Essays on God and Freud

1st EDITION

Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.

Editing and Design:

Lidija Rangelovska

Lidija Rangelovska

A Narcissus Publications Imprint, Skopje 2009

Not for Sale! Non-commercial edition.

© 2002, 2009 Copyright Lidija Rangelovska.

All rights reserved. This book, or any part thereof, may not be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from:

Lidija Rangelovska  – write to:

palma@unet.com.mk

Philosophical essays and Musings

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/culture.html

World in Conflict and Transition

http://samvak.tripod.com/guide.html

Created by:         LIDIJA RANGELOVSKA

REPUBLIC OF MACEDONIA

C O N T E N T S

GOD

I.                 Introduction: Science, God, and Religion

II.                Is God Necessary?

III.              Is the World Necessary?

IV.             Theodicy: The Problem of Evil

V.               Miracles, Wonders, Signs

VI.             Appendix: Scientific Theories

FREUD

VII.            In Defense of Psychoanalysis: Introduction

VIII.          The Revolution of Psychoanalysis

IX.             Fundamentals of Scientific Theories

X.               Critique and Defense of Psychoanalysis

XI.             The Author

GOD

God and Science

Introduction

"If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would strictly follow the teachings of the New, he would be insane"

(Robert Ingersoll)

If neurons were capable of introspection and world-representation, would they have developed an idea of "Brain" (i.e., of God)? Would they have become aware that they are mere intertwined components of a larger whole? Would they have considered themselves agents of the Brain - or its masters? When a neuron fires, is it instructed to do so by the Brain or is the Brain an emergent phenomenon, the combined and rather accidental outcome of millions of individual neural actions and pathways?

There are many kinds of narratives and organizing principles. Science is driven by evidence gathered in experiments, and by the falsification of extant theories and their replacement with newer, asymptotically truer, ones. Other systems - religion, nationalism, paranoid ideation, or art - are based on personal experiences (faith, inspiration, paranoia, etc.).

Experiential narratives can and do interact with evidential narratives and vice versa.

For instance: belief in God inspires some scientists who regard science as a method to "sneak a peek at God's cards" and to get closer to Him. Another example: the pursuit of scientific endeavors enhances one's national pride and is motivated by it. Science is often corrupted in order to support nationalistic and racist claims.

The basic units of all narratives are known by their effects on the environment. God, in this sense, is no different from electrons, quarks, and black holes. All four constructs cannot be directly observed, but the fact of their existence is derived from their effects.

Granted, God's effects are discernible only in the social and psychological (or psychopathological) realms. But this observed constraint doesn't render Him less "real". The hypothesized existence of God parsimoniously explains a myriad ostensibly unrelated phenomena and, therefore, conforms to the rules governing the formulation of scientific theories.

The locus of God's hypothesized existence is, clearly and exclusively, in the minds of believers. But this again does not make Him less real. The contents of our minds are as real as anything "out there". Actually, the very distinction between epistemology and ontology is blurred.

But is God's existence "true" - or is He just a figment of our neediness and imagination?

Truth is the measure of the ability of our models to describe phenomena and predict them. God's existence (in people's minds) succeeds to do both. For instance, assuming that God exists allows us to predict many of the behaviors of people who profess to believe in Him. The existence of God is, therefore, undoubtedly true (in this formal and strict sense).

But does God exist outside people's minds? Is He an objective entity, independent of what people may or may not think about Him? After all, if all sentient beings were to perish in a horrible calamity, the Sun would still be there, revolving as it has done from time immemorial.

If all sentient beings were to perish in a horrible calamity, would God still exist? If all sentient beings, including all humans, stop believing that there is God - would He survive this renunciation? Does God "out there" inspire the belief in God in religious folks' minds?

Known things are independent of the existence of observers (although the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics disputes this). Believed things are dependent on the existence of believers.

We know that the Sun exists. We don't know that God exists. We believe that God exists - but we don't and cannot know it, in the scientific sense of the word.

We can design experiments to falsify (prove wrong) the existence of electrons, quarks, and black holes (and, thus, if all these experiments fail, prove that electrons, quarks, and black holes exist). We can also design experiments to prove that electrons, quarks, and black holes exist.

But we cannot design even one experiment to falsify the existence of a God who is outside the minds of believers (and, thus, if the experiment fails, prove that God exists "out there"). Additionally, we cannot design even one experiment to prove that God exists outside the minds of believers.

What about the "argument from design"? The universe is so complex and diverse that surely it entails the existence of a supreme intelligence, the world's designer and creator, known by some as "God". On the other hand, the world's richness and variety can be fully accounted for using modern scientific theories such as evolution and the big bang. There is no need to introduce God into the equations.

Still, it is possible that God is responsible for it all. The problem is that we cannot design even one experiment to falsify this theory, that God created the Universe (and, thus, if the experiment fails, prove that God is, indeed, the world's originator). Additionally, we cannot design even one experiment to prove that God created the world.

We can, however, design numerous experiments to falsify the scientific theories that explain the creation of the Universe (and, thus, if these experiments fail, lend these theories substantial support). We can also design experiments to prove the scientific theories that explain the creation of the Universe.

It does not mean that these theories are absolutely true and immutable. They are not. Our current scientific theories are partly true and are bound to change with new knowledge gained by experimentation. Our current scientific theories will be replaced by newer, truer theories. But any and all future scientific theories will be falsifiable and testable.

Knowledge and belief are like oil and water. They don't mix. Knowledge doesn't lead to belief and belief does not yield knowledge. Belief can yield conviction or strongly-felt opinions. But belief cannot result in knowledge.

Still, both known things and believed things exist. The former exist "out there" and the latter "in our minds" and only there. But they are no less real for that.

Read Note on Complexity and Simplicity

Read Note on Scientific Theories and the Life Cycles of Science

Return

God and Science

II. Is God Necessary?

Could God have failed to exist (especially considering His omnipotence)? Could He have been a contingent being rather than a necessary one? Would the World have existed without Him and, more importantly, would it have existed in the same way? For instance: would it have allowed for the existence of human beings?

To say that God is a necessary being means to accept that He exists (with His attributes intact) in every possible world. It is not enough to say that He exists only in our world: this kind of claim will render Him contingent (present in some worlds - possibly in none! - and absent in others).

We cannot conceive of the World without numbers, relations, and properties, for instance. These are necessary entities because without them the World as we known and perceive it would not exist. Is this equally true when we contemplate God? Can we conceive of a God-less World?

Moreover: numbers, relations, and properties are abstracts. Yet, God is often thought of as a concrete being. Can a concrete being, regardless of the properties imputed to it, ever be necessary? Is there a single concrete being - God - without which the Universe would have perished, or not existed in the first place? If so, what makes God a privileged concrete entity?

Additionally, numbers, relations, and properties depend for their existence (and utility) on other beings, entities, and quantities. Relations subsist between objects; properties are attributes of things; numbers are invariably either preceded by other numbers or followed by them.

Does God depend for His existence on other beings, entities, quantities, properties, or on the World as a whole? If He is a dependent entity, is He also a derivative one? If He is dependent and derivative, in which sense is He necessary?

Many philosophers confuse the issue of existence with that of necessity. Kant and, to some extent, Frege, argued that existence is not even a logical predicate (or at least not a first-order logical predicate). But, far more crucially, that something exists does not make it a necessary being. Thus, contingent beings exist, but they are not necessary (hence their "contingency").

At best, ontological arguments deal with the question: does God necessarily exist? They fail to negotiate the more tricky: can God exist only as a Necessary Being (in all possible worlds)?

Modal ontological arguments even postulate as a premise that God is a necessary being and use that very assumption as a building block in proving that He exists! Even a rigorous logician like Gödel fell in this trap when he attempted to prove God's necessity. In his posthumous ontological argument, he adopted several dubious definitions and axioms:

(1) God's essential properties are all positive (Definition 1); (2) God necessarily exists if and only if every essence of His is necessarily exemplified (Definition 3); (3) The property of being God is positive (Axiom 3); (4) Necessary existence is positive (Axiom 5).

These led to highly-debatable outcomes:

(1) For God, the property of being God is essential (Theorem 2); (2) The property of being God is necessarily exemplified.

Gödel assumed that there is one universal closed set of essential positive properties, of which necessary existence is a member. He was wrong, of course. There may be many such sets (or none whatsoever) and necessary existence may not be a (positive) property (or a member of some of the sets) after all.

Worst of all, Gödel's "proof" falls apart if God does not exist (Axiom 3's veracity depends on the existence of a God-like creature). Plantinga has committed the very same error a decade earlier (1974). His ontological argument incredibly relies on the premise: "There is a possible world in which there is God!"

Veering away from these tautological forays, we can attempt to capture God's alleged necessity by formulating this Axiom Number 1:

"God is necessary (i.e. necessarily exists in every possible world) if there are objects or entities that would not have existed in any possible world in His absence."

We should complement Axiom 1 with Axiom Number 2:

"God is necessary (i.e. necessarily exists in every possible world) even if there are objects or entities that do not exist in any possible world (despite His existence)."

The reverse sentences would be:

Axiom Number 3: "God is not necessary (i.e. does not necessarily exist in every possible world) if there are objects or entities that exist in any possible world in His absence."

Axiom Number 4: "God is not necessary (i.e. does not necessarily exist in every possible world) if there are no objects or entities that exist in any possible world (despite His existence)."

Now consider this sentence:

Axiom Number 5: "Objects and entities are necessary (i.e. necessarily exist in every possible world) if they exist in every possible world even in God's absence."

Consider abstracta, such as numbers. Does their existence depend on God's? Not if we insist on the language above. Clearly, numbers are not dependent on the existence of God, let alone on His necessity.

Yet, because God is all-encompassing, surely it must incorporate all possible worlds as well as all impossible ones! What if we were to modify the language and recast the axioms thus:

Axiom Number 1:

"God is necessary (i.e. necessarily exists in every possible and impossible world) if there are objects or entities that would not have existed in any possible world in His absence."

We should complement Axiom 1 with Axiom Number 2:

"God is necessary (i.e. necessarily exists in every possible and impossible world) even if there are objects or entities that do not exist in any possible world (despite His existence)."

The reverse sentences would be:

Axiom Number 3: "God is not necessary (i.e. does not necessarily exist in every possible and impossible world) if there are objects or entities that exist in any possible world in His absence."

Axiom Number 4: "God is not necessary (i.e. does not necessarily exist in every possible and impossible world) if there are no objects or entities that exist in any possible world (despite His existence)."

Now consider this sentence:

Axiom Number 5: "Objects and entities are necessary (i.e. necessarily exist in every possible and impossible world) if they exist in every possible world even in God's absence."

According to the Vander Laan modification (2004) of the Lewis counterfactuals semantics, impossible worlds are worlds in which the number of propositions is maximal. Inevitably, in such worlds, propositions contradict each other (are inconsistent with each other). In impossible worlds, some counterpossibles (counterfactuals with a necessarily false antecedent) are true or non-trivially true. Put simply: with certain counterpossibles, even when the premise (the antecedent) is patently false, one can agree that the conditional is true because of the (true, formally correct) relationship between the antecedent and the consequent.

Thus, if we adopt an expansive view of God - one that covers all possibilities and impossibilities - we can argue that God's existence is necessary.

Appendix: Ontological Arguments regarding God's Existence

As Lewis (In his book "Anselm and Actuality", 1970) and Sobel ("Logic and Theism", 2004) noted, philosophers and theologians who argued in favor of God's existence have traditionally proffered tautological (question-begging) arguments to support their contentious contention (or are formally invalid). Thus, St. Anselm proposed (in his much-celebrated "Proslogion", 1078) that since God is the Ultimate Being, it essentially and necessarily comprises all modes of perfection, including necessary existence (a form of perfection).

Anselm's was a prototypical ontological argument: God must exist because we can conceive of a being than which no greater can be conceived. It is an "end-of-the-line" God. Descartes concurred: it is contradictory to conceive of a Supreme Being and then to question its very existence.

That we do not have to conceive of such a being is irrelevant. First: clearly, we have conceived of Him repeatedly and second, our ability to conceive is sufficient. That we fail to realize a potential act does not vitiate its existence.

But, how do we know that the God we conceive of is even possible? Can we conceive of impossible entities? For instance, can we conceive of a two-dimensional triangle whose interior angles amount to less than 180 degrees? Is the concept of a God that comprises all compossible perfections at all possible? Leibnitz said that we cannot prove that such a God is impossible because perfections are not amenable to analysis. But that hardly amounts to any kind of proof!

Read Note on Abstract Entities and Objects

Read Note on Complexity and Simplicity

Read Note on Scientific Theories and the Life Cycles of Science

Return

God and Science

III. Is the World Necessary?

"The more I examine the universe, and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the Universe in some sense must have known we were coming." — Freeman Dyson

"A bottom-up approach to cosmology either requires one to postulate an initial state of the Universe that is carefully fine-tuned — as if prescribed by an outside agency — or it requires one to invoke the notion of eternal inflation, a mighty speculative notion to the generation of many different Universes, which prevents one from predicting what a typical observer would see." — Stephen Hawking

"A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question." - Fred Hoyle

(Taken from the BioLogos Website)

I. The Fine-tuned Universe and the Anthropic Principle

The Universe we live in (possibly one of many that make up the Multiverse) is "fine-tuned" to allow for our existence. Its initial conditions and constants are such that their values are calibrated to yield Life as we know it (by aiding and abetting the appearance, structure, and diversity of matter). Had these initial conditions and/or constants deviated from their current levels, even infinitesimally, we would not have been here. Any theory of the Universe has to account for the existence of sapient and sentient observers. This is known as the "Anthropic Principle".

These incredible facts immediately raise two questions:

(i) Is such outstanding compatibility a coincidence? Are we here to observe it by mere chance?

(ii) If not a coincidence, is this intricate calibration an indication of (if not an outright proof for) the existence of a Creator or a Designer, aka God?

It is useful to disentangle two seemingly inextricable issues: the fact that the Universe allows for Life (which is a highly improbable event) and the fact that we are here to notice it (which is trivial, given the first fact). Once the parameters of the universe have been "decided" and "set", Life has been inevitable.

But, who, or what set the parameters of the Universe?

If our Universe is one of many, random chance could account for its initial conditions and constants. In such a cosmos, our particular Universe, with its unique parameters, encourages life while an infinity of other worlds, with other initial states and other constants of nature, do not. Modern physics - from certain interpretations of quantum mechanics to string theories - now seriously entertains the notion of a Multiverse (if not yet its exact contours and nature): a plurality of minimally-interacting universes being spawned repeatedly.

Yet, it is important to understand that even in a Multiverse with an infinite number of worlds, there is no "guarantee" or necessity that a world such as ours will have arisen. There can exist an infinite set of worlds in which there is no equivalent to our type of world and in which Life will not appear.

As philosopher of science Jesus Mosterín put it:

“The suggestion that an infinity of objects characterized by certain numbers or properties implies the existence among them of objects with any combination of those numbers or characteristics [...] is mistaken. An infinity does not imply at all that any arrangement is present or repeated. [...] The assumption that all possible worlds are realized in an infinite universe is equivalent to the assertion that any infinite set of numbers contains all numbers (or at least all Gödel numbers of the [defining] sequences), which is obviously false.”

But rather than weaken the Anthropic Principle as Mosterín claims, this criticism strengthens it. If even the existence of a Multiverse cannot lead inexorably to the emergence of a world such as ours, its formation appears to be even more miraculous and "unnatural" (in short: designed).

Still, the classic - and prevailing - view allows for only one, all-encompassing Universe. How did it turn out to be so accommodating? Is it the outcome of random action? Is Life a happy accident involving the confluence of hundreds of just-right quantities, constants, and conditions?

As a matter of principle, can we derive all these numbers from a Theory of Everything? In other words: are these values the inevitable outcomes of the inherent nature of the world? But, if so, why does the world possess an inherent nature that gives rise inevitably to these specific initial state and constants and not to others, more inimical to Life?

To say that we (as Life-forms) can observe only a universe that is compatible with and yielding Life is begging the question (or a truism). Such a flippant and content-free response is best avoided. Paul Davies calls this approach ("the Universe is the way it is and that's it"): "The Absurd Universe" (in his book "The Goldilocks Enigma", 2006).

In all these deliberations, there are four implicit assumptions we better make explicit:

(i) That Life - and, more specifically: Intelligent Life, or Observers - is somehow not an integral part of the Universe. Yielded by natural processes, it then stands aside and observes its surroundings;

(ii) That Life is the culmination of Nature, simply because it is the last to have appeared (an example of the logical fallacy known as "post hoc, ergo propter hoc"). This temporal asymmetry also implies an Intelligent Designer or Creator in the throes of implementing a master plan;

(iii) That the Universe would not have existed had it not been for the existence of Life (or of observers). This is known as the Participatory Anthropic Principle and is consistent with some interpretations of Quantum Mechanics;

(iv) That Life will materialize and spring forth in each and every Universe that is compatible with Life. The strong version of this assumption is that "there is an underlying principle that constrains the universe to evolve towards life and mind." The Universe is partial to life, not indifferent to it.

All four are forms of teleological reasoning (that nature has a purpose) masquerading as eutaxiological reasoning (that order has a cause). To say that the Universe was made the way it is in order to accommodate Life is teleological. Science is opposed to teleological arguments. Therefore, to say that the Universe was made the way it is in order to accommodate Life is not a scientific statement.

But, could it be a valid and factual statement? To answer this question, we need to delve further into the nature of teleology.

II. System-wide Teleological Arguments

A teleological explanation is one that explains things and features by relating to their contribution to optimal situations, or to a normal mode of functioning, or to the attainment of goals by a whole or by a system to which the said things or features belong. It often involves the confusion or reversal of causes and effects and the existence of some "intelligence" at work (either self-aware or not).

Socrates tried to understand things in terms of what good they do or bring about. Yet, there are many cases when the contribution of a thing towards a desired result does not account for its occurrence. Snow does not fall IN ORDER to allow people to ski, for instance.

But it is different when we invoke an intelligent creator. It can be convincingly shown that intelligent creators (human beings, for instance) design and maintain the features of an object in order to allow it to achieve an aim. In such a case, the very occurrence, the very existence of the object is explained by grasping its contribution to the attainment of its function.

An intelligent agent (creator) need not necessarily be a single, sharply bounded, entity. A more fuzzy collective may qualify as long as its behaviour patterns are cohesive and identifiably goal oriented. Thus, teleological explanations could well be applied to organisms (collections of cells), communities, nations and other ensembles.

To justify a teleological explanation, one needs to analyze the function of the item to be thus explained, on the one hand and to provide an etiological account, on the other hand. The functional account must strive to elucidate what the item contributes to the main activity of the system, the object, or the organism, a part of which it constitutes, or to their proper functioning, well-being, preservation, propagation, integration (within larger systems), explanation, justification, or prediction.

The reverse should also be possible. Given information regarding the functioning, integration, etc. of the whole, the function of any element within it should be derivable from its contribution to the functioning whole. Though the practical ascription of goals (and functions) is problematic, it is, in principle, doable.

But it is not sufficient. That something is both functional and necessarily so does not yet explain HOW it happened to have so suitably and conveniently materialized. This is where the etiological account comes in. A good etiological account explains both the mechanisms through which the article (to be explained) has transpired and what aspects of the structure of the world it was able to take advantage of in its preservation, propagation, or functioning.

The most famous and obvious example is evolution. The etiological account of natural selection deals both with the mechanisms of genetic transfer and with the mechanisms of selection. The latter bestow upon the organism whose features we seek to explain a better chance at reproducing (a higher chance than the one possessed by specimen without the feature).

Hitherto, we have confined ourselves to items, parts, elements, and objects within a system. The system provides the context within which goals make sense and etiological accounts are possible. What happens when we try to apply the same teleological reasoning to the system as a whole, to the Universe itself? In the absence of a context, will such cerebrations not break down?

Theists will avoid this conundrum by positing God as the context in which the Universe operates. But this is unprecedented and logically weak: the designer-creator can hardly also serve as the context within which his creation operates. Creators create and designers design because they need to achieve something; because they miss something; and because they want something. Their creation is intended (its goal is) to satisfy said need and remedy said want. Yet, if one is one's own context, if one contains oneself, one surely cannot miss, need, or want anything whatsoever!

III. The Issue of Context

If the Universe does have an intelligent Creator-Designer, He must have used language to formulate His design. His language must have consisted of the Laws of Nature, the Initial State of the Universe, and its Constants. To have used language, the Creator-Designer must have been possessed of a mind. The combination of His mind and His language has served as the context within which He operated.

The debate between science and religion boils down to this question: Did the Laws of Nature (the language of God) precede Nature or were they created with it, in the Big Bang? In other words, did they provide Nature with the context in which it unfolded?

Some, like Max Tegmark, an MIT cosmologist, go as far as to say that mathematics is not merely the language which we use to describe the Universe - it is the Universe itself. The world is an amalgam of mathematical structures, according to him. The context is the meaning is the context ad infinitum.

By now, it is a trite observation that meaning is context-dependent and, therefore, not invariant or immutable. Contextualists in aesthetics study a work of art's historical and cultural background in order to appreciate it. Philosophers of science have convincingly demonstrated that theoretical constructs (such as the electron or dark matter) derive their meaning from their place in complex deductive systems of empirically-testable theorems. Ethicists repeat that values are rendered instrumental and moral problems solvable by their relationships with a-priori moral principles. In all these cases, context precedes meaning and gives interactive birth to it.

However, the reverse is also true: context emerges from meaning and is preceded by it. This is evident in a surprising array of fields: from language to social norms, from semiotics to computer programming, and from logic to animal behavior.

In 1700, the English empiricist philosopher, John Locke, was the first to describe how meaning is derived from context in a chapter titled "Of the Association of Ideas" in the second edition of his seminal "Essay Concerning Human Understanding". Almost a century later, the philosopher James Mill and his son, John Stuart Mill, came up with a calculus of contexts: mental elements that are habitually proximate, either spatially or temporally, become associated (contiguity law) as do ideas that co-occur frequently (frequency law), or that are similar (similarity law).

But the Mills failed to realize that their laws relied heavily on and derived from two organizing principles: time and space. These meta principles lend meaning to ideas by rendering their associations comprehensible. Thus, the contiguity and frequency laws leverage meaningful spatial and temporal relations to form the context within which ideas associate. Context-effects and Gestalt  and other vision grouping laws, promulgated in the 20th century by the likes of Max Wertheimer, Irvin Rock, and Stephen Palmer, also rely on the pre-existence of space for their operation.

Contexts can have empirical or exegetic properties. In other words: they can act as webs or matrices and merely associate discrete elements; or they can provide an interpretation to these recurrent associations, they can render them meaningful. The principle of causation is an example of such interpretative faculties in action: A is invariably followed by B and a mechanism or process C can be demonstrated that links them both. Thereafter, it is safe to say that A causes B. Space-time provides the backdrop of meaning to the context (the recurrent association of A and B) which, in turn, gives rise to more meaning (causation).

But are space and time "real", objective entities - or are they instruments of the mind, mere conventions, tools it uses to order the world? Surely the latter. It is possible to construct theories to describe the world and yield falsifiable predictions without using space or time or by using counterintuitive and even "counterfactual' variants of space and time.

Another Scottish philosopher, Alexander Bains, observed, in the 19th century, that ideas form close associations also with behaviors and actions. This insight is at the basis for most modern learning and conditioning (behaviorist) theories and for connectionism (the design of neural networks where knowledge items are represented by patterns of activated ensembles of units).

Similarly, memory has been proven to be state-dependent: information learnt in specific mental, physical, or emotional states is most easily recalled in similar states. Conversely, in a process known as redintegration, mental and emotional states are completely invoked and restored when only a single element is encountered and experienced (a smell, a taste, a sight).

It seems that the occult organizing mega-principle is the mind (or "self"). Ideas, concepts, behaviors, actions, memories, and patterns presuppose the existence of minds that render them meaningful. Again, meaning (the mind or the self) breeds context, not the other way around. This does not negate the views expounded by externalist theories: that thoughts and utterances depend on factors external to the mind of the thinker or speaker (factors such as the way language is used by experts or by society). Even avowed externalists, such as Kripke, Burge, and Davidson admit that the perception of objects and events (by an observing mind) is a prerequisite for thinking about or discussing them. Again, the mind takes precedence.

But what is meaning and why is it thought to be determined by or dependent on context?

Many theories of meaning are contextualist and proffer rules that connect sentence type and context of use to referents of singular terms (such as egocentric particulars), truth-values of sentences and the force of utterances and other linguistic acts. Meaning, in other words, is regarded by most theorists as inextricably intertwined with language. Language is always context-determined: words depend on other words and on the world to which they refer and relate. Inevitably, meaning came to be described as context-dependent, too. The study of meaning was reduced to an exercise in semantics. Few noticed that the context in which words operate depends on the individual meanings of these words.

Gottlob Frege coined the term Bedeutung (reference) to describe the mapping of words, predicates, and sentences onto real-world objects, concepts (or functions, in the mathematical sense) and truth-values, respectively. The truthfulness or falsehood of a sentence are determined by the interactions and relationships between the references of the various components of the sentence. Meaning relies on the overall values of the references involved and on something that Frege called Sinn (sense): the way or "mode" an object or concept is referred to by an expression. The senses of the parts of the sentence combine to form the "thoughts" (senses of whole sentences).

Yet, this is an incomplete and mechanical picture that fails to capture the essence of human communication. It is meaning (the mind of the person composing the sentence) that breeds context and not the other way around. Even J. S. Mill postulated that a term's connotation (its meaning and attributes) determines its denotation (the objects or concepts it applies to, the term's universe of applicability).

As the Oxford Companion to Philosophy puts it (p. 411):

"A context of a form of words is intensional if its truth is dependent on the meaning, and not just the reference, of its component words, or on the meanings, and not just the truth-value, of any of its sub-clauses."

It is the thinker, or the speaker (the user of the expression) that does the referring, not the expression itself!

Moreover, as Kaplan and Kripke have noted, in many cases, Frege's contraption of "sense" is, well, senseless and utterly unnecessary: demonstratives, proper names, and natural-kind terms, for example, refer directly, through the agency of the speaker. Frege intentionally avoided the vexing question of why and how words refer to objects and concepts because he was weary of the intuitive answer, later alluded to by H. P. Grice, that users (minds) determine these linkages and their corresponding truth-values. Speakers use language to manipulate their listeners into believing in the manifest intentions behind their utterances. Cognitive, emotive, and descriptive meanings all emanate from speakers and their minds.

Initially, W. V. Quine put context before meaning: he not only linked meaning to experience, but also to empirically-vetted (non-introspective) world-theories. It is the context of the observed behaviors of speakers and listeners that determines what words mean, he said. Thus, Quine and others attacked Carnap's meaning postulates (logical connections as postulates governing predicates) by demonstrating that they are not necessary unless one possesses a separate account of the status of logic (i.e., the context).

Yet, this context-driven approach led to so many problems that soon Quine abandoned it and relented: translation - he conceded in his seminal tome, "Word and Object" - is indeterminate and reference is inscrutable. There are no facts when it comes to what words and sentences mean. What subjects say has no single meaning or determinately correct interpretation (when the various interpretations on offer are not equivalent and do not share the same truth value).

As the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy summarily puts it (p. 194):

"Inscrutability (Quine later called it indeterminacy - SV) of reference (is) (t)he doctrine ... that no empirical evidence relevant to interpreting a speaker's utterances can decide among alternative and incompatible ways of assigning referents to the words used; hence there is no fact that the words have one reference or another" - even if all the interpretations are equivalent (have the same truth value).

Meaning comes before context and is not determined by it. Wittgenstein, in his later work, concurred.

Inevitably, such a solipsistic view of meaning led to an attempt to introduce a more rigorous calculus, based on concept of truth rather than on the more nebulous construct of "meaning". Both Donald Davidson and Alfred Tarski suggested that truth exists where sequences of objects satisfy parts of sentences. The meanings of sentences are their truth-conditions: the conditions under which they are true.

But, this reversion to a meaning (truth)-determined-by-context results in bizarre outcomes, bordering on tautologies: (1) every sentence has to be paired with another sentence (or even with itself!) which endows it with meaning and (2) every part of every sentence has to make a systematic semantic contribution to the sentences in which they occur.

Thus, to determine if a sentence is truthful (i.e., meaningful) one has to find another sentence that gives it meaning. Yet, how do we know that the sentence that gives it meaning is, in itself, truthful? This kind of ratiocination leads to infinite regression. And how to we measure the contribution of each part of the sentence to the sentence if we don't know the a-priori meaning of the sentence itself?! Finally, what is this "contribution" if not another name for .... meaning?!

Moreover, in generating a truth-theory based on the specific utterances of a particular speaker, one must assume that the speaker is telling the truth ("the principle of charity"). Thus, belief, language, and meaning appear to be the facets of a single phenomenon. One cannot have either of these three without the others. It, indeed, is all in the mind.

We are back to the minds of the interlocutors as the source of both context and meaning. The mind as a field of potential meanings gives rise to the various contexts in which sentences can and are proven true (i.e., meaningful). Again, meaning precedes context and, in turn, fosters it. Proponents of Epistemic or Attributor Contextualism link the propositions expressed even in knowledge sentences (X knows or doesn't know that Y) to the attributor's psychology (in this case, as the context that endows them with meaning and truth value).

On the one hand, to derive meaning in our lives, we frequently resort to social or cosmological contexts: to entities larger than ourselves and in which we can safely feel subsumed, such as God, the state, or our Earth. Religious people believe that God has a plan into which they fit and in which they are destined to play a role; nationalists believe in the permanence that nations and states afford their own transient projects and ideas (they equate permanence with worth, truth, and meaning); environmentalists implicitly regard survival as the fount of meaning that is explicitly dependent on the preservation of a diversified and functioning ecosystem (the context).

Robert Nozick posited that finite beings ("conditions") derive meaning from "larger" meaningful beings (conditions) and so ad infinitum. The buck stops with an infinite and all-encompassing being who is the source of all meaning (God).

On the other hand, Sidgwick and other philosophers pointed out that only conscious beings can appreciate life and its rewards and that, therefore, the mind (consciousness) is the ultimate fount of all values and meaning: minds make value judgments and then proceed to regard certain situations and achievements as desirable, valuable, and meaningful. Of course, this presupposes that happiness is somehow intimately connected with rendering one's life meaningful.

So, which is the ultimate contextual fount of meaning: the subject's mind or his/her (mainly social) environment?

This apparent dichotomy is false. As Richard Rorty and David Annis noted, one can't safely divorce epistemic processes, such as justification, from the social contexts in which they take place. As Sosa, Harman, and, later, John Pollock and Michael Williams remarked, social expectations determine not only the standards of what constitutes knowledge but also what is it that we know (the contents). The mind is a social construct as much as a neurological or psychological one.

To derive meaning from utterances, we need to have asymptotically perfect information about both the subject discussed and the knowledge attributor's psychology and social milieu. This is because the attributor's choice of language and ensuing justification are rooted in and responsive to both his psychology and his environment (including his personal history).

Thomas Nagel suggested that we perceive the world from a series of concentric expanding perspectives (which he divides into internal and external). The ultimate point of view is that of the Universe itself (as Sidgwick put it). Some people find it intimidating - others, exhilarating. Here, too, context, mediated by the mind, determines meaning.

To revert to our original and main theme:

Based on the discussion above, it would seem that a Creator-Designer (God) needs to have had a mind and needs to have used language in order to generate the context within which he had created. In the absence of a mind and a language, His creation would have been meaningless and, among other things, it would have lacked a clear aim or goal.

IV. Goals and Goal-orientation as Proof of Design

Throughout this discourse, it would seem that postulating the existence of a goal necessarily implies the prior forming of an intention (to realize it). A lack of intent leaves only one plausible course of action: automatism. Any action taken in the absence of a manifest intention to act is, by definition, an automatic action.

The converse is also true: automatism prescribes the existence of a sole possible mode of action, a sole possible Nature. With an automatic action, no choice is available, there are no degrees of freedom, or freedom of action. Automatic actions are, ipso facto, deterministic.

But both statements may be false. The distinction between volitional and automatic actions is not clear-cut. Surely we can conceive of a goal-oriented act behind which there is no intent of the first or second order. An intent of the second order is, for example, the intentions of the programmer as enshrined and expressed in a software application. An intent of the first order would be the intentions of the same programmer which directly lead to the composition of said software.

Consider, for instance, house pets. They engage in a variety of acts. They are goal oriented (seek food, drink, etc.). Are they possessed of a conscious, directional, volition (intent)? Many philosophers argued against such a supposition. Moreover, sometimes end-results and by-products are mistaken for goals. Is the goal of objects to fall down? Gravity is a function of the structure of space-time. When we roll a ball down a slope (which is really what gravitation is all about, according to the General Theory of Relativity) is its "goal" to come to a rest at the bottom? Evidently not.

Still, some natural processes are much less clear-cut. Natural processes are considered to be witless reactions. No intent can be attributed to them because no intelligence can be ascribed to them. This is true, but only at times.

Intelligence is hard to define. The most comprehensive approach would be to describe it as the synergetic sum of a host of processes (some conscious or mental, some not). These processes are concerned with information: its gathering, its accumulation, classification, inter-relation, association, analysis, synthesis, integration, and all other modes of processing and manipulation.

But isn't the manipulation of information what natural processes are all about? And if Nature is the sum total of all natural processes, aren't we forced to admit that Nature is (intrinsically, inherently, of itself) intelligent? The intuitive reaction to these suggestions is bound to be negative.

When we use the term "intelligence", we seem not to be concerned with just any kind of intelligence, but with intelligence that is separate from and external to what is being observed and has to be explained. If both the intelligence and the item that needs explaining are members of the same set, we tend to disregard the intelligence involved and label it as "natural" and, therefore, irrelevant.

Moreover, not everything that is created by an intelligence (however "relevant", or external) is intelligent in itself. Some products of intelligent beings are automatic and non-intelligent. On the other hand, as any Artificial Intelligence buff would confirm, automata can become intelligent, having crossed a certain quantitative or qualitative level of complexity. The weaker form of this statement is that, beyond a certain quantitative or qualitative level of complexity, it is impossible to tell the automatic from the intelligent. Is Nature automatic, is it intelligent, or on the seam between automata and intelligence?

Nature contains everything and, therefore, contains multiple intelligences. That which contains intelligence is not necessarily intelligent, unless the intelligences contained are functional determinants of the container. Quantum mechanics (rather, its Copenhagen interpretation) implies that this, precisely, is the case. Intelligent, conscious, observers determine the very existence of subatomic particles, the constituents of all matter-energy. Human (intelligent) activity determines the shape, contents and functioning of the habitat Earth. If other intelligent races populate the universe, this could be the rule, rather than the exception. Nature may, indeed, be intelligent.

Jewish mysticism believes that humans have a major role to play: to fix the results of a cosmic catastrophe, the shattering of the divine vessels through which the infinite divine light poured forth to create our finite world. If Nature is determined to a predominant extent by its contained intelligences, then it may well be teleological.

Indeed, goal-orientated behaviour (or behavior that could be explained as goal-orientated) is Nature's hallmark. The question whether automatic or intelligent mechanisms are at work really deals with an underlying issue, that of consciousness. Are these mechanisms self-aware, introspective? Is intelligence possible without such self-awareness, without the internalized understanding of what it is doing?

Kant's third and fourth dynamic antinomies deal with this apparent duality: automatism versus intelligent acts.

The third thesis relates to causation which is the result of free will as opposed to causation which is the result of the laws of nature (nomic causation). The antithesis is that freedom is an illusion and everything is pre-determined. So, the third antinomy is really about intelligence that is intrinsic to Nature (deterministic) versus intelligence that is extrinsic to it (free will).

The fourth thesis deals with a related subject: God, the ultimate intelligent creator. It states that there must exist, either as part of the world or as its cause a Necessary Being. There are compelling arguments to support both the theses and the antitheses of the antinomies.

The opposition in the antinomies is not analytic (no contradiction is involved) - it is dialectic. A method is chosen for answering a certain type of questions. That method generates another question of the same type. "The unconditioned", the final answer that logic demands is, thus, never found and endows the antinomy with its disturbing power. Both thesis and antithesis seem true.

Perhaps it is the fact that we are constrained by experience that entangles us in these intractable questions. The fact that the causation involved in free action is beyond possible experience does not mean that the idea of such a causality is meaningless.

Experience is not the best guide in other respects, as well. An effect can be caused by many causes or many causes can lead to the same effect. Analytic tools - rather than experiential ones - are called for to expose the "true" causal relations (one cause-one effect).

Experience also involves mnemic causation rather than the conventional kind. In the former, the proximate cause is composed not only of a current event but also of a past event. Richard Semon said that mnemic phenomena (such as memory) entail the postulation of engrams or intervening traces. The past cannot have a direct effect without such mediation.

Russell rejected this and did not refrain from proposing what effectively turned out to be action at a distance involving backward causation. A confession is perceived by many to annul past sins. This is the Aristotelian teleological causation. A goal generates a behaviour. A product of Nature develops as a cause of a process which ends in it (a tulip and a bulb).

Finally, the distinction between reasons and causes is not sufficiently developed to really tell apart teleological from scientific explanations. Both are relations between phenomena ordained in such a way so that other parts of the world are effected by them. If those effected parts of the world are conscious beings (not necessarily rational or free), then we have "reasons" rather than "causes".

But are reasons causal? At least, are they concerned with the causes of what is being explained? There is a myriad of answers to these questions. Even the phrase: "Are reasons causes?" may be considered to be a misleading choice of words. Mental causation is a foggy subject, to put it mildly.

Perhaps the only safe thing to say would be that causes and goals need not be confused. One is objective (and, in most cases, material), the other mental. A person can act in order to achieve some future thing but it is not a future cause that generates his actions as an effect. The immediate causes absolutely precede them. It is the past that he is influenced by, a past in which he formed a VISION of the future.

The contents of mental imagery are not subject to the laws of physics and to the asymmetry of time. The physical world and its temporal causal order are. The argument between teleologists and scientist may, all said and done, be merely semantic. Where one claims an ontological, REAL status for mental states (reasons) - one is a teleologist. Where one denies this and regards the mental as UNREAL, one is a scientist.

But, regardless of what type of arguments we adopt, physical (scientific) or metaphysical (e.g. teleological), do we need a Creator-Designer to explain the existence of the Universe? Is it parsimonious to introduce such a Supreme and Necessary Being into the calculus of the world?

V. Parsimonious Considerations regarding the Existence of God

Occasionalism is a variation upon Cartesian metaphysics. The latter is the most notorious case of dualism (mind and body, for instance). The mind is a "mental substance". The body – a "material substance". What permits the complex interactions which happen between these two disparate "substances"? The "unextended mind" and the "extended body" surely cannot interact without a mediating agency, God. The appearance is that of direct interaction but this is an illusion maintained by Him. He moves the body when the mind is willing and places ideas in the mind when the body comes across other bodies.

Descartes postulated that the mind is an active, unextended, thought while the body is a passive, unthinking extension. The First Substance and the Second Substance combine to form the Third Substance, Man. God – the Fourth, uncreated Substance – facilitates the direct interaction among the two within the third.

Foucher raised the question: how can God – a mental substance – interact with a material substance, the body. The answer offered was that God created the body (probably so that He will be able to interact with it). Leibniz carried this further: his Monads, the units of reality, do not really react and interact. They just seem to be doing so because God created them with a pre-established harmony. The constant divine mediation was, thus, reduced to a one-time act of creation. This was considered to be both a logical result of occasionalism and its refutation by a reductio ad absurdum argument.

But, was the fourth substance necessary at all? Could not an explanation to all the known facts be provided without it? The ratio between the number of known facts (the outcomes of observations) and the number of theory elements and entities employed in order to explain them is the parsimony ratio. Every newly discovered fact either reinforces the existing worldview or forces the introduction of a new one, through a "crisis" or a "revolution" (a "paradigm shift" in Kuhn's abandoned phrase).

The new worldview need not necessarily be more parsimonious. It could be that a single new fact precipitates the introduction of a dozen new theoretical entities, axioms and functions (curves between data points). The very delineation of the field of study serves to limit the number of facts, which could exercise such an influence upon the existing worldview and still be considered pertinent. Parsimony is achieved, therefore, also by affixing the boundaries of the intellectual arena and / or by declaring quantitative or qualitative limits of relevance and negligibility. The world is thus simplified through idealization. Yet, if this is carried too far, the whole edifice collapses. It is a fine balance that should be maintained between the relevant and the irrelevant, what matters and what could be neglected, the comprehensiveness of the explanation and the partiality of the pre-defined limitations on the field of research.

This does not address the more basic issue of why do we prefer simplicity to complexity. This preference runs through history: Aristotle, William of Ockham, Newton, Pascal – all praised parsimony and embraced it as a guiding principle of work scientific. Biologically and spiritually, we are inclined to prefer things needed to things not needed. Moreover, we prefer things needed to admixtures of things needed and not needed. This is so, because things needed are needed, encourage survival and enhance its chances. Survival is also assisted by the construction of economic theories. We all engage in theory building as a mundane routine. A tiger beheld means danger – is one such theory. Theories which incorporated fewer assumptions were quicker to process and enhanced the chances of survival. In the aforementioned feline example, the virtue of the theory and its efficacy lie in its simplicity (one observation, one prediction). Had the theory been less parsimonious, it would have entailed a longer time to process and this would have rendered the prediction wholly unnecessary. The tiger would have prevailed.

Thus, humans are Parsimony Machines (Ockham Machines): they select the shortest (and, thereby, most efficient) path to the production of true theorems, given a set of facts (observations) and a set of theories. Another way to describe the activity of Ockham Machines: they produce the maximal number of true theorems in any given period of time, given a set of facts and a set of theories.

Poincare, the French mathematician and philosopher, thought that Nature itself, this metaphysical entity which encompasses all, is parsimonious. He believed that mathematical simplicity must be a sign of truth. A simple Nature would, indeed, appear this way (mathematically simple) despite the filters of theory and language. The "sufficient reason" (why the world exists rather than not exist) should then be transformed to read: "because it is the simplest of all possible worlds". That is to say: the world exists and THIS world exists (rather than another) because it is the most parsimonious – not the best, as Leibniz put it – of all possible worlds.

Parsimony is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for a theory to be labeled "scientific". But a scientific theory is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to parsimony. In other words: parsimony is possible within and can be applied to a non-scientific framework and parsimony cannot be guaranteed by the fact that a theory is scientific (it could be scientific and not parsimonious). Parsimony is an extra-theoretical tool. Theories are under-determined by data. An infinite number of theories fits any finite number of data. This happens because of the gap between the infinite number of cases dealt with by the theory (the application set) and the finiteness of the data set, which is a subset of the application set. Parsimony is a rule of thumb. It allows us to concentrate our efforts on those theories most likely to succeed. Ultimately, it allows us to select THE theory that will constitute the prevailing worldview, until it is upset by new data.

Another question arises which was not hitherto addressed: how do we know that we are implementing some mode of parsimony? In other words, which are the FORMAL requirements of parsimony?

The following conditions must be satisfied by any law or method of selection before it can be labeled "parsimonious":

a. Exploration of a higher level of causality: the law must lead to a level of causality, which will include the previous one and other, hitherto apparently unrelated phenomena. It must lead to a cause, a reason which will account for the set of data previously accounted for by another cause or reason AND for additional data. William of Ockham was, after all a Franciscan monk and constantly in search for a Prima Causa.

b. The law should either lead to, or be part of, an integrative process. This means that as previous theories or models are rigorously and correctly combined, certain entities or theory elements should be made redundant. Only those, which we cannot dispense with, should be left incorporated in the new worldview.

c. The outcomes of any law of parsimony should be successfully subjected to scientific tests. These results should correspond with observations and with predictions yielded by the worldviews fostered by the law of parsimony under scrutiny.

d. Laws of parsimony should be semantically correct. Their continuous application should bring about an evolution (or a punctuated evolution) of the very language used to convey the worldview, or at least of important language elements. The phrasing of the questions to be answered by the worldview should be influenced, as well. In extreme cases, a whole new language has to emerge, elaborated and formulated in accordance with the law of parsimony. But, in most cases, there is just a replacement of a weaker language with a more powerful meta-language. Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity and Newtonian dynamics are a prime example of such an orderly lingual transition, which was the direct result of the courageous application of a law of parsimony.

e. Laws of parsimony should be totally subjected (actually, subsumed) by the laws of Logic and by the laws of Nature. They must not lead to, or entail, a contradiction, for instance, or a tautology. In physics, they must adhere to laws of causality or correlation and refrain from teleology.

f. Laws of parsimony must accommodate paradoxes. Paradox Accommodation means that theories, theory elements, the language, a whole worldview will have to be adapted to avoid paradoxes. The goals of a theory or its domain, for instance, could be minimized to avoid paradoxes. But the mechanism of adaptation is complemented by a mechanism of adoption. A law of parsimony could lead to the inevitable adoption of a paradox. Both the horns of a dilemma are, then, adopted. This, inevitably, leads to a crisis whose resolution is obtained through the introduction of a new worldview. New assumptions are parsimoniously adopted and the paradox disappears.

g. Paradox accommodation is an important hallmark of a true law of parsimony in operation. Paradox Intolerance is another. Laws of parsimony give theories and worldviews a "licence" to ignore paradoxes, which lie outside the domain covered by the parsimonious set of data and rules. It is normal to have a conflict between the non-parsimonious sets and the parsimonious one. Paradoxes are the results of these conflicts and the most potent weapons of the non-parsimonious sets. But the law of parsimony, to deserve it name, should tell us clearly and unequivocally, when to adopt a paradox and when to exclude it. To be able to achieve this formidable task, every law of parsimony comes equipped with a metaphysical interpretation whose aim it is to plausibly keep nagging paradoxes and questions at a distance. The interpretation puts the results of the formalism in the context of a meaningful universe and provides a sense of direction, causality, order and even "intent". The Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is an important member of this species.

h. The law of parsimony must apply both to the theory entities AND to observable results, both part of a coherent, internally and externally consistent, logical (in short: scientific) theory. It is divergent-convergent: it diverges from strict correspondence to reality while theorizing, only to converge with it when testing the predictions yielded by the theory. Quarks may or may not exist – but their effects do, and these effects are observable.

i. A law of parsimony has to be invariant under all transformations and permutations of the theory entities. It is almost tempting to say that it should demand symmetry – had this not been merely an aesthetic requirement and often violated.

j. The law of parsimony should aspire to a minimization of the number of postulates, axioms, curves between data points, theory entities, etc. This is the principle of the maximization of uncertainty. The more uncertainty introduced by NOT postulating explicitly – the more powerful and rigorous the theory / worldview. A theory with one assumption and one theoretical entity – renders a lot of the world an uncertain place. The uncertainty is expelled by using the theory and its rules and applying them to observational data or to other theoretical constructs and entities. The Grand Unified Theories of physics want to get rid of four disparate powers and to gain one instead.

k. A sense of beauty, of aesthetic superiority, of acceptability and of simplicity should be the by-products of the application of a law of parsimony. These sensations have been often been cited, by practitioners of science, as influential factors in weighing in favor of a particular theory.

l. Laws of parsimony entail the arbitrary selection of facts, observations and experimental results to be related to and included in the parsimonious set. This is the parsimonious selection process and it is closely tied with the concepts of negligibility and with the methodology of idealization and reduction. The process of parsimonious selection is very much like a strategy in a game in which both the number of players and the rules of the game are finite. The entry of a new player (an observation, the result of an experiment) sometimes transforms the game and, at other times, creates a whole new game. All the players are then moved into the new game, positioned there and subjected to its new rules. This, of course, can lead to an infinite regression. To effect a parsimonious selection, a theory must be available whose rules will dictate the selection. But such a theory must also be subordinated to a law of parsimony (which means that it has to parsimoniously select its own facts, etc.). a meta-theory must, therefore, exist, which will inform the lower-level theory how to implement its own parsimonious selection and so on and so forth, ad infinitum.

m. A law of parsimony falsifies everything that does not adhere to its tenets. Superfluous entities are not only unnecessary – they are, in all likelihood, false. Theories, which were not subjected to the tests of parsimony are, probably, not only non-rigorous but also positively false.

n. A law of parsimony must apply the principle of redundant identity. Two facets, two aspects, two dimensions of the same thing – must be construed as one and devoid of an autonomous standing, not as separate and independent.

o. The laws of parsimony are "back determined" and, consequently, enforce "back determination" on all the theories and worldviews to which they apply. For any given data set and set of rules, a number of parsimony sets can be postulated. To decide between them, additional facts are needed. These will be discovered in the future and, thus, the future "back determines" the right parsimony set. Either there is a finite parsimony group from which all the temporary groups are derived – or no such group exists and an infinity of parsimony sets is possible, the results of an infinity of data sets. This, of course, is thinly veiled pluralism. In the former alternative, the number of facts / observations / experiments that are required in order to determine the right parsimony set is finite. But, there is a third possibility: that there is an eternal, single parsimony set and all our current parsimony sets are its asymptotic approximations. This is monism in disguise. Also, there seems to be an inherent (though solely intuitive) conflict between parsimony and infinity.

p. A law of parsimony must seen to be at conflict with the principle of multiplicity of substitutes. This is the result of an empirical and pragmatic observation: The removal of one theory element or entity from a theory – precipitates its substitution by two or more theory elements or entities (if the preservation of the theory is sought). It is this principle that is the driving force behind scientific crises and revolutions. Entities do multiply and Ockham's Razor is rarely used until it is too late and the theory has to be replaced in its entirety. This is a psychological and social phenomenon, not an inevitable feature of scientific progress. Worldviews collapse under the mere weight of their substituting, multiplying elements. Ptolemy's cosmology fell prey to the Copernican model not because it was more efficient, but because it contained less theory elements, axioms, equations. A law of parsimony must warn against such behaviour and restrain it or, finally, provide the ailing theory with a coup de grace.

q. A law of parsimony must allow for full convertibility of the phenomenal to the nuomenal and of the universal to the particular. Put more simply: no law of parsimony can allow a distinction between our data and the "real" world to be upheld. Nor can it tolerate the postulation of Platonic "Forms" and "Ideas" which are not entirely reflected in the particular.

r. A law of parsimony implies necessity. To assume that the world is contingent is to postulate the existence of yet another entity upon which the world is dependent for its existence. It is to theorize on yet another principle of action. Contingency is the source of entity multiplication and goes against the grain of parsimony. Of course, causality should not be confused with contingency. The former is deterministic – the latter the result of some kind of free will.

s. The explicit, stated, parsimony, the one formulated, formalized and analyzed, is connected to an implicit, less evident sort and to latent parsimony. Implicit parsimony is the set of rules and assumptions about the world that are known as formal logic. The latent parsimony is the set of rules that allows for a (relatively) smooth transition to be effected between theories and worldviews in times of crisis. Those are the rules of parsimony, which govern scientific revolutions. The rule stated in article (a) above is a latent one: that in order for the transition between old theories and new to be valid, it must also be a transition between a lower level of causality – and a higher one.

Efficient, workable, parsimony is either obstructed, or merely not achieved through the following venues of action:

a. Association – the formation of networks of ideas, which are linked by way of verbal, intuitive, or structural association, does not lead to more parsimonious results. Naturally, a syntactic, grammatical, structural, or other theoretical rule can be made evident by the results of this technique. But to discern such a rule, the scientist must distance himself from the associative chains, to acquire a bird's eye view , or, on the contrary, to isolate, arbitrarily or not, a part of the chain for closer inspection. Association often leads to profusion and to embarrassment of riches. The same observations apply to other forms of chaining, flowing and networking.

b. Incorporation without integration (that is, without elimination of redundancies) leads to the formation of hybrid theories. These cannot survive long. Incorporation is motivated by conflict between entities, postulates or theory elements. It is through incorporation that the protectors of the "old truth" hope to prevail. It is an interim stage between old and new. The conflict blows up in the perpetrators' face and a new theory is invented. Incorporation is the sworn enemy of parsimony because it is politically motivated. It keeps everyone happy by not giving up anything and accumulating entities. This entity hoarding is poisonous and undoes the whole hyper-structure.

c. Contingency – see (r) above.

d. Strict monism or pluralism – see (o) above.

e. Comprehensiveness prevents parsimony. To obtain a description of the world, which complies with a law of parsimony, one has to ignore and neglect many elements, facts and observations. Gödel demonstrated the paradoxality inherent in a comprehensive formal logical system. To fully describe the world, however, one would need an infinite amount of assumptions, axioms, theoretical entities, elements, functions and variables. This is anathema to parsimony.

f. The previous excludes the reconcilement of parsimony and monovalent correspondence. An isomorphic mapping of the world to the worldview, a realistic rendering of the universe using theoretical entities and other language elements would hardly be expected to be parsimonious. Sticking to facts (without the employ of theory elements) would generate a pluralistic multiplication of entities. Realism is like using a machine language to run a supercomputer. The path of convergence (with the world) – convergence (with predictions yielded by the theory) leads to a proliferation of categories, each one populated by sparse specimen. Species and genera abound. The worldview is marred by too many details, crowded by too many apparently unrelated observations.

g. Finally, if the field of research is wrongly – too narrowly – defined, this could be detrimental to the positing of meaningful questions and to the expectation of receiving meaningful replies to them (experimental outcomes). This lands us where we started: the psychophysical problem is, perhaps, too narrowly defined. Dominated by Physics, questions are biased or excluded altogether. Perhaps a Fourth Substance IS the parsimonious answer, after all.

It would seem, therefore, that parsimony should rule out the existence of a Necessary and Supreme Being or Intelligence (God). But is Nature really parsimonious, as Poincare believed? Our World is so complex and includes so many redundancies that it seems to abhor parsimony. Doesn't this ubiquitous complexity indicate the existence of a Mind-in-Chief, a Designer-Creator?

VI. Complexity as Proof of Design

"Everything is simpler than you think and at the same time more complex than you imagine."
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Complexity rises spontaneously in nature through processes such as self-organization. Emergent phenomena are common as are emergent traits, not reducible to basic components, interactions, or properties.

Complexity does not, therefore, imply the existence of a designer or a design. Complexity does not imply the existence of intelligence and sentient beings. On the contrary, complexity usually points towards a natural source and a random origin. Complexity and artificiality are often incompatible.

Artificial designs and objects are found only in unexpected ("unnatural") contexts and environments. Natural objects are totally predictable and expected. Artificial creations are efficient and, therefore, simple and parsimonious. Natural objects and processes are not.

As Seth Shostak notes in his excellent essay, titled "SETI and Intelligent Design", evolution experiments with numerous dead ends before it yields a single adapted biological entity. DNA is far from optimized: it contains inordinate amounts of junk. Our bodies come replete with dysfunctional appendages and redundant organs. Lightning bolts emit energy all over the electromagnetic spectrum. Pulsars and interstellar gas clouds spew radiation over the entire radio spectrum. The energy of the Sun is ubiquitous over the entire optical and thermal range. No intelligent engineer - human or not - would be so wasteful.

Confusing artificiality with complexity is not the only terminological conundrum.

Complexity and simplicity are often, and intuitively, regarded as two extremes of the same continuum, or spectrum. Yet, this may be a simplistic view, indeed.

Simple procedures (codes, programs), in nature as well as in computing, often yield the most complex results. Where does the complexity reside, if not in the simple program that created it? A minimal number of primitive interactions occur in a primordial soup and, presto, life. Was life somehow embedded in the primordial soup all along? Or in the interactions? Or in the combination of substrate and interactions?

Complex processes yield simple products (think about products of thinking such as a newspaper article, or a poem, or manufactured goods such as a sewing thread). What happened to the complexity? Was it somehow reduced, "absorbed, digested, or assimilated"? Is it a general rule that, given sufficient time and resources, the simple can become complex and the complex reduced to the simple? Is it only a matter of computation?

We can resolve these apparent contradictions by closely examining the categories we use.

Perhaps simplicity and complexity are categorical illusions, the outcomes of limitations inherent in our system of symbols (in our language).

We label something "complex" when we use a great number of symbols to describe it. But, surely, the choices we make (regarding the number of symbols we use) teach us nothing about complexity, a real phenomenon!

A straight line can be described with three symbols (A, B, and the distance between them) - or with three billion symbols (a subset of the discrete points which make up the line and their inter-relatedness, their function). But whatever the number of symbols we choose to employ, however complex our level of description, it has nothing to do with the straight line or with its "real world" traits. The straight line is not rendered more (or less) complex or orderly by our choice of level of (meta) description and language elements.

The simple (and ordered) can be regarded as the tip of the complexity iceberg, or as part of a complex, interconnected whole, or hologramically, as encompassing the complex (the same way all particles are contained in all other particles). Still, these models merely reflect choices of descriptive language, with no bearing on reality.

Perhaps complexity and simplicity are not related at all, either quantitatively, or qualitatively. Perhaps complexity is not simply more simplicity. Perhaps there is no organizational principle tying them to one another. Complexity is often an emergent phenomenon, not reducible to simplicity.

The third possibility is that somehow, perhaps through human intervention, complexity yields simplicity and simplicity yields complexity (via pattern identification, the application of rules, classification, and other human pursuits). This dependence on human input would explain the convergence of the behaviors of all complex systems on to a tiny sliver of the state (or phase) space (sort of a mega attractor basin). According to this view, Man is the creator of simplicity and complexity alike but they do have a real and independent existence thereafter (the Copenhagen interpretation of a Quantum Mechanics).

Still, these twin notions of simplicity and complexity give rise to numerous theoretical and philosophical complications.

Consider life.

In human (artificial and intelligent) technology, every thing and every action has a function within a "scheme of things". Goals are set, plans made, designs help to implement the plans.

Not so with life. Living things seem to be prone to disorientated thoughts, or the absorption and processing of absolutely irrelevant and inconsequential data. Moreover, these laboriously accumulated databases vanish instantaneously with death. The organism is akin to a computer which processes data using elaborate software and then turns itself off after 15-80 years, erasing all its work.

Most of us believe that what appears to be meaningless and functionless supports the meaningful and functional and leads to them. The complex and the meaningless (or at least the incomprehensible) always seem to resolve to the simple and the meaningful. Thus, if the complex is meaningless and disordered then order must somehow be connected to meaning and to simplicity (through the principles of organization and interaction).

Moreover, complex systems are inseparable from their environment whose feedback induces their self-organization. Our discrete, observer-observed, approach to the Universe is, thus, deeply inadequate when applied to complex systems. These systems cannot be defined, described, or understood in isolation from their environment. They are one with their surroundings.

Many complex systems display emergent properties. These cannot be predicted even with perfect knowledge about said systems. We can say that the complex systems are creative and intuitive, even when not sentient, or intelligent. Must intuition and creativity be predicated on intelligence, consciousness, or sentience?

Thus, ultimately, complexity touches upon very essential questions of who we, what are we for, how we create, and how we evolve. It is not a simple matter, that...

VII. Summary

The fact that the Universe is "fine-tuned" to allow for Life to emerge and evolve does not necessarily imply the existence of a Designer-Creator (although this cannot be ruled out conclusively). All forms and manner of Anthropic Principles are teleological and therefore non-scientific. This, though, does not ipso facto render them invalid or counterfactual.

Still, teleological explanations operate only within a context within which they acquire meaning. God cannot serve as His own context because he cannot be contained in anything and cannot be imperfect or incomplete. But, to have designed the Universe, He must have had a mind and must have used a language. His mind and His language combined can serve as the context within which he had labored to create the cosmos.

The rule of parsimony applies to theories about the World, but not to the World itself. Nature is not parsimonious. On the contrary: it is redundant. Parsimony, therefore, does not rule out the existence of an intelligent Designer-Creator (though it does rule out His incorporation as an element in a scientific theory of the world or in a Theory of Everything).

Finally, complexity is merely a semantic (language) element that does not denote anything in reality. It is therefore meaningless (or at the very least doubtful) to claim the complexity of the Universe implies (let alone proves) the existence of an intelligent (or even non-intelligent) Creator-Designer.

Read Note on Teleology: Legitimizing Final Causes

Read Note on Context, Background, Meaning

Read Note on Parsimony – The Fourth Substance

Read Note on Complexity and Simplicity

Read Note on Scientific Theories and the Life Cycles of Science

Return

God and Science

IV. Theodicy: The Problem of Evil

''There is nothing that an omnipotent God could not do.' 'No.' 'Then, can God do evil?' 'No.' 'So that evil is nothing, since that is what He cannot do who can do anything.'

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (480? - 524?), Roman philosopher and statesman, The Consolation of Philosophy

"An implication of intelligent design may be that the designer is benevolent and, as such, the constants and structures of the universe are 'life-friendly'. However such intelligent designer may conceivably be malevolent … (I)t is reasonable to conclude that God does not exist, since God is omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good and thereby would not permit any gratuitous natural evil. But since gratuitous natural evils are precisely what we would expect if a malevolent spirit created the universe … If any spirit created the universe, it is malevolent, not benevolent."

Quentin Smith, The Anthropic Coincidences, Evil and the Disconfirmation of Theism

Nequaquam nobis divinitus esse creatum
Naturam mundi, quæ tanta est prædita culpa.

Lucretius (De Rerum Natura)

I. The Logical Problem of Evil

God is omniscient, omnipotent and good (we do not discuss here more "limited" versions of a divine Designer or Creator). Why, therefore won't he eliminate Evil? If he cannot do so, then he is not all-powerful (or not all-knowing). If he will not do so, then surely he is not good! Epicurus is said to have been the first to offer this simplistic formulation of the Logical (a-priori, deductive) Problem of Evil, later expounded on by David Hume in his "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion" (1779).

Evil is a value judgment, a plainly human, culture-bound, period-specific construct. St. Thomas Aquinas called it "ens rationis", the subjective perception of  relationships between objects and persons, or persons and persons. Some religions (Hinduism, Christian Science) shrug it off as an illusion, the outcome of our intellectual limitations and our mortality. As St. Augustine explained in his seminal "The City of God" (5th century AD), what to us appears heinous and atrocious may merely be an integral part of a long-term divine plan whose aim is to preponderate good. Leibniz postulated in his Theodicy (1710) that Evil (moral, physical, and metaphysical) is an inevitable part of the best logically possible world, a cosmos of plenitude and the greatest possible number of "compatible perfections".

But, what about acts such as murder or rape (at least in peace time)? What about "horrendous evil" (coined by Marilyn Adams to refer to unspeakable horrors)? There is no belief system that condones them. They are universally considered to be evil. It is hard to come up with a moral calculus that would justify them, no matter how broad the temporal and spatial frame of reference and how many degrees of freedom we allow.

The Augustinian etiology of evil (that it is the outcome of bad choices by creatures endowed with a free will) is of little help. It fails to explain why would a sentient, sapient being, fully aware of the consequences of his actions and their adverse impacts on himself and on others, choose evil? When misdeeds are aligned with the furtherance of one's self-interest, evil, narrowly considered, appears to be a rational choice. But, as William Rowe observed, many gratuitously wicked acts are self-defeating, self-destructive, irrational, and purposeless. They do not give rise to any good, nor do they prevent a greater evil. They increase the sum of misery in the world.

As Alvin Plantinga suggested (1974, 1977) and Bardesanes and St. Thomas Aquinas centuries before him, Evil may be an inevitable (and tolerated) by-product of free will. God has made Himself absent from a human volition that is free, non-deterministic, and non-determined. This divine withdrawal is the process known as "self-limitation", or, as the Kabbalah calls it: tsimtsum, minimization. Where there's no God, the door to Evil is wide open. God, therefore, can be perceived as having absconded and having let Evil in so as to facilitate Man's ability to make truly free choices. It can even be argued that God inflicts pain and ignores (if not leverages) Evil in order to engender growth, learning, and maturation. It is a God not of indifference (as proposed by theologians and philosophers from Lactantius to Paul Draper), but of "tough love". Isaiah puts it plainly: "I make peace and create evil" (45:7).

Back to the issue of Free Will.

The ability to choose between options is the hallmark of intelligence. The entire edifice of human civilization rests on the assumption that people's decisions unerringly express and reflect their unique set of preferences, needs, priorities, and wishes. Our individuality is inextricably intermeshed with our ability not to act predictably and not to succumb to peer pressure or group dynamics. The capacity to choose Evil is what makes us human.

Things are different with natural evil: disasters, diseases, premature death. These have very little to do with human choices and human agency, unless we accept Richard Swinburne's anthropocentric - or, should I say: Anthropic? - belief that they are meant to foster virtuous behaviors, teach survival skills, and enhance positive human traits, including the propensity for a spiritual bond with God and "soul-making" (a belief shared by the Mu'tazili school of Islam and by theologians from Irenaeus of Lyons and St. Basil to John Hick).

Natural calamities are not the results of free will. Why would a benevolent God allow them to happen?

Because Nature sports its own version of "free will" (indeterminacy). As Leibniz and Malebranche noted, the Laws of Nature are pretty simple. Not so their permutations and combinations. Unforeseeable, emergent complexity characterizes a myriad beneficial natural phenomena and makes them possible. The degrees of freedom inherent in all advantageous natural processes come with a price tag: catastrophes (Reichenbach). Genetic mutations drive biological evolution, but also give rise to cancer. Plate tectonics yielded our continents and biodiversity, but often lead to fatal earthquakes and tsunamis. Physical evil is the price we pay for a smoothly-functioning and a fine-tuned universe.

II. The Evidential Problem of Evil

Some philosophers (for instance, William Rowe and Paul Draper) suggested that the preponderance of (specific, horrific, gratuitous types of) Evil does not necessarily render God logically impossible (in other words, that the Problem of Evil is not a logical problem), merely highly unlikely. This is known as the Evidential or Probabilistic (a-posteriori, inductive) Problem of Evil.

As opposed to the logical version of the Problem of Evil, the evidential variant relies on our (fallible and limited) judgment. It goes like this: upon deep reflection, we, human beings, cannot find a good reason for God to tolerate and to not act against intrinsic Evil (i.e. gratuitous evil that can be prevented without either vanquishing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse). Since intrinsic evil abounds, it is highly unlikely that He exists.

Skeptic Theists counter by deriding such thinkers: How can we, with our finite intellect ever hope to grasp God's motives and plan, His reasons for action and inaction? To attempt to explicate and justify God (theodicy) is not only blasphemous, it is also presumptuous, futile, and, in all likelihood, wrong, leading to fallacies and falsities.

Yet, even if our intelligence were perfect and omniscient, it would not necessarily have been identical to or coextensive with God's. As we well know from experience, multiple intelligences with the same attributes often obtain completely different behaviors and traits. Two omniscient intellects can reach diametrically-opposed conclusions, even given the same set of data.

We can turn the evidential argument from evil on its head and, following Swinburne, paraphrase Rowe:

If there is an omnipotent and omniscient being, then there are specific cases of such a being's intentionally allowing evil occurrences that have wrongmaking properties such that there are rightmaking characteristics that it is reasonable to believe exist (or unreasonable to believe do not exist) and that both apply to the cases in question and are sufficiently serious to counterbalance the relevant wrongmaking characteristics.

Therefore it is likely that (here comes the inductive leap from theodicy to defense):

If there is an omnipotent and omniscient being, then there is the case of such a being intentionally allowing specific or even all evil occurrences that have wrongmaking properties such that there are rightmaking characteristics that it is reasonable to believe exist (or unreasonable to believe do not exist) — including ones that we are not aware of — that both apply to the cases in question, or to all Evil and are sufficiently serious to counterbalance the relevant wrongmaking characteristics.

Back to reality: given our limitations, what to us may appear evil and gratuitous, He may regard as necessary and even beneficial (Alston, Wykstra, Plantinga).

Even worse: we cannot fathom God's mind because we cannot fathom any mind other than our own. This doubly applies to God, whose mind is infinite and omniscient: if He does exist, His mind is alien and inaccessible to us. There is no possible intersubjectivity between God and ourselves. We cannot empathize with Him. God and Man have no common ground or language. It is not Hick's "epistemic distance", which can be bridged by learning to love God and worship Him. Rather, it is an unbridgeable chasm.

This inaccessibility may cut both ways. Open Theists (harking back to the Socinians in the 17th century) say that God cannot predict our moves. Deists say that He doesn't care to: having created the Universe, He has moved on, leaving the world and its inhabitants to their own devices. Perhaps He doesn't care about us because He cannot possibly know what it is to be human, He does not feel our pain, and is incapable of empathizing with us. But this view of an indifferent God negates his imputed benevolence and omnipotence.

This raises two questions:

(i) If His mind is inaccessible to us, how could we positively know anything about Him? The answer is that maybe we don't. Maybe our knowledge about God actually pertains to someone else. The Gnostics said that we are praying to the wrong divinity: the entity that created the Universe is the Demiurge, not God.

(ii) If our minds are inaccessible to Him, how does He make Himself known to us? Again, the answer may well be that He does not and that all our "knowledge" is sheer confabulation. This would explain the fact that what we think we know about God doesn't sit well with the plenitude of wickedness around us and with nature's brutality.

Be that as it may, we seem to have come back full circle to the issue of free will. God cannot foresee our choices, decisions, and behaviors because He has made us libertarian free moral agents. We are out of His control and determination and, thus, out of His comprehension. We can choose Evil and there is little He can do about it.

III. Aseity and Evil

Both formulations of the Problem of Evil assume, sotto voce, that God maintains an intimate relationship with His creation, or even that the essence of God would have been different without the World. This runs contra to the divine attribute of aseity which states flatly that God is self-sufficient and does not depend for His existence, attributes, or functioning on any thing outside Himself. God, therefore, by definition, cannot be concerned with the cosmos and with any of its characteristics, including the manifestations of good and evil. Moreover, the principle of aseity, taken to its logical conclusion, implies that God does not interact with the World and does not change it. This means that God cannot or will not either prevent Evil or bring it about.

IV. God as a Malicious Being

A universe that gives rise to gratuitous Evil may indicate the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, but also supremely malevolent creator. Again, turning on its head the familiar consequentialist attempt to refute the evidential argument from evil, we get (quoting from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article about The Problem of Evil):

"(1) An action is, by definition, morally right if and only if it is, among the actions that one could have performed, an action that produces at least as much value as every alternative action;

(2) An action is morally wrong if and only if it is not morally right;

(3) If one is an omnipotent and omniscient being, then for any action whatever, there is always some (alternative) action that produces greater value."

In other words, the actions of an omnipotent and omniscient being are always morally wrong and never morally right. This is because among the actions that such a being could have performed (instead of the action that he did perform) there is an infinity of alternatives that produce greater value.

Moreover, an omnibenevolent, merciful, and just God is hardly likely to have instituted an infinite Hell for nonbelievers. This is more in tune with a wicked, vicious divinity. To suggest the Hell is the sinner's personal choice not to be with God (i.e. to sin and to renounce His grace) doesn't solve the problem: for why would a being such as God allow mere ignorant defective mortals a choice that may lead them straight to Hell? Why doesn't He protect them from the terrifying outcomes of their nescience and imperfection? And what kind of "choice" is it, anyway? Believe in me, or else ... (burn in Hell, or be annihilated).

V. Mankind Usurping God - or Fulfilling His Plan?

A morally perfect God (and even a morally imperfect one) would surely wish to minimize certain, horrendous types of gratuitous Evil albeit without sacrificing the greater good and while forestalling even greater evils. How can God achieve these admirable and "ego"-syntonic goals without micromanaging the World and without ridding it of the twin gifts of free will and indeterminacy?

If there is a God, He may have placed us on this Earth to function as "moral policeman". It may be our role to fight Evil and to do our best to eradicate it (this is the view of the Kabbalah and, to some extent, Hegel). We are God's rightmaking agents, his long arm, and his extension. Gradually, Mankind acquires abilities hitherto regarded as the exclusive domain of God. We can cure diseases; eliminate pain; overcome poverty; extend life, fight crime, do justice. In the not too distant future we are likely to be able to retard ageing; ameliorate natural catastrophes; eradicate delinquency (remember the film "Clockwork Orange"?).

Imagine a future world in which, due to human ingenuity and efforts, Evil is no more. Will free will vanish with it and become a relic of a long-forgotten past? Will we lose our incentive and capacity to learn, improve, develop, and grow? Will we perish of "too much good" as in H. G. Wells' dystopia "The Time Machine"? Why is it that God tolerates Evil and we seek to dispose of it? In trying to resist Evil and limit it, are we acting against the Divine Plan, or in full compliance with it? Are we risking His wrath every time we temper with Nature and counter our propensity for wickedness, or is this precisely what He has in store for us and why He made us?

Many of these questions resolve as if by magic once we hold God to be merely a psychological construct, a cultural artifact, and an invention. The new science of neuro-religion traces faith to specific genes and neurons. Indeed, God strikes some as a glorified psychological defense mechanism: intended to fend off intimations of a Universe that is random, meaningless and, ipso facto, profoundly unjust by human criteria. By limiting God's omnipotence (since He is not capable of Evil thoughts or deeds) even as we trumpet ours (in the libertarian view of free will), we have rendered His creation less threatening and the world more habitable and welcoming. If He is up there, He may be smiling upon our accomplishments against all odds.

Read Note about Narcissism and Evil

Read Note on Teleology: Legitimizing Final Causes

Read Note on Context, Background, Meaning

Read Note on Parsimony – The Fourth Substance

Read Note on Complexity and Simplicity

Read Note on Scientific Theories and the Life Cycles of Science

Return

God and Science

XII.       Miracles, Wonders, Signs:

God's Interactions with the World

"And from the great and well-known miracles a man comes to admit to hidden miracles which are the foundation of the whole Torah. A person has no portion in the Torah of Moses unless he believes that all our matters and circumstances are miracles and they do not follow nature or the general custom of the world …rather, if one does mitzvoth he will succeed due to the reward he merits …" (Nachmanides, or Ramba"n on Exodus 13:16)

“This Universe remains perpetually with the same properties with which the Creator has endowed it… none of these will ever be changed except by way of miracle in some individual instances….” (Maimonides, Ramba"m, Guide for the Perplexed, 2:29).

"(N)othing then, comes to pass in nature in contravention to her universal laws, nay, nothing does not agree with them and follow from them, for . . . she keeps a fixed and immutable order... (A) miracle, whether in contravention to, or beyond, nature, is a mere absurdity ...  We may, then, be absolutely certain that every event which is truly described in Scripture necessarily happened, like everything else, according to natural laws." (Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologica-Politicus)

"Those whose judgment in these matters is so inclined that they suppose themselves to be helpless without miracles, believe that they soften the blow which reason suffers from them by holding that they happen but seldom ... How seldom? Once in a hundred years? . . . Here we can determine nothing on the basis of knowledge of the object . . . but only on the basis of the maxims which are necessary to the use of our reason. Thus, miracles must be admitted as (occurring) daily (though indeed hidden under the guise of natural events) or else never . . . Since the former alternative is not at all compatible with reason, nothing remains but to adopt the later maxim - for this principle remains ever a mere maxim for making judgments, not a theoretical assertion ... (For example: the) admirable conservation of the species in the plant and animal kingdoms, . . . no one, indeed, can claim to comprehend whether or not the direct influence of the Creator is required on each occasion ...  (T)hey are for us, . . . nothing but natural effects and ought never to be adjudged otherwise . . . To venture beyond these limits is rashness and immodesty . . . In the affairs of life, therefore, it is impossible for us to count on miracles or to take them into consideration at all in our use of reason." (Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone)

Can God suspend the Laws of Nature, or even change or "cancel" them?

I. Historical Overview

God has allegedly created the Universe, or, at least, as Aristotle postulated, he acted as the "Unmoved Mover". But Creation was a one-time interaction. Did God, like certain software developers, embed in the world some "backdoors" or "Easter eggs" that allow Him to intervene in exceptional circumstances and change the preordained and predestined course of events? If he did, out go the concepts of determinism and predestination, thus undermining (and upsetting) quite a few religious denominations and schools of philosophy.

The Stoics were pantheists. They (and Spinoza, much later) described God (not merely the emanation of the Holy Ghost, but the genuine article Himself) as all-pervasive, His unavoidable ubiquity akin to the all-penetrating presence of the soul in a corporeal body. If God is Nature, then surely He can do as He wishes with the Laws of Nature?

Not so. Philo from Alexandria convincingly demonstrated that a perfect being can hardly be expected to remain in direct touch with imperfection. Lacking volition, wanting nothing, and not in need of thought, God, suggested Philo, uses an emanation he called "Logos" (later identified by the Apologists with Christ) as an intermediary between Himself and His Creation.

The Neoplatonist Plotinus concurred: Nature may need God, but it was a pretty one-sided relationship. God used emanations to act upon the World's stage: these were beings coming from Him, but not of Him. The Council of Nicea (325 AD) dispensed of this multiplication: the Father, the Son (Logos), and the Holy Ghost were all of the same substance, they were all God Himself. In modern times, Cartesian dualism neglected to explain by what transmission mechanisms God can and allegedly does affect the material cosmos.

Finally, as most monotheistic religions maintain, miracles are effected by God directly or via his envoys and messengers (angels, prophets, etc.) Acts that transgress against the laws of nature but are committed by other "invisible agents" are not miracles, but magick (in which we can include spiritualism, the occult, and "paranormal" phenomena).

II. Miracles and Natural Laws

Can we even contemplate a breach of the natural order? Isn't this very juxtaposition meaningless, even nonsensical? Can Nature lapse? And how can we prove divine involvement in the un-natural when we are at a loss to conclusively demonstrate His contribution to the natural? As David Hume observed, it is not enough for a miracle to run contra to immutable precedent; it must also evidently serve as an expression of divine "volition and interposition". Indeed, as R.F. Holland correctly noted, even perfectly natural events, whose coincidence yields religious (i.e. divine) significance, amount to miracles. Thus, some miracles are actually signs from Heaven even where Nature is not violated.

Moreover, if God, or some other supernatural agency stand outside Nature, then when they effect miracles, they are not violating the Laws of Nature to which they are not subjected.

Hume is a skeptic: the evidence in favor of natural laws is so overwhelming that it is bound to outweigh any evidence (any number of testimonies included) produced in support of miracles. Yet, being the finite creatures that we are, can we ever get acquainted with all the evidence in favor of any given natural law? Our experience is never perfectly exhaustive, merely asymptotically so (Rousseau). Does this leave room for exceptions, as Richard Purtill suggested in "Thinking about Religion" (1978)? Hume emphatically denies this possibility. He gives this irrefutable examples: all of us must die, we cannot suspend lead in mid-air, wood is consumed by fire which is extinguished by water ("Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding"). No exceptions here, not now, not ever.

In "Hume's Abject Failure" (2000), John Earman argues for the probability of miracles founded on multiple testimonies by independent and reliable observers. Yet, both Earman and Hume confine themselves to human witnesses. What if we were to obtain multiple readings from machines and testing equipment that imply the occurrence of a miracle? The occasional dysfunction aside, machines are not gullible, less fallible, disinterested, and, therefore, more reliable than humans.

But machines operate in accordance with and are subject to the laws of nature. Can they record an event that is outside of Nature? Do miracles occur within Nature or outside it? If miracles transpire within Nature, shouldn't they be deemed ipso facto "natural" (though ill-understood)? If miracles emerge without Nature, how can anything and anyone within Nature's remit and ambit witness them?

Indeed, it is not possible to discuss miracles meaningfully. Such contemplation gives rise to the limitations of language itself. If one subscribes to the inviolable uniformity of Nature, one excludes the mere possibility (however remote) of miracles from the conversation. If one accepts that miracles may occur, one holds Nature to be mutable and essentially unpredictable. There is no reconciling these points of view: they reflect a fundamental chasm between two ways of perceiving our Universe and, especially, physical reality.

Moreover, Nature (and, by implication, Science) is the totality of what exists and of what happens. If miracles exist and happen then they are, by this definition, a part and parcel of Nature (i.e., they are natural, not supernatural). We do experience miracles and, as Hume correctly notes, we cannot experience that which happens outside of Nature. That some event is exceedingly improbable does not render it logically impossible, of course. Equally, that it is logically possible does not guarantee its likelihood. But if a highly incredible event does occur it merely limns the limitations of our contemporary knowledge. To use Hume's terminology: it is never a miracle, merely a marvel (or an extraordinary event).

In summary:

Man-made laws are oft violated (ask any prosecutor) - why not natural ones? The very word "violation" is misleading. Criminals act according to their own set of rules. Thus, criminal activity is a violation of one body of edicts while upholding another. Similarly, what may appear to us to be miraculous (against the natural order) may merely be the manifestation of a law of nature that is as yet unrevealed to us (which was St. Augustine's view as well as Hume's and Huxley's and is today the view of the philosopher-physicist John Polkinghorne).

Modern science is saddled with metaphysical baggage (e.g., the assumptions that the Universe is isotropic and homogeneous; or that there is only one Universe; or that the constants of Nature do not change in time or in space; and so on). "Miracles" may help us rid ourselves of this quasi-religious ballast and drive science forward as catalysts of open-minded progress (Spinoza, McKinnon). In Popperian terms, "miracles" help us to falsify scientific theories and come up with better ones, closer to the "truth".

III. Miracles: nonrepeatable counterinstances, or repeatable events?

Jesus is reported to have walked on water. Is this ostensible counterinstance to natural law an isolated incident, or will it repeat itself? There is no reason in principle or in theology that this miracle should not recur. Actually, most "miracles" had multiple instances throughout history and thus are of dubious supernatural pedigree.

On the other hand, the magnitude of the challenge to the prevailing formulation of the relevant natural laws increases with every recurrence of a "miracle". While nonrepeatable counterinstances (violations) can be ignored (however inconveniently), repetitive apparent breaches cannot be overlooked without jeopardizing the entire scientific edifice. They must be incorporated in a new natural law.

How can we tell miracles apart from merely unexplained or poorly understood events? How can we ascertain, regardless of the state of our knowledge, that a phenomenon is not natural in the sense that it can never be produced by Nature? How can we know for sure that it is nonrepeatable, a counterinstance, a true breach of Natural Laws? As Sir Arthur Clarke correctly observed: a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Antony Flew suggested that we are faced with a Problem of Identifying Miracles.

The Problem seems to emanate from three implicit assumptions:

(1) That God is somehow above or outside Nature and his actions (such as miracles wrought by Him) are, therefore, not natural (or supernatural);

(2) That every event (even a miracle) must have a cause, be it natural or supernatural; and

(3) That explanations and causes ought to be empirical concepts.

All three assertions are debatable:

(1) As pantheists and occasionalists who adhere to the principle of immanence demonstrate, God's place in the scheme of things depends on how we define Nature. They postulate that God and the World are one and the same. This requires God to have a material dimension or quality and to occupy the entirety of space and time, allowing Him to interact with the Universe (which is material and spatio-temporal).

(2) As for causality: now we know that the Laws of Nature and its Constants are not immutable nor permanent and that causes (as expressed in Laws of Nature) are mere statistical, true, and contingent generalizations with non-universal predictive powers (applicable only to a localized segment of space-time, or, at the maximum, to our Universe alone). Thus, we can definitely conceive of events and entities that have no causes (as these causes are perceived in our patch of the Cosmos).

(3) There is, however, a true problem with the empirical nature of causes and explanations: they require a body of observations which yield regularity based on events oft-repeated or repeatable in principle (capable of being retrodicted). Supernatural causes satisfy only one requirement (their effects are, arguably, observable), but not the other: they are, by definition, irregular (and, thus, cannot be repeated). Does this inherent irregularity and non-repeatability render specious the supernaturalness imputed to miracles?

Probably. If God pervades Nature (let alone if God, Himself is Nature), then no event is supernatural. All occurrences are natural and, thus, obey the Laws of Nature which are merely the manifestations of God's attributes (this is also the Muslim and Jewish points of view). And because the Laws of Nature and its Constants are changeable and not uniform across the Universe (and, possibly, the Multiverse), there is room for "spontaneous" (cause-less), ill-understood, and irregular (but objectively-observed) phenomena, such as "miracles". Nothing supernatural about it.

There is no contradiction in saying that miracles are natural events brought about by God, or even in saying that miracles are basic (or primitive, or immediate) actions of God (actions clearly attributable to God as an agent with a free will and for which we do not need to show a natural cause).

This leads us to the question of divine intervention and intent. Miracles serve God's plan and reflect His volition. They are an interposition, not merely a happenstance. They are not random: they serve a purpose and accomplish goals (even when these are unknown to us and inscrutable). This holds true even if we reject Leibnitz's Principle of pre-established Harmony (in "Monadology") and disagree or the occasionalist's point of view that God is the direct and exclusive cause of all events, including natural events and that all other forms of purported causation ("Laws of Nature") are illusions.

If we believe in God's propensity to uphold Good against Evil; to encourage and support virtue while penalizing and suppressing sin (through the use of what Wittgenstein called "gestures"); and to respond to our most urgent needs - in short: if one accept Divine Providence - then a "Theory of God" would possess predictive powers: it would allow us to foresee the occurrence of miracles. For instance: whenever Evil seems on the brink of prevailing, we should expect a miracle to eventuate, restoring the supremacy of Good. There's the rudimentary regularity we have been seeking all along (Locke).

Admittedly, it is impossible to predict the exact nature of future miracles, merely their likelihood. This is reminiscent of the Uncertainty Principle that is at the basis of Quantum Mechanics. Miracles often consist of "divinely-ordained" confluences and coincidences of perfectly "natural" and even pedestrian events. We are awed by them all the same. The true miracle amounts to our sense of wonder and restored proportion in the face of this humungous mystery that is our home: the Universe.

Read Note about Parapsychology and the Paranormal

Read Note about The Science of Superstitions

Read Note on Teleology: Legitimizing Final Causes

Read Note on Complexity and Simplicity

Read Note on Scientific Theories and the Life Cycles of Science

Return

God and Science

Appendix: Scientific Theories and

Science's Life Cycles

I. Scientific Theories

All theories - scientific or not - start with a problem. They aim to solve it by proving that what appears to be "problematic" is not. They re-state the conundrum, or introduce new data, new variables, a new classification, or new organizing principles. They incorporate the problem in a larger body of knowledge, or in a conjecture ("solution"). They explain why we thought we had an issue on our hands - and how it can be avoided, vitiated, or resolved.

Scientific theories invite constant criticism and revision. They yield new problems. They are proven erroneous and are replaced by new models which offer better explanations and a more profound sense of understanding - often by solving these new problems. From time to time, the successor theories constitute a break with everything known and done till then. These seismic convulsions are known as "paradigm shifts".

Contrary to widespread opinion - even among scientists - science is not only about "facts". It is not merely about quantifying, measuring, describing, classifying, and organizing "things" (entities). It is not even concerned with finding out the "truth". Science is about providing us with concepts, explanations, and predictions (collectively known as "theories") and thus endowing us with a sense of understanding of our world.

Scientific theories are allegorical or metaphoric. They revolve around symbols and theoretical constructs, concepts and substantive assumptions, axioms and hypotheses - most of which can never, even in principle, be computed, observed, quantified, measured, or correlated with the world "out there". By appealing to our imagination, scientific theories reveal what David Deutsch calls "the fabric of reality".

Like any other system of knowledge, science has its fanatics, heretics, and deviants.

Instrumentalists, for instance, insist that scientific theories should be concerned exclusively with predicting the outcomes of appropriately designed experiments. Their explanatory powers are of no consequence. Positivists ascribe meaning only to statements that deal with observables and observations.

Instrumentalists and positivists ignore the fact that predictions are derived from models, narratives, and organizing principles. In short: it is the theory's explanatory dimensions that determine which experiments are relevant and which are not. Forecasts - and experiments - that are not embedded in an understanding of the world (in an explanation) do not constitute science.

Granted, predictions and experiments are crucial to the growth of scientific knowledge and the winnowing out of erroneous or inadequate theories. But they are not the only mechanisms of natural selection. There are other criteria that help us decide whether to adopt and place confidence in a scientific theory or not. Is the theory aesthetic (parsimonious), logical, does it provide a reasonable explanation and, thus, does it further our understanding of the world?

David Deutsch in "The Fabric of Reality" (p. 11):

"... (I)t is hard to give a precise definition of 'explanation' or 'understanding'. Roughly speaking, they are about 'why' rather than 'what'; about the inner workings of things; about how things really are, not just how they appear to be; about what must be so, rather than what merely happens to be so; about laws of nature rather than rules of thumb. They are also about coherence, elegance, and simplicity, as opposed to arbitrariness and complexity ..."

Reductionists and emergentists ignore the existence of a hierarchy of scientific theories and meta-languages. They believe - and it is an article of faith, not of science - that complex phenomena (such as the human mind) can be reduced to simple ones (such as the physics and chemistry of the brain). Furthermore, to them the act of reduction is, in itself, an explanation and a form of pertinent understanding. Human thought, fantasy, imagination, and emotions are nothing but electric currents and spurts of chemicals in the brain, they say.

Holists, on the other hand, refuse to consider the possibility that some higher-level phenomena can, indeed, be fully reduced to base components and primitive interactions. They ignore the fact that reductionism sometimes does provide explanations and understanding. The properties of water, for instance, do spring forth from its chemical and physical composition and from the interactions between its constituent atoms and subatomic particles.

Still, there is a general agreement that scientific theories must be abstract (independent of specific time or place), intersubjectively explicit (contain detailed descriptions of the subject matter in unambiguous terms), logically rigorous (make use of logical systems shared and accepted by the practitioners in the field), empirically relevant (correspond to results of empirical research), useful (in describing and/or explaining the world), and provide typologies and predictions.

A scientific theory should resort to primitive (atomic) terminology and all its complex (derived) terms and concepts should be defined in these indivisible terms. It should offer a map unequivocally and consistently connecting operational definitions to theoretical concepts.

Operational definitions that connect to the same theoretical concept should not contradict each other (be negatively correlated). They should yield agreement on measurement conducted independently by trained experimenters. But investigation of the theory of its implication can proceed even without quantification.

Theoretical concepts need not necessarily be measurable or quantifiable or observable. But a scientific theory should afford at least four levels of quantification of its operational and theoretical definitions of concepts: nominal (labeling), ordinal (ranking), interval and ratio.

As we said, scientific theories are not confined to quantified definitions or to a classificatory apparatus. To qualify as scientific they must contain statements about relationships (mostly causal) between concepts - empirically-supported laws and/or propositions (statements derived from axioms).

Philosophers like Carl Hempel and Ernest Nagel regard a theory as scientific if it is hypothetico-deductive. To them, scientific theories are sets of inter-related laws. We know that they are inter-related because a minimum number of axioms and hypotheses yield, in an inexorable deductive sequence, everything else known in the field the theory pertains to.

Explanation is about retrodiction - using the laws to show how things happened. Prediction is using the laws to show how things will happen. Understanding is explanation and prediction combined.

William Whewell augmented this somewhat simplistic point of view with his principle of "consilience of inductions". Often, he observed, inductive explanations of disparate phenomena are unexpectedly traced to one underlying cause. This is what scientific theorizing is about - finding the common source of the apparently separate.

This omnipotent view of the scientific endeavor competes with a more modest, semantic school of philosophy of science.

Many theories - especially ones with breadth, width, and profundity, such as Darwin's theory of evolution - are not deductively integrated and are very difficult to test (falsify) conclusively. Their predictions are either scant or ambiguous.

Scientific theories, goes the semantic view, are amalgams of models of reality. These are empirically meaningful only inasmuch as they are empirically (directly and therefore semantically) applicable to a limited area. A typical scientific theory is not constructed with explanatory and predictive aims in mind. Quite the opposite: the choice of models incorporated in it dictates its ultimate success in explaining the Universe and predicting the outcomes of experiments.

To qualify as meaningful and instrumental, a scientific explanation (or "theory") must be:

a. All-inclusive (anamnetic) – It must encompass, integrate and incorporate all the facts known.

b. Coherent – It must be chronological, structured and causal.

c. Consistent – Self-consistent (its sub-units cannot contradict one another or go against the grain of the main explication) and consistent with the observed phenomena (both those related to the event or subject and those pertaining to the rest of the universe).

d. Logically compatible – It must not violate the laws of logic both internally (the explanation must abide by some internally imposed logic) and externally (the Aristotelian logic which is applicable to the observable world).

e. Insightful – It must inspire a sense of awe and astonishment which is the result of seeing something familiar in a new light or the result of seeing a pattern emerging out of a big body of data. The insights must constitute the inevitable conclusion of the logic, the language, and of the unfolding of the explanation.

f. Aesthetic – The explanation must be both plausible and "right", beautiful, not cumbersome, not awkward, not discontinuous, smooth, parsimonious, simple, and so on.

g. Parsimonious – The explanation must employ the minimum numbers of assumptions and entities in order to satisfy all the above conditions.

h. Explanatory – The explanation must elucidate the behavior of other elements, including the subject's decisions and behavior and why events developed the way they did.

i.       Predictive (prognostic) – The explanation must possess the ability to predict future events, including the future behavior of the subject.

j.

k.     Elastic – The explanation must possess the intrinsic abilities to self organize, reorganize, give room to emerging order, accommodate new data comfortably, and react flexibly to attacks from within and from without.

Scientific theories must also be testable, verifiable, and refutable (falsifiable). The experiments that test their predictions must be repeatable and replicable in tightly controlled laboratory settings. All these elements are largely missing from creationist and intelligent design "theories" and explanations. No experiment could be designed to test the statements within such explanations, to establish their truth-value and, thus, to convert them to theorems or hypotheses in a theory.

This is mainly because of a problem known as the undergeneration of testable hypotheses: Creationism and intelligent Design do not generate a sufficient number of hypotheses, which can be subjected to scientific testing. This has to do with their fabulous (i.e., storytelling) nature and the resort to an untestable, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent Supreme Being.

In a way, Creationism and Intelligent Design show affinity with some private languages. They are forms of art and, as such, are self-sufficient and self-contained. If structural, internal constraints are met, a statement is deemed true within the "canon" even if it does not satisfy external scientific requirements.

II. The Life Cycle of Scientific Theories

"There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe that there ever was such a time... On the other hand, I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics... Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?', because you will get 'down the drain' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that."
R. P. Feynman (1967)

"The first processes, therefore, in the effectual studies of the sciences, must be ones of simplification and reduction of the results of previous investigations to a form in which the mind can grasp them."
J. C. Maxwell, On Faraday's lines of force

" ...conventional formulations of quantum theory, and of quantum field theory in particular, are unprofessionally vague and ambiguous. Professional theoretical physicists ought to be able to do better. Bohm has shown us a way."
John S. Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics

"It would seem that the theory [quantum mechanics] is exclusively concerned about 'results of measurement', and has nothing to say about anything else. What exactly qualifies some physical systems to play the role of 'measurer'? Was the wavefunction of the world waiting to jump for thousands of millions of years until a single-celled living creature appeared? Or did it have to wait a little longer, for some better qualified system ... with a Ph.D.? If the theory is to apply to anything but highly idealized laboratory operations, are we not obliged to admit that more or less 'measurement-like' processes are going on more or less all the time, more or less everywhere. Do we not have jumping then all the time?

The first charge against 'measurement', in the fundamental axioms of quantum mechanics, is that it anchors the shifty split of the world into 'system' and 'apparatus'. A second charge is that the word comes loaded with meaning from everyday life, meaning which is entirely inappropriate in the quantum context. When it is said that something is 'measured' it is difficult not to think of the result as referring to some pre-existing property of the object in question. This is to disregard Bohr's insistence that in quantum phenomena the apparatus as well as the system is essentially involved. If it were not so, how could we understand, for example, that 'measurement' of a component of 'angular momentum' ... in an arbitrarily chosen direction ... yields one of a discrete set of values? When one forgets the role of the apparatus, as the word 'measurement' makes all too likely, one despairs of ordinary logic ... hence 'quantum logic'. When one remembers the role of the apparatus, ordinary logic is just fine.

In other contexts, physicists have been able to take words from ordinary language and use them as technical terms with no great harm done. Take for example the 'strangeness', 'charm', and 'beauty' of elementary particle physics. No one is taken in by this 'baby talk'... Would that it were so with 'measurement'. But in fact the word has had such a damaging effect on the discussion, that I think it should now be banned altogether in quantum mechanics."
J. S. Bell, Against "Measurement"

"Is it not clear from the smallness of the scintillation on the screen that we have to do with a particle? And is it not clear, from the diffraction and interference patterns, that the motion of the particle is directed by a wave? De Broglie showed in detail how the motion of a particle, passing through just one of two holes in screen, could be influenced by waves propagating through both holes. And so influenced that the particle does not go where the waves cancel out, but is attracted to where they co-operate. This idea seems to me so natural and simple, to resolve the wave-particle dilemma in such a clear and ordinary way, that it is a great mystery to me that it was so generally ignored."
J. S. Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics

"...in physics the only observations we must consider are position observations, if only the positions of instrument pointers. It is a great merit of the de Broglie-Bohm picture to force us to consider this fact. If you make axioms, rather than definitions and theorems, about the "measurement" of anything else, then you commit redundancy and risk inconsistency."
J. S. Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics

"To outward appearance, the modern world was born of an anti religious movement: man becoming self-sufficient and reason supplanting belief. Our generation and the two that preceded it have heard little of but talk of the conflict between science and faith; indeed it seemed at one moment a foregone conclusion that the former was destined to take the place of the latter... After close on two centuries of passionate struggles, neither science nor faith has succeeded in discrediting its adversary.
On the contrary, it becomes obvious that neither can develop normally without the other. And the reason is simple: the same life animates both. Neither in its impetus nor its achievements can science go to its limits without becoming tinged with mysticism and charged with faith."
Pierre Thierry de Chardin, "The Phenomenon of Man"

I opened with lengthy quotations by John S. Bell, the main proponent of the Bohemian Mechanics interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (really, an alternative rather than an interpretation). The renowned physicist, David Bohm (in the 50s), basing himself on work done much earlier by de Broglie (the unwilling father of the wave-particle dualism), embedded the Schrödinger Equation (SE) in a deterministic physical theory which postulated a non-Newtonian motion of particles.

This is a fine example of the life cycle of scientific theories, comprised of three phases: Growth, Transitional Pathology, and Ossification.

Witchcraft, Religion, Alchemy and Science succeeded one another and each such transition was characterized by transitional pathologies reminiscent of psychotic disorders. The exceptions are (arguably) the disciplines of medicine and biology. A phenomenology of ossified bodies of knowledge would make a fascinating read.

Science is currently in its Ossification Phase. It is soon to be succeeded by another discipline or magisterium. Other explanations to the current dismal state of science should be rejected: that human knowledge is limited by its very nature; that the world is inherently incomprehensible; that methods of thought and understanding tend to self-organize to form closed mythic systems; and that there is a problem with the language which we employ to make our inquiries of the world describable and communicable.

Kuhn's approach to Scientific Revolutions is but one of many that deal with theory and paradigm shifts in scientific thought and its resulting evolution. Scientific theories seem to be subject to a process of natural selection every bit as organisms in nature are.

Animals could be thought of as theorems (with a positive truth value) in the logical system "Nature". But species become extinct because nature itself changes (not nature as a set of potentials - but the relevant natural phenomena to which the species are exposed). Could we say the same about scientific theories? Are they being selected and deselected partly due to a changing, shifting backdrop?

Indeed, the whole debate between "realists" and "anti-realists" in the philosophy of Science can be settled by adopting this single premise: that the Universe itself is not immutable. By contrasting the fixed subject of study ("The World") with the transient nature of Science anti-realists gained the upper hand.

Arguments such as the under-determination of theories by data and the pessimistic meta-inductions from past falsity (of scientific "knowledge") emphasize the transience and asymptotic nature of the fruits of the scientific endeavor. But such arguments rest on the implicit assumption that there is some universal, invariant, truth out there (which science strives to asymptotically approximate). This apparent problematic evaporates if we allow that both the observer and the observed, the theory and its subject, are alterable.

Science develops through reduction of miracles. Laws of nature are formulated. They are assumed to encompass all the (relevant) natural phenomena (that is, phenomena governed by natural forces and within nature). Ex definitio, nothing can exist outside nature: it is all-inclusive and all-pervasive, or omnipresent (formerly the attributes of the divine).

Supernatural forces, supernatural intervention, are contradictions in terms, oxymorons. If some thing or force exists, it is natural. That which is supernatural does not exist. Miracles do not only contravene (or violate) the laws of nature, they are impossible, not only physically, but also logically. That which is logically possible and can be experienced (observed), is physically possible.

But, again, we are faced with the assumption of a "fixed background". What if nature itself changes in ways that are bound to confound ever-truer knowledge? Then, the very shifts of nature as a whole, as a system, could be called "supernatural" or "miraculous".

In a way, this is how science evolves. A law of nature is proposed or accepted. An event occurs or an observation made which are not described or predicted by it. It is, by definition, a violation of the suggested or accepted law which is, thus, falsified. Subsequently and consequently, the laws of nature are modified, or re-written entirely, in order to reflect and encompass this extraordinary event. Result: Hume's comforting distinction between "extraordinary" and "miraculous" events is upheld (the latter being ruled out).

Extraordinary events can be compared to previous experience - miraculous events entail some supernatural interference with the normal course of things (a "wonder" in Biblical terms). It is by confronting the extraordinary and eliminating its "abnormal" or "supernatural" attributes that science progresses as a miraculous activity. This, of course, is not the view of the likes of David Deutsch (see his book, "The Fabric of Reality").

Back to the last phase of this Life Cycle, to Ossification. The discipline degenerates and, following the "psychotic" transitional phase, it sinks into a paralytic state which is characterized by the following:

All the practical and technological aspects of the dying discipline are preserved and continue to be utilized. Gradually the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings vanish or are replaced by the tenets and postulates of a new discipline - but the inventions, processes and practical know-how do not evaporate. They are incorporated into the new discipline and, in time, are erroneously attributed to it, marking it as the legitimate successor of the now defunct, preceding discipline.

The practitioners of the old discipline confine themselves to copying and replicating the various aspects of the old discipline, mainly its intellectual property (writings, inventions, other theoretical material). This replication does not lead to the creation of new knowledge or even to the dissemination of old one. It is a hermetic process, limited to the ever decreasing circle of the initiated. Special institutions govern the rehashing of the materials related to the old discipline, their processing and copying. Institutions related to the dead discipline are often financed and supported by the state which is always an agent of conservation, preservation and conformity.

Thus, the creative-evolutionary dimension of the now-dead discipline is gone. No new paradigms or revolutions happen. The exegesis and replication of canonical writings become the predominant activities. Formalisms are not subjected to scrutiny and laws assume eternal, immutable, quality.

All the activities of the adherents of the old discipline become ritualized. The old discipline itself becomes a pillar of the extant power structures and, as such, is condoned and supported by them. The old discipline's practitioners synergistically collaborate with the powers that be: with the industrial base, the military complex, the political elite, the intellectual cliques in vogue. Institutionalization inevitably leads to the formation of a (mostly bureaucratic) hierarchy.

Emerging rituals serve the purpose of diverting attention from subversive, "forbidden" thinking. These rigid ceremonies are reminiscent of obsessive-compulsive disorders in individuals who engage in ritualistic behavior patterns to deflect "wrong" or "corrupt" thoughts.

Practitioners of the old discipline seek to cement the power of its "clergy". Rituals are a specialized form of knowledge which can be obtained only by initiation ("rites of passage"). One's status in the hierarchy of the dead discipline is not the result of objectively quantifiable variables or even of judgment of merit. It is the outcome of politics and other power-related interactions.

The need to ensure conformity leads to doctrinarian dogmatism and to the establishment of enforcement mechanisms. Dissidents are subjected to both social and economic sanctions. They find themselves ex-communicated, harassed, imprisoned, tortured, their works banished or not published, ridiculed and so on.

This is really the triumph of text over the human spirit. At this late stage in the Life Cycle, the members of the old discipline's community are oblivious to the original reasons and causes for their pursuits. Why was the discipline developed in the first place? What were the original riddles, questions, queries it faced and tackled? Long gone are the moving forces behind the old discipline. Its cold ashes are the texts and their preservation is an expression of longing and desire for things past.

The vacuum left by the absence of positive emotions is filled by negative ones. The discipline and its disciples become phobic, paranoid, defensive, and with a faulty reality test. Devoid of the ability to generate new, attractive content, the old discipline resorts to motivation by manipulation of negative emotions. People are frightened, threatened, herded, cajoled. The world is painted in an apocalyptic palette as ruled by irrationality, disorderly, chaotic, dangerous, or even lethal. Only the old discipline stands between its adherents and apocalypse.

New, emerging disciplines, are presented as heretic, fringe lunacies, inconsistent, reactionary and bound to regress humanity to some dark ages. This is the inter-disciplinary or inter-paradigm clash. It follows the Psychotic Phase. The old discipline resorts to some transcendental entity (God, Satan, or the conscious intelligent observer in the Copenhagen interpretation of the formalism of Quantum Mechanics). In this sense, the dying discipline is already psychotic and afoul of the test of reality. It develops messianic aspirations and is inspired by a missionary zeal and zest. The fight against new ideas and theories is bloody and ruthless and every possible device is employed.

But the very characteristics of the older nomenclature is in the old discipline's disfavor. It is closed, based on ritualistic initiation, and patronizing. It relies on intimidation. The numbers of the faithful dwindle the more the "church" needs them and the more it resorts to oppressive recruitment tactics. The emerging discipline wins by default. Even the initiated, who stand most to lose, finally abandon the old discipline. Their belief unravels when confronted with the truth value, explanatory and predictive powers, and the comprehensiveness of the emerging discipline.

This, indeed, is the main presenting symptom, the distinguishing hallmark, of paralytic old disciplines. They deny reality. They are rendered mere belief-systems, myths. They require  the suspension of judgment and disbelief, the voluntary limitation of one's quest for truth and beauty, the agreement to leave swathes of the map in a state of "terra incognita". This reductionism, this schizoid avoidance, the resort to hermeticism and transcendental authority mark the beginning of the end.

Read Note on Complexity and Simplicity

Return to "God and Science"

Also Read

Atheism in a Post-Religious World

The Science of Superstitions

Return

FREUD

In Defense of Psychoanalysis:

I. Introduction

Introduction

No social theory has been more influential and, later, more reviled than psychoanalysis. It burst upon the scene of modern thought, a fresh breath of revolutionary and daring imagination, a Herculean feat of model-construction, and a challenge to established morals and manners. It is now widely considered nothing better than a confabulation, a baseless narrative, a snapshot of Freud's tormented psyche and thwarted 19th century Mitteleuropa middle class prejudices.

Most of the criticism is hurled by mental health professionals and practitioners with large axes to grind. Few, if any, theories in psychology are supported by modern brain research. All therapies and treatment modalities - including medicating one's patients - are still forms of art and magic rather than scientific practices. The very existence of mental illness is in doubt - let alone what constitutes "healing". Psychoanalysis is in bad company all around.

Some criticism is offered by practicing scientists - mainly experimentalists - in the life and exact (physical) sciences. Such diatribes frequently offer a sad glimpse into the critics' own ignorance. They have little idea what makes a theory scientific and they confuse materialism with reductionism or instrumentalism and correlation with causation.

Few physicists, neuroscientists, biologists, and chemists seem to have plowed through the rich literature on the psychophysical problem. As a result of this obliviousness, they tend to proffer primitive arguments long rendered obsolete by centuries of philosophical debates.

Science frequently deals matter-of-factly with theoretical entities and concepts - quarks and black holes spring to mind - that have never been observed, measured, or quantified. These should not be confused with concrete entities. They have different roles in the theory. Yet, when they mock Freud's trilateral model of the psyche (the id, ego, and superego), his critics do just that - they relate to his theoretical constructs as though they were real, measurable, "things".

The medicalization of mental health hasn't helped either.

Certain mental health afflictions are either correlated with a statistically abnormal biochemical activity in the brain – or are ameliorated with medication. Yet the two facts are not ineludibly facets of the same underlying phenomenon. In other words, that a given medicine reduces or abolishes certain symptoms does not necessarily mean they were caused by the processes or substances affected by the drug administered. Causation is only one of many possible connections and chains of events.

To designate a pattern of behavior as a mental health disorder is a value judgment, or at best a statistical observation. Such designation is effected regardless of the facts of brain science. Moreover, correlation is not causation. Deviant brain or body biochemistry (once called "polluted animal spirits") do exist – but are they truly the roots of mental perversion? Nor is it clear which triggers what: do the aberrant neurochemistry or biochemistry cause mental illness – or the other way around?

That psychoactive medication alters behavior and mood is indisputable. So do illicit and legal drugs, certain foods, and all interpersonal interactions. That the changes brought about by prescription are desirable – is debatable and involves tautological thinking. If a certain pattern of behavior is described as (socially) "dysfunctional" or (psychologically) "sick" – clearly, every change would be welcomed as "healing" and every agent of transformation would be called a "cure".

The same applies to the alleged heredity of mental illness. Single genes or gene complexes are frequently "associated" with mental health diagnoses, personality traits, or behavior patterns. But too little is known to establish irrefutable sequences of causes-and-effects. Even less is proven about the interaction of nature and nurture, genotype and phenotype, the plasticity of the brain and the psychological impact of trauma, abuse, upbringing, role models, peers, and other environmental elements.

Nor is the distinction between psychotropic substances and talk therapy that clear-cut. Words and the interaction with the therapist also affect the brain, its processes and chemistry - albeit more slowly and, perhaps, more profoundly and irreversibly. Medicines – as David Kaiser reminds us in "Against Biologic Psychiatry" (Psychiatric Times, Volume XIII, Issue 12, December 1996) – treat symptoms, not the underlying processes that yield them.

So, what is mental illness, the subject matter of Psychoanalysis?

Someone is considered mentally "ill" if:

1.     His conduct rigidly and consistently deviates from the typical, average behavior of all other people in his culture and society that fit his profile (whether this conventional behavior is moral or rational is immaterial), or

2.     His judgment and grasp of objective, physical reality is impaired, and

3.     His conduct is not a matter of choice but is innate and irresistible, and

4.     His behavior causes him or others discomfort, and is

5.     Dysfunctional, self-defeating, and self-destructive even by his own yardsticks.

Descriptive criteria aside, what is the essence of mental disorders? Are they merely physiological disorders of the brain, or, more precisely of its chemistry? If so, can they be cured by restoring the balance of substances and secretions in that mysterious organ? And, once equilibrium is reinstated – is the illness "gone" or is it still lurking there, "under wraps", waiting to erupt? Are psychiatric problems inherited, rooted in faulty genes (though amplified by environmental factors) – or brought on by abusive or wrong nurturance?

These questions are the domain of the "medical" school of mental health.

Others cling to the spiritual view of the human psyche. They believe that mental ailments amount to the metaphysical discomposure of an unknown medium – the soul. Theirs is a holistic approach, taking in the patient in his or her entirety, as well as his milieu.

The members of the functional school regard mental health disorders as perturbations in the proper, statistically "normal", behaviors and manifestations of "healthy" individuals, or as dysfunctions. The "sick" individual – ill at ease with himself (ego-dystonic) or making others unhappy (deviant) – is "mended" when rendered functional again by the prevailing standards of his social and cultural frame of reference.

In a way, the three schools are akin to the trio of blind men who render disparate descriptions of the very same elephant. Still, they share not only their subject matter – but, to a counter intuitively large degree, a faulty methodology.

As the renowned anti-psychiatrist, Thomas Szasz, of the State University of New York, notes in his article "The Lying Truths of Psychiatry", mental health scholars, regardless of academic predilection, infer the etiology of mental disorders from the success or failure of treatment modalities.

This form of "reverse engineering" of scientific models is not unknown in other fields of science, nor is it unacceptable if the experiments meet the criteria of the scientific method. The theory must be all-inclusive (anamnetic), consistent, falsifiable, logically compatible, monovalent, and parsimonious. Psychological "theories" – even the "medical" ones (the role of serotonin and dopamine in mood disorders, for instance) – are usually none of these things.

The outcome is a bewildering array of ever-shifting mental health "diagnoses" expressly centred around Western civilization and its standards (example: the ethical objection to suicide). Neurosis, a historically fundamental "condition" vanished after 1980. Homosexuality, according to the American Psychiatric Association, was a pathology prior to 1973. Seven years later, narcissism was declared a "personality disorder", almost seven decades after it was first described by Freud.

Also Read

On Disease

The Myth of Mental Illness

The Insanity of the Defense

In Defense of Psychoanalysis

he Metaphors of the Mind - Part I (The Brain)

The Metaphors of the Mind - Part II (Psychotherapy)

The Metaphors of the Mind - Part III (Dreams)

The Use and Abuse of Differential Diagnoses

Althusser, Competing Interpellations and the Third Text

Return

In Defense of Psychoanalysis

II. The Revolution of Psychoanalysis

"The more I became interested in psychoanalysis, the more I saw it as a road to the same kind of broad and deep understanding of human nature that writers possess."

Anna Freud

Towards the end of the 19th century, the new discipline of psychology became entrenched in both Europe and America. The study of the human mind, hitherto a preserve of philosophers and theologians, became a legitimate subject of scientific (some would say, pseudo-scientific) scrutiny.

The Structuralists - Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Bradford Titchener - embarked on a fashionable search for the "atoms" of consciousness: physical sensations, affections or feelings, and images (in both memories and dreams). Functionalists, headed by William James and, later, James Angell and John Dewey - derided the idea of a "pure", elemental sensation. They introduced the concept of mental association. Experience uses associations to alter the nervous system, they hypothesized.

Freud revolutionized the field (though, at first, his reputation was limited to the German-speaking parts of the dying Habsburg Empire). He dispensed with the unitary nature of the psyche and proposed instead a trichotomy, a tripartite or trilateral model (the id, ego, and superego). He suggested that our natural state is conflict, that anxiety and tension are more prevalent than harmony. Equilibrium (compromise formation) is achieved by constantly investing mental energy. Hence "psychodynamics".

Most of our existence is unconscious, Freud theorized. The conscious is but the tip of an ever-increasing iceberg. He introduced the concepts of libido and Thanatos (the life and death forces), instincts (Triebe, or "drives", in German) or drives, the somatic-erotogenic phases of psychic (personality) development, trauma and fixation, manifest and latent content (in dreams). Even his intellectual adversaries used this vocabulary, often infused with new meanings.

The psychotherapy he invented, based on his insights, was less formidable. Many of its tenets and procedures have been discarded early on, even by its own proponents and practitioners. The rule of abstinence (the therapist as a blank and hidden screen upon which the patient projects or transfers his repressed emotions), free association as the exclusive technique used to gain access to and unlock the unconscious, dream interpretation with the mandatory latent and forbidden content symbolically transformed into the manifest - have all literally vanished within the first decades of practice.

Other postulates - most notably transference and counter-transference, ambivalence, resistance, regression, anxiety, and conversion symptoms - have survived to become cornerstones of modern therapeutic modalities, whatever their origin. So did, in various disguises, the idea that there is a clear path leading from unconscious (or conscious) conflict to signal anxiety, to repression, and to symptom formation (be it neuroses, rooted in current deprivation, or psychoneuroses, the outcomes of childhood conflicts). The existence of anxiety-preventing defense mechanisms is also widely accepted.

Freud's initial obsession with sex as the sole driver of psychic exchange and evolution has earned him derision and diatribe aplenty. Clearly, a child of the repressed sexuality of Victorian times and the Viennese middle-class, he was fascinated with perversions and fantasies. The Oedipus and Electra complexes are reflections of these fixations. But their origin in Freud's own psychopathologies does not render them less revolutionary. Even a century later, child sexuality and incest fantasies are more or less taboo topics of serious study and discussion.

Ernst Kris said in 1947 that Psychoanalysis is:

"...(N)othing but human behavior considered from the standpoint of conflict. It is the picture of the mind divided against itself with attendant anxiety and other dysphoric effects, with adaptive and maladaptive defensive and coping strategies, and with symptomatic behaviors when the defense fail."

But Psychoanalysis is more than a theory of the mind. It is also a theory of the body and of the personality and of society. It is a Social Sciences Theory of Everything. It is a bold - and highly literate - attempt to tackle the psychophysical problem and the Cartesian body versus mind conundrum. Freud himself noted that the unconscious has both physiological (instinct) and mental (drive) aspects. He wrote:

"(The unconscious is) a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the physical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind" (Standard Edition Volume XIV).

Psychoanalysis is, in many ways, the application of Darwin's theory of evolution in psychology and sociology. Survival is transformed into narcissism and the reproductive instincts assume the garb of the Freudian sex drive. But Freud went a daring step forward by suggesting that social structures and strictures (internalized as the superego) are concerned mainly with the repression and redirection of natural instincts. Signs and symbols replace reality and all manner of substitutes (such as money) stand in for primary objects in our early formative years.

To experience our true selves and to fulfill our wishes, we resort to Phantasies (e.g., dreams, "screen memories") where imagery and irrational narratives - displaced, condensed, rendered visually, revised to produce coherence, and censored to protect us from sleep disturbances - represent our suppressed desires. Current neuroscience tends to refute this "dreamwork" conjecture but its value is not to be found in its veracity (or lack thereof).

These musings about dreams, slips of tongue, forgetfulness, the psychopathology of everyday life, and associations were important because they were the first attempt at deconstruction, the first in-depth insight into human activities such as art, myth-making, propaganda, politics, business, and warfare, and the first coherent explanation of the convergence of the aesthetic with the "ethic" (i.e., the socially acceptable and condoned). Ironically, Freud's contributions to cultural studies may far outlast his "scientific" "theory" of the mind.

It is ironic that Freud, a medical doctor (neurologist), the author of a "Project for a Scientific Psychology", should be so chastised by scientists in general and neuroscientists in particular. Psychoanalysis used to be practiced only by psychiatrists. But we live at an age when mental disorders are thought to have physiological-chemical-genetic origins. All psychological theories and talk therapies are disparaged by "hard" scientists.

Still, the pendulum had swung both ways many times before. Hippocrates ascribed mental afflictions to a balance of bodily humors (blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile) that is out of kilt. So did Galen, Bartholomeus Anglicus, Johan Weyer (1515-88). Paracelsus (1491-1541), and Thomas Willis, who attributed psychological disorders to a functional "fault of the brain".

The tide turned with Robert Burton who wrote "Anatomy of Melancholy" and published it in 1621. He forcefully propounded the theory that psychic problems are the sad outcomes of poverty, fear, and solitude.

A century later, Francis Gall (1758-1828) and Spurzheim (1776-1832) traced mental disorders to lesions of specific areas of the brain, the forerunner of the now-discredited discipline of phrenology. The logical chain was simple: the brain is the organ of the mind, thus, various faculties can be traced to its parts.

Morel, in 1809, proposed a compromise which has since ruled the discourse. The propensities for psychological dysfunctions, he suggested, are inherited but triggered by adverse environmental conditions. A Lamarckist, he was convinced that acquired mental illnesses are handed down the generations. Esquirol concurred in 1845 as did Henry Maudsley in 1879 and Adolf Meyer soon thereafter. Heredity predisposes one to suffer from psychic malaise but psychological and "moral" (social) causes precipitate it.

And, yet, the debate was and is far from over. Wilhelm Greisinger published "The Pathology and Therapy of Mental Disorders" in 1845. In it he traced their etiology to "neuropathologies", physical disorders of the brain. He allowed for heredity and the environment to play their parts, though. He was also the first to point out the importance of one's experiences in one's first years of life.

Jean-Martin Charcot, a neurologist by training, claimed to have cured hysteria with hypnosis. But despite this demonstration of non-physiological intervention, he insisted that hysteroid symptoms were manifestations of brain dysfunction. Weir Mitchell coined the term "neurasthenia" to describe an exhaustion of the nervous system (depression). Pierre Janet discussed the variations in the strength of the nervous activity and said that they explained the narrowing field of consciousness (whatever that meant).

None of these "nervous" speculations was supported by scientific, experimental evidence. Both sides of the debate confined themselves to philosophizing and ruminating. Freud was actually among the first to base a theory on actual clinical observations. Gradually, though, his work - buttressed by the concept of sublimation - became increasingly metaphysical. Its conceptual pillars came to resemble Bergson's élan vital and Schopenhauer's Will. French philosopher Paul Ricoeur called Psychoanalysis (depth psychology) "the hermeneutics of suspicion".

Return

In Defense of Psychoanalysis

III. The Fundamentals of

Psychological Theories

All theories - scientific or not - start with a problem. They aim to solve it by proving that what appears to be "problematic" is not. They re-state the conundrum, or introduce new data, new variables, a new classification, or new organizing principles. They incorporate the problem in a larger body of knowledge, or in a conjecture ("solution"). They explain why we thought we had an issue on our hands - and how it can be avoided, vitiated, or resolved.

Scientific theories invite constant criticism and revision. They yield new problems. They are proven erroneous and are replaced by new models which offer better explanations and a more profound sense of understanding - often by solving these new problems. From time to time, the successor theories constitute a break with everything known and done till then. These seismic convulsions are known as "paradigm shifts".

Contrary to widespread opinion - even among scientists - science is not only about "facts". It is not merely about quantifying, measuring, describing, classifying, and organizing "things" (entities). It is not even concerned with finding out the "truth". Science is about providing us with concepts, explanations, and predictions (collectively known as "theories") and thus endowing us with a sense of understanding of our world.

Scientific theories are allegorical or metaphoric. They revolve around symbols and theoretical constructs, concepts and substantive assumptions, axioms and hypotheses - most of which can never, even in principle, be computed, observed, quantified, measured, or correlated with the world "out there". By appealing to our imagination, scientific theories reveal what David Deutsch calls "the fabric of reality".

Like any other system of knowledge, science has its fanatics, heretics, and deviants.

Instrumentalists, for instance, insist that scientific theories should be concerned exclusively with predicting the outcomes of appropriately designed experiments. Their explanatory powers are of no consequence. Positivists ascribe meaning only to statements that deal with observables and observations.

Instrumentalists and positivists ignore the fact that predictions are derived from models, narratives, and organizing principles. In short: it is the theory's explanatory dimensions that determine which experiments are relevant and which are not. Forecasts - and experiments - that are not embedded in an understanding of the world (in an explanation) do not constitute science.

Granted, predictions and experiments are crucial to the growth of scientific knowledge and the winnowing out of erroneous or inadequate theories. But they are not the only mechanisms of natural selection. There are other criteria that help us decide whether to adopt and place confidence in a scientific theory or not. Is the theory aesthetic (parsimonious), logical, does it provide a reasonable explanation and, thus, does it further our understanding of the world?

David Deutsch in "The Fabric of Reality" (p. 11):

"... (I)t is hard to give a precise definition of 'explanation' or 'understanding'. Roughly speaking, they are about 'why' rather than 'what'; about the inner workings of things; about how things really are, not just how they appear to be; about what must be so, rather than what merely happens to be so; about laws of nature rather than rules of thumb. They are also about coherence, elegance, and simplicity, as opposed to arbitrariness and complexity ..."

Reductionists and emergentists ignore the existence of a hierarchy of scientific theories and meta-languages. They believe - and it is an article of faith, not of science - that complex phenomena (such as the human mind) can be reduced to simple ones (such as the physics and chemistry of the brain). Furthermore, to them the act of reduction is, in itself, an explanation and a form of pertinent understanding. Human thought, fantasy, imagination, and emotions are nothing but electric currents and spurts of chemicals in the brain, they say.

Holists, on the other hand, refuse to consider the possibility that some higher-level phenomena can, indeed, be fully reduced to base components and primitive interactions. They ignore the fact that reductionism sometimes does provide explanations and understanding. The properties of water, for instance, do spring forth from its chemical and physical composition and from the interactions between its constituent atoms and subatomic particles.

Still, there is a general agreement that scientific theories must be abstract (independent of specific time or place), intersubjectively explicit (contain detailed descriptions of the subject matter in unambiguous terms), logically rigorous (make use of logical systems shared and accepted by the practitioners in the field), empirically relevant (correspond to results of empirical research), useful (in describing and/or explaining the world), and provide typologies and predictions.

A scientific theory should resort to primitive (atomic) terminology and all its complex (derived) terms and concepts should be defined in these indivisible terms. It should offer a map unequivocally and consistently connecting operational definitions to theoretical concepts.

Operational definitions that connect to the same theoretical concept should not contradict each other (be negatively correlated). They should yield agreement on measurement conducted independently by trained experimenters. But investigation of the theory of its implication can proceed even without quantification.

Theoretical concepts need not necessarily be measurable or quantifiable or observable. But a scientific theory should afford at least four levels of quantification of its operational and theoretical definitions of concepts: nominal (labeling), ordinal (ranking), interval and ratio.

As we said, scientific theories are not confined to quantified definitions or to a classificatory apparatus. To qualify as scientific they must contain statements about relationships (mostly causal) between concepts - empirically-supported laws and/or propositions (statements derived from axioms).

Philosophers like Carl Hempel and Ernest Nagel regard a theory as scientific if it is hypothetico-deductive. To them, scientific theories are sets of inter-related laws. We know that they are inter-related because a minimum number of axioms and hypotheses yield, in an inexorable deductive sequence, everything else known in the field the theory pertains to.

Explanation is about retrodiction - using the laws to show how things happened. Prediction is using the laws to show how things will happen. Understanding is explanation and prediction combined.

William Whewell augmented this somewhat simplistic point of view with his principle of "consilience of inductions". Often, he observed, inductive explanations of disparate phenomena are unexpectedly traced to one underlying cause. This is what scientific theorizing is about - finding the common source of the apparently separate.

This omnipotent view of the scientific endeavor competes with a more modest, semantic school of philosophy of science.

Many theories - especially ones with breadth, width, and profundity, such as Darwin's theory of evolution - are not deductively integrated and are very difficult to test (falsify) conclusively. Their predictions are either scant or ambiguous.

Scientific theories, goes the semantic view, are amalgams of models of reality. These are empirically meaningful only inasmuch as they are empirically (directly and therefore semantically) applicable to a limited area. A typical scientific theory is not constructed with explanatory and predictive aims in mind. Quite the opposite: the choice of models incorporated in it dictates its ultimate success in explaining the Universe and predicting the outcomes of experiments.

Are psychological theories scientific theories by any definition (prescriptive or descriptive)? Hardly.

First, we must distinguish between psychological theories and the way that some of them are applied (psychotherapy and psychological plots). Psychological plots are the narratives co-authored by the therapist and the patient during psychotherapy. These narratives are the outcomes of applying psychological theories and models to the patient's specific circumstances.

Psychological plots amount to storytelling - but they are still instances of the psychological theories used. The instances of theoretical concepts in concrete situations form part of every theory. Actually, the only way to test psychological theories - with their dearth of measurable entities and concepts - is by examining such instances (plots).

Storytelling has been with us since the days of campfire and besieging wild animals. It serves a number of important functions: amelioration of fears, communication of vital information (regarding survival tactics and the characteristics of animals, for instance), the satisfaction of a sense of order (predictability and justice), the development of the ability to hypothesize, predict and introduce new or additional theories and so on.

We are all endowed with a sense of wonder. The world around us in inexplicable, baffling in its diversity and myriad forms. We experience an urge to organize it, to "explain the wonder away", to order it so that we know what to expect next (predict). These are the essentials of survival. But while we have been successful at imposing our mind on the outside world – we have been much less successful when we tried to explain and comprehend our internal universe and our behavior.

Psychology is not an exact science, nor can it ever be. This is because its "raw material" (humans and their behavior as individuals and en masse) is not exact. It will never yield natural laws or universal constants (like in physics). Experimentation in the field is constrained by legal and ethical rules. Humans tend to be opinionated, develop resistance, and become self-conscious when observed.

The relationship between the structure and functioning of our (ephemeral) mind, the structure and modes of operation of our (physical) brain, and the structure and conduct of the outside world have been a matter for heated debate for millennia.

Broadly speaking, there are two schools of thought:

One camp identify the substrate (brain) with its product (mind). Some of these scholars postulate the existence of a lattice of preconceived, born, categorical knowledge about the universe – the vessels into which we pour our experience and which mould it.

Others within this group regard the mind as a black box. While it is possible in principle to know its input and output, it is impossible, again in principle, to understand its internal functioning and management of information. To describe this input-output mechanism, Pavlov coined the word "conditioning", Watson adopted it and invented "behaviorism", Skinner came up with "reinforcement".

Epiphenomenologists (proponents of theories of emergent phenomena) regard the mind as the by-product of the complexity of the brain's "hardware" and "wiring". But all of them ignore the psychophysical question: what IS the mind and HOW is it linked to the brain?

The other camp assumes the airs of "scientific" and "positivist" thinking. It speculates that the mind (whether a physical entity, an epiphenomenon, a non-physical principle of organization, or the result of introspection) has a structure and a limited set of functions. It is argued that a "mind owner's manual" could be composed, replete with engineering and maintenance instructions. It proffers a dynamics of the psyche.

The most prominent of these "psychodynamists" was, of course, Freud. Though his disciples (Adler, Horney, the object-relations lot) diverged wildly from his initial theories, they all shared his belief in the need to "scientify" and objectify psychology.

Freud, a medical doctor by profession (neurologist) - preceded by another M.D., Josef Breuer – put forth a theory regarding the structure of the mind and its mechanics: (suppressed) energies and (reactive) forces. Flow charts were provided together with a method of analysis, a mathematical physics of the mind.

Many hold all psychodynamic theories to be a mirage. An essential part is missing, they observe: the ability to test the hypotheses, which derive from these "theories". Though very convincing and, surprisingly, possessed of great explanatory powers, being non-verifiable and non-falsifiable as they are – psychodynamic models of the mind cannot be deemed to possess the redeeming features of scientific theories.

Deciding between the two camps was and is a crucial matter. Consider the clash - however repressed - between psychiatry and psychology. The former regards "mental disorders" as euphemisms - it acknowledges only the reality of brain dysfunctions (such as biochemical or electric imbalances) and of hereditary factors. The latter (psychology) implicitly assumes that something exists (the "mind", the "psyche") which cannot be reduced to hardware or to wiring diagrams. Talk therapy is aimed at that something and supposedly interacts with it.

But perhaps the distinction is artificial. Perhaps the mind is simply the way we experience our brains. Endowed with the gift (or curse) of introspection, we experience a duality, a split, constantly being both observer and observed. Moreover, talk therapy involves TALKING - which is the transfer of energy from one brain to another through the air. This is a directed, specifically formed energy, intended to trigger certain circuits in the recipient brain. It should come as no surprise if it were to be discovered that talk therapy has clear physiological effects upon the brain of the patient (blood volume, electrical activity, discharge and absorption of hormones, etc.).

All this would be doubly true if the mind were, indeed, only an emergent phenomenon of the complex brain - two sides of the same coin.

Psychological theories of the mind are metaphors of the mind. They are fables and myths, narratives, stories, hypotheses, conjunctures. They play (exceedingly) important roles in the psychotherapeutic setting – but not in the laboratory. Their form is artistic, not rigorous, not testable, less structured than theories in the natural sciences. The language used is polyvalent, rich, effusive, ambiguous, evocative, and fuzzy – in short, metaphorical. These theories are suffused with value judgments, preferences, fears, post facto and ad hoc constructions. None of this has methodological, systematic, analytic and predictive merits.

Still, the theories in psychology are powerful instruments, admirable constructs, and they satisfy important needs to explain and understand ourselves, our interactions with others, and with our environment.

The attainment of peace of mind is a need, which was neglected by Maslow in his famous hierarchy. People sometimes sacrifice material wealth and welfare, resist temptations, forgo opportunities, and risk their lives – in order to secure it. There is, in other words, a preference of inner equilibrium over homeostasis. It is the fulfillment of this overwhelming need that psychological theories cater to. In this, they are no different to other collective narratives (myths, for instance).

Still, psychology is desperately trying to maintain contact with reality and to be thought of as a scientific discipline. It employs observation and measurement and organizes the results, often presenting them in the language of mathematics. In some quarters, these practices lends it an air of credibility and rigorousness. Others snidely regard the as an elaborate camouflage and a sham. Psychology, they insist, is a pseudo-science. It has the trappings of science but not its substance.

Worse still, while historical narratives are rigid and immutable, the application of psychological theories (in the form of psychotherapy) is "tailored" and "customized" to the circumstances of each and every patient (client). The user or consumer is incorporated in the resulting narrative as the main hero (or anti-hero). This flexible "production line" seems to be the result of an age of increasing individualism.

True, the "language units" (large chunks of denotates and connotates) used in psychology and psychotherapy are one and the same, regardless of the identity of the patient and his therapist. In psychoanalysis, the analyst is likely to always employ the tripartite structure (Id, Ego, Superego). But these are merely the language elements and need not be confused with the idiosyncratic plots that are weaved in every encounter. Each client, each person, and his own, unique, irreplicable, plot.

To qualify as a "psychological" (both meaningful and instrumental) plot, the narrative, offered to the patient by the therapist, must be:

a. All-inclusive (anamnetic) – It must encompass, integrate and incorporate all the facts known about the protagonist.

b. Coherent – It must be chronological, structured and causal.

c. Consistent – Self-consistent (its subplots cannot contradict one another or go against the grain of the main plot) and consistent with the observed phenomena (both those related to the protagonist and those pertaining to the rest of the universe).

d. Logically compatible – It must not violate the laws of logic both internally (the plot must abide by some internally imposed logic) and externally (the Aristotelian logic which is applicable to the observable world).

e. Insightful (diagnostic) – It must inspire in the client a sense of awe and astonishment which is the result of seeing something familiar in a new light or the result of seeing a pattern emerging out of a big body of data. The insights must constitute the inevitable conclusion of the logic, the language, and of the unfolding of the plot.

f. Aesthetic – The plot must be both plausible and "right", beautiful, not cumbersome, not awkward, not discontinuous, smooth, parsimonious, simple, and so on.

g. Parsimonious – The plot must employ the minimum numbers of assumptions and entities in order to satisfy all the above conditions.

h. Explanatory – The plot must explain the behavior of other characters in the plot, the hero's decisions and behavior, why events developed the way they did.

i. Predictive (prognostic) – The plot must possess the ability to predict future events, the future behavior of the hero and of other meaningful figures and the inner emotional and cognitive dynamics.

j. Therapeutic – With the power to induce change, encourage functionality, make the patient happier and more content with himself (ego-syntony), with others, and with his circumstances.

k. Imposing – The plot must be regarded by the client as the preferable organizing principle of his life's events and a torch to guide him in the dark (vade mecum).

l. Elastic – The plot must possess the intrinsic abilities to self organize, reorganize, give room to emerging order, accommodate new data comfortably, and react flexibly to attacks from within and from without.

In all these respects, a psychological plot is a theory in disguise. Scientific theories satisfy most of the above conditions as well. But this apparent identity is flawed. The important elements of testability, verifiability, refutability, falsifiability, and repeatability – are all largely missing from psychological theories and plots. No experiment could be designed to test the statements within the plot, to establish their truth-value and, thus, to convert them to theorems or hypotheses in a theory.

There are four reasons to account for this inability to test and prove (or falsify) psychological theories:

1. Ethical – Experiments would have to be conducted, involving the patient and others. To achieve the necessary result, the subjects will have to be ignorant of the reasons for the experiments and their aims. Sometimes even the very performance of an experiment will have to remain a secret (double blind experiments). Some experiments may involve unpleasant or even traumatic experiences. This is ethically unacceptable.

2. The Psychological Uncertainty Principle – The initial state of a human subject in an experiment is usually fully established. But both treatment and experimentation influence the subject and render this knowledge irrelevant. The very processes of measurement and observation influence the human subject and transform him or her - as do life's circumstances and vicissitudes.

3. Uniqueness – Psychological experiments are, therefore, bound to be unique, unrepeatable, cannot be replicated elsewhere and at other times even when they are conducted with the SAME subjects. This is because the subjects are never the same due to the aforementioned psychological uncertainty principle. Repeating the experiments with other subjects adversely affects the scientific value of the results.

4. The undergeneration of testable hypotheses – Psychology does not generate a sufficient number of hypotheses, which can be subjected to scientific testing. This has to do with the fabulous (=storytelling) nature of psychology. In a way, psychology has affinity with some private languages. It is a form of art and, as such, is self-sufficient and self-contained. If structural, internal constraints are met – a statement is deemed true even if it does not satisfy external scientific requirements.

So, what are psychological theories and plots good for? They are the instruments used in the procedures which induce peace of mind (even happiness) in the client. This is done with the help of a few embedded mechanisms:

a.      The Organizing Principle – Psychological plots offer the client an organizing principle, a sense of order, meaningfulness, and justice, an inexorable drive toward well defined (though, perhaps, hidden) goals, the feeling of being part of a whole. They strive to answer the "why’s" and "how’s" of life. They are dialogic. The client asks: "why am I (suffering from a syndrome) and how (can I successfully tackle it)". Then, the plot is spun: "you are like this not because the world is whimsically cruel but because your parents mistreated you when you were very young, or because a person important to you died, or was taken away from you when you were still impressionable, or because you were sexually abused and so on". The client is becalmed by the very fact that there is an explanation to that which until now monstrously taunted and haunted him, that he is not the plaything of vicious Gods, that there is a culprit (focusing his diffuse anger). His belief in the existence of order and justice and their administration by some supreme, transcendental principle is restored. This sense of "law and order" is further enhanced when the plot yields predictions which come true (either because they are self-fulfilling or because some real, underlying "law" has been discovered).

b.     The Integrative Principle – The client is offered, through the plot, access to the innermost, hitherto inaccessible, recesses of his mind. He feels that he is being reintegrated, that "things fall into place". In psychodynamic terms, the energy is released to do productive and positive work, rather than to induce distorted and destructive forces.

c.      The Purgatory Principle – In most cases, the client feels sinful, debased, inhuman, decrepit, corrupting, guilty, punishable, hateful, alienated, strange, mocked and so on. The plot offers him absolution. The client's suffering expurgates, cleanses, absolves, and atones for his sins and handicaps. A feeling of hard won achievement accompanies a successful plot. The client sheds layers of functional, adaptive stratagems rendered dysfunctional and maladaptive. This is inordinately painful. The client feels dangerously naked, precariously exposed. He then assimilates the plot offered to him, thus enjoying the benefits emanating from the previous two principles and only then does he develop new mechanisms of coping. Therapy is a mental crucifixion and resurrection and atonement for the patient's sins. It is a religious experience. Psychological theories and plots are in the role of the scriptures from which solace and consolation can be always gleaned.

Return

In Defense of Psychoanalysis

Critique and Defense of Psychoanalysis

“I am actually not a man of science at all. . . . I am nothing but a conquistador by temperament, an adventurer.”

(Sigmund Freud, letter to Fleiss, 1900)

"If you bring forth that which is in you, that which you bring forth will be your salvation".

(The Gospel of Thomas)

"No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we cannot get elsewhere."

(Sigmund Freud, "The Future of an Illusion")

Harold Bloom called Freud "The central imagination of our age". That psychoanalysis is not a scientific theory in the strict, rigorous sense of the word has long been established. Yet, most criticisms of Freud's work (by the likes of Karl Popper, Adolf Grunbaum, Havelock Ellis, Malcolm Macmillan, and Frederick Crews) pertain to his - long-debunked - scientific pretensions.

Today it is widely accepted that psychoanalysis - though some of its tenets are testable and, indeed, have been experimentally tested and invariably found to be false or uncorroborated -  is a system of ideas. It is a cultural construct, and a (suggested) deconstruction of the human mind. Despite aspirations to the contrary, psychoanalysis is not - and never has been - a value-neutral physics or dynamics of the psyche.

Freud also stands accused of generalizing his own perversions and of reinterpreting his patients' accounts of their memories to fit his preconceived notions of the unconscious . The practice of psychoanalysis as a therapy has been castigated as a crude form of brainwashing within cult-like settings.

Feminists criticize Freud for casting women in the role of "defective" (naturally castrated and inferior) men. Scholars of culture expose the Victorian and middle-class roots of his theories about suppressed sexuality. Historians deride and decry his stifling authoritarianism and frequent and expedient conceptual reversals.

Freud himself would have attributed many of these diatribes to the defense mechanisms of his critics. Projection, resistance, and displacement do seem to be playing a prominent role. Psychologists are taunted by the lack of rigor of their profession, by its literary and artistic qualities, by the dearth of empirical support for its assertions and fundaments, by the ambiguity of its terminology and ontology, by the derision of "proper" scientists in the "hard" disciplines, and by the limitations imposed by their experimental subjects (humans). These are precisely the shortcomings that they attribute to psychoanalysis.

Indeed, psychological narratives - psychoanalysis first and foremost - are not "scientific theories" by any stretch of this much-bandied label. They are also unlikely to ever become ones. Instead - like myths, religions, and ideologies - they are organizing principles.

Psychological "theories" do not explain the world. At best, they describe reality and give it "true", emotionally-resonant, heuristic and hermeneutic meaning. They are less concerned with predictive feats than with "healing" - the restoration of harmony among people and inside them.

Therapies - the practical applications of psychological "theories" - are more concerned with function, order, form, and ritual than with essence and replicable performance. The interaction between patient and therapist is a microcosm of society, an encapsulation and reification of all other forms of social intercourse. Granted, it is more structured and relies on a body of knowledge gleaned from millions of similar encounters. Still, the therapeutic process is nothing more than an insightful and informed dialog whose usefulness is well-attested to.

Both psychological and scientific theories are creatures of their times, children of the civilizations and societies in which they were conceived, context-dependent and culture-bound. As such, their validity and longevity are always suspect. Both hard-edged scientists and thinkers in the "softer" disciplines are influenced by contemporary values, mores, events, and interpellations.

The difference between "proper" theories of dynamics and psychodynamic theories is that the former asymptotically aspire to an objective "truth" "out there" - while the latter emerge and emanate from a kernel of inner, introspective, truth that is immediately familiar and is the bedrock of their speculations. Scientific theories - as opposed to psychological "theories" - need, therefore, to be tested, falsified, and modified because their truth is not self-contained.

Still, psychoanalysis was, when elaborated, a Kuhnian paradigm shift. It broke with the past completely and dramatically. It generated an inordinate amount of new, unsolved, problems. It suggested new methodological procedures for gathering empirical evidence (research strategies). It was based on observations (however scant and biased). In other words, it was experimental in nature, not merely theoretical. It provided a framework of reference, a conceptual sphere within which new ideas developed.

That it failed to generate a wealth of testable hypotheses and to account for discoveries in neurology does not detract from its importance. Both relativity theories were and, today, string theories are, in exactly the same position in relation to their subject matter, physics.

In 1963, Karl Jaspers made an important distinction between the scientific activities of Erklaren and Verstehen. Erklaren is about finding pairs of causes and effects. Verstehen is about grasping connections between events, sometimes intuitively and non-causally. Psychoanalysis is about Verstehen, not about Erklaren. It is a hypothetico-deductive method for gleaning events in a person's life and generating insights regarding their connection to his current state of mind and functioning.

So, is psychoanalysis a science, pseudo-science, or sui generis?

Psychoanalysis is a field of study, not a theory. It is replete with neologisms and formalism but, like Quantum Mechanics, it has many incompatible interpretations. It is, therefore, equivocal and self-contained (recursive). Psychoanalysis dictates which of its hypotheses are testable and what constitutes its own falsification. In other words, it is a meta-theory: a theory about generating theories in psychology.

Moreover, psychoanalysis the theory is often confused with psychoanalysis the therapy. Conclusively proving that the therapy works does not establish the veridicality, the historicity, or even the usefulness of the conceptual edifice of the theory. Furthermore, therapeutic techniques evolve far more quickly and substantially than the theories that ostensibly yield them. They are self-modifying "moving targets" - not rigid and replicable procedures and rituals.

Another obstacle in trying to establish the scientific value of psychoanalysis is its ambiguity. It is unclear, for instance, what in psychoanalysis qualify as causes - and what as their effects.

Consider the critical construct of the unconscious. Is it the reason for - does it cause - our behavior, conscious thoughts, and emotions? Does it provide them with a "ratio" (explanation)? Or are they mere symptoms of inexorable underlying processes? Even these basic questions receive no "dynamic" or "physical" treatment in classic (Freudian) psychoanalytic theory. So much for its pretensions to be a scientific endeavor.

Psychoanalysis is circumstantial and supported by epistemic accounts, starting with the master himself. It appeals to one's common sense and previous experience. Its statements are of these forms: "given X, Y, and Z reported by the patient - doesn't it stand to (everyday) reason that A caused X?" or "We know that B causes M, that M is very similar to X, and that B is very similar to A. Isn't it reasonable to assume that A causes X?".

In therapy, the patient later confirms these insights by feeling that they are "right" and "correct", that they are epiphanous and revelatory, that they possess retrodictive and predictive powers, and by reporting his reactions to the therapist-interpreter. This acclamation seals the narrative's probative value as a basic (not to say primitive) form of explanation which provides a time frame, a coincident pattern, and sets of teleological aims, ideas and values.

Juan Rivera is right that Freud's claims about infantile life cannot be proven, not even with a Gedankenexperimental movie camera, as Robert Vaelder suggested. It is equally true that the theory's etiological claims are epidemiologically untestable, as Grunbaum repeatedly says. But these failures miss the point and aim of psychoanalysis: to provide an organizing and comprehensive, non-tendentious, and persuasive narrative of human psychological development.

Should such a narrative be testable and falsifiable or else discarded (as the Logical Positivists insist)?

Depends if we wish to treat it as science or as an art form. This is the circularity of the arguments against psychoanalysis. If Freud's work is considered to be the modern equivalent of myth, religion, or literature - it need not be tested to be considered "true" in the deepest sense of the word. After all, how much of the science of the 19th century has survived to this day anyhow?

Return

THE AUTHOR

Shmuel (Sam) Vaknin

Born in 1961 in Qiryat-Yam, Israel.

Served in the Israeli Defence Force (1979-1982) in training and education units.

Education

Completed a few semesters in the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa.

Ph.D. in Philosophy (major: Philosophy of Physics) – Pacific Western University, California, USA.

Graduate of numerous courses in Finance Theory and International Trading.

Certified E-Commerce Concepts Analyst by Brainbench.

Certified in Psychological Counselling Techniques by Brainbench.

Certified Financial Analyst by Brainbench.

Full proficiency in Hebrew and in English.

Business Experience

1980 to 1983

Founder and co-owner of a chain of computerised information kiosks in Tel-Aviv, Israel.

1982 to 1985

Senior positions with the Nessim D. Gaon Group of Companies in Geneva, Paris and New-York (NOGA and APROFIM SA):

– Chief Analyst of Edible Commodities in the Group's Headquarters in Switzerland
– Manager of the Research and Analysis Division
– Manager of the Data Processing Division
– Project Manager of the Nigerian Computerised Census
– Vice President in charge of RND and Advanced Technologies
– Vice President in charge of Sovereign Debt Financing

1985 to 1986

Represented Canadian Venture Capital Funds in Israel.

1986 to 1987

General Manager of IPE Ltd. in London. The firm financed international multi-lateral countertrade and leasing transactions.

1988 to 1990

Co-founder and Director of "Mikbats-Tesuah", a portfolio management firm based in Tel-Aviv.
Activities included large-scale portfolio management, underwriting, forex trading and general financial advisory services.

1990 to Present

Freelance consultant to many of Israel's Blue-Chip firms, mainly on issues related to the capital markets in Israel, Canada, the UK and the USA.

Consultant to foreign RND ventures and to Governments on macro-economic matters.

Freelance journalist in various media in the United States.

1990 to 1995

President of the Israel chapter of the Professors World Peace Academy (PWPA) and (briefly) Israel representative of the "Washington Times".

1993 to 1994

Co-owner and Director of many business enterprises:

– The Omega and Energy Air-Conditioning Concern
– AVP Financial Consultants
– Handiman Legal Services
Total annual turnover of the group: 10 million USD.

Co-owner, Director and Finance Manager of COSTI Ltd. – Israel's largest computerised information vendor and developer. Raised funds through a series of private placements locally in the USA, Canada and London.

1993 to 1996

Publisher and Editor of a Capital Markets Newsletter distributed by subscription only to dozens of subscribers countrywide.

In a legal precedent in 1995 – studied in business schools and law faculties across Israel – was tried for his role in an attempted takeover of Israel's Agriculture Bank.

Was interned in the State School of Prison Wardens.

Managed the Central School Library, wrote, published and lectured on various occasions.

Managed the Internet and International News Department of an Israeli mass media group, "Ha-Tikshoret and Namer".

Assistant in the Law Faculty in Tel-Aviv University (to Prof. S.G. Shoham).

1996 to 1999

Financial consultant to leading businesses in Macedonia, Russia and the Czech Republic.

Economic commentator in "Nova Makedonija", "Dnevnik", "Makedonija Denes", "Izvestia", "Argumenti i Fakti", "The Middle East Times", "The New Presence", "Central Europe Review", and other periodicals, and in the economic programs on various channels of Macedonian Television.

Chief Lecturer in courses in Macedonia organised by the Agency of Privatization, by the Stock Exchange, and by the Ministry of Trade.

1999 to 2002

Economic Advisor to the Government of the Republic of Macedonia and to the Ministry of Finance.

2001 to 2003

Senior Business Correspondent for United Press International (UPI).

2007 -

Associate Editor, Global Politician

Founding Analyst, The Analyst Network

Contributing Writer, The American Chronicle Media Group

Expert, Self-growth.com

2008

Columnist and analyst in "Nova Makedonija", "Fokus", and "Kapital" (Macedonian papers and newsweeklies).

Seminars and lectures on economic issues in various forums in Macedonia.

2008-

2008-

Member of the Steering Committee for the Advancement of Healthcare in the Republic of Macedonia

Advisor to the Minister of Health of Macedonia

Seminars and lectures on economic issues in various forums in Macedonia.

Web and Journalistic Activities

Author of extensive Web sites in:

– Psychology ("Malignant Self Love") - An Open Directory Cool Site for 8 years.

– Philosophy ("Philosophical Musings"),

– Economics and Geopolitics ("World in Conflict and Transition").

Owner of the Narcissistic Abuse Study Lists and the Abusive Relationships Newsletter (more than 6,000 members).

Owner of the Economies in Conflict and Transition Study List , the Toxic Relationships Study List, and the Links and Factoid Study List.

Editor of mental health disorders and Central and Eastern Europe categories in various Web directories (Open Directory, Search Europe, Mentalhelp.net).

Editor of the Personality Disorders, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, the Verbal and Emotional Abuse, and the Spousal (Domestic) Abuse and Violence topics on Suite 101 and Bellaonline.

Columnist and commentator in "The New Presence", United Press International (UPI), InternetContent, eBookWeb, PopMatters, Global Politician, The Analyst Network, Conservative Voice, The American Chronicle Media Group, eBookNet.org, and "Central Europe Review".

Publications and Awards

"Managing Investment Portfolios in States of Uncertainty", Limon Publishers, Tel-Aviv, 1988

"The Gambling Industry", Limon Publishers, Tel-Aviv, 1990

"Requesting My Loved One – Short Stories", Yedioth Aharonot, Tel-Aviv, 1997

"The Suffering of Being Kafka" (electronic book of Hebrew and English Short Fiction), Prague, 1998-2004

"The Macedonian Economy at a Crossroads – On the Way to a Healthier Economy" (dialogues with Nikola Gruevski), Skopje, 1998

"The Exporters' Pocketbook", Ministry of Trade, Republic of Macedonia, Skopje, 1999

"Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited", Narcissus Publications, Prague, 1999-2007  (Read excerpts - click here)

The Narcissism Series (e-books regarding relationships with abusive narcissists), Prague, 1999-2007

Personality Disorders Revisited (e-book about personality disorders), Prague, 2007

"After the Rain – How the West Lost the East", Narcissus Publications in association with Central Europe Review/CEENMI, Prague and Skopje, 2000

Winner of numerous awards, among them Israel's Council of Culture and Art Prize for Maiden Prose (1997), The Rotary Club Award for Social Studies (1976), and the Bilateral Relations Studies Award of the American Embassy in Israel (1978).

Hundreds of professional articles in all fields of finance and economics, and numerous articles dealing with geopolitical and political economic issues published in both print and Web periodicals in many countries.

Many appearances in the electronic media on subjects in philosophy and the sciences, and concerning economic matters.

Write to Me:

palma@unet.com.mk

narcissisticabuse-owner@yahoogroups.com

My Web Sites:

Economy/Politics: http://ceeandbalkan.tripod.com/

Psychology: http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/

Philosophy: http://philosophos.tripod.com/

Poetry: http://samvak.tripod.com/contents.html

Fiction: http://samvak.tripod.com/sipurim.html