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Reviews for The Fracture of an Illusion

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  • Of Borders and Barriers1

    Clifford Stevens In 1943, modern science took a huge step forward when Erwin Schrodinger, one of the pioneers of Quantum Mechanics, gave two lectures at Trinity College in Dublin on "What is Life?" and "Matter and Mind". This was the first time that a scientist would admit that his science had limitations and did not explain the whole of reality. He recognized with surprise and regret that the principles of Physics could not explain the new science of Molecular Biology and that his science had found a border that it could not cross and a natural barrier in applying principles and conclusions of Quantum Mechanics to life forms.

    What he recognized was that Quantum Mechanics was not a universal science, but a study of one aspect of reality and thta its principles and laws could not explain the phenomena revealed by the life sciences, in particular, Molecular Biology, which at that time was in its infancy and had to await the discovery of DNA a decade later to reveal the inner workings of life forms.

    This was true, even though atoms, protons, electrons and photons and other micromatter particles were part of the composition of living cells, but the cells themselves did not follow the laws of Physics. Here were two physical realities, joined together in a unity, each following its own laws, one the material substratum of the other, and neither interfering with each other's activities and composition.

    What ilt revealed to Schrodinger was a new world of physical reality that in some respects contradicted the composition of matter, as he knew it, giving new forms to matter that he found strange and wonderful, for which, in his own science, there was no explanation. Nature itself had placed a barrier beyond which the laws of Physics did not apply, even though the subatomic particles that were part of the composition of life forms still followed their own laws without interference.

    Pascal Boyer as written two books with the titles "The Fracture of Illusion" and "Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought", and with this literary output he has become the high priest of evolutionary biology, but there is a streak of exaggeration in the text of these books and he uses mathematical and sociological terminology with abundance, as if the solution to religion were a mathematical and sociological question.

    The fact is that there is no hard, scientific, clearly demonstrable evidence that evolutionary biology is the etiology of religion, or of anything else that is specifically human. In his summary of biologic factors for his view, he overlooks the fact that DNA reveals data in two directions: lines of inheritance going backward towards ancestors and lines of inheritance that immediately affect the organism itself. The first does not extend beyond the immediate bearers of inheritance, the parents, and the second does not go beyond the somatic and psychosomatic structure of the human embryo. This is a fact that has puzzled molecular biologists for a long time, with a hint that Erwin Schrodinger was right in recognizing that there are borders and barriers within nature itself that cannot be crossed by applying principles of one science to another.l In this case, Dr. Boyer tries to apply principles that apply to the evolutionary biology of non-human mammalian species to the somatic and psychosomatic structure of Homo Sapiens.

    It simply does not work, and the dirty little secret in evolutionary studies at this time is that evolutionary science cannot demonstrate that Darwin's evolutionary principles: Natural Selection, Behavior Modification and Survival of the Fittest have any bearing on human beings at all, and that any attempt to demonstrate the opposite has proven fruitless.

    Supposition and presumption have replaced scientific investigation, and the interpretations that have been given to the DNA sequences of human beings are all based on the presumption that the DNA sequences of Homo Sapiens are identical to the DNA sequences of non-human mammalian species.

    The first hurdle in evolutionary science that could not be explained was that the biology of the human species had no effect upon human thought, human behavior, human reason or religion. There is a barrier that biology cannot cross, and this confirms the experience of Erwin Schrodinger in regard to Physics and Molecular Biology. The Molecular Biology of human beings has purely somatic and psychosomatic effects, the building of of cells, the DNA structure and the organs of sense and feeling.

    THe parallel with the relationship of Quantum Physics to Molecular Biology is the same as the parallel of Molecular Biology to Homo Sapiens. There i a barrier in Molecular Biology that Molecular Biology cannot explilan, and that is because the biological working and structure are part of a HUMAN organism and serves the purpose of a HUMAN life, leaving what is uniquely human in the organism totally unaffected by purely biological phenomena. This is not the first time that such a mistake has been made in evolutionary science. Generalization do not work in the empirical sciences and without a knowledge of specifics, it is not true science we are talking about.

    Comparative biology is not the solution because the biology of Homo Sapiens is structurally similar to that of non-human mammalian species, except for the information sequences of DNA unique to human beings, containing information, somatic and psychomatic, of a particular member of Homo Sapiens.

    The two books mentioned at the begining of this Review are loaded with biological and evolutionary information that is true of non-human mammalian species, but his attempt to demonstrate that human reason, behavior and religion are products of evolution is nowehre demonstrated with scientific accuracy.

    Religion in human beings is a cosmological question and is the result of human reason contemplating the Cosmos. It is not an "emergence" from the senses, from DNA or from the invasion of evolutionary powers on the human psyche. It is an act of reason that looks to causes and is the recognition of a Primary Cause behind the multitude of Secondary Causes that make up the Cosmos. That Primary Cause cannot be reached by empirical science: evolutionary, biological, or astronomical. It is reached by Demonstrative Science, which is as old as Aristotle and is the science that is the foundation and basis of all other sciences.

    Father Clifford Stevens
    Boys Town, Nebraska by Clifford Stevens

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