Faith & Reason
Peter Hodgson Arecently published book by the Benedictine priest S L Jaki draws attention to a simple fact of communication that is often ignored.
The title of the book is Means to Message: A Treatise on Truth and it shows that the means used to send a message is a message in itself. Thus, if someone, for example. is inclined to assert that there is nothing real, that there are no real objects, and then he writes a book about it, he should realise that the book is itself a real object, and so the means contradicts the message. Objects are so fundamental that they cannot be explained by anything else. Acknowledgement of the existence of objects is the cornerstone of a system of truth.
Some people, called solipsists, believe that there are no other people. If they write a book about this, they implicitly assume that there must be other people to read it.
A book is written following the free decision of the author. Free will cannot be reduced to anything simpler and it is experienced personally. If we do not have free will there can be no duty or responsibility. no praise or blame.
Free will makes sense within the Biblical perspective: we are given free will not so that we can do what we want to do, but so that we can do what we should do.
A book is written for a delinite purpose. Conscious, purposeful action is a characteristic of man alone. In the process, he makes and uses tools, an activity found only in man. A blind, chance, evolutionary process could not produce man, whose very nature is to act for a purpose. Chance is another word for ignorance, and the alleged necessity of evolution is refuted by the very freedom used to express it. Biologists observe and describe the organisms they study, and in addition if they look at them from a deeper perspective they find everywhere evidence of purpose.
Books written freely and for a purpose are intended to bring about a change of mind in the reader. It is thus selfdefeating to argue against causality. In spite of this, some physicists have claimed that quantum mechanics, in particular Heisenberg's unGertainty principle, has disproved causality. The fallacy here is that our inability to measure a physical quantity exactly does not imply that it does not take place exactly.
A similar insensitivity to philosophical principles is shown by cosmologists who affirm that the universe came into being by a chance fluctuation of the vacuum, or that
baby universes are popping up all over the place. Many years ago the cosmological steady state theory, which affirmed that the universe remains always the same over large distances and times. postulated the appearance of hydrogen atoms out of nothing all the time. This enabled them to compensate for the known expansion of the universe, but they refused to comment on the creation process involved. The recognition of causality requires the recognition that reality exists independently of ourselves. Science must assume that nature is causal, for otherwise there would be no sense in studying it.
While the means is generally a tangible object, the message is an intangible that must be understood by sender and receiver. This in turn implies conscious minds that persist through space and time. Conscious minds think, and mental operations arc made freely and purposefully. Transference of ideas requires a language, a most sophisticated product of the human mind.
This whole analysis is carried out in detail, with many examples from science. It shows how reflection on the means used to convey a message implies a whole range of vital philosophical beliefs. This is a profoundly original idea that deserves careful attention.