(Note to the reader: an earlier version of this essay was first published in The Surface On-line – an International Art and Literary Journal www.surfaceonline.org in June of 2003)

    On Faith and Knowing, Mysticism and Science
	      	      		by 
    			Michael Ricciardi

     I consider myself to be a scientist, but I have no faith in the laws and principles revealed by science. Scientific laws require no faith. 
     I do not need to have faith in gravity to fall down. I know that there are mathematically precise laws that govern the attraction and acceleration of objects towards each other. And conversely, if I throw an object straight up in the air, and it does not come down, I know that some other knowable force is inhibiting this from happening. I do not claim that some 'super-natural' agency or mystical force is at work. When confronted with an apparent suspension of known physical laws, a scientist will resort to investigation, or at least, theoretical speculation, as to the true cause of this anomaly. If no evidence is forthcoming, if the putative suspension of physical law can not be explained and/or demonstrated rationally, a scientist will admit to a mystery. 
     For some, such a mystery is evidence enough to adopt a mystical belief, or more radically, adopt the 'existential' posture of mysticism. Mysticism embraces mystery as its own integrity. Mysticism does not advocate rational investigation [for 'faith denies proof'], only personal subjugation to, and trust in, a mysterious power that is "greater" and "beyond" the apprehension of us mere mortals. Mysticism is, essentially, a posture of inferiority in the face of nature's wonders and mysteries. The mystic places his/her faith in a 'super-natural' power, believing [in circular fashion] that its "ways are mysterious" and that, whatever it truly is, it can not be rationally understood, only unquestioningly obeyed, and 'believed in'.
      Interestingly, the dark-age monk Boethius [often referred to as a 'mystic'] is credited with saying: To command Nature, first obey Nature. This might seem to be a capitulation to the mystical imperative noted above, but it is in truth the core expression/injunction of an emerging natural philosophy whose practice lay at the roots of modern science. To "obey Nature" means endeavoring to understand its laws and principles [through this natural science], and not imposing upon this Nature some preconceived/self-fulfilling system or symbology. The monk's injunction is to first obey [submit to learning], and then 'command' will be possible; 'science', or knowing, is its basic intent.
     As a scientist, I do not accept the existence of the 'super-natural'. For me, all is nature--there is only nature known and nature unknown. What is unknown in nature compels further study and/or experimentation. The existence of mystery in the natural world is an opportunity for exploration, speculation, and yes, even wondrous contemplation. But not faith. For, as a scientist, placing my faith in a 'mysterious' power, however benign or purposeful it might be, is a risky proposition and, ultimately, unsatisfactory. It is not an arrogant posture [as some mystics might claim] but an embrace of a fundamental human trait: curiosity. 
     Only through this curiosity, and the science that it has produced, has human knowledge any claim to progress. Had we only and always advocated and practiced mysticism--and its concomitant subjugation to the unknown--we would still be living in the dark ages, our lives pervaded with 'mystery', magik, and superstition at every conceivable turn, forever the subject of nature's powers [and the human powers that claim authority through them], never its agents. Science, in its questioning of received 'truth', was/is an undeniable means of human empowerment--one that does not rely on faith in a deity [and its creative power] to validate itself.
    Yet, in truth, there was a time not so long ago when science and mysticism were over-lapping behaviors and endeavors. This was a time before the scientific method was developed, when rational theory was still in its infancy, and 'demons' were invoked to fill in the intellectual gaps.
     If one were to trace the historical roots of scientific thought, one would find a long historical phase in which 'science' [or natural philosophy] was intricately bound up with mysticism and 'magik'. As great a scientific icon as Sir Isaac Newton--intellectual founder of modern physics and the Enlightenment--was also a practitioner of 'The Alchemical Arts'. Upon publication of his Principia Mathematica in 1768, Newton gave orders to a friend to have his three treatises on alchemy destroyed. Alchemy was, for many centuries prior to the modern era, a popular magikal practice that ultimately gave birth to the science of chemistry. But its incorporation of symbolic magik, pseudo-scientific formulae, sacred/mystical elements [deistic invocations], and insistence upon "transmutation" of lead into gold doomed it to condemnation by the modern scientific movement. Alchemy would not stand up to the emerging and more rigorous scientific methodology. Sir Isaac perhaps knew this, and thus chose to have these works destroyed, thus avoiding the intellectual embarrassment of his occult interest. 
     But some occultists and mystics maintain that the fact of Newton's alchemical writings/interests proved the validity of alchemical practices, that such a scientific genius as he would even indulge them. Yet, it was not these works that were sent to a publisher, but rather his work on 'universal gravitation'. It was not an alchemical formula that revolutionized 'natural philosophy' into science, but a mathematical formula: f=m'm"/d^2
     Sir Isaac Newton demonstrated little if any faith in such mystical-magikal practices, though he devoted many years of his life to writing about them. His earthly ego was decidedly on the side of rational philosophy and mathematical logic. And yet, there is a great irony here in terms of historical movements. Although there were various inklings and attempts at a thoroughly rational description of the universe prior to Newton, such as Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, and Bruno, it was the Principia that first laid out a complete theory and mathematics governing all observable physical motion. The powerful insights laid forth in this book were unprecedented. It was a tremendous 'leap of faith' on Newton's part. Imagine the risk one had to take in publishing a revolutionary theory of physics based upon one's own rational logic--an artifice of the intellect! What hubris to even attempt such a thing! And what an act of pure faith [In truth, Newton placed as much faith in the intellectual work of Johannes Kepler, whose 'inverse square law' he appropriated and developed].
    Despite what we scientists would like to suppose, there is a subtle, newer form of faith buttressing the scientific pursuit of 'truth'. It is a fundamental faith in the power of the rational mind, and its analytical constructs, to apprehend the workings of the natural world. We creatures of the modern era take for granted our recourse to scientific logic to explain or clarify what we claim to be true. It was not always so. We often forget the tremendous risks early scientific thinkers took in choosing to express their theories and perform their experiments. Courage and faith often walk hand in hand. Galileo nearly paid for his science with his life. Bruno assuredly did.
    Those that came after Newton--those heirs of the Enlightenment--would come to place their 'faith', or trust, in this new science [and its ability to explain/predict almost everything]--a science that ultimately would replace faith in a super-natural, guiding agency. 
    And yet, counter-rationally, some vestiges of magikal thinking remain; modern biological scientists still invoke, for example, 'Mendel's Demon' to account for probabilistic [as opposed to certain] inheritance in the genetic evolution of complex systems, and 'Maxwell's Demon' to account for non-random distribution of atoms in a closed [divided] system. Such "demons", though purely metaphorical, are none the less still practical. The 'demon' here is a fanciful substitute for mystery, a question mark placed on the road map of rational inquiry.
    None-the-less, the influence of rational science permeates virtually every aspect of our lives. The modern era of Western, democratic civilization is based upon a rational conception of the socio-political universe that relegates religious faith and spiritual and magikal practice to the realm of personal, private indulgence. The church is separated from the state. You may practice any religion you care to, but it cannot be imposed on others who do not share this belief. Ironically, all this takes a degree of faith--faith in the intellectual idea that government is not 'ordained by god' but must be rational, just, and accountable to the people; faith that rule without recourse to faith in a super-natural agency is the wisest or best form of rule. 
    Returning to our modern scientific endeavors, Albert Einstein [who credited his radical insights to having "stood on the shoulders of Isaac Newton."] wrote: "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible." To Einstein, placing trust in the rational, intellectual pursuit of knowledge in the face of an unimaginably immense and puzzling universe, was a source of profound astonishment. And equally so, his statement implies another faith--a faith that the universe will continue to conform to rational thought. For, what if the universe--in all its fuzziness and uncertainty--one day just stopped being rationally knowable? No, we scientists have faith that it will continue to be so. We base this, of course, on the past. We, having embraced the 'space-time continuum', do also trust that rational apprehension of the cosmos will continue into the indefinite future [at least until the cosmological constant decays four trillion years hence]. 
    This faith in continuity further implies a more underlying faith that the scientific method will correct all scientific errors, unrecognized at present; that our methodology, our tool, is sufficient for the task. And so, with all of this implicate faith, we scientists continue to rely upon our rational intelligence--even when it occasionally yields knowledge which is disruptive to our cherished theories and long-held presumptions.
    Einstein's theories of special and general relativity [published in 1905 and 1916 respectively] would prove likewise revolutionary--but each requiring many years of experimentation and observation to prove them valid and true. Yet he, like Newton before him, had faith in his individual, rational apprehension of the physical universe--enough to send his theories out into the world where they would endure great initial criticism and ridicule. Curiously, what Einstein himself called his "greatest blunder"--his 'anti-gravity' constant (denoted by the lambda symbol ) utilized in his General Theory--is making a comeback fifty years after his death, as an explanation for the repulsive force, or 'dark energy', that prevents the universe from collapsing back in on itself. Faith in one's rational constructs has its limits, apparently, even for an Einstein.
     Einstein's theories demanded a new awareness of the universe--one at odds with Isaac Newton's. At that time, most scientists still placed their 'scientific trust' [faith?] in the Newtonian conception of the universe. Relativity states that space and time are relative quantities, wholly dependent upon matter and motion. Einsteinian physics annihilated the concepts of absolute Space and Time so firmly established in the science and philosophy of that day. What courage it must have taken for thinkers to embrace Einstein's peculiar logic of 'relativistic space-time continuity' and give up their belief in an a priori space/time absolutism. Ultimately, rational science embraced Einstein's conception of matter, space, and light (as both particle and wave) even though it implicated an unstable and mind-bendingly strange cosmos of time and space distortion.
     The human pursuit of rational knowing has often steered us into unknown waters, where we must occasionally risk everything we have previously held to be so, in order to claim a knowledge that is valid and true. Einstein himself had to confront this risk. When the illustrious genius was confronted with the probabilistic and indeterminate universe implied by the mathematics and experiments of Quantum Physics, his famous response was "God does not play dice!"         
     So, even Einstein could not completely shed his 'security blanket' of a rational agency [or set of physical laws] that governs with certainty and predictability. Though he revolutionized Physics with his own radical paradigm shift, he perhaps presumed that such a shift would never be expected of him.
     Einstein spent the last years of his life struggling to formulate a 'unified field theory' that would successfully reconcile relativity with quantum probability. No doubt he had faith that he, or someone else, would one day succeed at this. Indeed, the 'grand unified theory', or Theory Of Everything, remains the holy grail of modern science--no less earnestly sought after than the mystic-warriors-of-old sought after theirs, guided by absolute faith in the nobility and necessity of their sacred quest.

Michael Ricciardi
wc: 2054
http://www.chaosmosis.net/Essays.html

When Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica failed to account for the stability of the solar system — why the planets tugging at one another’s orbits have not collapsed into the Sun — Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was “an intelligent and powerful being.”
It was left to Pierre Simon Laplace, a century later, to take the next step—arrogantly telling Napoleon that his model “did not require God”. Laplace extended Newton’s mathematics and opened the way to a purely physical theory.