Science & Myth: With a Response to Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design

by Wolfgang Smith

To read Wolfgang Smith is to encounter that rara avis: someone deeply versed in science and religion. Whereas most who stand on the side of religion lack the technical expertise to know science "from inside," scientists and writers on science are, as a rule, blind to their own metaphysical assumptions, and woefully inept when it comes to subtle metaphysical points. Not so for Professor Smith, who moves easily between these two essential ways of knowing: between the core twentieth-century discipline of physics, and metaphysical doctrine as articulated by the sapiential traditions of mankind. In Science & Myth the author shows that science too has its mythology, unrecognized and unacknowledged though the fact be. Starting with a profound clarification of this basic issue he goes on to explain the metaphysical significance of scientific findings relating to visual perception, the relation of neurons to mind, and much else, all of which leads up to the central chapter on Stephen Hawking's best-selling book, The Grand Design. Professor Smith first presents Hawking's case, summarizing his entire argument -- in which Hawking claims that the very existence of the universe can be explained on scientific grounds -- and then proceeds with a magisterial point-by-point rebuttal that leaves his grand thesis in tatters. Science & Myth is a must-read for all those concerned with contemporary issues of science and religion.

Genres: Science, Philosophy, Nonfiction

242 pages, Paperback

First published April 7, 2010

About the author

Wolfgang Smith is a scholar and researcher in the fields of mathematics and physics, but is also a writer on theology, metaphysics, and religion. Because of his unusual qualifications in both scientific and theological disciplines, he is able to write with great authority on many topics of concern to religious and scientific scholars today. He has published extensively on mathematical topics relating to algebraic and differential topology. However, ever since his youth, Smith has had a deep interest in metaphysics and theology. Early on, he acquired a taste for Plato and the neoplatonists, and traveled in India to gain acquaintance with the Vedantic tradition. Later he devoted himself to the study of theology, and began his career as a Catholic metaphysical author.

Reviews

[Gabriel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The work of a Genius. I highly recommend all of his books and articles. Wolfgang Smith is definitely the most valuable knight against scientificism and stupidity. With a deep knowledge of the traditional cosmologies, philosophy and science, the author unravels boundaries of science. The book reaches its climax on the response to Stephen Hawking, which makes the genius physicist look like an eight year old child lost in his own world.

[Avery · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wolfgang Smith seems to think that quantum physics is the greatest thing since sliced bread, since it holds out promise for a non-clockwork physical universe. He chides René Guénon for having lacked the curiosity to follow along with Bohr and Heisenberg's great discoveries: "It is clear that the advent of quantum theory does indeed mark the de-solidification of the physical universe ... that analysis provides in fact the key to a metaphysical understanding of quantum theory, and thus of contemporary physics at large: the very science, that is, the existence of which Guénon never recognized!" (31)

This is highly confused. Metaphysics is not derived from physics. It is the other way around. The immaterial would still exist even if quantum physics were disproven, and the idea of the center would still exist even if Jerusalem or Mecca were destroyed (God forbid). This is the same sort of thinking that puts God on a cloud, or makes Carl Sagan wonder why God didn't leave a giant cross hanging in outer space. It's an insult to the intellect of believers and non-believers.

What follows is an attempt to analogize quantum physics to Aristotelian materia and potentia, another gross attempt to reduce metaphysics to particle physics. Reducing the "will of Heaven" to determination of quantum states is a "God of the gaps" theory, and a rather pathetic one. Does Smith not believe in miracles? Or does he believe miracles are caused by quantum anomalies? No, let's not go there...

Combine this with Smith's usual overeagerness to support creationist pseudoscience, and his continued overuse of the word "behooves", and the value of the book is markably degraded. Most of it is a commentary on various scientific discoveries and their metaphysical "implications", which I find useless due to the reversal described above.

[Jonathan Hockey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of good and valid criticisms of the myths and ideologies that have come to inhabit much of what claims to be science these days. Largely from a phenomenological perspective, which I can appreciate, but also from a religious perspective, which I am less interested in.

The core of the book shows how a presumption of epistemic closure and a representational account of things such as perception and meaning formation have left science stuck in a position that is totally unable to account for quantum paradoxes and unable to reconcile a mechanical space and time of general relativity with non local transmission of information in quantum theory.

A direct, external realist view of perception is given, based on the work of Gibson, but many of these ideas can also be found in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception, which he surprisingly doesn't reference at all. This account of vision finds support in other recent "renegade" thinkers like Bohm, Sheldrake. Even John Searle, a mainstream philosopher promotes aspects of this view in "seeing things as they are".

The emerging informational account of quantum theory also provides great support for the arguments of the author in this book, and shows us how the positivistic illusion of separating science from metaphysics, was always simply that, an illusion. He criticises Darwinism also as unfalsifiable, and largely amounting to a tautology, citing Popper in relation to this point. But he extends this to try and deny transition between species over a long time through natural processes, in favour I presume of his religious doctrines, which I think remains an unjustifiable leap of reasoning. Yes, we cannot account for complicated design based on random processes, but neither do we account for them by postulating design, we merely beg the question of design. So, for sake of science, it remains to make sense to focus on those empirical things we can discover without begging the question, while accepting the limits to this approach.

Of course, many do not, which is the problem, many get completely taken in by a reductionist or materialist account, with representationalism of meaning and sensation, and this book is a great counter point to that, I only worry that some of the religious elements will put some people off and give those people an easy excuse to not consider the more plain and simple reasonable arguments on display in this book.

An interesting take on Parmenides also of how he was not some simple, rationalistic monist, but had a much more mystical account of illusion and reality partly informed by many of the ancient Indian Hindu beliefs of Brahma, the veil of illusion, and yogic practice and by shaministic style practice of journeys into other realms through the taking of mind altering substances.

All in all, a good and sobering counterpoint to many needless cul de sacs of thought you can easily find yourself trapped in, if you take the hubristic claims of certain mainstream and popular and academic science a bit too seriously and to heart. And if you don't keep it in is proper place and perspective relative to human abilities to see, intuit and perceive the truths of the reality surrounding us for ourselves. The lack of respect for this latter is a big cause of the recent fake news pandemic, for people are too quick to trust authority over the evidence of their own sense of their immediate surroundings and this dangerous and worrying trend, needs to be countered rigorously.

[Daniel]

Tem um erro garrafal. Egas Moniz não foi morto por um paciente. Foi baleado as sobreviveu.