O Science, Where Art My Algorithm?

The Natural Sciences

This was Wilson's baby. He opened with his pet fallacy about religious experience: that pre-scientific people created origination and fertility myths because they lacked the science that would allow them to know the truth. Wilson then vastly overemphasized the difference between pre-scientific and scientific people. In fact, he considered this to be the most important division in humanity. All religious experience from the Neolith to us is the expression of God-consciousness cast in the natural environment, language, and socioeconomics of the one experiencing God. All religious experience is individual experience. When we look at people in the past, we tend to see them as a group and so we also see their religious experience as group experience. The individual human heart is the seat of the mind and God's letter box. Scientific sophistication has nothing to do with checking your mail.

Wilson invented a chasm between the scientific and pre-scientific because of his devotion to scientific materialism. Science as a spiritual world view was not satisfactory for the Old Humanity. Scientolatry had an extremely short lifespan. God surrenderance did not recede from the world because it had been rightfully conquered by science, it withdrew in the service of God's Wish to have the cycle end and the New Humanity arise.

Page 50 Wilson made three conclusions that proved his own notion that religious fanaticism—in his case fanatic scientism—can make a smart person say foolish things.

1. We know that the spiritual hierarchy of Avatars, Perfect Masters, masts and saints permanently stabilize the world and permit creation to continue. Scientific curiosity itself is a form of mysticism, which is why so many of the great scientists talk about God. Here's a hint Professor Wilson: if humanity had been left to its own devices, scientific or otherwise, it would have committed suicide a long time ago.

2. God's Will anticipates infinitely. Natural selection is the mechanics of the second narrative of evolution, which enables the arising of human consciousness.

3. Would Wilson ever ask how did natural selection prepare ants to live in ant colonies? He only gets flummoxed when thinking about human consciousness. Natural selection is the mechanics of the second narrative of evolution, which enables the arising of human consciousness, which has led to civilization. Civilization is the outward expression of the third narrative of reincarnation.

Reductionist science was largely useless to explicate meaning in human consciousness and entirely useless to discover significance. Reductionism was a powerful tool for Wilson because he was a biologist who studied insects. Ant theism is very latent in ants, although The Awakener told us to avoid killing ants because of their ant love for one another.

Page 52 Wilson described the preconditions of the scientific revolution. Science in and of itself could never be a spiritually satisfying connection to God. By 1998 the spiritual aspect of the scientific revolution Wilson hoped for was already losing steam. From its depths the heart does not cry out, "Oh science, where art my algorithm?" The heart calls to God and God responds.

Nevertheless, Wilson spelled out three preconditions for his imaginary revolution: creativity, imagination, and mathematics. The first two conditions are forms of love, of the desire to transcend self which is the essence of love. Creativity and imagination are also basic constituents of religious experience. How else can one experience God's presence within? Wilson's science was his religious experience, creativity his natural theism.

The power to abstract arose in human beings not to develop scientific understanding but to realize God. More interesting than the power to abstract is the impulse to abstract.

Another way to describe the impulse of the mind to generate religious experience: Impulse to form theories is essentially spiritual, not material or intellectual. Inborn power to abstract is shared among all human beings, but an infinitesimally small number compared with all the souls that have passed through this world use that power scientifically. That power is used toward the eternal question of whence and whither. A just criticism of social religion during the Great Purification was that no single religion was followed by a majority of humanity, suggesting to skeptics and agnostics the falsity of all religion. But the conclusion that creation is non-purposive was satisfactory to a very few.

Page 53 "The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it. It is not at all that 'laws of nature' exist, much less that man is able to discover them. The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand or deserve." (Eugene Wigner)

Who is the Giver of the gift of mathematics? Why does Mr. Wigner feel himself to be unworthy of such a gift? Those Old Humanity scientists, especially the physicists, were bashful lovers, stammering in the Presence, glancing sidelong but unable to ignore the mysterious. Wilson would not face the obvious that their mathematics was largely useless above the level of the physical sciences, and even there scientists were beginning to accept that mathematics had reached its limits. Mathematics had made extraordinary contributions throughout all science but had contributed nothing to elucidating the significance of human consciousness.

Wilson's puzzle: Why does evolution appear purposive when the most important tenet of my religion is that evolution is non-purposive?

O Hereditary Epigenetics, lead us not into teleology
and protect us from significance
for thine is the kingdom.

As the soul journeys, phenomena become less predictable. When the soul sojourns in inanimate and early animate forms, comparatively distant from the Goal, nature is relatively lawful and predictable, so reductionistic science is useful and mathematics powerful to explicate how things work. As the soul reaches the human form, God's Wish to realize Self makes phenomena playful and unpredictable, and reductionistic science and mathematics become increasingly irrelevant in understanding and incapable of prediction. The ordering of physics, chemistry, then biology parallels the nine stations of evolution in the Theme of Creation. The leaps of Divine Wish occur at the turnings within each kingdom.

The Old Humanity sought power, and the holy grail of scientific power was prediction.

Page 54 Wilson was thrilled by the accuracy of predictions about electrons. He summarized the past search for ultimate smallness from 400 B.C. when Leucippus speculated to Democritus about atoms. He was excited about recent nanotechnology and smallness research.

Page 56 Wilson was satisfied with a paltry tautological understanding of the ultimate. Such is karma. Millions of people, uneducated people, slowtops, had a truer understanding of the purpose of evolution than Wilson.

Page 56 Wilson went on to say our brain and sensory systems enable us to navigate through only the tiny segment of the physical world whose mastery serves that primal need to preserve and multiply genes. Scientific materialism did not recognize the heart except the muscle in the chest. The heart is the bridge between the phenomenal and Reality. Scientific materialism denies the existence of God's love for creation and the ability of the individual to experience divine love through the heart, which is the seat of the mind.

Page 56 Wilson explained at some length the essentiality of theory for scientific understanding and mentioned two successful theories, quantum electrodynamics and evolution by natural selection. Yet when it came to the significance of life, he had no theory and sought none, "it just happened."

The Awakener is the Christ of Consilience. He unified the theory of God and creation which had been bifurcated into Eastern and Western thought. From the East he gathered and expanded upon the knowledge of reincarnation, of the transmigration of souls. From the West he intensified the knowledge that God is love, and the best way to love God is to love and forgive others. To these he added significant new information about the three planes, consciousness, and the goal of God Realization.

Baba also honored theory making:

Page 57 Wilson paused to discuss the word "theory." The charming aspect of that word is that it is an extension of the Greek word for God. To Wilson scientific theory is what enabled one to discount God and trivialize religion. Wilson traced his science back to the Greeks. The religious experience of the ancient Greeks was a complex and subtle blending of deism and theism. The Greek word thea is the root of the word theory and means a contemplation or vision of the world. The ancient Greeks felt a clearer unity between eternal divine consciousness and the material world. In the Old Humanity there was antagonism between institutionalized religious authority and science, but the aberration of scientific theory pitted against God was a symptom of the end of the cycle. Scientific creativity and God-surrenderance are both forms of natural theism.

Far from bearing within itself antagonism to God or natural religious experience, scientific creativity is an expression God's love for humanity.

The most important question that can be asked in philosophy or religion is how to love God. Orderly materialism is not a religious question at all. Wilson's seeing philosophy and religion as subservient to science was a variation of the 'science is religion freed and writ large' theme. Science is the best of religion and philosophy because it poses questions without bias or encumbrance. Scientolatry meant believing one had no biases. Of course, as a dogmatist himself Wilson was unaware that his biases defined the limits of his imagination. For virtually all human history people could not even imagine that visible light is a small portion of electromagnetic radiation. But that ignorance did not mean the rest of the spectrum did not exist.

Wilson spelled out a great intellectual malaise of his age. Love cannot be reduced. And many of Wilson's contemporaries did not share his faith in reductionism. One of the leading philosophers of science, Isabelle Stegner, wrote: " . . . Many physicists and chemists judge away the question of life as some kind of complicated physiochemical problem, the ideal understanding of which would refer to interactions among molecules, and biologists judge away human sciences as just waiting for a biological understanding of the functioning of the brain. A total lack of imagination is at the basis of scientific reductionism . . . "

The great David Bohm, whose seminal work we all know, was deeply disenchanted with reductionism as a method of understanding quantum phenomena.

After exalting science as the true religion in these terms, Wilson described the course of education and training required to become an ordained scientist, and then dilated on professional science without sparing any allusion to the heroics of the process. It is understandable Wilson loved science when one considers the extreme differences in health and longevity between the science haves and have nots of his time. But those disparities did not have to do with accepting Wilson's orthodoxy. They had to do with lives of wealth and poverty, with the karma of birthplace, above all with money. It is clear now that Wilson's scientism impeded the just sharing of science and technology by rich people with poor people.

I have studied the eleemosynary work of the late 20th century. Most of the American medical charities to the ailing poor peoples were in Jesus's name. The professional training Wilson touted placed no emphasis on selfless service. Nowhere do we find a three-year stint in Africa or India for scientists in the educational and professional resume that Wilson detailed. For the Old Humanity, the essentiality of directly serving the poor was taught by religion, not by science.

Wilson's religion had cardinals but no nuns.

The priesthood of scientific materialism was opened only to a very select group of highly intelligent people with access to an extremely expensive education. Everyone has a individual religious experience and unique relationship with God, but very few people deeply understood any aspect of science and even fewer wanted to become scientists. It did not trouble Wilson that only one in 10,000 people might have the power to "pull the sword from the stone."

Wilson implied Enlightenment thinkers really wanted to get rid of God altogether but were scared to "outrage the pious." He again defined deism. Prior to the Enlightenment was God disobedient to His own will? Wilson needed to see religion as unnatural. God's Wish, the power of love, must overcome God's Will, the force of law, in order for creation to fulfill its purpose. Love is the speeding ticket on the highway of life (20th-century allusion).

Did scientists need a special license to make the "most important human study?" I imagine opening a closet 300 years ago and seeing a shame-faced scientist with a flashlight and a Bible. He mocked the spiritual longing and intellectual seeking of his fellow scientists. His summary contained a core fallacy of scientific materialism that religious experience is a perception of God outside the heart. Theology told them that God is revealed in everything. Theology is the science of discovering God within, as soul and spirit the knowledge of God as the self of every self. Wilson could not have so completely misunderstood theology if he did not have a bias.

When atheists spoke of the religion of the Old Humanity they were not referring to individual religious experience, which is God's presence in individual consciousness. Difficult to put into words—pure, natural, spontaneous religion unburdened assisted by external forms yet independent.

Religious experience is internal, social religion is external. It is social religion, the external written practices and forms transmitted through the centuries, that tends to collect the unnatural aspects of separativeness and pride. From the Enlightenment on, many intellectuals looked disparagingly on social religion. We now see this disrespect was a precursor for the unification of religion. Wilson did not recognize or care about the difference between social religion and individual religious experience.

Page 66 Wilson discussed problem of objective truth. Scientific theory is not objective truth, it ascends a scale of credibility:

interesting —> suggestive —> persuasive —> compelling —> obvious

"There is no body of external objective truth . . . only warranted assertibility." (William James)

God is sole objective Truth. God requires a leap of faith, science is a series of probationary hops. Wilson describes that leap as a romantic weakness. Page after page, the great achievements of science that Wilson admired were on the molecular level.

Natural selection builds the brain as the hammer and saw build the house. Wilson forgot the Carpenter. God built the world for the sake of consciousness of Self. There is no misalignment. Human consciousness culminates in unique individual religious experience based on the karma to be expended in the life, subject to the impulse of divine Love.

Wilson wondered why everyone did not fall into line with rationalism and materialism. He confused romanticism with spiritual longing. From everything I have read of the tone of American civilization during the Great Purification, much of the romanticism was destroyed by vulgarity. But spiritual longing intensified. I wish I could tell my colleague from the past how well everything worked out. Scientific theory never replaced contemplating God. In fact, his own spiritual theories and times were the zenith of God-envy. Shortly after Wilson's time the motivation to disabuse faith in God became unnecessary. And we still benefit from their scientific discoveries.

For Wilson, objective truth existed solely and completely within the world of phenomena and could only be discovered by a rational mind using the scientific method. But Consilience was filled with a sense of a chance that had been lost, that humanity, given the chance to become rational and demythologized, had failed and was running out of time. As the 19th century closed, the dream of objective truth was rekindled by European positivism and American pragmatism.

Positivism and pragmatic positivism: the belief that truth is the exact description of what is perceived by the senses. Pragmatism: the belief that truth is what consistently works in human action. These two philosophies were stages of the process away from God-surrenderance. Wilson counts logical positivism as the final stage of philosophy on the path of atheism. Wilson defines logical positivism as "a variation on general positivism that attempted to define the essence of scientific statements by means of logic and the analysis of language." This is the atheistic analog of The Word. If God is all than God's Word is supremely important. If the human being is all than the human word is crucially important. Wilson described a meeting that took place in 1939 at his own Harvard University, for "exploring the idea that rationally acquired knowledge is the best hope for humanity." These positivists reaffirmed the view that "the human species is best served by unblinking realism" and "Having 'no protectors and no enemies' (neither God nor Satan), humanity must find its way to transcendent existence solely by its own intelligence and will. Science is simply the best instrument at our disposal."

This is a good place to put Wilson's scientolatry in perspective, lest it appears that his view was representative of the Old Humanity of that time. Both philosophy of logical positivism and scientific materialism could never capture the heart. Throughout the last two centuries of the Old Humanity longing for Truth and Truth's Body waved across this planet. Even as pragmatism was developing in Old America in the early decades of the 19th century a vast movement toward Christ consciousness swept Old America. It was called the Great Awakening. Many deistic peoples, especially in Africa and the countless lands and islands of the Pacific, were starving for theism, for the inestimable advance to surrenderance to the unseen God. They were thrilled by the arrival of Christian theology and Christian scripture, even though this transformation often brought with it material destruction and decimated whole populations of deistic people. Such is the longing for the unseen God.

Wilson's scientific materialism was a counterpoint to humanity's march forward. Positivism and scientific materialism could never satisfy the longing of the heart for truth, but they were influential far beyond the scant numbers of people who settled for that bleak and purposeless world. Those movements were taken up by educators like Wilson and became influential beyond their scientific or spiritual vitality.

No self-immolating monk was more fanatic than Wilson.

A paradox defeats scientific materialism. If the search for truth is an incidental feature of the brain and all truth amounts to understanding how the brain works, how can the brain motivate itself to search for its incidental self? In cannot be done. The human search for Truth is the eternal epiphany of God's search for Himself.

The search for truth is not incidental to human consciousness. It is essential to human consciousness. Having a long neck is not incidental to being a giraffe, it is a peculiarity that defines giraffeness. Searching for truth is not incidental to being a human, it is the characteristic that defines humanness, then and now. Wilson was searching for God in his passionate rejection of God.

Wilson ended this chapter with one last soaring accolade to the " knowledge, obsession, daring" of scientists. Every cult has its demigods and Wilson lionized scientists. Understandably, since science was to bestow Godlike power on human beings, scientists were more than bishops in his church, they were generative gods, most of whom rarely or never left their affluent surroundings to personally serve the sick and poor. This view of scientists was pompous rubbish.

Speaking of rubbish, truly I tell you, in Wilson's day the life of an urban garbage collector involved far more daring than that of the typical scientist, whose profession had no ethos about personal obligation to alleviate suffering. Their sole purpose was to discover scientific knowledge with no personal responsibility to ensure that knowledge benefited the unfortunate of humanity. That was somebody else's problem. Remember, the ideal of scientific materialism was not compassion but rationality. Wilson admired rationality and intellect, not selfless service. The vast harmfulness of scientific materialism was in this shift away from compassionate love to rational power as the savior of humanity. But Wilson's romantic myth was about science, and as he said, the Old Humanity could not live without their myths.