-- 
Email:  house@usq.edu.au

Web Site: http://www.sci.usq.edu.au/staff/house

Goodness trumps ideologies.

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Abstract
--------

Looking at the range of social, political, and environmental problems
in the modern world, most Baha'is will have no difficulty giving due
credence to Baha'u'llah's assessment: "Such shall be [the world's]
plight that to disclose it now would not be meet and seemly. ... when
the appointed hour is come, there shall suddenly appear that which
shall cause the limbs of mankind to quake." (GWB. LXI) Wise as
Baha'u'llah's decision not to explain in plain language undoubtedly
is, His writings do, however, appear to contain veiled references to a
single crucial philosophical error that this writer has identified
underlying many of the serious mis-steps in modern science,
philosophy, religious understanding, and most disciplines in the
humanities. This paper explains this error, traceable to Hume
(although Hume himself repudiated it), and presents tantalising
material by Baha'u'llah, which, though heavily disguised, points the
finger at precisely the mistake that the world, unaware, has adopted
in various forms as a central pillar of modern thought. The failure of
the modern intellectual edifice would produce a profound crisis of
faith in the world's scientific, rationalistic, non-theistic zeitgeist
and, the author speculates, this could produce much greater long-term
destruction to the world's fabric than any calamity of a purely
material nature (short of actual extinction of human life).

Biography
---------

Ron House became a Baha'i in 1973 in the midst of his studies of
physics and mathematics, in particular quantum mechanics and applying
computers to medical research problems, and has since become a
lecturer in applied computer science at the University of Southern
Queensland. He and Gitie House undertook a pilgrimage to Haifa in
1987, which profoundly altered their understanding of Baha'u'llah's
revelation. Ron lives in Cambooya shire, south of Toowoomba.

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Introduction
------------

Today I want to discuss some matters connected with the state of
affairs that Baha'u'llah predicted would precede the 'calamity', and
to offer some thoughts about what that calamity might be. He wrote:

"The world is in travail, and its agitation waxeth day by day. Its
face is turned towards waywardness and unbelief. Such shall be its
plight, that to disclose it now would not be meet and seemly. Its
perversity will long continue. And when the appointed hour is come,
there shall suddenly appear that which shall cause the limbs of
mankind to quake. Then, and only then, will the Divine Standard be
unfurled, and the Nightingale of Paradise warble its melody."
(Gleanings LXI)

I believe it is now possible to discern some of the distinctive
characteristics of the 'unbelief' that Baha'u'llah predicted would
envelop the world, and I want to mention one today. It is a somewhat
abstract philosophical notion, but one with surprising practical
consequences. Let me start, though, by listing some of the things that
I see as negative consequences of the principle I want to talk about.
Some of the items I'll list here will probably surprise you, and there
might not be much obvious connection amongst them, so please bear with
me for the moment. Also, the argument I want to make is too big for a
one-hour talk, so a lot of what I'll say I won't have time to justify.

With that proviso, let's take a look at some examples from various
fields where I believe serious mis-steps are being made:

* In science, falsifiability; this is the notion that scientific
  theories can never be proved, only disproved (originally from
  Popper).

* In the humanities, many examples:

  Science as a power struggle - for example, the claim that Newton's
  Principia might as well be called Newton's rape manual, also misuse
  of Kuhn's 'paradigm' theory to imply, for example, that voodoo and
  science are merely different ways of knowing, neither better than
  the other, with science having greater credence only because of
  power relations.

  Deconstruction, postmodernism, poststructuralism, etc. All these
  have in common a disbelief in any absolute claim to knowledge.
  Typical claims are (from deconstruction) "There is nothing but the
  text" - that is, denial of meaning; (and from postmodernism) the
  idea that a history book is no different from a novel - denying
  objective truth.

* In religion, fundamentalism. Seemingly quite different from the
  preceding, I hope to show the family resemblance later.

* In economics, free market philosophy and economic rationalism.

* In law, the replacement of the principle of natural rights by
'community
  standards' etc.

It may seem surprising to lump all these in the same basket, as
apparently they represent divergent world views, in some cases almost
direct opposites. I hope to show how all of these apparently divergent
examples have underlying common factors and represent a loss of belief
that is worthy of Baha'u'llah's description quoted above. We'll start
by taking a look at two different conceptions of how to gain
knowledge, in the course of which I hope to convince you that one way
is better than the other, and then examine the underlying
philosophical error behind the less satisfactory way; then we'll look
at how the error has influenced some of the fields listed above.


Two Ways of Understanding
------------------------------

The first way is the well-known Cartesian program: start with
indisputable premises and deduce, using correct logical procedures,
further conclusions from the premises.

To see what is involved here, let us consider how fallible creatures
obtain knowledge. Is it in fact true that we, in daily life, proceed
by deduction from unassailable premises, the implication being that
anything less than certainty is unacceptable? This is discussed by
Prof. Frederick L. Will is his book, _Induction and Justification_. He
remarks that "Of course instincts and the rest do fail, but they do
not all fail simultaneously and completely, and the ideal of
objectivity does not require that we treat them as if they had... A
reason for doubting... whether A shot B, is not itself a reason for
doubting the existence of firearms, explosives, or projectiles. It is
in terms of a settled background of practice, belief, opinion, and
presumption about such things that an investigation can be launched
and conducted in such a way that partisans of different judgments on
the matter can agree that the matter at issue was dealt with by a
procedure that did not itself in any way favor or prejudice the
rightness of the claims or counterclaims that were involved."

What I believe is the issue here is this: that as fallible creatures
in a universe in which nothing can be known in itself as an absolute
certainty, we proceed by creating pictures of reality. The _homo
erectus_ walking across the African plain had a picture of the herds
of animals, the lions stalking them, the stripped bones of the animals
after the various carnivores had finished with the kill, and, within
the large bones, the nutritious marrow; so he acted in accordance with
his understanding of reality and waited for the carnivores to leave
the scene, then with a large rock brought there for the purpose,
smashed the bones and obtained food. The process was not infallible:
perhaps he believed that an appeal to a god or goddess would lead the
herd in a certain direction, whereas the truth might be that his
intuitions based on observation led him to foresee the future movement
of the herd.

Similarly modern humans make pictures, both everyday and scientific.
Thus the Newtonian worldview of physics made some things seem more
likely than others. I believe Lord Kelvin once said that understanding
something in physics was the same as knowing the mechanism by which it
happened. Since the advent of quantum mechanics, however, such an
understanding of explanation in physics has become untenable. We are
led to see the point behind Kuhn's idea of paradigms; that one world
view can be replaced by another when two things happen: the
preponderance of evidence makes the old view untenable, and a new view
exists to take its place. (But more about Kuhn later.)

Now let me return to the question of fundamentalism and
deconstructionism. It seems to me that both these ideas are related to
the flawed Cartesian program for obtaining knowledge - flawed because
we can't have the certainty needed for the program to succeed.

The deconstructionist says "Because I can't be certain, because
everything is embedded in some paradigm related to my society,
therefore I cannot know anything; therefore there is no impartial
truth, nothing is beyond the text, everything is political, everything
is a power relation." And so on. Deconstructionism accepts that the
Cartesian program fails, but incorrectly assumes that this program is
the only one on offer.

Fundamentalism, on the other hand, is the persistent use of the failed
paradigm. Whether because no new paradigm is discernable, or because
the new paradigm is unacceptable, the fundamentalist continues the
Cartesian program: a religious text is deemed to be the source of
unimpeachable truth and the words of that text are examined minutely
and conclusions deduced, without checking those conclusions against
any wider view of the world or any considerations of rationality or
ethics.

But Baha'u'llah teaches that truth is to be obtained also from sources
other than scriptures. In the Four Valleys He says: "Hereafter We will
show them our signs in the regions of the earth, and in themselves,
until it become manifest unto them that it is the truth..." In this
one passage He clearly alludes to both science and mysticism.
'Abdu'l-Baha also teaches that religion must be in conformity with
science: "...religion must be in harmony with science and reason. If
it does not conform to science and reconcile with reason it is
superstition."

The Cartesian program at the root of both the harmful humanist
philosophies of today and also religious fundamentalism is clearly
unable to reconcile the above quotations with Baha'u'llah's strong
emphasis on the eternal verities He has revealed to mankind in this
dispensation.

We might call the alternative to Cartesianism the "method of faith".
Clearly faith is not about believing something for which there is no
evidence; that is fundamentalism, not faith. A person of true faith
accepts and trusts the method that God has given us for learning truth
in an uncertain universe: to compare what we see with our complete
understanding of the world and ourselves, and trust that by following
rational methods informed by our fullest sources of information, we
can proceed successfully. God has not created a malicious universe.
The fullest sources of information include, as well as practical facts
about the universe, a knowledge of our own natures as sentient,
feeling beings with the capacity for love, friendship, empathy, and so
on - as well as our capacity for hate, vindictiveness, and other
vices.

From time to time in history someone has produced a new paradigm, a
new way of understanding our spiritual condition. Thus Buddha taught
the Four Noble Truths, an incisive understanding of our psychological
and spiritual reality, along with techniques for bringing our spirits
into accord with the laws of the universe. Similarly, Jesus taught the
doctrine of love, and told us how we can find the Kingdom of Heaven
through action: the practice of love and goodness in our real, present
lives. Likewise Baha'u'llah taught that the love of Jesus must be
extended to the whole world, not just to one's neighbour or family or
nation.

Any of us can embrace these great truths as taught by these great
souls and put them into practice in our own lives, but we should do so
within the same framework that God in His goodness gave us as far back
as our wanderings on the African plains: we must have faith that God
has not made an incomprehensible, traitorous universe in which nothing
can be known; we must continually bring our understanding into accord
with a rational understanding of the world, and we must continually
test our ideas against the great teachings of love from Buddha, Jesus,
and Baha'u'llah.

Now let me address where I believe fundamentalism makes its error.
Consider someone who has a large map printed on paper, and who must
make some measurements from the map as accurately as possible. Suppose
there is a drafting table available, with a sliding ruler such that
positions and angles may be read off. Now we all know, from Euclidean
geometry, that to unambiguously position a shape in two dimensions,
all we need do is define two points. So let us hold the map on the
table by putting a small piece of sticking tape on one corner. As the
tape covers more than two points, by Euclidean geometry it has fixed
the map precisely, and so we can proceed to take our highly accurate
measurements. Or can we? The tape isn't perfectly inelastic, nor is
the glue on the tape infinitely strong and rigid, neither is the paper
perfectly flat and undeformable. In short, the rest of the paper,
unfixed, will slip and slop this way and that and the measurements
will be defective.

By contrast, the wise person in this situation will spread the map as
carefully as possible and fix it at least at all four corners before
taking measurements. In other words, irrespective of the 'proof' that
follows from Euclidean principles about one piece of tape in one
corner, the wise person secures the entire picture against errors.
Even by doing so there is no guarantee of perfection, but we do know
that there are limits to how far the map can slip as we take our
readings.

It is a philosophical version of this mistake that I think best
describes the fundamentalist program. Whether the fundamentalist
decrees Jesus or Muhammad or Baha'u'llah to be the infallble
authority, they fix their teachings firmly to their map of reality in
one corner and expect the whole map to give infallible readings,
regardless of the fact that we know we are fallible beings in a
universe in which there is 'many a slip between cup and lip'. Thus, a
fundamentalist fixes his belief in a religious text and decrees the
sheer logic of the text to be the total basis of his understanding.
Anything whatever that can be deduced from the text is accepted, no
matter how unreasonable or how contrary to the obvious spirit of the
religion's teachings the deduction may be. It seems to me that there
is an arrogance in this process, as the fundamentalist is effectively
saying that he can vouch absolutely for the correctness of the
original text, translate and interpret it perfectly, and infallibly
deduce its consequences.

My point is this: the way we fallible creatures are meant to learn
about reality is not by such deduction, but by employing everything we
can learn and understand about the world, although with the proviso
that occasionally we may have to revise our picture when a deficient
understanding is validly replaced with a better one.

The fundamentalist reasoning method is such a deficient paradigm, and
the better one, namely bringing all our actions and understandings
into accord with the love of God at every moment, has been taught by
the great souls whom God has sent to guide the world. 'Abdu'l-Baha
taught us not to follow authority blindly in this fashion. He writes:

"If you find harmful teachings are being set forth by some individual
no matter who that individual be, even though he should be my own son,
know verily that I am completely severed from him... If... you see
anyone whose deeds and conduct are contrary to and not in conformity
with the good-pleasure of the Blessed Perfection and against the
spirit of the _Hidden Words_, let that be your standard and criterion
of judgment against him, for know that I am altogether severed from
him no matter who he may be. This is the truth."  (Promulgation of
Universal Peace pp452-453)

We are here ordered by 'Abdu'l-Baha to check our actions against the
standard of the spirit of the Hidden Words. This is a direct
expression of the spirit of true faith which I have contrasted in this
article with the deductive authoritarian spirit of fundamentalism.

The challenge for all members of all religions, therefore, is to bring
one's practice and understanding into accord with the universal
principles of love and free rational enquiry that God has granted to
us. When we find fellow believers following fundamentalist principles
and overlooking the principles of love and justice, we should explain
better ways of understanding that will permit them to let go of the
fear that leads them to take refuge in fundamentalism.


The Philosophical Error
-----------------------

So on the one hand we have a view of gaining knowledge as logical
deduction from inviolable first principles, and on the other, the way
of faith whereby we adjust our understanding in accordance with the
totality of the information available.

Before looking at the logical mistake that I believe underlies all the
ideas I listed earlier, I must first stress that the issue I will
examine here is not the only common factor; various political,
emotional, and ideological commonalities exist also, as well as a
common heritage that can be traced historically (with only religious
fundamentalism having completely distinct historical origins). But the
issue I am considering is clear and provable and throws a great deal
of light on many things we think we know about the world.

The error originated, at least in one instance, with the Scottish
philosopher David Hume (1711-1776). Hume writes: "Even after the
observation of the frequent or constant conjunction of objects, we
have no reason to draw any inference concerning any object beyond
those of which we have had experience." We have seen the sun come up
every morning since time immemorial, but just maybe, so the argument
goes, it won't come up tomorrow (and no amount of theorising tonight
can rule out the possibility). It is easy to see from this how Popper
can conclude that we can never confirm a scientific theory, only
disprove one: no matter what the number of confirming instances for a
theory, just maybe a disconfirming instance will pop up next time we
do an experiment.

The Australian philosopher David Stove, in "Anything Goes; origins of
the cult of scientific irrationalism" minutely dissects the logic of
Hume's argument and discovers a flaw in it. Stove gives Hume's
conclusion the title "scepticism about the unobserved" - that is there
is no reason to believe any contingent proposition about the
unobserved (such as that the sun will come up tomorrow). He shows that
this depends on two other propositions: (a) empiricism - that any
reason to believe a contingent proposition about the unobserved is a
proposition about the observed (for example, evidence of how the earth
turns on its axis), and (b) inductive scepticism - that no proposition
about the observed is a reason to believe a contingent proposition
about the unobserved (for example, our observations of the turning of
the earth on its axis is no guarantee that it will turn at other
times).

Tracing Hume's argument backwards, Stove discovers an unnoticed
implicit assumption, and it is a big one: deductivism (in slightly
simplified form, that something is a reason to believe another thing
only if there is a logical argument validly deducing the second from
the first). The connection with the material in the previous part of
this paper will now be immediately apparent. Popper's falsifiability
criterion for science is a direct application of Hume. Humanist
irrationalism about the merits of science versus, say, voodooism or
folk tales depends upon Kuhn's paradigm theory, which implicitly
assumed the main results of Popper. An examination of
deconstructionist and postmodern writings easily uncovers evidence of
scepticism regarding anything that cannot be logically proved (for
example, "all facts are theory-laden"). Modern economic theory is a
classic example of meticulous logical/ mathematical deduction from
axioms - except that the axioms do not correspond with reality. The
loss of principles of natural rights in law also derives from the
logical impossibility of proving the existence of these rights. Only
religious fundamentalism seems to have a different provenance, going
back in one case, for example, to Luther's establishment of the
principle of biblical infallibility.

But now that the hidden assumption behind Hume is clear, we also see
the impossibility of giving any rational credence to his argument.
(Indeed, Hume himself rejected inductive scepticism in his old age.)
For it is a commonplace that we as human beings cannot live without
assuming that good reasons exist apart from pure logical deductions.
We wake in the morning and open our eyes; never do we keep them shut
out of consideration that there is no logical reason whatever to
believe that the sun has come up and we will be able to see the room
around us, and we put our feet on the floor, which we assume will
still hold our weight; and so on. Of course, in any of these steps we
_might_ be wrong. But so what? We are not infallible and we must
expect occasional mistakes.

As I was thinking about this, it occurred to me that the deductivist
assumption isn't even consistent - and the reason is simple, for human
beings cannot make a logical argument without relying on memory to go
from one step to the next, and we only have the previous reliability
of our memory to guarantee its future reliability. So every logical
argument (for a human being in this universe) carries with it an
implicit inductive argument!


Baha'u'llah's Prophecy
----------------------

I promised you a prophecy. I believe there is a wonderful, if veiled,
denunciation in Baha'u'llah's writings of the deconstructionist
position. For those who haven't seen this stuff before, I shall give a
small sample from Derrida, the father of the movement. This was posted
on an email list in response to a request from me for a sample of the
best Derrida could produce:

"Differance is a structure and a movement that cannot be conceived on
the basis of the opposition presence/absence. Differance is the
systematic play of differences, of traces of differences, of the
spacing by which elements relate to one another. This spacing is the
production, simultaneously active and passive (the "a" of differance
indicates the indecision as regards activity and passivity, that which
cannot yet be governed and organized by that opposition) of intervals
without which the "full" terms could not signify, could not function."

Perhaps the best comment one could make about this and similar
passages comes from Gilbert and Sullivan:

"If you're anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line
As a man of culture rare,
You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms
And plant them everywhere.
You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases
Of your complicated state of mind,
The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter
Of a transcendental kind."
(W.S. Gilbert: Bunthorne's song from "Patience", 1881)

My correspondent also gave me the following from a disciple of
Derrida's, Culler:

"The meaning of a word, it is plausible to claim, is what speakers
mean by it. A word's meaning within the system of a language , what we
find when we look up a word in the dictionary, is a result of the
meaning speakers have given it in past acts of communication. And what
is true of a word is true of language in general: the structure of the
language, its system of norms and regularities, is a product of
events, the result of prior speech acts. However, when we take this
argument seriously and begin to look at the events which are said to
determine structures, we find that every event is itself already
determined and made possible by prior structures. The possibility of
meaning something by an utterance is already inscribed in the
structure of the language. The structures themselves are always
products, but however far back we try to push, even when we try to
imagine the "birth" of language and describe an originary event that
might have produced the first structure, we discover that we must
assume prior organization, prior differentiation. As in the case of
causality we find only nonoriginary origins. If a cave man is to
successfully inaugurate language by making a special grunt signify
"food," we must suppose that the grunt is already distinguished from
other grunts and that the world has already been divided into the
categories of "food" and "nonfood" that allows food to be signified or
the contrast between signifying elements that allows a sequence to
function as a signifier."

The inherent scepticism about knowledge that I have been discussing
comes through loud and clear in this passage. The way of faith has no
trouble with language: we know that we can speak with others, and we
accept some possibility that we might be misunderstood, and we can
take care to become better and better judges of what will be easily
understood and what will confuse others, and to use this knowledge to
become better communicators. But at no point do we feel the need to
trace our words back through prehistory to be sure that some homo
heidelbergensis ancestor had a good logical or observational ground
for uttering the first word. (And by the way, even a bacterium can
distinguish between food and non-food: you'll find very often that the
key objections to deconstruction are almost farcically obvious.) If
ever there was a example of taking the Cartesian program to excess,
this would have to be it.

What would Baha'u'llah say about all this? In the Four Valleys, He
relates the following:

"The story is told of a mystic knower, who went on a journey with a
learned grammarian as his companion. They came to the shore of the Sea
of Grandeur. The knower straightway flung himself into the waves, but
the grammarian stood lost in his reasonings, which were as words that
are written on water. The knower called out to him, Why dost thou not
follow? The grammarian answered, O Brother, I dare not advance. I must
needs go back again. Then the knower cried, Forget what thou didst
read in the books of Sibavayh and Qawlavayh, of Ibn-i-Hajib and
Ibn-i-Malik, and cross the water.

"The death of self is needed here, not rhetoric: Be nothing, then, and
walk upon the waves."

The four writers Baha'u'llah mentions were the leading Arabic
systematisers of the first four centuries of the Islamic era, and it
is not hard to imagine that Baha'u'llah had in mind some such foggery
as the example from Culler above. But God puts His Manifestation's
Words to work in surprising ways, and as a denunciation of the
Derridaean insecurities ("there is nothing but the text", "death of
the author", etc.), it simply cannot be excelled. We find here a
contradiction of every aspect of the deconstructionist program: the
denial that study of grammar and rhetoric will lead to the really
important insights; the absolute nature of the "Sea of Grandeur" and
of "the knower"; and the spirit of faith in action without regard for
rhetorical scepticism. And lastly, what better way to describe the
words of one who believes that texts have no inherent meaning and that
all there is is an endless play of word upon word as "words that are
written on water"?


Where Do We Go from Here?
-------------------------

Anyone with familiarity with academe will be aware that (especially in
America) the humanities nowadays operate virtually exclusively on a
constellation of "academic left" presumptions including postmodernism
and deconstruction. I don't want to go into the intricacies of all the
various philosophies on offer, except to make this one point: almost
everywhere there is disregard, and often contempt, for the empirical
gathering of evidence in general and for science in particular. The
decay of civic society and the increase in every measure of social
maladaption (crime, homelessness, single motherhood, drug addiction,
alcoholism, etc.) has tracked the adoption of this constellation of
philosophies by society. Now I know that's a controversial statement
and we don't have time to debate it here, as making this case involves
challenging thirty years of intellectual edifice-building; but let's
consider what is going to happen next.

There is one final preliminary before we can peer into our crystal
ball at the future, and that is this observation: at the end of the
nineteenth century, scientists thought that all that remained to be
done in understanding the world was to put "a few more decimal points"
on the measurements. Well, we know what happened: the notion of the
ether was apparently torpedoed by the Michelson-Morley experiment and
observations of the orbits of the moons of Jupiter - but fortuitously
Einstein had developed a theory that handled these facts (special
relativity); and observations of the atom led to the discovery of
quantum mechanics, which, in the popular mind at least, dissolved the
idea of a solid realistic universe. The modern twentieth century
fascination with all forms of relativism is to a very large measure an
outworking of that disappointment. In other words, the disastrous
disbelief in "absolute reality" (to quote a phrase of Baha'u'llah's)
that is poisoning our world originated in large measure in the failure
of nineteenth century physics.

This point is important: in the popular mind (and that includes
humanities academics) absolute truth has been displaced by the two
relativity theories (special and general) and the objective world has
been disproved by quantum mechanics. I don't have time to explain why,
but all of these pop-scientific ideas are fallacious.

Something else happened early this century: observations of distant
galaxies showed a consistent red-shift, which was interpreted as
similar to a Doppler effect due to the galaxies receding from us. This
in turn led to the idea of an expanding universe. A solution to
Einstein's equations of general relativity by Friedmann in 1922
required that the universe either expand or contract (in the absence
of a cosmological constant), and it seemed that all these ideas fitted
together: special and general relativity, with the observation-based
theory of the origin of the universe, the big bang.

What if all these theories (SR, GR and the BB) were proven false?

Two-thirds of modern physics would be disproved, along with the
current origin myth of our civilisation.

If the present relativist doctrines of the humanities resulted from
the relatively minor earthquake in physics at the end of the
nineteenth century, one can only speculate on the effects of the
collapse of most of modern physics.

In the session I shall distribute a photograph of a galaxy, Arp220,
along with its near neighbours. The only problem is, whilst Arp220 has
a low redshift, those neighbours have high redshifts up to z=0.5,
which is a recession velocity of half the speed of light! If you
obtain the book "Seeing Red; redshifts, cosmology and academic
science" by Halton Arp, you will find a wealth of evidence that
redshifts are not in general due to recession velocity. The Big Bang
is living on borrowed time, and when it goes, both general and special
relativity will go (at least in their present form) with it.

I can't hope to prove in this talk what a catastrophic effect such a
collapse of established certainties will have on western civilisation.
I could talk about the exhaltations of such irrationalists as the
creationists and the deconstructionists, but the largest effects will
be much more subtle and won't happen in a day. Suffice it to say that
relativism in all forms (epistemological, moral, social) will sweep
the field and leave anyone who believes in goodness or truth looking
like a fool.

And which scientific theory will survive the catastrophe? Quantum
mechanics! The one theory so badly misunderstood in the humanities
already and that is widely believed to be non-realist.

In brief, I believe that the outcome of such influences will be a dark
age, dominated by privatisation, intellectual obscurantism and
soulless application of technology. (In fact we are already on a
trajectory towards that outcome, even without these developments.)
Like the previous dark age, the human race cannot hope to emerge
within a thousand years - and that assumes that big business will not,
with the assistance of foolish national governments, destroy the
environment and cause an ecological collapse that kills most or all of
the human race. See "The Future of Capitalism" by Lester Thurow for
comparison of conditions now and at the end of the Roman Empire. All
the following characteristics apply to both periods:

* commenced with a period of uncertainty! - NOT with an external shock
* technologies did not disappear, but conditions made it impossible
  to apply them.
* real per capita incomes fell dramatically
* the rate of invention was up, production was down
* social disorganisation and disintegration
* public systems were privatised
* private police forces
* loss of civic pride
* growing resentment to paying taxes
* sell-off of public assets, ceasing of public investments
* drop in literacy
* falling incomes at the bottom of the social ladder
* rise in religious fundamentalism
* no vision of how one made a better life

Baha'is can stop all this. I believe that Baha'is must go back to the
teachings of Baha'u'llah Himself and notice some highly salient facts,
chief of which is the complete absence of any non-realist teaching in
the entire corpus of His writings. Baha'is must teach themselves the
importance of science and empirical knowledge and open, tolerant
societies, as Baha'u'llah recommended to Queen Victoria. Baha'is must
free themselves both from the pernicious effects of both
fundamentalism and the relativist doctrines taught today throughout
the humanities disciplines.

If Baha'is do this, then when the world loses its faith, Baha'is will
not lose theirs. The Divine Standard will be unfurled and the
Nightingale of Paradise will warble its melody.

"O people of Baha! The source of crafts, sciences and arts is the
power of reflection. Make ye every effort that out of this ideal mine
there may gleam forth such pearls of wisdom and utterance as will
promote the well-being and harmony of all the kindreds of the earth."
(Tablets of Baha'u'llah, 72)

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                              End
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Postscript: Kuhn
----------------

Kuhn's theory of scientific paradigms is relevant to the material
presented here. Simply, (perhaps too simply), it states that science
falls into paradigms in which most scientists work and, from time to
time, as a result of some kind of crisis, switches to a new,
incommensurable paradigm. An example would be the change from
Newtonian mechanics to relativity. Interpreted as a description of
human psychology (namely that humans tend to follow a dominant idea
until the idea becomes untenable and there is another idea available
for adoption), the theory makes a lot of sense and explains neatly the
reason why scientists are continuing to pursue the big bang theory.
However, as a theory of truth or knowledge (that truth itself is not
out there to be found and that there is nothing more than whatever the
dominant paradigm stipulates and that different paradigms are simply
incommensurable) it is in sharp disagreement with Baha'u'llah and,
indeed, is incoherent for reasons that doom every relativist theory of
knowledge. Briefly, all relativist theories make at least one absolute
statement, and Kuhn's is no different. Kuhn's theory itself represents
a paradigm shift, but if a paradigm is no better than the paradigm it
replaces, and if paradigms do not represent an approach to the truth,
then Kuhn's own paradigm cannot be objectively any better than the
idea of progress that it replaced. Simply, the mere statement of any
relativist theory is self-negating.


Bibliography
------------

Arp, Halton: "Seeing Red; redshifts, cosmology and academic science".
Apeiron, Montreal, 1998. This book contains amassed evidence
contradictory to the big bang theory, and notes about a possible
alternative to the current understanding of general relativity.

Ellis, John M.: "Against Deconstruction". Princeton University press,
1989. A hostile introduction to deconstruction.

Gross, Paul R. and Levitt, Norman: "Higher Superstition; the academic
left and its quarrels with science". Johns Hopkins University Press,
1998. This book documents and debunks the academic left's attack on
science.

Stove, David: "Anything Goes; origins of the cult of scientific
irrationalism". Macleay Press, Paddington, Australia, 1998. A partly
technical, yet highly entertaining demolition of the philosophies of
Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend.

Thurow, Lester: "The Future of Capitalism". Allen and Unwin 1996. An
informed book about current and future trends in capitalism and
economics; it's a real surprise to find eight pages of warning about a
dark age in a book like this.

Will, Frederick L.: "Induction and Justification; an investigation of
Cartesian procedure in the philosophy of knowledge." A technical
examination of the Cartesian philosophy of knowledge and an
introduction to the structures of a better theory.

Windschuttle, Keith: "The Killing of History; how literary critics and
social theorists are murdering our past". The Free Press (Simon and
Schuster) 1996. Explains some of the bigger mistakes in postmodernist
theory.