Scientific Cosmology

There’s much fun poked at the History Channel these days for being obsessed with aliens rather than history. It’s not completely fair, since these are ancient aliens we’re talking about, but the point still stands. The Travel Channel is somewhat better, being divided between foods and spirits from around the world, and the spirits are often of an … ethereal variety; the travel is both here and to the hereafter. Periodically you’ll also see shows about bigfeet and demons and what-have-you.

Aliens, ghosts, and all the rest are things that science denies exist at all, so why do they attract such attention? How can people, in this age of reason, still cling to these long debunked superstitions of otherworldly visitors or paranormal activities? Sure, they make for enjoyable stories, but if we wanted those things, we could just watch HBO.

That people have strange experiences is not in the least bit controversial; where disagreement lies is in how to understand those experiences. Mundane explanations like wind and weather and dust go a long way, but some experiences appear to be incorrigible. For some reason, when you tell people that what they witnessed with their own two eyes was just a hallucination, they don’t always believe you.

Before going further, let’s make a distinction between science and Science. Science is a set of theories about how various physical phenomena work, as well as a process for developing and refining new theories. Strictly speaking, science does not tell us anything about the world: we interpret experiences and data using science in order to make sense of them or do practical things like fly airplanes. Also, in principle science is tentative, always open to the possibility of falsification and improvement, though in practice it generally works well enough to be safely regarded as true.

Science, on the other hand, is a worldview, one which has opinions on far more matters than concern science. For instance, Science claims that science is pretty much done. Sure, there are still frontiers of knowledge to be pushed, but nothing that anyone who is not a scientist ever encounters remains to be explained. This means that the paranormal or supernatural simply don’t exist, and this implies that people who claim to have experienced such things are wrong, either because they are lying or because they are deluded.

Science doesn’t say anything about the nature of the world. It only describes physical phenomena and in strictly physical terms, for example, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t non-physical phenomena. Science does tackle metaphysics: it claims that the world is purely physical on the grounds that if it weren’t, science would say so. Similarly, there is no such thing as the supernatural or paranormal because if there were, science would describe it, making it completely natural and normal. Science doesn’t deny that there exists evidence of the supernatural but claims rather that if this evidence were legitimate, then science would have noticed by now.

Of course, there is a great deal of such evidence, and that is why a great many people, even ones who otherwise adhere to Science, believe in the paranormal. Direct experience is difficult to argue with, whether it is valid or not. Still, this belief is heresy from Science, and the social position of Science prevents this heresy from gaining ground. Sure, lots of people believe in the supernatural, but all respectable Scientists heap scorn upon them.

Science is a key element of Leftism, helping Leftists orient themselves within the universe as a whole. All the social and political elements of Leftism help place the Leftists within the human world; Science tells them where they are in the physical world. These two perspectives are not unrelated, of course, and insight into Leftist’s understanding of the physical world will shed light on their understanding of the human world.

To better understand Science, let’s compare its cosmology to various others that humans have believed. Specifically, we’ll look at ancient paganism, Christianity, and Germanic paganism. These three religions map the fundamental forces of the human and physical world onto the cosmos, associating them with physical locations within … well, not exactly within the world but still connected to it. Additionally, the individual person and human society as a whole are microcosms, reflections in miniature of the entire cosmos. When Plato proposed to analyze the human soul by considering the human city, he was merely making explicit a tacit presumption of his religion.

Contrary to the neat and orderly picture painted by modern anthologies, paganism was an unholy mess. Different places all had their own local traditions; different poets all had their own mythologies. Homer and Hesiod disagreed on many points; if you throw in Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, you get only more confusion, and these are just representatives of Greek beliefs. Myths from Italy, Phoenicia, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and even India all formed part of the ancient religious milieu. Given this confusing stew of beliefs, one may well wonder whether people actually believed it all.

The pagan myths were much less important than the pagan worldview. A pagan man worshiped the gods of his household and his country and perhaps the gods of a country he visited; if he craved new religious experience, then he joined a mystery cult. Ritual, not creed or faith, structured his relationship with the divine; many people performed the same or similar rituals but to different gods. In the same way, the most important stories, creation myths and such, were largely isomorphic. Zeus, for instance, was a deified king of Crete whose tomb was a popular tourist attraction, but within Greek paganism he filled the same role as, say, Marduk did for the Babylonians.

In his book Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come, Norman Cohn analyzes the creation myths of a variety of ancient cultures and uncovers numerous key points of agreement. All the peoples Cohn studies believed that the world was born out of a watery soup. Water provides the material for the world, as well as being the source of all life. But water is also chaotic, disorderly, and dangerous, a threat to the very life it breeds. If water were unchecked, then life, the world, cosmos in the sense of “order” would be impossible.

Fortunately, out of the watery chaos emerged gods, specifically sky gods, and among these gods was a mighty warrior, a storm god. Armed with wind, thunder, and lightning, this warrior challenged an embodiment of chaos, a horrid sea monster, and by defeating her imposed order upon the world. This victory sets the stage for the creation of humans and of human civilization under the protection of the gods.

Cosmographically, the world is completely surrounded by water and chaos. Not only does the earth sit upon water, but water also looms beyond the sky. The storm god controls cosmic spigots which allow water to enter the world in controlled amounts, such as during thunderstorms, and he has even wiped the world clean with a great flood. These relatively limited incursions of water upon the world help maintain life, but the storm god constantly battles the forces of chaos trying to force their way in uncontrollably. Were it not for the storm god’s efforts, the world would return to chaos and in effect cease to exist altogether.

The world and everything in it thus enjoys a precarious existence. Without constant and heroic efforts on the part of the gods, the world would not exist. By the same token, kings must strive manfully to maintain their states, a householder must labor painfully to eke out his subsistence, and each man must struggle with his own inner tendencies toward chaos lest his life be thrown into disarray.

Cohn does not examine the myths of the Greeks, but they employed the dichotomy not of water and sky but of earth and sky, the chthonic and the ouranic. Chaos was still the origin of all things, but it had no watery aspect and largely disappeared after disgorging the first generation of gods, most notably Gaia. Gaia was a loving mother, and her main failing was that she could not see the monstrous and destructive natures of her children like the Hecatonchires or Typhon.

The central conflict of Greek mythology is the struggle of the sky gods to subdue the chthonic creatures and failing to do so. That failure is important. First Ouranos shut away these creatures within Gaia, but she incited her son Cronos to overthrow and castrate his father. But then Cronos threw the Cyclopes and Hecatonchires into Tartarus, not much of an improvement in Gaia’s view, and so Gaia supported Zeus’ own revolution.

Zeus puts an end to this conflict by defanging the chthonic side. After defeating the Titans and casting them down into Tartarus, he sets the Cyclopes and Hecatonchires as the Titans’ jailers—so instead of being stuck in Tartarus as prisoners, they’re stuck in Tartarus as honored watchmen. The chthonic forces were just as powerless as before, but they received honor and respect. Grasping for anything more than that, as Typhon did, resulted in swift and total destruction.

This tale of divine conflict and compromise undergirds archaic Greek thought. On the level of society, kings rule because they hold supreme power, but they must properly respect the aristocrats under them lest they face revolt. Democracy has a similar justification in the Greek mind: democracy assures that all citizens receive appropriate respect. On the personal level, there is the maxim “Nothing to excess,” which was inscribed above the gate to the sanctuary at Delphi. Whereas other cultures exalted law over chaos, the Greeks sought a middle ground between the two. The world is still fragile, but because it is precariously balanced between extremes, not because chaos is threatening to break in, but because equally legitimate powers are constantly contending with each other.

Cosmographically, the human world rests between the earth and the sky, and this is a notable innovation. Whereas in other myths the sky shields the world, including the earth, from the watery chaos, according to the Greeks the sky rules the earth on account of might not right or even on account of beneficence toward mankind. Chthonic monsters like the Erinyes may be more monstrous than Poseidon’s waves, but the first may well be more kindly toward humans than the latter. In the same way, humans must revere and obey the sky gods, but they are not an ideal to be strived after. Man absolutely must not try to be like a god.

Philosophers, men who studied the ideas of Eastern peoples, tried to blend these two perspectives and reconcile them, with mixed results. Thales’ famous claim “All is water” was simply an expression of commonly held beliefs. Homer had talked about “the justice of Zeus,” but Thales’ student Anaximander identified it with the natural as well as the social order. Most important was Plato’s identification of the rational part of the human soul with the divine and the idea that men should aim to subject their irrational impulses to their rational faculty. In short, Plato argued that men should strive to be like the gods. Aristotle dissented, and the two perspectives were never fully reconciled. To the ordinary person, these disputes were academic, but by the time of the late Roman Empire, paganism was intellectually in disarray.

Christian cosmology combines features of both pagan ideas. On the one hand, it retains the Greek notion of the world standing in between earth and sky. Above the earth and beyond the stars looms God, a supremely ouranic figure, and beneath the earth sits the Devil. However, the Devil is not a chthonic figure, though he does represent subterranean desires, dark secrets, and emotion overruling reason. But the chthonic is nurturing and keenly interested in health; the Devil is an embodiment of corruption and disease of the soul. He is not simply a competitor with God, but an adversary to mankind as well.

Hell is the Devil’s domain. Both Hell and the Devil actively pursue mankind, trying to corrupt it and swallow it up, consigning it ultimately to oblivion. Just as the Babylonians and others viewed the world as an island of order amidst a sea of chaos, so do Christians regard themselves and their communities as beset by temptation and ferocious enemies. God provides a shield against these threats, not only allowing life and society to exist, but also offering a path toward improvement. Christians are supposed to become more like God as well, subjecting their inner demons to God’s commandments.

The Christian world is not as fragile as the pagan one; no matter how hard he tries, the Devil will never destroy the universe. The existential threat posed by the Devil is rather personal: though the world may keep turning, a Christian’s soul is still in jeopardy. The Devil may also stiffen the arms of the Saracens or turn a king or priest away from God, but Christian society is also shielded from harm by God, and in a similar fashion, though the Devil can inflict natural disasters, these do not affect the orderliness of the cosmos.

Now finally we turn to Germanic paganism, following Collin Cleary’s explanation in The Fourfold and The Ninefold (Part 2, Part 3), which provides a much more complex cosmology than either ancient paganism or Christianity. There are serious problems with this cosmology, such as reconciling the nine worlds with the tree Yggdrasil. We’ll stick with the nine worlds for simplicity, but even this trimming leaves elements from both ancient paganism and Christianity and yet maps them out in new and interesting ways.

In Germanic paganism, the world is born out of the meeting of venom from Niflheim and sparks from Muspelheim in the vastness of Ginnungagap. Specifically, this combination created the giant Ymir, whom Odin and his brothers killed and out of whom they fashioned Midgard, the world of men. Midgard sits, appropriately enough, in the middle of the other eight worlds: Asgard and Alfheim above, Hel and Svartalfheim below, Niflheim to the north, Muspelheim to the south, Vanaheim to the west, and Jotunheim to the east. Each of these realms is not only a physical location but also an idealization of a greater variety of concepts than other cosmologies include.

On the vertical axis, Asgard and Alfheim are ouranic realms, but Hel and Svartalfheim are not exactly chthonic. Hel is heavy, dark, and mysterious, jealous rather than nutritive: the goddess Hel who dwells there begrudgingly offers subsistence not to the men in the world above but to the souls of men who have died ingloriously. Nor is it actively hostile in the manner of Hell or the watery chaos; rather Hel glowers from below, always present and always dangerous but passive.

Cleary clarifies the Germanic vertical dichotomy in this way. Hel represents innate and unconscious nature, subterranean desires and passive material awaiting conscious direction. Asgard represents man’s capacity for ekstasis, for standing outside himself and looking in, for self-examination, self-criticism, and self-rule. Asgard is reason; Hel is emotion. Asgard is duty; Hel is desire. Asgard is masculine; Hel is feminine. Asgard is active and kingly; Hel cannot even bestir itself to rule.

The horizontal plane offers two more pairs of opposites enriching Germanic cosmology. Niflheim is a realm of cold, condensation, and density; Muspelheim of fire, dissolution, and rarity. The combination and balance of the two allows Midgard to exist. Midgard is dense enough to be concrete, but not so dense as to be immobile, rare enough to flex and shift, but not so rare as to fly apart. Each extreme is dangerous, as in Greek myth, but neither is an immediate threat. Happily, Midgard sits precisely at that point where life as we know it is possible, though extreme heat and extreme cold can still threaten Midgard’s residents.

Vanaheim and Jotunheim present a very different dichotomy, both representing change but each of a unique sort. The Vanir of Vanaheim embody all the positive aspects of the chthonic and also govern natural cycles, including the turning of the seasons and the life cycle of a man. The Etins of Jotunheim are creatures of chaos, disorderly change. Once the gods of Asgard, the Aesir, warred with the Vanir, but eventually these two lawful forces became allies. The Etins, on the other hand, pose an existential threat to Midgard, and the Aesir spend a good bit of time fighting them, Thor, the storm god, being the Aesir’s principal champion. Jotunheim thus takes the place of the watery chaos as the primary threat to human existence.

For the individual, the vertical axis represents the internal forces a man faces, while the horizontal plane maps out external realities, these last in a fairly obvious sense. Within himself, however, a man struggles to force his body and his desires to conform to the rules of right conduct. At the same time, he cannot ever completely overcome his biological nature. Man is trapped between gods and beasts.

Kings have legitimacy insofar as they rule actively like the gods. A king must defend against outside threats, help his people deal with extreme weather, respect the old and established laws, and banish disorderly persons from the community. If he fails to do all of these things, he risks upsetting the delicate balance that makes human life possible.

Having examined all three of these religions, let us summarize a bit before returning to Science. All three religions place the world at the center of a contest between various forces not only natural but supernatural. Indeed, the supernatural surrounds and penetrates the world in which we all live. Sure, there is a natural order, physical things follow various discoverable laws, but there are also supernatural beings upholding this order and others seeking to tear it down. These disorderly beings pose a threat to mankind in some fashion, providing an imperative to action: humans must constantly strive and struggle against hostile forces to maintain their existence.

Now let’s look at Science. The creation story of Science really isn’t one. The world sprang into being somehow, the precise fashion being unimportant. The key feature of creation according to Science is what it lacked: intention. There was no purpose or design in the emergence of the universe as a whole or of planet Earth in particular. Ultimately, the cosmos simply is and to seek any deeper explanation is misguided (scientific research is acceptable, however).

And it is a cosmos; there is order in the universe. The laws of physics and chemistry and biology all shape the universe and everything in it. Most of these laws are deterministic, and it is an ongoing project of Science to reconcile quantum physics with deterministic physics. There is no will operating upon the cosmos. This means that on the microcosmic level, that of the individual, there also does not exist anything like will, free or otherwise.

Now wait a minute: aren’t adherents of Science supposed to go out and do things? Shouldn’t they be feeding the gays and giving equality to the homeless? How do Scientists reconcile the notion of physical determinism with their political and social ideals?

Before tackling that question, let’s look at the Scientists’ world cosmographically. The world, planet Earth, sits amidst a vast, largely empty universe through which stars and planets careen. The movement of these heavenly bodies is dictated by the laws of physics, laws which created the relatively hospitable world in which we live. However, there is absolutely no reason to imagine that the world will remain hospitable. Indeed, there are monsters in the heavens, asteroids and black holes, which could at any moment (though we would probably see it coming) snuff out our pleasant little existence. And eventually the very Sun that gives life to our planet will expand and swallow Earth up.

There does not appear to be much difference between the cosmos of Science and chaos. Indeed, the other myths claim that the world emerged out of chaos, and the fact that it continues to exist and will continue to exist in the future is explained by the imposition of order upon the chaos. Thus, Science actually denies the existence of order in the world as older cultures understood it. The world truly is chaos rather than cosmos.

Turning back to the individual, Science thus claims that each person is internally a chaos just like the universe as a whole. Within each individual swirl multitudinous desires wrestling with each other, and there is no ruling system, just desires that happen to be relatively strong or weak. There is thus no reason to deny one’s desires; hedonism is the morality behind Science. Scientists of refinement will claim that not all desires are truly equal, and that people would get more pleasure from, say, listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson lecture on theoretical astrophysics than from shopping for shoes, but even that line of reasoning is still hedonistic.

The connection between Science and Leftism is here quite easy to perceive. In the Leftist mind, there is no difference between desire and Love, and Love forms the cornerstone for all Leftist social and political programs. Leftism is what Leftist’s desires impel them toward, and hostility to other points of view is just another desire. There is no room for reason or justification in this matter.

One big problem with Science is that it does not actually describe how people experience their world. People keep insisting that there is order in the world, not simply the laws of science but an order specifically for the benefit of humanity. In order to hold this belief, however, one must also believe in supernatural powers; conversely, if there exist supernatural beings of any potency, then there must also be order in the world. The two ideas are absolutely inseparable.

People still believe in ghosts and goblins, bigfeet and ESP not simply because of personal experience but also because they believe in order. Though Science denies the existence of order in the world, it cannot quash the belief. It’s almost as though it’s hardwired into us, part of our nature.

But that can’t be right: Science says so.

Liked it? Take a second to support Social Matter on Patreon!