Ingenious Nonsense: Religion, Philosophy, Pseudoscience, and the Paranormal

By Fouad Bishay Michael

Dr. Michael presents to us an overview of the three fundamental branches of science, physics, chemistry and biology, in a simple and easy to understand fashion. With this basic knowledge, he leads us to re-evaluate the alternative explanation of the natural world as envisioned by religion, philosophy and pseudoscience with their abstract ideas that have dominated human culture for thousands of years. The result is an intellectual journey to reach the truth and achieve the thought-after well-being of mankind and global peace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477207604

Fouad Bishay Michael

Dr. Fouad Bishay Michael was the Chief of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at Mercy Medical Center in Rockville Center, N.Y., and a teacher in the residency program at The New York Eye and Ear Infirmary Hospital in Manhattan. As a medical student at Cairo University, Egypt, he studied the human anatomy and physiology for two years and kept on expanding his knowledge in these subjects during his long medical career. His interest in neuroscience grew as he dealt with the head and neck area of the human body, where the five senses and the brain reside. After his retirement from the practice of medicine in January 2000, he moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where he pursued his intellectual interests. He made use of what a great university has to offer, by auditing classes and participating in the Community Scholar program at the University of Virginia (UVA). His university studies included creative writing, literature, philosophy and biology. He spends his time reading, writing, sculpting, listening to classical music, and learning to play the flute.

Book preview

© 2012 Fouad Bishay Michael. All rights reserved.t

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 05/24/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-0-7611 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-0-7604 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012908695

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Introduction

Neuroscience

Language

Religion

Philosophy

Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

The Triumph of Science

References

About the Author

Publications

Writings

Introduction

Since the beginning of recorded history, humans have been trying to understand what’s going on in their bodies and in the world around them. With very little knowledge of how nature works, humans understandably found it convenient to introduce certain speculative assumptions to explain the mysteries they were faced with. These assumptions became the foundation of an ever-expanding mythology that acquired a life of its own and survived even after natural phenomena became less mysterious and more factually explainable. Social scientists call this phenomenon path-dependence as they illustrate how a product becomes dominant in the market even when it is inferior to products introduced later on. Thus, the ancient myths persisted in the core of successive religions and cultures, and became so deeply and strongly conditioned in our brains’ neural circuits that they continue to resist any rational reevaluation. Whatever good may have come from these myths, like literature and art, it has been more than offset by the harm they have inflicted on humanity and by the obstacles they have erected against the search for the truth and mankind’s ultimate goal of happiness and well-being.

For more than two thousand years, philosophers have been grappling with ideas and forms, with hylomorphism, the duality of body and soul, the precedence of essence or existence, and with the role of the senses or that of thought in the origin and justification of knowledge, without ever reaching a conclusion. The influence of the ancient philosophers on human thought – for example, their view that the universe is made up of four elements, air, fire, water, and earth, even when some of them were aware of Democritus’ idea that matter can be broken down into its minutest and indivisible particles – was so influential and distracting that humanity has wandered with them in senseless and unproductive quest to unravel the secrets of nature. Where philosophical speculation may once have been historically necessary - when our knowledge of the natural sciences was deficient - it became less justified after the discoveries of Newton, Maxwell, Rutherford and others. The original fanciful four elements of the universe were finally discarded as such, and were correctly replaced by the 118 confirmed chemical elements of the Periodic Table, as of 2012. (This is the total number of the naturally occurring and the man-made elements that we know of, with the possibility of more to be added in the latter category.) It is time to similarly discard the rest of the ancient myths and replace them with the known and established scientific facts. Unfortunately, modern philosophers from Descartes time until now are still circling around the scientific understanding of the natural world, and are endlessly debating the meaning of life, epistemology, ontology, the existence or non-existence of God, as if a decision on these issues would feed us in a famine, save us from a financial meltdown or edify us morally or spiritually, to borrow these two words from their lexicon.

Philosophers obfuscate and equivocate. They use the language in such a way as to make it difficult for anyone else to understand what they mean by the language they use. Frederick Copleston, the theologian and historian of philosophy, in the introduction to his seven volumes, "A History of Philosophy,¹ justifies this bewildering use of the language by stating that, …all philosophy labors under the difficulty of having to express non-sensuous thought in language which has been evolved for the purpose of expressing sensuous ideas. (Vol. 1, p. 70) In a more specific instance, Ian MacLean, a professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Oxford, as quoted by Sir Antony Kenny in his book, A new History of Western Philosophy,²⁰ judged Descartes’ writing style as, …clear but (with) complex syntax… He has a predilection for subordinate clauses and qualifications; he shows great care in expressing preconditions and causal relations… and he is very adept in the use of negation, double negation, and even on occasion triple negation." Although MacLean, and by implication Antony Kenny too, targets Descartes with this critique, his analysis pertains, in fact, no less to philosophers in general. To illustrate this confusing philosophical use of the language, the following story is illuminating.

During my university studies in philosophy, a classmate in one of our discussion groups approached me when I voiced my own critical analysis of the topics discussed and the conclusions reached, and tried to make that day’s subject amenable to my understanding.

For more than two hours, our discussion group was focusing on the difference between the philosophical schools over their view on essentialism and existentialism, and on the precedence of one or the other. Our reading assignment for that particular session was book IV of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle states: the phrase ‘to be’ or ‘not to be’ means something definite, so that not everything can be in a given state and not in a given state. Following that, he goes on to explain that Being, "…has to include substance and essence. Substance is the primary requirement for anything to exist. And by indicating the substance of something we mean that its essence is that and nothing else." He then introduces another word to make a distinction between substance and accident, where substance, in his opinion, is the essence of things and all other attributes are accidental. So far so good, but let us find out to where this discussion is going to lead.

Aristotle writes, … When we say that man is ‘white’ or ‘musical,’ the white and musical are accidental attributes of man because man is white or musical but not essentially so…if all things are said to be accidental, there will be no primary subject for them…the process would necessarily go on to infinity. This, however, is impossible; no more than two accidents can be combined. One accident is not the accident of another except if both are accidents of the same thing.

According to Aristotle, the statement under his scrutiny obviously contains contradictory assertions. However, he accepts two preceding ancient philosophers’, Anaxagoras and Democritus, explanation of this contradiction when he quotes them as saying, The empty and the full are present alike in every part of things, and yet, the one of them is ‘what is’ and the other is ‘what is not. Then he introduces his own opinion by saying: For there are two ways in which one talks of what is: in one way it is possible for something to come into being out of what is not, in another way it is not possible; and it is possible for the same thing to be ‘being’ and ‘not being’ at the same time, but not in the same respect. For it is possible for the same thing to be potentially two opposites but not actually.

Try to figure out what Aristotle wanted to say. I personally couldn’t. Somehow, I thought of Francis Bacon, the empiricist par excellence, who had no sympathy for such pronouncements. Bacon emphasized that the senses and experiments are the only valid source of knowledge, and concluded that the purpose of science is the relief of man’s estate. Then I turned to my classmate and asked her, Even if one truly understands this confusing language, why does all this philosophical exercise matter to us?

She looked at me with disbelief and said, We are trying to apply our epistemological understanding of knowledge to the ontological proof of the existence of God. My classmate is notorious for floating philosophical terminology in any discussion as if the gravity of these terms would give weight to the conclusions she wants to reach, whether she herself understands these conclusions or not.

On similarly confusing grounds, the three monotheistic religions have been promulgating baffling scriptures, and what is worse, they have been battling endless physical and verbal wars for no justifiable reason except their intolerant and exclusive dogmas.

This intolerance and exclusivity started with the idea of a chosen people in the Hebrew Torah, where a supposedly just Creator singled out one people from all his creation to be his favorites. Subsequently, the rest of the Torah becomes a narration of endless cycles of brutality by God and his chosen people to annihilate others when the sacred commandments are followed, or to annihilate the chosen people by the same God and others when they, the chosen people, deviate from the covenant they had made with their God. Incredibly, the same creator who is supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent is obviously helpless in predicting, let alone influencing, the behavior of his own creation.

Then Christianity came up with the astounding concept of the Trinity; the Hebrew God turned out to have a tripartite identity. Then, even when Christianity had rescinded the Hebrew exclusivity - not only the Jews but all of mankind were invited to seek salvation - this was conditioned, first, on the acceptance of Jesus as the savior who sacrificed himself on the cross to erase an original sin committed by someone else who was created by God from nothing, and second, on going through baptismal rebirth and repeated sharing in the ritual of the communion in which wine and bread are miraculously transformed into the blood and flesh of the supposedly ‘Son of God’ for the forgiveness of sin. And this Son of God worldly existence was premised on a virgin birth, an impossibility that defies the laws of biology.

As if that wasn’t enough, one more prophet emerged in a different land but with the same biases and exclusivity, preaching and fighting with the sword for the same God. This latter-day prophet replaced the Hebrew chosen people with another chosen people, the Nation of Islam. Now, the new road to salvation, he declared, has to go through his newly minted Islamic doctrines, and above all, through him personally as stipulated in the required declaration of faith: There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his prophet.

Multitudes still believe in these three warring creationist religions even when the Darwinian theory of evolution, the most valid scientific theory by far, has shed doubt on the validity of all these myths. Cognizant of this fact, creationists are now adding a scientific twist to their argument and talking about intelligent design; they are supporting their argument by the biological complexity of a flagellum in a deliberate intention of instituting religious doctrines as science. Fortunately, their argument didn’t stand in the court of law.

Similarly, Hindu and Buddhist gurus, with voluminous and extremely confusing texts in their arsenal, have been going on in circles for thousands of years without any convincing argument as to the premises they deal with. It is a challenge to comprehend the numerous Vedas that constitute their sacred texts. It seems that the more confusing their teaching is the more followers they can persuade. Simply, they ask you to relax, contemplate, and have positive thinking, and if you follow their recipes, you will live happily ever after in this life and in other reincarnated lives. They talk