THE RANDLE REPORT

THE LAST OF NEWTON

If worshippers at the shrine of reductionist materialism were in any real sense pursuers of the avowed noble cause of ‘science’, they would feel no need to exclude anything from what purports to be a truthful and all-embracing subject.

Their purview would be infinite, and their practice that of continually observing and re-evaluating the subjects thereof in the light of those observations.

That it does nothing of the kind is due in no small part to the passing on of orthodox dogma by popular priests, such as David Attenborough and Brian Cox. Just about everyone believes in a mish-mash of Darwinian and Dawkinsian evolution because these trusted clergy treat it as a proven given; certainly not because there is any convincing evidence for it. And to make sure they continue to so believe, in a crime against free-thinking redolent of Joe Stalin, tame educators have been forbidden to discuss or examine any other possibility.

Anyone who made it to the end of a BBC documentary on Isaac Newton entitled The Last Magician, in defiance of the epic efforts of the cloth-eared music editor to prevent it, would have made out among the cacophony someone honestly admitting that science still has no idea what constitutes life and is nowhere near having all the answers to anything.

Yet the very title of the documentary spoke volumes about what hamstrings dogmatic science in the twenty-first century. Calling it by that title was apposite in pointing up the arbitrary and semantic nature of what is considered the proper business of science and what isn’t.

Newton would not even get a job in a school science department these days, because his views on science, as those on other religions would be considered heretical. He was no great respecter of persons, and never believed anything he was told even, and perhaps especially, by those claiming some authority. When his work and discoveries were subjected to the system of so-called ‘peer review’, he realised at once that he was without peers.

The programme described him as a magician because he investigated phenomena and relationships which today’s ‘rational’ science simply rejects. The universe is not by nature rational. Rationalising is the effort to impose order upon it. It is almost inevitable that this course of endeavour would tend to reject the apparently disordered and seek a fixed theory that, if it didn’t explain everything, at least had the agreement of other rationalisers.

Creation is an irritation to such people, because it does not conform to the so-called laws of physics. Laws fixed for all time can only introduce entropy to a subject. But, no matter how deep they delve, or how far they reduce matter, they are always going to come up against it.

Creation-denial infers that the Mona Lisa painted itself. It permits the denizens of Cerne’s Hadron Collider to operate on the principle that if you completely stripped down an old Cortina, you would come face to face with Henry Ford.

Creation is not dependent upon religion. Indeed it is not dependent upon anything, because, by definition, it pre-exists everything.

If, as we are expected to believe, the universe was produced from something like a multi-multi-zillion megaton gobstopper, who or what packed everything into the gobstopper? And who put it there – if there was such a thing as a there in those days; that is, if there was such a thing as days?

If the so-called Big Bang happened, it would, in any case, have been a Big Silence if nobody was around to convert the vibrations into a sound effect and be conscious of the result. That aside, what was the difference between the gobstopper and the resulting celestial firmament? Space, is the obvious answer. Though physicists would claim the mass is identical, there is a lot more apparent nothingness in the latter than the former.

Reductionist material science doesn’t notice space; doesn’t know anything much about it – just looks through it at its precious matter. Yet space is not an absence of things; is not empty; is not just a place in which things occur – although without it nothing would. It is the thing (or non-thing) that makes the gobstopper into a universe, that hosts and bounds the vibrations of molecules, atoms and the infinitesimal (by comparison) elements from which they appear to be constituted.

Above matter, beyond it and within it, defining it, permitting its motions and reactions is this intangible ‘nothingness’ that physics can’t bottle, act upon or even measure.

When Newton went beyond laws of matter, he became a magician in the eyes of the faithful. In fact, he was being a true scientist, boldly going into that which was not yet known or dogmatically promulgated. If blinkered materialism provides no answers to the riddles of life, it just may be that what science is looking for is beyond the arbitrary barriers it has itself set up.

Seeking to prevent people looking beyond those barriers does not put science above life and creation, except in the sense that a jailer can keep someone from sunlight and air, but cannot convincingly claim that they do not exist.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

This article originally appeared in THE MENSA MAGAZINE