was doing, and modern scientists can do the same. They are not making scientific statements even though they are scientists. Fuller, with his certificate, braggs to us that he is a scientist but still believes the impossible, yet when a reasonable scientist speculates that eventually everything will be explicable in terms of physics, Fuller objects.

He tells us that these different types of reductionism are “hotly debated”, and perhaps they are in the theological common rooms of the universities—but nowhere else! Scientists do not have the least interest in it, except for those who decide to be theologians. The scientists answer all this hogwash in practice, as they have always done. Christians who object to science will be giving up their cars, their TVs, their computers, their telephones, refusing their electricity supply, their medical care, and returning to Catholicism, if they are not already because contraception is scientific. The theologians did not invent these, but doubtless they will tell us that they really came from God. When theologians ruled the world, so did disease, pestilence and plague.

Theologians do not like reductionism because it gets rid of God. If reductionism is a proper way to think of the world, then God, at best, is the totality of Nature. That is a sensible way of seeing God, but it will not do for Christians who have already persuaded themselves that God is beyond Nature, yet before long Fuller is arguing precisely that this is what God is except, of course, that the totality of Nature is beyond Nature. Ho hum!

One of the troubles with Christians is that they hang on to the Gnostic idea that the world is wicked, even though it is supposed to be God’s own Creation. They think that when Eve persuaded Adam to bite an apple, wickedness forever entered the world. On that basis, God cannot be Nature, unless God is Himself wicked. No Christian ever pauses to wonder whether He really is. If they thought He was then they would have become Gnostics. Nevertheless, a wicked God would suit the way the world seems to be more than the supposed loving one that Christians want to please.

Where too is the gaps for angels, spirits, demons, Satan, heaven and hell, and eternal life—all the things that make life worth living for batty Christians? They could accept a Natural God, but their whole raison d’etre would disappear—unthinkable! Yet, this is exactly why Christians cannot be scientists. It thrusts their unreasonableness down your throat. They have what they believe, and the world must be made to fit it. That is the purpose of mendacious theologians, won over to the services of Mammon, by its providers like the Templeton Foundation.

Fuller wants to talk about something he calls anti-reductionism. Like kiddies playing at post-offices, they go through their infantile motions imitating the real thing as they perceive it in their imperfect way, inventing appropriate sounding words that actually mean nothing, but convince the kiddies themselves. So, these theological kiddies invent anti-reductionism as the name that actually means science. It is what actually happens in science, but the theologians pretend does not so that they can correct the scientists! Risable!

As if to show that this interpretation is correct, professor Fuller, waving his certificate, tells us that a water molecule is not wet, and a single neurone cannot think. Astonishing, or at least it must astonish scientists, according to the theologians, because they do not realize these profound things—they are reductionists not anti-reductionists!

The “anti-reductionist approach” to science has important consequences, don’t you know? Not for science, but for theology. It can have no consequences for science because it is science. For theologians, it allows for the existence of God as the topmost property of Nature. Then, it allows for mystery. What is mysterious seems to be what emerges from the combinations of the parts of Nature.

Fuller is mixing his apples and pears again. He thinks what we discover about Nature is an emergent property of it. It is as if wetness did not happen until we looked for it. The emergent properties of Nature must already have emerged from Nature over the several billions of years that it has existed. The peculiar properties noticed in the EPR experiment and chaos theory were already present in Nature even though we had not noticed them. They are emerging into our own consciousness, but they were already present in Nature. Wetness has emerged long ago, though perhaps it needed consciousness to emerge from brains for anyone to explictly notice—except that God is supposed, apparently to have emerged conscious from the outset—immensely huge and beautifully formed, so to speak. Theologians ignore that animal consciousness required the evolution of brains, but apparently not God’s consciousness.

The job of scientists is to explain Nature, but Fuller portrays scientists as deluded mini-gods who are putting it together as they go along. As they add a few more parts, suddenly they are surprised by an emergent property. The poor man cannot seem to see that we discover from science what Nature already is. There is nothing emergent about EPR, or that non-linear systems can be chaotic. They always were so, but we discovered it, and it came as a surprise to us because we did not expect it. Scientists are humble before Nature. Not theologians, who expect that God can do anything he likes, so they cannot be surprised.

It gets sillier. Anti-reductionism supports the notion of panentheism, yet another term coined to find a place for the God of the theologians. If the full interaction of all the parts of Nature gives rise to a new property called God, then that God is part of Nature no less than wetness is a property of water. In the same way, life arises out of Nature, and thought arises out of Nature. Christians, however, must have their transcendental Father at all costs. So, they say the ultimate property of Nature transcends it yielding the transcendent God. This is an idea that pleases Christian theologians, but you will notice immediately that it is just a notion they have made up to save the Father while preserving a sort of pseudo-science. They could have made up any other notion and it would have had just as much validity. None.

The logic of their emergent property idea is that God is Nature. That is called pantheism, not panentheism, and it is because Christians do not like pantheism that they have invented panentheism instead. Even then, it is not Christian because of the Christian addiction to the ancient Creation myths in the Jewish scriptures that they insist are God’s own Word written down when the holy ghost could sit down with a human amanuensis and dictate God’s thoughts. God creates Nature in the bible, and God is a property of the Nature He created. The universe is the body of the panentheistic God which was an emergent property of it, but God can live without His body. Wetness lives!

More imperfect analogies “emerge” from this woolly nonsense, this time from the majesty of Arthur Peacocke, whose wonders have already been noted. If the universe is the body of God and God has a mind, then a little divine psychosomatic influence can explain miracles. This is meant to be an improvement on the old idea that God could do as he likes, but it has a little of the Schoolmen about it. Several intermediate entities are dreamed up that are unnecessary to the Christian believer, but merely to try to effect some sort of link with what the theologian thinks is science. Occam is dead!

Appendix

Steven Weinberg on Reductionism

It is fashionable to object to “reductionism”. Most Christians do and some scientists do. That Christians should object seems curious. The biblical scholar, Norman Gottwald says every method of knowing involves reduction of what is studied to regularities in, and to abstractions about, the phenomena and their relationships.

• Literary criticism reduces texts.
• History reduces events.
• Sociology reduces social structures and processes.

No discipline is more reductionist than Christianity. Christianity reduces everything to God. Theology traffics in reductionism by having to take on board discoveries in scientific knowledge, especially in biblical history, evolution and creation. Yet it is Christians and their scientific and philosophic apologists who are leading the campaign against science. Their bases are that:

• some people, including some scientists, deny that the search for the final laws of nature has its own special sort of value,
• others do not appreciate the reductionist tradition in science, a tradition that in our time is embodied in the physics of elementary particles and fields.

Steven Weinberg in reply to Freeman Dyson, a grateful receiver of Templeton’s Christian gelt, has explained the intricacies of scientific reductionism, perhaps in the hope of showing to Dyson’s Christian admirers what it is really all about. It is pretty pointless, if so, because Christians do not want to know any facts that contradict their own opinions. That is God’s truth!

In 1992, John Cornwell at Cambridge UK, convened a group of well-known scientists and philosophers to discuss reductionism. Freeman Dyson contributed negatively to the Cambridge seminar, having a “low opinion” of reductionism, even though he helped develop quantum field theory, the basis of the reduction of all of elementary particle physics to the standard model proposed by Weinberg.

Freeman Dyson defines reductionism in physics as the attempt to reduce the world of physical phenomena to a finite set of fundamental equations. He praises the work on quantum mechanics of Schrödinger and Dirac as “triumphs of reductionism” in which “bewildering complexities of chemistry and physics were reduced to two lines of algebraic symbols”. Dyson does not question the value of the discovery of the fundamental equations. He seems to be saying that there are other problems worth tackling too. Who denies it?

Science is properly called reductionist. It is like a vast chart showing all the laws and principles of science and their interconnectedness. Whatever is scientific is connected. By following the conections, they all spread from a common source, an ultimate law of nature. These are Dyson’s “a finite set of fundamental equations”. Whatever depends on laws closer to the core equations are considered as less fundamental. It is not a value judgement but merely a taxonomy. The reductionist program of physics is the search for the core equations of Nature. It has a long history that for Christians no doubt shows how terrible the human race is without the crucified god.

1. The ancient Greek philosophers were reductionist. They proposed that there were four elements from which things were made. Then different philosophers supposed that one or other of them was a prime element, and really everything was made of that.
2. Over two thousand years later Isaac Newton proposed that light and chemistry would someday be understood by mechanical principles, applied to “the smallest particles of nature”. He was reductionist.
3. By the end of the nineteenth century physicists and chemists had succeeded in explaining much of what was known about chemistry and heat, from the properties of some ninety types of atoms. They were reductionist.
4. In the 1920s, physicists explained the properties of atoms, and radioactivity and light, using quantum mechanics. The theory was applied to particles more elementary than atoms—electrons, protons, and a few others—with fields of force that surround them, like magnetic or electric fields. It was reductionism at work.
5. By the mid-1970s it had become clear that the properties of these particles and all other known particles could be understood as mathematical consequences of a quantum theory called the standard model. The fundamental equations of the standard model do not deal with particles and fields, but with fields of force alone—particles are just bundles of field energy. That is reductionist.

Why are even scientists, involved in the supposed heinous practice, joining in the denigration of reductionism in science? Christian gold? Certainly that! Confusion perhaps? Propaganda? Not knowing what reductionism is is one problem. Two major distinctions need to be made. Ernst Mayr calls them “explanatory” and “theory” reductionism.

• Explanatory reductionism seeks understanding of the way things behave by examining their constituents.
• Theory reductionism seeks understanding of the way things behave by finding the universal laws of Nature that explain the behaviour, subject to initial conditions.

Theory and explanatory reductionism are confused because much of practical science has been finding what things are made of—explanatory reductionism—effectively analysis, often a necessary stage of finding out how anything does what it does. Once the components have been discovered and their relationships to each other have been noted, the proof that the phenomenon is understood is to synthesise it. In physics, this synthesis is a theoretical synthesis, meaning that a theory has to be found that will explain the phenomenon from its components and what is already known in science.

Scientists from Galileo to Newton could study motion and put together a lot of observations that constituted the components of motion. Seemingly complicated motions such as the acceleration of a falling object and the motions of the planets were reduced to a set of observations of positions and times. Newton then synthesised these by theory reductionism into a set of simple equations that completely explained the motions subject to some conditions.

When Einstein explained Newton’s theories of motion and gravitation, he too used theory reductionism. He synthesised a new physical principle, the general principle of relativity, which is embodied in his theory of curved spacetime. Steven Weinberg thinks that physics has gone beyond the explanatory reductionism level in the sense that particles cannot be analysed in the conventional sense any more. The properties of interacting particles have to be studied, and, in these conditions, statements about particles being composed of other particles do not have a precise meaning. To say a proton is three quarks is convenient but imprecise because any quark is intimately surrounded by other quarks, antiquarks and other particles, including protons. For a brief moment a quark is made of protons. Theory reductionism—alias theoretical synthesis—explains this.

Perhaps the main reason for the opposition to reductionism, and specifically to the perspective provided by theory reductionism, is that it removes much of the traditional motivation for belief in God.

• Darwin and Wallace explained evolution as a consequence of adaptation via heredity and natural selection, leading to a chain of being including humanity.
• Then twentieth-century biologists explained heredity and adaptation as a result of genes and mutations.
• Then Crick and Watson explained the working of genes from the structure of the DNA molecule.
• The reductionist Schrödinger equation yields the DNA molecule as a solution given a large enough computer.

To understand the world, not only the laws of nature need to be known, but also the initial conditions. The initial conditions may ultimately be derived from the laws of nature, but we are a long way from that. Even so, the evolution of humanity, and with it its various ideas of God, are explained in principle by solving the Schrödinger equation! Christians resent this, though it has happened before:

1. Thales’ ocean had no room for Poseidon.
2. Epicurus adopted the atomistic theory of Democritus to subvert belief in the Olympian gods.
3. Laplace had no need of the hypothesis of God to explain the movement of the celestial spheres.

The best scientists are secular humanists and are often motivated by a disgust of religion, but opinion does not bear on whether reductionism is the right line in science. It is in practice and theory.

The moral philosopher, alias Christian apologist, Mary Midgley tilts at windmills. She seems to have a fear that physics will become a sort of Big Brother that will force her to use Newspeak in her everyday life or her philosophical discussions.

What, for instance, about a factual statement like “George was allowed home from prison at last on Sunday?” How will the language of physics convey the meaning of “Sunday?” or “home?” or “allowed?” or “prison?” or “at last?” or even “George?”

What about it, indeed? As Weinberg observes, no physicists are trying to use physics to convey these meanings. While Nature is logically made up of its constituents, that is not necessarily the practical way to approach problems. In meteorology, the weather people do not currently use gas densities and compositions, latent heat, fluid mechanics and so on to predict the weather, though they might eventually. Supercomputers linked directly to satellites to pull down vast amounts of atmospheric data would be able to do it, but no one is trying to do what is presently impossible.

The determinist goal is accurate prediction. Weinberg warns that determinism is logically distinct from reductionism, but the two doctrines go together because the reductionist goal of explanation is shown by making correct predictions. The atmosphere behaves the way it does because of well understood laws of aerodynamics, heat and fluid flow, such as convection, and so on, but these are not the practical theories used to predict the weather. For that, cyclones, anti-cyclones and hot and cold fronts are more practical. The cyclones and fronts themselves are understood in terms of the more basic laws, but to explain the weather, the motions of the larger entities are more relevant. Cold fronts are the way they are because of the properties of air and water vapour which in turn are the way they are because of the principles of chemistry and physics. Reductionism shows autonomous laws of weather logically independent of the principles of physics do not exist. And George is arguably even more complicated than the north Atlantic weather.

The theological buzzword is “emergence”. Phenomena emerge from complicated systems that would require incredible sophistication to model from, say, a molecular level. Life seems to be a phenomenon that emerges from the chemistry of complicated molecules. Mind emerges from the biology of complicated arrangements of neurones. Whether George is happy to be out of jail is a question that is interesting in a different way from nerve cells. Nerve cells are interesting in a different way from the atoms that constitute them.

When phenomena like mind and life emerge, the rules they obey are not independent truths, but follow scientific principles at a deeper level—macroscopic physics and chemistry, and microsopic elementary particles obeying the rules of the standard model. Startling properties emerging, like the motions of electrons in metals, superconductivity at low temperatures or superfluidity in the same conditions, are like the emergence of life and mind, but are understood. There is no reason to think life and mind will not be.

Scientists have known for decades the way slime mould colonies ebb and flow in response to changing nutrients, or the way cell membranes form. In water, fatty molecules called phospholipids assemble into double layers with their water-hating tails huddled together inside and their water-loving heads facing outwards making structures like cell membranes. Tiny micelles made from single layers of phospholipid molecules spontaneously assemble within the protoplasm of cells and have distinct boundaries.

Such new features are called “emergent” properties. Some scientists think they are a feature of Nature. Nature has a set of organising principles that determine the arrangement of atoms or electrons in materials producing new properties. No doubt some will think it is God! Meanwhile, its name is “complex adaptive matter”, and the researchers have formed an Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM) in New Mexico.

Self-organisation eventually leads to the emergence of life itself, but nobody knows where self-organisation comes from. Two key principles seem to be what have been called “frustration”, because it is a tug of war between two opposites, and “funnelling”. Frustration makes matter grow and change in unstable non-linear ways, and, under the right conditions, it might snap into a state with new, unexpected properties.

George Whitesides of Harvard University has shown self-organisation on our own scale, with many millimetre-sized iron balls put in a plastic Petri dish, and propelled with a rotating bar magnet under the dish. The balls swarm around inside the plastic dish as the magnet rotates. At first the swarm is disordered, but then it forms into concentric rotating rings. In each ring, the balls follow one another along precise but invisible tracks. Soon the balls in each track are perfectly equidistant. Finally, one ball in each ring comes to a dead stop. The other balls in each track line up behind this leader in a tiny arc and stay there, even though the magnet is still rotating. A suggested cause is tribocharging, electric charge forming on the iron spheres by friction, but details are not understood.

To repair DNA or take oxygen around the body, the amino acids that constitutes a protein have to fold into a particular shape, the only shape that will allow the protein to do its job. The overall energy of a protein depends on how its atoms are arranged, and the associated attractive and repulsive forces. Each of the various shapes the amino-acid chain can adopt requires a certain energy. Alter its shape and its energy changes. High energy arrangements of the amino acids are less stable and resist folding. Low energy arrangements are favourable, being unstrained, and fold easily. Plotting all the possible arrangements in an orderly fashion yields an “energy landscape” for the protein, showing the changes in energy as the amino acids arrange themselves progressively.

All functional proteins have funnel shaped energy landscapes, rather like a river and its tributaries in a geological drainage basin. Molecular motion gives the protein bumps which knock it progressively down from the watershed to the estuary where its energy is least, the most stable shape. Proteins with this property of funnel-shaped energy landscapes have been selected by evolution. Those lacking them would not consistently fold properly, so only those with this property were suitable for life.

Nobel prizewinner, Robert Laughlin, believes that designing the energy landscape of materials, and creating novel characteristics in the process, may make it possible to design an entirely artificial system that shows the adaptive behaviour seen in living things. He seems to mean that we shall create life!

Midgley, in her search for examples of reductionism, targets B F Skinner, the behaviorist. Why does she pick him in a critique of reductionism? Skinner was a positivist. He placed his faith in what could be directly observed, like behaviour, not in vaguely defined phenomena like consciousness. Experimentalists are positivists, and there is nothing wrong with that in itself, but it is quite different from reductionism, unless collecting any data is reductionist.

Skinner excluded consciousness from his view of the mind, but Christians and their philosophical apologists like consciousness. It is the manifestation of the soul, and, for them, poses the greatest challenge to reductionism. These people still think that George is George because he has a soul governed by laws unrelated to those that govern particles or thunderstorms. But, if George has a soul, however numinous it might be, it is governed by the laws of science.

Neuroscientist, Gerald Edelman, thinks the brain is not already programmed but evolves through a sort of natural selection during the life of the organism. He seems to be giving a posh sound to what most people call “experience”, and computers can be taught similarly. Even so, he says, confidently:

A person is not explainable in molecular, field-theoretical, or physiological terms alone. To reduce a theory of individual’s behavior to a theory of molecular interactions is simply silly… Even given the success of reductionism in physics, chemistry, and molecular biology, it nonetheless becomes silly reductionism when it is applied exclusively to the matter of the mind.

This is merely assertion based on his beliefs, not science. Christians neuroscientists often seem to think they are the next best thing to god. Another one, Sir John Carew Eccles decided that because he could not understand consciousness, God must be responsible for it! Neural Darwinism seems to be a way that the neurones adapt to their environment, so that they can respond appropriately to it. It seems no more emergent that natural selection itself. History might be conditioning the behaviour of the neurones, but ultimately they are the way they are because of the fundamental principles of physics.

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