Modern times

Today it seems obvious that we each can have no knowledge of the world around us that we have not obtained through the direct application of our senses; or indirectly through the reported application of someone else's.

For each of us the world is as it seems.  But to reach an understanding of the actual world behind the appearances, illusion needs to be recognised and accounted for.  And when dealing with indirect experience we need to guard against deliberate untruth and artistic flights of imagination and intuition of others that may have intervened in the process.  I have discussed this in more detail elsewhere on this website.  What grounds do we have for believing that we move things through actual physical contact?

Thanks to Hume and his successors by 1901 Einstein could demonstrate that Newton’s laws are inconsistent with Maxwell’s equations (relating to electro-magnetic radiation, such as light and radio waves).  While accurately describing the universe at slow speeds Newton’s laws provide an increasingly poor approximation of reality as objects move towards the speed of light relative to each other.  

Suddenly we understood that matter and energy are manifestations of the same thing and that far from being contrary to common experience, all material interactions are at a distance; mediated by invisible forces. Today we would say that when we push, pull, lift or hold we never actually touch an atom in the object of our action, because at the sub atomic level everything is separated by invisible forces; at a distance.

A century after Darwin, to the present time, and this scientific method has yielded insights to vastly more of the mysteries of the universe.  Many of these discoveries have been made and insights developed within my lifetime.  

When I was at school an atom was an infinitesimal, unimaginably small, object that was only known about very indirectly through the results of experiments.  Today we have computer chips with features a few atoms across and commercial fabrication equipment capable of placing a single atom into such a structure. The structure of DNA was unknown when I was a child.  Today we have documented the information sequence that is responsible for determining the underlying properties of each of the cellular colonies that is each of us; the Human Genome. 

In addition to humans we have done this for many other animals and plants and are well on the way to determining the role of each code segment in determining the characteristics expressed in each colony (animal or plant).

This has often involved a complete change of thinking.  No longer can we believe in absolute authority; that those who came before are inevitably wiser than we.  For example in 1949 Fred Hoyle derided the concept that the universe had a finite beginning with the derogatory term ‘The Big Bang’ and when I was in high school the ‘steady state universe’ was still the preferred but somewhat controversial model.  This was resolved while I was at University with the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964 by American radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson; for which they won the Nobel Prize1978. The Big Bang was suddenly vindicated. There are many other examples in which real evidence has falsified an earlier misunderstanding.

Largely because of Hume, there are few educated people today, including some theologians, who can any longer believe in miracles; or that consequently, believe the miracles reported in the Bible were not simply natural events given supernatural explanations.  Indeed some fundamentalists seem not to realise that discovering natural evidence for a Biblical event, like the flood, is to deny its miraculous nature.  For some theologians reported miracles are like the images prayed to by some Christians; an essentially worthless, earthly, thing that provides a focus for their prayers to the otherwise inconceivably transcendent; or a simple badge of faith.

As Sportin' Life sings in Gershwin's Porgy and Bess on the subject of miracles:

Yet elsewhere people are still being killed and moved off their lands on the basis of revelations and claimed reality drawn from the Bible.   

The Bible is undoubtedly a finely crafted poetic expression of great emotional power.  Following Armstrong’s convincing analysis the later books of the Old Testament certainly inspired that great Jewish project: the welfare state.  In Christian and Muslim times it has provided many with a motivation for personal sacrifice and charity in the interests of our fellow man.  But it has for over three millennia also provided the justification for uncountable wars, atrocities and deaths in the name of God.

Now US President Obama has told Israel that returning to the 1967 borders key to any future peace.  Predictably Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu rejected any withdrawal to what he called ‘indefensible’1967 borders that would ‘jeopardize Israel's security and leave major West Bank settlements outside Israeli borders’. 

These are the same settlements that are the principal cause of Middle East conflict; having been continually and illegally expanded by zealots who believe that they have a, Biblically sanctioned, God given, right to the land.  How can they possibly believe this?

It’s a pity that more people do not have access to the inspiration and rationality that was the Scottish enlightenment, and David Hume.