timeimmortal

David Warren is back from his annual vacation, and is in fine form. I’ve been meaning to comment on the recent discovery of memristors (the “fourth” fundamental circuit element, after resistors, inductors, and capacitors) for a while now, but I rather prefer Mr. Warren’s approach to it:

…the empirical outlook of science needs balancing against the philosophical outlook, which demands context, and seeks breadth. It is incidentally also why the greater advances in scientific understanding are often made by rank amateurs — people like Einstein working in places like Swiss patent offices, who can see the forest in spite of all the trees.

It is also why such a disproportionate number of the greatest theoretical advances have been made by religious “nutjobs” (in the current parlance) — from the evangelical Newton, to the Catholic fundamentalist Galileo, to monks such as Copernicus, Mendel, and Lemaître — people chilled out by disposition, with a grand view of nature and her infinitely distant, but transubstantially present, God. Without such vision, we all tend to become easily panicked data crunchers.

I was struck this week by another science story, also in Nature magazine. The techies at Hewlett-Packard have successfully fabricated “memristors,” a fourth building block for electronic circuits (after capacitors, resistors, and inductors). The achievement promises significant advances in computer memory and processing.

The possibility of memristors was first established by Leon Chua, a professor at Berkeley, in 1971. He said this week, “I’m thrilled because it’s almost like vindication. Something I did is not just in my imagination, it’s fundamental.”

I love the implicit faith and humility in that statement. The man is thrilled because he didn’t really invent anything after all, merely discovered (”dis-covered”) something already there, in nature or “the mind of God.”

And THAT is where authority comes from. Not from “scientists.”

The thought of scientific discovery is thrilling, but so often it seems the frame of mind that is put in to the necessary research is…lacking in a certain internal humility. Leon Chua knew, from mathematical circuit models, that something more was yet to be discovered; resistors, inductors, and capacitors, though important, did not tell the whole story. But he didn’t create memristors — he understood from looking at the math that the fundamental laws that governed the Universe required that something like memristance exist, even if no technology corporation had yet constructed a memristor.

And indeed, all congratulations to both Leon Chua and the researchers at HP — this discovery is a significant advance in computing technology.

But even in saying that sentence, what is the most important reflection one can make? David Warren points to it — the term “discovery.” For indeed, this is not something new that has emerged suddenly, but instead is something very old which has now been found.

God is rather wont to array things in just such a way that this sort of thing transpires from time to time.

I do wish I could write as eloquently as David Warren does, especially when communicating a point of such profound importance:

To those who know some history, the modern sciences emerged in an unambiguously Christian milieu. They flourished, over centuries in the West, as the direct result of the Judaeo-Christian teaching that “God does not contradict Himself.” The whole notion of unalterable physical laws, and thus a universal order that will repay inquiry, is the product of a theological position unique to the West. It is a view that has been glimpsed in other civilizations, but could only be doggedly pursued in this one. science was stillborn in all other civilizations.

By contrast, an atheistical view involves no such dogma; and the prevailing Darwinist scientistic view involves an actual self-contradiction so glaring that it cannot withstand a moment’s review. For it claims to explain order by the chance accumulation of random events. Such a view is itself in revolt against a tradition which found reason in nature and an answering reason in man. It can only lead to the death of science.

The Christian outlook stood from the beginning on two ancient legs. One was the revelation to the Hebrews, which lights the way to Christ. And the other was our inheritance from the Greeks. For “Western Civ” emerged out of the ancient world as a set of uncannily adequate replies to questions Greek philosophers had raised about time and final causation. Indeed, the rebirth of empirical science in the Christian Middle Ages was a return to Athens and Alexandria, and to the inquiries of e.g. Aristotle, and Aristarchus (“the ancient Copernicus”).

…

One of the historical myths of today is that such pseudo-sciences as astrology and alchemy preceded the emergence of true science, which overcame them by its superior predictive powers.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. In the actual ancient world of the Mediterranean and Near East, it was the other way around. Astrology, alchemy, and various kinds of sorcery emerged from the decadence of Greek empiricism. The mystery cults that sustained them, began to flourish just as that Greek world was crumbling under the might of an expanding Roman power, in the centuries before Christ. The ancient degeneration of science was predicated not on the rise of an “irrational” religious force, that suppressed it, but on progressive loss of faith in, and growing cynicism towards, the ancient religious and cosmological order.

Indeed, many atheistic commentators often seem to forget, in their zeal to use highly selective examples to claim that the Church is antagonistic towards science, that it was the Church which preserved the accumulated knowledge of the “Old World” through the Dark Ages, that it was the Church which frameworked the ancient academies of learning which became the modern university, and that it was the Church and the scientific inquiry conducted through it during the Middle Ages that laid the groundwork for all the innovations and discoveries of the 17th century onward. Far from being anti-science, or anti-reason, or anti-knowledge, the Church has been at the forefront of reason and discovery through the centuries. Animism, Islam, Hinduism, and other religions have not produced the same vibrant tradition of inquiry and discovery; only the West founded by and upon Christianity has done so. And it is the height of foolishness to deny that the Christian origins of the West have had anything to do with the wondrous discoveries that have been made therein.