A Philosophical Thought Experiment

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that something existed--a force, an influence, a state of being, an entity, whatever--that could not be understood through science and logical reasoning. Call it Mr Jelly. Leave aside the question of what we would mean by asserting that such a thing as Mr Jelly existed at all; adopt a convenient definition of existence, and play along. What would this mean?

Now, note that this hypothesis is very rigid. For whatever reasons, Mr Jelly is not comprehensible by any scientific means whatsoever. There is, we're assuming, absolutely no way whatsoever to describe the behaviour of Mr Jelly--in so far as such a thing could be said to exhibit behaviour at all--reliably in objective terms, no way to quantify or measure Mr Jelly, no way to collect empirical data on Mr Jelly and with it test, refute, and refine hypotheses on the deeper nature and structure of Mr Jelly.

Mr Jelly cannot be seen, heard, touched; but that's not so bad. There are plenty of other unseeable, unhearable, untouchable things whose existence we accept. Gamma radiation. Quaternions. Thomas Pynchon.

But that's not all. Things like gamma radiation, quaternions, and Thomas Pynchon, though not directly apprehensible to our senses, nevertheless influence the world in ways we can observe. We can build Compton Gamma Ray Observatories, formulate theorems, and read novels. Our hypothesis is that this is not the case with Mr Jelly. However Mr Jelly interacts with the rest of the universe, it is, for some reason or another, intrinsically unmeasurable. This is problematic. How could Mr Jelly interact with the rest of the cosmos under these conditions?

Perhaps Mr Jelly doesn't interact with the observable universe at all. Though, in this case, it'd be mighty hard to work out what you mean when you say 'Mr Jelly exists.'

Perhaps Mr Jelly does interact with it, but in ways that carry absolutely no signature of Mr Jelly-ness: there might be no way to distinguish between something experiencing a Mr Jelly interaction and something experiencing some more comprehensible, banal, workaday phenomenon, like gravity, or seasonal unemployment. Though in this case, there's the embarassing possibility that someone might attribute to Mr Jelly the completely innocuous works of gravity or seasonal unemployment.

Perhaps Mr Jelly interacts, but in intrinsically unquantifiable ways. That is, an interaction with Mr Jelly might be a completely subjective thing, unrepeatable, unverifiable, each one unique, forming no statistical pattern or trend. There are a number of (almost) completely subjective things in this world whose existence we accept, so this does not seem too unreasonable. Until we consider what these other completely subjective things are. Like temporal lobe epilepsy. And bad acid trips. And dreams. And schizophrenia. (These have comprehensible, measurable causes, but the experiences themselves are, I think we can agree, not fully communicable to anyone who hasn't had them.) We normally associate such things with delusional states and distorted perceptions. What if we accidentally attribute to Mr Jelly the results of an organic brain disorder?

Perhaps, again, Mr Jelly interacts in ways that can be understood, but only if one first undergoes a very specific sort of interaction with Mr Jelly. That is, perhaps there are certain specific people, call them the Jelly Gang, who have had some kind of direct personal experience of Mr Jelly that has revealed to them the glorious workings of Mr Jelly-ness, which they attempt to explain to the rest of the population. The Jelly Gang can make firm and authoritative statements on all Mr Jelly-esque things, having directly experienced the truth of what they are saying, but cannot offer up verifiable data: the only way to know that what the Jelly Gang says is true is to experience the full Jellified truth of it yourself in a way which can't be quantified or described. But there's no way to predict when or how such an experience will come about, or how to get one, or else we'd have a piece of empirical scientific data on Mr Jelly, and we don't and can't. But how is anyone who isn't in the Jelly Gang supposed to know the Gang is telling the truth? Especially if there is also a Jam Gang, making similar yet irreconcilable statements about another unobservable quality called Miss Jam? And the Jam Gang and the Jelly Gang both claim that their completely subjective and non-repeatable experiences of Miss Jam and Mr Jelly have convinced them that the other Gang's experiences were false, perhaps due to something like our old friend organic brain disorder?

In case you haven't cottoned on, I'm actually talking about God here, and I'm claiming He is pretty much a crock. (I'm trying to be polite tonight, so I omitted from that last sentence the prepositional phrase 'of shit.') I'm also talking about Intelligent Design, and Young-Earth Creationism, and Republicanism. Pretty much anything faith-based, in fact. If you cannot produce some kind of replicable, patterned, scientific data on a phenomenon, how do you know this phenomenon exists? How do you know you aren't just smoking crack when you think you've had the truth dropped into your lap? What does it mean to claim something exists, even, if there's no objective way to verify it somehow?

If God exists, he's going to show up on a God-o-meter some day. If you can never, ever, ever measure Him, even indirectly, then He just isn't there.

This rant was provoked by a poster I've seen up on the Math Department lately, advertising a lecture soon to be given here by the Director of the Vatican Observatory. While his topic sounds reasonable on the surface--a dialogue between religion and science when both give up their idolatries--it is, on a more fundamental level, total bunk. The Director claims that the idolatry of science is to believe science is the only path to true knowledge. I would argue that, by any reasonable standard of knowledge and truth, it is. If you can think of any other way to tell the difference between an external event and delusion, I would love to hear it.

Posted by aloysius at October 22, 2003 10:58 PM | TrackBack |