A little light conversation

To go with Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”

Meta AI - generated image of 4 friends engaged in a post-dinner conversation

The Background

One evening four friends – let’s call them P, Q, R and S – had their own little college reunion, after many years.

P was a professor of philosophy in a reputed university in the UK. A ponderer by nature, she had a penchant for paradoxical statements and intellectual conundrums. She was a passionate athlete and a marathon runner.

Q questioned anything anybody said and was usually skeptical about any answer he was given. Now an editor with a leading newspaper, his career as an investigative journalist benefited a lot from his naturally suspicious disposition. Endowed with a keen artistic sensibility, he loved poetry, music and painting.

R was a religious man, and having studied many world religions, decided that Panentheism best reflected the tenets of his personal belief system. To him things didn’t need to make sense as long as one had faith. As a social entrepreneur, he had promoted several startups focused on climate action and social justice. His idea of a holiday was to get as far away into the wilderness as possible to be one with nature.

S was a scientist – a physicist to be precise, attached to a well-known American space research center. A confirmed atheist, she didn’t have time for ideas that didn’t make sense, and very little patience with arguments that were not very coherent or did not follow a cogent line of reasoning. Her other major preoccupation was renewable energy.

All four friends were passionate about their work and maintained high standards of integrity in their professional, social and personal lives. However, they had evolved different perspectives on life, after their college days, and their doxastic attitudes were in sharp contrast. S believed nothing that was not backed up by rigorous scientific reasoning, verifiable experimentation, irrefutable evidence and consensus across the global scientific community. R believed anything that came out of an authentic spiritual or religious experience. Q the affable agnostic, never took any claim seriously, always doubting any evidence presented to him, but steering clear of conspiracy theories. As to what P believed remained a mystery - all that could be said was that she would examine a given proposition from various angles but not have any definitive, categorical opinion about its veracity.

Q, always full of bonhomie and good cheer, had invited P, R and S over to his home, eager to play host to his old friends from college. If he caused people discomfort with his incisive and tough questions, he more than compensated for it by making them comfortable with his convivial hospitality. The guests arrived on time and greeted one another with a great deal of warmth and affection. Over drinks they exchanged pleasantries, enquired after each other’s families, teased each other about their social media posts, complained about the weather, the traffic, the pollution and lamented about how living conditions in the city they once called home had deteriorated so much since the time they were in college. Over dinner they went on to voice opinions on how the city – and by extension the country, and by further extension the world – was being run and how it ought to be run.

After dinner the conversation eventually drifted to more abstract subjects, such as our understanding of the universe, the meaning and purpose of life, etc., as these four friends enjoyed their coffee and cognac (except for R, a teetotaler, who skipped the cognac and had just the coffee). Q had by this time turned on his Bluetooth speakers and started off his Mozart playlist from his phone, and this was how the conversation went, with “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” playing softly in the background…

The Conversation

Q: We often talk about concepts like reality, truth, meaning and purpose. While on a mundane level these words are part of our common parlance, they do merit deeper investigation. These days as I lie on my couch, à la Wordsworth “in vacant or in pensive mood”, my mind drifts to questions like: What is the truth about the universe, our existence in this world, and life as we know it? How do we, if ever, arrive at the truth? Can we ascertain it with certainty? etc. We used to have a lot of discussions on such questions in college. No doubt our views today are better informed, more refined, nuanced and sophisticated. I’d love to know what you folks think. You go first, P.

P: Thanks, Q. To answer questions like those, we must first clarify what we mean by the truth and certainty, and try and understand our framework for determining such things. We need to be clear as to whether we are talking about the truth as a thing in itself that exists regardless of us, or as something in relation to us and that is knowable by us. The two may not be the same. And I use the word “exists” lightly here – there’s a whole branch of philosophy that deals with questions on what it means to exist, the “is-ness” of things in a manner of speaking. Be that as it may, it helps to arrive at a better understanding of such questions. In the journey toward knowledge and understanding all roads are but alleys off the main highway of philosophy. Some of them are dead-ends though, which we need to watch out for.

R: Haha P you haven’t changed at all - “so good with words and at keeping things vague” to quote Joan Baez. As for me, I have clarity and certainty on this. The ultimate truth is God and whatever it is that God has given us to understand. There is nothing else that can be - or for that matter even needs to be - said about this matter. God is the absolute embodiment of all reality, and the truth that is God is the absolute truth. And if you don’t like the word God, then I could use other words, like Universal Consciousness or Spirit. I guess that doesn’t make much difference to our friend S here, who would dismiss all these words with equal disdain.

S: Correct, R. Disdain it is. We may never actually know the whole truth about the universe, but – to borrow P’s expression – of all known paths that claim to lead to the truth, Science gives us the most efficient methods and tools to get as close as possible to knowing it. And hopefully we will know most of it at some point, if not all, with varying degrees of certainty. Like we already do, for example, about many things – we know enough about some materials to be able to make useful things with them or build infrastructure. We know enough about certain diseases to be able to cure them and increase life expectancy. And so on and so forth. The universe is a bit too vast and a bit too complex for us to be able to say that we understand all or even most of it. While we know quite a bit about some aspects of it, there’s a significant portion out there that we know next to nothing about. In short, we have a good working knowledge about the ordinary stuff of regular life – stuff that is of a size and scale commensurate with the five senses of humans. It’s only the infinitesimally small and the seemingly infinitely large that we have trouble with.

Q: Interesting responses, but not surprising at all. I note with some amusement how the three of you responded with your own versions of essentially the same thing, but none of you directly answered my question. In many ways, you are all saying that we can only get a glimpse of what is “presented” to us as the truth – and I’m putting the word presented in quotes; not that I take this presented-ness for granted, but for the moment I am just going along with it as a metaphor. So tell me, my dear friends, what is so elusive and complex about the truth and why can’t we get to it?

R: Whoa, Q. I don’t know about the others but I did give you a simple and straightforward answer, but it looks like you don’t want to accept it. Frankly the only way to appreciate the full meaning of what I said, is to take the leap of faith. You can’t remain forever skeptical and yet imagine that you will get ready answers within the narrow confines of your worldly perception. Free your mind from the fetters of thought, free your heart from the bondage of emotion, and open your soul to allow the beauty of the Spirit and the infinite love it has for all creatures, to embrace you. Only then will you experience the truth and the profound joy of discovering it. I can tell you this from my own first-hand experience. In my case, I’ve stopped saying I think or I feel or even I know. I now only say “it is”, with full knowledge and confidence. All of us can, and should, attain that state of consciousness. That is our purpose in life.

S: My dear Q, I would be happy to explain to you in great detail everything that today’s scientific community, with a certain degree of confidence, holds to be accurate explanations about the universe. I would also be happy to throw-in the various hypotheses we think are valid but are not so sure about, and those phenomena around which we are still struggling to develop meaningful hypotheses. But then there’s a catch – a couple of pre-conditions, if you like. On your part, you should be ready to: (a) invest the time required to go through those explanations and, since you’re such a skeptic, to also review and question the evidence presented to substantiate each explanation, and (b) invest the time needed to bring your math skills up to date and develop the mental stamina to go through some fairly complex mathematics. I’m afraid without that, it won’t be possible. There’s a limit to simplification and expression in plain English. Remember that quote from Einstein: make things simple as possible but not simpler. There’s a reason he said that, and it has a lot to do with the limitations on translating complex math into English. Unfortunately, without turning to a white-board and putting up the relevant mathematical formulations, there is no simpler way to explain certain things.

P: Dude Q, asker of deep questions, do spend a moment to think about your question itself. Quite often we ask questions without realizing that while the question sounds perfectly valid, it is without meaning, as happens in some cases. In other cases the question itself contains the answer. For example the question: “What happens after the end of time?” doesn’t merit an answer, because when you say end of time it implies that there is no “after”. Another example: “What is the purpose behind existence?” is a question that already assumes that existence has a purpose, and then tries to figure out what it is. Well, it is whatever you say it is. But to the seeker of purpose this would seem like a frivolous response. Our friend R here says the purpose of life is to attain a certain level of consciousness. So be it. It is up to the seeker to first prove that there “is” a purpose to existence, since philosophy takes no such premise as a starting point, but clearly the seeker does. Note that I’d put the word “is” in quotes. Hopefully, in the course of developing the proof the seeker might discover the reason itself. So I ask you this: tell me what you mean by truth and I’ll tell you what my answer to your question might be.

Q: Again, you’re all saying more or less the same thing – do X first and then you’ll get your answer. The only difference is the X factor i.e., what that X means in each case. S wants me to relearn math first. R wants me to abandon reason and take the leap of faith first. P wants me to first ponder over my question itself. Yo S, I had difficulty with math even back then in college. So I’m left with no option but to accept what scientists tell me in plain English, in the sincere belief that they know what they’re talking about, that they’re not bluffing. And so this boils down to faith in scientists, much like what R asks of me, except he means faith in what he calls God or whatever.

S: Let me interrupt you here – I am not asking you to accept what scientists say as the truth simply because they are scientists and have followed a strict, disciplined process to arrive at their conclusions. All experiments they conduct and all evidence they gather and all the reasoning they put together is all open for review and verification. You can check these things out for yourself. There is total transparency.

R: Hey, I could say the same thing too. I can give you whatever evidence you need, which has already been experienced and verified by me and many others in so many cases. Where it has failed, there has always been an explanation behind the failure. Scientists make mistakes too. Haven’t we heard of theories that have been disproven when fresh evidence was found?

S: Yes but in all those cases, a weaker theory was eventually replaced by a stronger theory.

R: But till that stronger theory came up, we were being sold the weak theory as the truth.

S: Scientists don’t sell …

R: Yeah, yeah… you know what I mean. My question to you is this: at what point, precisely, should we accept a theory as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Does science ever make such a claim? Do your methodologies permit you to? When it comes to religion and spirituality, there *IS* such a point – it is the moment of enlightenment, when you are one with the Absolute Truth. Capital A, capital T.

S: Empiricism is sometimes easily misunderstood but when applied correctly we are able to make fairly accurate statements about what we know to be true, what we think may likely be true, and what we just don’t know enough about but have done some intelligent guesswork on. That said, deductive logic is never wrong. Mathematical equations are never wrong.

R: Oh come on, S! I’m sure you’re aware of instances when even the best scientists have goofed up on their math and corrected themselves later. Let me read out a paragraph from an article I read just the other day. Hang on [opens his phone]. OK here it is [reads aloud from http://www.pnas.org/content/96/8/4224.full]:

A decade before the discovery of cosmic expansion, Einstein introduced a “cosmological constant” into his equations, to make the universe static, in accord with the astronomical wisdom of the day. When the astronomical evidence changed, he quickly abandoned the cosmological constant and much later referred to it as his “greatest blunder”…

So what’s all this about? Introducing constants into equations in accord with astronomical wisdom of the day? And then admitting that it was a blunder? Your lot have barely understood gravitational forces and you invent terms like dark energy and dark matter which even some scientists say they don’t fully comprehend. Stuff like this sounds far more nebulous as compared to the stuff that spiritualists say, which is based on actual experience.

P: Hang on, we are digressing from Q’s quest. Q’s point is that in both cases, he is unable to jump into the pool and test the water himself. And so to him, the claims of scientists and the claims of spiritualists are no different. Both communities admit that some of their propositions may be in error, but assert that others are not. And both communities claim that there has been adequate verification and evidence on those. So where do we go from here?

Q: Yes, that more or less sums up my predicament. However, P, what’s your perspective on this, again. When you say ponder over your question what do you mean exactly? What is there to ponder? How is “tell me the truth about the universe” different from “tell me the truth about which day of the week it is today”?

P: Interesting question, Q. While Religion offers answers and Science tests hypotheses, a key task of Philosophy is to establish rigor in asking well-formed questions. Let me try and answer your question. The main difference between those two “quests for truth” - if I may call them that - is that the day of the week is a man-made construct that can be easily referenced on a calendar. Stuff that we make is easy to understand and explain, because we make it. We set it up to be just that one thing, and not another. If today is a Tuesday, it is not a Wednesday, because we made it so. The universe is a different ball-game. We didn’t make it. As S here would tell you, we are reasonably confident that it spontaneously burst into existence from nothing, about 14 billion years ago, but we are not absolutely certain. We probably never will be. But if we find a black swan, then we will know we were wrong to say that all swans are white, even though we tested this with several hundreds of thousands of swans.

R: So until then we are asked to live with an kinda-sorta-true-but-possibly-falsifiable belief? What if I said that the universe rides on the back of a giant turtle?

S: [sigh] I could do with some more cognac!

R: I’m kidding.

S: Heh. Yeah, right!

P: Hey Q, do you accept that the earth is not flat?

Q: Of course I do.

P: How about the heliocentric solar system?

Q: That too. And to your point, neither was man-made, but we know the truth about them.

P: Yes, but as S said, we know enough about certain aspects of nature to give us a working knowledge on how to deal with nature.

S: Thanks, P. By extension, I’d say that the Big Bang theory explains the birth of the universe with almost the same degree of certainty.

Q: My question to you, S, is this: Is “almost” good enough?

S: For some purposes, it is. For others it may not be. This is what I meant by getting closer to the truth as science advances our frontiers of knowledge.

R: Isn’t it interesting that the Christian view of creation matches the Big Bang explanation? Take the Book of Genesis, which talks about the beginning, when there was nothing… I mean the pattern of both explanations is almost identical. There was absolutely nothing – no matter, no energy, no space, no time – and suddenly, boom! there was the whole universe. “God said let there be light” is just another way of expressing the same thing, which the laity understands better. Not everyone is a scientist, you know, and lay people need a way to understand the concept of spontaneous creation in simple terms.

S: [smile] And your point is …?

Q: I always thought that Western scientists tended to favor the Big Bang hypothesis over all others, because its pattern matched with one of the core beliefs of their religion. Even if most of them turned atheist later in their lives, isn’t it possible that the patterns of all the myths and legends and stories you are told when very young stay with you and kind of shape your precepts that determine how to understand things? Prof. Jayant Narlikar on the other hand came up with the Steady State explanation. Maybe it was because he wasn’t tainted by ideas from the Book of Genesis indoctrinated into him as a kid, since he wasn’t raised Christian. Why aren’t other scientists backing up these alternative explanations?

S: Well, the thing is that the bulk of the observed and recorded evidence supports the Big Bang, and this supporting evidence has become so much stronger over the years that astronomers now think it is not useful to spend scarce resources and time on continuing the research on other hypotheses.

Q: Nice! Isn’t that precisely why you find more evidence to support one theory and less to support the other? Because you are diverting more funds to look for evidence to prove the favored theory? This looks like circular reasoning to me… self-fulfilling prophecies… confirmation bias… call it what you will. If you don’t fund research into alternative hypotheses, you won’t get any credible alternative hypotheses. I would venture to say that science works more through human consensus, than it does through evidence. There’s a cultural and sociological element to the scientific method that we just cannot ignore.

R: I’m happy that the Big Bang resonates with the Christian Creationist view, though I’m not a Christian. But even if that turns out to be incorrect, it wouldn’t worry me.

Q: OK, so let’s talk about that then, R. Since you know the Absolute Truth with a capital A and capital T, tell us, R. Tell us what it is. Should be easy, right?

R: Let me clarify – yes, I’ve had numerous experiences… very profound and supernatural experiences… and I’ve got a glimpse of the Absolute Truth, but I’m not there yet. However, I do have faith that as I travel further on that path, I shall be one with it, some day. In any case, my spiritual experiences are not about divining how the universe started, but about being one with the universe. When I meditate, there is no dichotomy of the observer versus the observed. For scientists like S, there is always that distinction as they investigate the world. Which is why for them there will never be the oneness of absolute knowledge. Like I said, I’m not there yet, but I know that I am not far from it. But scientists will never be there, because their path of rational inquiry implicitly requires the separation of the observer and the observed. Bottom line – if scientists can say that they are inching closer to the truth with every new discovery, why can’t I?

S: [smile] I can’t argue with that. I respect people’s personal experiences, assuming of course that they are genuine narratives. Let’s please remember that there are lots of mountebanks out there making all sorts of claims. I’m sure if scientists have a chance to study what appear at first glance to be supernatural phenomena, they will find a reasonable explanation for them in the natural scheme of things. Another thing Einstein said was something to the effect that you can look at the world as though everything is a miracle, or as though nothing is a miracle.

P: Perhaps the issue here is the idea of the preternatural – something extraordinary that prima facie seems unnatural but can eventually be understood as rare, unusual and strange natural phenomena, as different from the idea of the supernatural – something that transcends the natural world altogether and is not subject to the laws of nature.

S: There cannot exist such a thing as a supernatural force, period. It is possible that some phenomena appear to defy the laws of nature - we know that we have not understood all of nature, and there could always be phenomena we have never come across and have therefore not had a chance to examine. However, this so-called supernatural force certainly obeys certain other laws, doesn’t it – perhaps more complex laws that we have yet to comprehend. They could be a higher order of laws that supervene over the more mundane laws - call them meta-laws if you like, but they’re laws of nature just the same. The framework of natural laws expands to absorb what you call supernatural phenomenon.

R: Do you have empirical proof of that?

Q: R, I think S’s point is that the idea of “supernatural” is conceptually paradoxical. Similar to other self-referential paradoxes. You can’t transcend nature and also be a part of it at the same time.

S: R, absurd ideas don’t require empirical verification. Moreover, “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence” – that’s Hitchens’ Razor for you. Go look it up.

P: I see this boiling down to a phenomenology versus ontology debate – or to put it in simple words, a face-off between the experiential and the existential. In other words, what you experience may exist inasmuch as you experience it, but may not have an independent existence as a thing in itself, removed from you and your experience of it. To put that in context, R’s experience of oneness with God, while fully valid in itself and by itself, as R’s authentic experience, does not ipso facto prove the objective existence of that God.

Q: Thanks P, that more or less summarizes it, in my view. Friends, this has been a most invigorating conversation and I’m thrilled that we recaptured that spirit of discourse and debate we shared in our college days, after so many years! So on that happy note let’s wind down this evening’s fun and games and save the rest for another day. Sorry to bring this to an abrupt-ish end, but frankly it could go on forever and I wish we all had that kind of free time. Speaking for myself, I have an early morning tomorrow and need to turn in. Thanks for dropping by, be safe, take care.