How Science Goes Out with a Whimper
by Asa Boxer
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Picking up where we left off last week, my purpose here is to explain why I see the demise of naturalism (and modern science) as historically inevitable. To that end, I’d like to walk us quickly through some passages from Cicero’s On Divination to convey a sense of how divination came to be replaced by naturalism. And at the end, I’d like to ask whether today’s naturalism might equally be criticised for the same problems that undermined divination: namely, its inconsistencies and lack of coherence. The analogy follows: since both maps of meaning are similarly flawed, what happened to the former must ultimately befall the latter.
Let’s start with a passage from Book 1 of On Divination, which is mostly related in the voice of Cicero’s brother Quintus, who elucidates the view of the Stoic school:
The second division of divination, as I said before, is the natural; and it, according to the exact teaching of physics, must be ascribed to divine Nature, from which, as the wisest philosophers maintain, our souls have been drawn and poured forth. And since the universe is wholly filled with the Eternal Intelligence and the Divine Mind, it must be that human souls are influenced by their contact with divine souls. But when men are awake their souls, as a rule, are subject to the demands of everyday life and are withdrawn from divine association because they are hampered by the chains of the flesh. (1:49, p. 343)
So the metaphysic here is based on several assumptions: (a) that human beings possess a soul (or psyche); (b) that the universe is composed of Eternal Intelligence and Divine Mind; (c) that there is a divine Nature which proceeds from the universe; (d) that there are “divine souls”; and (e) that the human soul can be in contact with “divine souls,” and even be influenced by them. By implication, the human soul abides among the divine qualities inherent to the universe and to Nature. There is yet a sixth assumption that mundane, material existence entails a withdrawal from “divine association”—which is immaterial. In other words, this metaphysic assumes a mind-matter dichotomy. We too are familiar with this mind-matter divide today: the difference is that since Galileo, we’ve largely regarded mind along with all qualitative perception as separate from measurable matter. We’ve carried this absurdity so far, that we presently believe human consciousness is an accidental consequence of chemical interactions on neural processing. (It’s a fact any one among us might be holding onto without realising how irrelevant it is, how not up to the task of accounting for human consciousness.)
Identifying this contrast between our metaphysics (paradigms or conceptual maps) and that of believers in divination is essential if we want to get into the mindset of the sort of culture that saw divination as an art and science worthy of political authority. Keep in mind that the assumption of a Divine Mind permeating the cosmos is necessary to the coherence of the belief in divination. For divination to have any purchase on our imaginations, the human soul must be understood to proceed from a primordial, essential substance. Given those fundamental assumptions, the idea of divination makes sense. Take any of them away, and the whole thing unravels.
With these assumptions taken as axiomatic, the Stoics sideline any questioning into their metaphysic by asserting that they need not provide a causal explanation for how and why divination works (1:14, p. 249). It need only be demonstrated that it does work. Quintus explains:
I see the purgative effect of the scammony root and I see an antidote for snake-bite in the aristolochia plant—which by the way, derives its name from its discoverer who learned of it in a dream—I see their power and that is enough; why they have it I do not know. Thus as to the cause of those premonitory signs of winds and rains already mentioned I am not quite clear, but their force and effect I recognize, understand and vouch for. Likewise as to the cleft or thread in the entrails: I accept their meaning: I do not know their cause. (1:10, p. 241)
And if divination does work, the following syllogism applies: “if the kinds of divination which we have inherited from our forefathers and now practise are trustworthy, then there are gods and, conversely, if there are gods then there are men who have the power of divination” (1:5, p. 233). In other words, the practice of successful divination is evidence that the metaphysic is true.
Quintus provides several proofs: (a) the widespread use of divination systems across the civilised world; (b) the long history of their use, dating back to the Babylonians; (c) the observational records dating at least as far back; and (d) the analogical resemblance of reading signs of divination to the reading of signs portending storms and illnesses. Considering the ubiquity of the practices among the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Carthaginians, the Egyptians, and others, Quintus reasons, Why would so many diverse and venerable cultures engage in divination for such a long time if it didn’t work? Moreover, divination didn’t come from nowhere. It developed over time. The early practitioners discovered how to read divination signs through repeated, recorded and studied observation, and they passed along the knowhow to their pupils. More generally, reading portents is no more absurd than a doctor reading symptoms or a mariner reading the sea and sky or a farmer consulting the almanac. And significantly, like the practitioners of these other arts, diviners sometimes get it wrong (1:14, pp. 249-51). To top it all off, Quintus relates piles of cultural stories from Homer, civic poetry, and recent history about successful divinations that foretold all manner of victories, failures, conquests, betrayals, and deaths.
That’s nearly the long and short of the Stoic approach in a nutshell. There remains the fundamental question of what divination actually is. According to Quintus, divination “is the foreseeing and foretelling of events considered as happening by chance” (1:5 p. 233). At this point, I’ll jump right into Book 2 and Cicero’s rejoinder. And we might as well begin with his critique of this very fundamental point:
Surely nothing is so at variance with reason and stability as chance. Hence it seems to me that it is not in the power even of God himself to know what event is going to happen accidentally and by chance. For if He knows, then the event is certain to happen; but if it is certain to happen, chance does not exist. And yet chance does exist, therefore there is no foreknowledge of things that happen by chance. (2:7, p. 389-91)
And bam! The whole idea of divination is inconsistent and incoherent. We’re talking about a basic logical fallacy, an oxymoron. But Cicero isn’t done with this subject. There’s also Fate. He holds Quintus to account as follows:
And you were inconsistent enough, too, to say that everything that is or will be is controlled by Fate! Why the very word ‘Fate’ is full of superstition and old women’s credulity, and yet the Stoics have much to say of this Fate of yours. . . .Of what advantage to me is divination if everything is ruled by Fate? . . .What is it that lots, entrails, or any other means of prophesy warn me to avoid? For, if it was the will of Fate that the Roman fleets in the First Punic War should perish—the one by shipwreck and the other at the hands of the Carthaginians—they would have perished just the same. . .On the other hand, if obedience to the auspices would have prevented the destruction of the fleets, then they did not perish in accordance with Fate. But you insist that all things happen by Fate; therefore there is no such thing as divination. (2:8, p. 391-393)
So the very concept of divination is deeply flawed. I’m not sure if the logic follows at the end. Cicero overstates the conclusion, probably as a joke. It doesn’t follow in a “therefore” kind of way that “there is no such thing as divination.” What does follow is, What’s the point? He asks what these means of prophesy warn him to avoid if Fate makes the future impossible to avoid. Implied here is that the whole point and purpose of divination is to know which action is best so that one may avoid failure and pursue success in any given endeavour. It’s a way of navigating the uncertain future for one’s own gain or the gain of another.
However, as I mentioned last week, consulting oracles and auspices for political and personal purposes was more about checking in with the gods to verify whether a course of action was approved or whether it was opposed. This is the only logical relationship one can have with divination if one subscribes to the idea of Fate. Furthermore, Cicero is misstating the raison d’etre of divination. The whole point of foretelling the future is so we can plan for it, not necessarily so we may gain control of it. That’s precisely why we bother with weather forecasts. It’s not so we can change the weather. And yet, knowing-the-future presents us with a problem. If we know something bad or undesirable is going to happen, shouldn’t we take action to avoid it? Who wouldn’t? In that sense, Cicero is right on the money. Practically speaking, this is how we relate to foreknowledge. And what then, if we take a different course? Do we cheat Fate? If we do, then there is no such thing as Fate. And the whole deck of rickety reasoning comes tumbling down.
What then of the hundreds of years of observation that lend divination practices legitimacy? Here’s Cicero:
Now can anybody be induced to believe that the things said to be predicted by means of entrails were learned by soothsayers through ‘long-continued observation’? How long, pray, did the observations last? How could the observations have continued for a long time? How did the soothsayers manage to agree among themselves what part of the entrails was unfavourable, and what part favourable; or what cleft in the liver indicated danger and what promised some advantage? Are the soothsayers of Etruria, Elis, Egypt, and of Carthage in accord on these matters? Apart from such an agreement being impossible in fact, it is impossible even to imagine; and moreover, we see some nations interpreting entrails in one way and some in another; hence there is no uniformity of practice. [my italics] (2:12, p. 401-3)
A little further on, Cicero questions the possibility of “long-continued observation” with reference to lightnings:
According to your view, long-continued observation is employed in the case of lightnings, and reason and conjecture are generally employed in the case of portents. But what is it that has been observed in the case of lightnings? The Etruscans divided the sky into sixteen parts. Of course it was easy enough for them to double the four parts into which we divide it and then double that total and tell from which one of those divisions a bolt of lightening had come. In the first place, what difference does its location make? and in the second place, what does it foretell? . . .
. . .
. . .By dividing the heavens in the manner already indicated and by noting what happened in each division the soothsayers learn whence the thunderbolt comes from and whither it goes, but no method can show that the thunderbolt has any prophetic value. (2:17, 2:20, pp. 417, 419-21)
Due to the lack of uniformity of practice and application, no consistent observation is possible. And when a lightning strike hits a significant monument, it’s merely an accident. And if something terrible happens sometime thereafter, it’s just coincidence. Lightning strikes all over the place, including in uninhabited deserts, mountain tops, and in the middle of the sea without any apparent divinatory purpose. In other words, the significance is contrived and imposed on the phenomenon.
Now let’s see what Cicero has to say about the nature of things. Without stating his own metaphysic as clearly as he presents that of the Stoics, and without making a point of dismissing the earlier metaphysic, Cicero holds the theory of divination to naturalist standards:
But what relationship have they with the laws of nature? Assuming that all the works of nature are firmly bound together in a harmonious whole (which, I observe, is the view of the natural philosophers and especially of those men who maintain that the universe is a unit), what connexion can there be between the universe and the finding of a treasure? For instance, if the entrails foretell an increase in my fortune and they do so in accordance with some law of nature, then, in the first place, there is some relationship between them and the universe, and in the second place, my financial gain is regulated by the laws of nature. Are not the natural philosophers ashamed to utter such nonsense? And yet a certain contact between different parts of nature may be admitted and I concede it. The Stoics have collected much evidence to prove it. They claim, for example, that the livers of mice become larger in winter; that the dry pennyroyal blooms the very day of the winter solstice, and that its seed-pods become inflated and burst and the seeds enclosed therein are sent in various directions; that at times when certain strings of the lyre are struck others sound; that it is the habit of oysters and of all shell-fish to grow with the growth of the moon and to become smaller when it wanes; and that trees are considered easiest to cut down in the winter and in the dark of the moon, because they are then free from sap.
There is no need to go on and mention the seas and straits with their tides, whose ebb and flow are governed by the motion of the moon. Innumerable instances of the same kind may be given to prove that some natural connexion does exist between objects apparently unrelated. Concede that it does exist; it does not contravene the point I make, that no sort of cleft in a liver is prophetic of financial gain. What natural tie, or what ’symphony,’ so to speak, or association, or what ‘sympathy,’ as the Greeks term it, can there be between a cleft in a liver and a petty addition to my purse? Or what relationship between my miserable money-getting, on the one hand, and heaven, earth, and the laws of nature on the other? [my italics] (2:14, pp. 405-9)
Cicero’s universe is not infused with the Eternal Mind from whence the soul of man proceeds; it’s permeated instead by the laws of nature. And, not surprisingly, divination appears ridiculous in this light. Of course, divination was not a product of natural philosophy. It requires another metaphysic altogether if it is to have any coherence at all. When your universe is made of Mind, and when the minds of human beings proceed from that Mind, the material universe is more flexible and more connections are possible. When your universe is made of mechanical laws, material reality must be consistent and the connections between phenomena must be materially measurable. As Cicero puts it:
There is a head to the liver and a heart in the entrails, presto! they will vanish the very second you have sprinkled them with meal and wine! Aye, some god will destroy them or eat them up! Then the creation and destruction of all things are not due to nature, and there are some things which spring from nothing or suddenly become nothing. Was any such statement ever made by a natural philosopher? (2:16, p. 413)
It is difficult to disagree with Cicero, in part because today’s naturalism is pretty much the same, and it’s the dominant conceptual map of our sciency time. The inconsistencies of divination are devastating. And Cicero makes much of the disagreements between divination systems as well as the conflicting auspices one receives when making sacrifices to more than one god at the same time. Cicero hammers away at the methodological inconsistencies, the philosophical incoherence, and the disagreement among practitioners to obliterate the rationale of divination. Whatever else, its days as a civic and personal authority were numbered. A new way of thinking was going to displace it, that of natural philosophy.
The question I have today, however, is whether present day naturalism might not be open to similar criticism. Are the methods consistent? Is there a uniformity of practice? Do all practitioners agree? Are the various sciences coherent with their claims? The answer is invariably, No. The real trouble with that last question is that today’s science presents itself as a dispenser of literal truth. At the same time, science often recommends itself as being open to revision. How can it both dispense literal truth and be open to revision? Suddenly the universe is twice as old as it was yesterday, and that’s the really true final truth of the matter period. . . until the science changes, of course. During the recent covid debacle, we witnessed this sort of schizoid messaging at such a rapid pace, it made many throw up their hands at the absurdity. And for many, this frustration was aimed at science as a whole because that was the rhetoric: “believe the science”; “trust the science.” And covertly, the message was, Accept the science as master of your political and social worlds.
There are deeper problems with our sciences that I’ve discussed in previous articles: we never view phenomena directly in some immaculate manner that mirrors reality. Our instrumentation mediates and our modelling is imposed.
But look at what our science has given us! Indeed. Compared to divination, our sciences have been way more productive—at least materially speaking. The more we investigate the causes of phenomena, the better we can manipulate them. Hopefully, it’s clear that I’m not rejecting science. I’ll state again that I’m a lover of science and engineering. But I also have a philosophical disposition, and I feel it necessary to point out how our science has lost touch with naturalism and overhyped its claim on our lives. It’s rotten through, and it’s coming apart. The bottom line reason for this unravelling is the rejection of Mind, cosmic mind, divine mind. . . whatever you want to call it. No mind. And no questioning of assumptions. What could be more utterly absurd and unworthy of a rational thinker than to denigrate the very faculty you’re using (the mind) as an unreliable aberration that arose by undirected evolutionary processes? What’s the point of thinking then?
What serious thinker views Einstein’s twin paradox a puzzle worthy of their attention? Briefly, for those who aren’t familiar with it, the twin paradox posits a twin going up into outer space and journeying away from the earth for a few short years in a spacecraft. Upon his return, he finds his brother has aged far more than he has. Why? Because moving clocks tell time more slowly than stationary clocks. The problem with the scenario is that according to relativity, each twin exists in his own inertial frame, where he is stationary and the other is moving. There is no twin paradox. But this is how sciency types scientiphysize. And this is how scientists think about subatomic particles approaching the earth, even though, according to the inertial frame of those particles, they aren’t moving at all; the earth is moving toward them.
And then there’s probability, a clever mathematical workaround devised to compensate for what we cannot predict: the next card we will receive, the next roll of the dice, or the next outcome of a spin at the roulette wheel. This gambling math is now deemed a law of nature that governs the behaviour of fundamental particles. Indeed, probability is now taken to be the fundamental framework of the universe. Our solar system is a spin in a cosmic casino without any purpose or game value. Out of this logic, we get wavicles and endless universes that play out probabilities. No model could be a more obvious imposition on the phenomena to which it’s applied, and yet scientific thinkers blindly apply probability willy nilly to all manner of things. What serious natural philosopher would countenance such philosophically broken thinking? Probability has about as much to do with natural law as a cleft in the liver has with Cicero’s purse. We’ve come to a point where one might say, Science doesn’t exist. Surely, when Richard Feynman tells us that quantum physics isn’t supposed to make sense, we’ve reached the absurd end of naturalism.
Modern science also suffers from a furtive flitting between empiricism and rationalism, where the former insists on observation and experimentation, while the latter insists that inductive and deductive reasoning alone are enough (for historical sciences like Darwinism, archaeology and early universe theories). Science undoes itself at least as badly as divination did. But in some ways, science is worse than divination was.
Just look at what naturalism has taken from us! Our world has become more and more mechanised and automated. People feel they must be “regular” and live a regimented robot life. We often speak of “installing” ourselves in a job or a new flat or home. This is deemed “healthy.” We’d rather live long than meaningfully. We’d rather accumulate wealth and toys than love and honour. We believe that happiness can be measured. Does it have any meaning to declare that you’re 33% happy? Maybe feeling 3% suicidal today. . . ? You talk this way and you’re considered a scientific thinker. Where are our philosophers? What sort of poets and artists are we producing? Find me a politician with vision! There is no room for heroism, and no room for visionaries. Heroes and visionaries would freak us out these days. They’d be deemed crazy and dangerous, and they’d be medicated. Meanwhile, political causes are led by celebrity opinion and news anchors who play-act as journalists. Everything is play-acting and puppet show because authentic practitioners are vieux jeu. We hear hot mics of health authorities admitting they don’t read scientific papers; they just read the script and collect the paycheque. We don’t need to be numerate because we have calculators. We don’t need to be literate because AI can provide a quick summary. Naturalism is emptying us out into a bunch of hollow men—destroying the heart life. Divination certainly didn’t cause that kind of harm. But when its time had come, out it went.
Unlike Cicero’s Rome, we, today, have no new school of philosophy pushing out the old one. Science is simply failing to live up to the naturalist metaphysic that recommended it in the first place: this is the metaphysic which assumes “that all the works of nature are firmly bound together in a harmonious whole” that is sensible and rational. It’s hard to say what will replace our science cum scientism. It will have to be something that acknowledges our inner world, and this will entail a metaphysic that puts Mind back into the cosmos. We can expect a mass return to the refuge of religion before that happens. I know because I’ve consulted the haruspex, the augur, the weatherman, the hadron collider, and ChatGPT, and the odds are on the side of Fate against science.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies(Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.