Vision: Part V

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Two further processes, distortion of reality and creativity are even harder to understand from the point of evolution and adaptation.  If an animal or person distorts or changes reality, it makes it that much harder to plan and manipulate in an adaptive way. How do we know there is distortion in perception?  For one thing there are so many different strategies for seeing.  The spider with eight eyes has a much different strategy for recording visual events than man.  Undoubtedly he’s designed to make primitive responses to simple elements in his visual world with more or less hard-wired direct connections from his eyes to muscles that can make a change whereas we humans are more attuned to take in the big picture rather than to respond to small elements of a scene.  Even among people though, when a lot of people witness the same event the accounts disagree.  They can’t all be right of course and this non-reproducibility of perception is a sign that there is distortion. (Figure 25)

 

Figure 25: The predatory spider has eight simple eyes of various sizes that respond to key aspects of the visual field. Tactile sensations derived from the web are more important to spiders than vision is.[i]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[ii]

 

 

 

	Figure 26: Fundamentally different ways of seeing things depend on design of eye and nervous system. Piecemeal or particulate percept is closer to a spider eye view of the world, whereas whole structured view is closest to our own.

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

CREATIVITY:

     What of creativity?  Few artists seek to make an exact copy of a real image though that is one approach to art, more akin to photography.  But a photograph would include none of the message of the artist, nothing of his inner self.   Granted, the photographer selects his images, seeking to photograph something worthwhile and thinks nothing of altering his photographic subject or waiting for just the right moment to take a photograph.  The painter, on the other hand, does not need to manipulate reality except in his mind’s eye and is free to distort images at will. Distortion may just be a matter of style as it was at the time of El Greco’s Saint Jerome.   El Greco had no particular perceptual deficit.  He was merely painting his subjects as was the custom of his time,   as an elongated figure.  Still this distortion as maladaptive as it is makes a work of art.  It is a change that biology and evolution just cannot explain. 

 

     The origins of abstract art are not to be found in biology that can barely explain what we do see and how our vision adapts us to the practical world. A record of reality, no doubt, serves a useful purpose, such as an exact internal map of territory and internal picture of prey and other animals in one’s own species.  It is easy to understand how an internal mental map might help an animal. Predator and prey would both have a distinct advantage knowing the lay of the land and obstacles to be encountered in a chase.  The usefulness of pure imagination is more difficult to defend.  The biggest problem is that imagined distorted pictures of reality are inaccurate and may actually be maladaptive. Much better to have an accurate picture of reality than an inaccurate one, all else being equal. This is at first glance.  

 

     Yet it is also apparent that the imaginative faculty confers a biological advantage. If you can imagine your habitat, then you may keep it in your mind’s eye, creating different perspectives than are obvious from you specific vantage point, perhaps see it in a different way, make plans, even gain competence surprising your prey or your enemies. It does confer an advantage not only to be able to see your environment, but to be able to flip images and see them from a different perspective, to further manipulate these images in your mind. With writing or the computer, these manipulations multiply a hundredfold.

 

     One could ask, of what possible use could abstraction or unreality be from the purely biological point of view?  How can evolution possibly explain imagination, particularly unreal or surreal imagination?  Look at the Picasso below. We see the face as we never see it with a front and profile view simultaneously.   This is not altered perception but a manipulation of reality that we find novel.  To be able to manipulate in the abstract sense, instead of having to try things out in the real world, is valuable.  That is what computer modeling is about. If you wonder about the effects of global warming, factories spewing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, you don’t have to wait to see it in the real world.  You can model it, use tools to expand memory and manipulative abilities, then make changes in virtual reality.   It gives you a chance to test your theories out before applying them.   A football coach can try out a play on paper before bringing it into play.  This manipulation is not restricted to visual imagery.  Apart from the purely adaptive advantages that such manipulation confers, it serves a sociological function increasing cohesiveness of the group.

 

     The same could be said about exact recollection of events.  There is always a conflict between the accurate telling of a story and imagination.  The Greeks defeat the Trojans and burn down the city. This is done through force of arms and cunning. But through the telling and retelling of the story it is embellished and a conflict between mortals becomes a struggle between the Gods, killing becomes a heroic act done for vengeance or some other higher purpose, imagination becomes myth and over the years the story becomes more interesting and universal in its appeal. For a group this process increases cohesion and group identity where little of it existed before.  Man being a social animal such creativity can be viewed as a biological adaptation.

 

     Consider the earliest known examples of cave painting found as long as 23000 years ago in Southern France and Northern Spain at such Paleolithic sites as Lascaux and Altimira.   For our Cro-Magnon progenitor hunters these were intimate images in which hunted animals were much more intimately and accurately portrayed than were humans.  Some of the paintings seem to be telling a story or illustrating a myth perhaps of a mighty ancestor. In one image the hunter is downed by an enormous speared animal his entrails spilling on the ground[iii].  We witness the fierce fight of a legendary hero in the upper Paleolithic age of hunting and gathering. Sculpture tended to be primarily sexual, accentuated with prominent genitalia, buttocks and breasts.  What function did all of this artwork serve?  We might theorize that almost for the first time man was able to manipulate mental images of his prey. Cro-Magnon kept his prey, his living, in his mind’s eye.  Primitive art evidences premeditation and planning, functions of the human frontal lobe.  This image painting is mental rehearsal about he act of hunting. Imaging and rehearsal has the same quality as the work that is part of our dream journey in the middle of the night.  Mental rehearsal will ultimately enhance performance and expresses anxieties about possible failure and other dangers.  Our Cro-Magnon ancestors went to bed thinking of their day and work. Their visions accomplished for them the very same thing as ours do today.

 

     But there is much more to the story. Cave painting is almost always situated in inaccessible parts of caves (aren't our own dreams similarly inaccessible?) . To get to them, one needs to be able to ford underground streams and slip through dangerous craggy narrow dark passageways, an adventure into the depths of the psyche and the traditions of the past.   Abstract and practical concepts are conveyed on cave walls through imagery.  Religion may have been an adventitious outgrowth of a basic mental imagery with pictures deliberately set deep inside his caves, beyond the region of habitation.  Or perhaps they were placed in these remote regions for posterity so that in a sense, these cave painters were painting for us rather than for their contemporaries who might destroy their images. The artwork placed in deep inaccessible regions is suddenly made more secure, far removed from daily traffic and at the same time becomes secret, remote and mysterious which always makes the symbols all the more exclusive and powerful.  Consider images made in utter darkness except for artificial torchlight quite possibly in the middle of the night.  Then the work would really be part of dreamscape, not practical reality. Painting animals confers upon them a certain immortality, a way of thanking them for making life possible.  Perhaps religion began this simply thanking the very animals that provided sustenance, food and skins then only later imagining some external force that created these hunted animals.  These primitives did not take without saying thank you, but even at that time wondered about the universal questions that we ask today.  Why they were there, and how were they able to make a living from their surroundings and even about the permanence of death.  These deeply situated images would have worked for initiation rites that introduce to the maturing initiate the permanent and transcendent myths and heroes of his heritage, to teach not only the abstract elements but also practicalities of survival both economic and sexual.  Some of these areas have multiple footprints and may have been a communal spot where dancing ceremonies occurred in a remote location far from dangers but also in secret regions that were difficult to approach.  The more primitive Neanderthals seem to give evidence of the first burials in human history although some finds have been discounted. It makes on wonder about when man became conscious of his own mortality. [iv]

 

 

Figure 27: Multicolored animal pictograph from Lascaux cave[v].

 

Figure 28: Venus figure similar to countless others. Note accentuation of vulva, breasts, and buttocks with small non-descript head.  Chances are these were sexual or fertility symbols that may well have been used to hand down sexual mores during initiation[vi].

 

 

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Figure 29: Picasso: Woman with Long Hair (1938) Note how Picasso combines front view and profile simultaneously.[vii]

Figure 30: The flounder is a predator whose eyes migrate in the larval stage to one side of the head.[viii]

 

 

     To distort and to invent to imagine as well as to see.  All of this serves a certain adaptive purpose.  No one knows the origin of music.  An awful waste of effort to create rhythms, melodies, and harmonies, time and effort that could be used to build shelter, to hunt animals, make weapons to defend against enemies etc.  Yet enormous effort seems to have gone into the production of organized sound. Why?  One might think hearing should have developed for the purpose of signaling, detecting enemies and prey, yet from simple auditory reception the facilities of speech, writing and music eventually developed.  The greatest argument for music is again, that it is an instrument for social cohesion, the tribal war and hunting dances, rituals of marriage and birth and other communal events. The hardest concept for me to grasp though when it comes to art and imagery whether it be visual or auditory, is distinguishing between the practical and the abstract.  It is easy to postulate that art and music began for some practical purpose,  and even in the most advanced condition still serves some practical purpose such as social cohesion.  Yet at the same time it takes on a life of its own, which is abstract and disconnected from reality, more from the dream world of night than the practical world of daylight.

 

DREAMS AS REHEARSAL :

     The origin of dreams, imaginings is the same as the origin of visual and aural art.  It is nocturnal.  Visualization perhaps started as a form of rehearsal giving the opportunity to try out certain strategies perhaps in hunting, fighting and other fields of endeavor in  a different arena so as to avoid the high stakes game of reality.  Today we’ve developed the tools of imagination to a high degree in computer simulations.  We can test stresses on buildings and bridges in bearing weight and in simulated storms, test out materials for human joint replacement undergoing various stresses,  model weather and seismic systems, test automobiles before production and avoid destruction and expense using computer models.  At the same time we’re experiencing the same evolution as our forebears did in Lascaux cave. The imaginings take on a life of their own and begin to devolve their own mysterious purpose as we use computer simulations to create an alter reality.  In the far reaches of our offices and homes we may enjoy and live in a dreamlike alter reality born of darkness,  not the bright light of day.   

 

     One might even propose that as the imaginary facility was cultivated in society and specialists evolved who could make a living in a civilized milieu, women were as attracted or even more attracted to men who could make a living with mental creations as they were to more intrepid men who make a living by hunting or with their hands.  Could it be that the brain of a man was as attractive to the opposite sex as his body and may have given certain individuals a reproductive advantage?  If we take this argument farther one might propose that a different kind of evolution is going on today as there must be many women who actually prefer mental function to brawn and thus natural selection is occurring under what may be viewed as unnatural that is civilized circumstances.

 

     Mating us often viewed as a matter of female choice. Since males have little investment in their offspring,  they are less involved in upbringing and do not have to maintain pregnancy for nine months in the case of humans  they can afford to be less finicky the choice of  a mate.  Females, having much more investment in the relationship, must  choose well.  But it isn’t generally noticed how much of this choice is made by males themselves well before the female comes onto the scene. Females, particularly viviparous ones,  such as humans, hold onto their young during gestation, must  nourish them and can only be involved with a few offspring at a time.  Hence their investment in small numbers of offspring is great and their fecundity will critically depend on their choice of a mate. They will want the most physically fit male or perhaps the most successful or dominant male. What most of us do not appreciate is that systems of dominance have evolved which immediately inform eligible females which male has achieved dominant status.  Some baboons and other primates have established readily identifiable hierarchies in which the dominant male gets to copulate the most times with females in heat.  Other less dominant males remain in the periphery of the group. Homosexuality may have evolved as part of a readily visible dominance scheme, homosexual males staying in the periphery and never getting a chance to copulate. 

 

     Birds such as the pied flycatcher have evolved so-called Lek systems.  The eligible female does not come into a group scouting for a suitable male.  Instead the males have already decided who will be elected to do most or all of the mating, the other males in the group performing some other function. A male who copulates so many times is not going to be a very effective father, so that the strategy in these groups would appear to be that male dominance, determined beforehand strictly among males, is the paramount consideration in offspring fitness and some other means of taking care of young offspring, has to be worked out.  One can readily draw conclusions about males in human societies.  Don’t they posture male against male, to determine some dominance structure well before the arrival of any female?   Presumably, she will respond to superficial trappings of male dominance, perhaps some sign of power, say position, income, power, clothes, car and make her choice.  Such sports as football, and war especially seem to serve a function of jockeying for power purely among men that may explain why both athletic events and war are strongly connected with aggressive, abundant and exuberant sex. 

 

     The biological explanations go very far but fall short of explaining what has ultimately developed in civilization with regard to the visual and auditory arts.  Does our biology define what is art and what is not art, the world of the beautiful?  I think it does but not entirely. We all are subject to the immediate effects of near universals, what are called in ethology, releasers.  This is the moving target to the duckling who will bond with it as its mother, the red flag of the stickleback fish, redwinged blackbird and bull, the stridulation of the cricket, all of these sensory experiences trigger specific behaviors.  For men, the voluptuous female breast or buttocks is a releaser, so are lips and eyes of  a certain variety and the conception of what is sexually attractive is very much the same particularly within a given range or ethnic group. 

 

     On the other hand advanced concepts of beauty or certainly not biological or bioethological.  To a physicist beauty and truth are close relatives. At the very least beauty seems to be a requirement for truth in the sense that the truth is beautifulF .  What does something need, particularly a mathematical equation, in order to be beautiful?  Beauty has a classical (almost Grecian) form which includes some symmetry of design, simplicity of conception and a minimum of preconceived notions. In the lingo of mathematics means a small number of axioms and constants which are viewed as fudge factors for physicists in an effort to ram or pigeonhole an equation or theory to make it fit with reality.  The classic example is the pre-Copernican Ptolomaic picture of the solar system consisting of rotating spheres with the earth at the center.  For a long while it was possible to describe the motion of the planets and stars in this system. Only it needed so many “epicycles” and other fudge factors to accommodate movement in the heavens,  a person had to be an expert to figure everything out an predict planetary motion.  Despite the best efforts of the church which felt it had to conform to an erroneous notion of bible lore that place the earth at the center of the universe, the Ptolomaic theory had eventually to be scrapped in favor of theories of  Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler.  Why?  The heliocentric picture was intrinsically more beautiful, simplistic and did not need fudge factors and anyway proved to be a far more accurate predictor of the motion of heavenly bodies.  Once the intrinsic beauty in a system is apprehended we are transfixed to me.  We are willing to follow our theories and mathematical conceptions to the ends of the earth, to the outer limits of credulity.  Hence we have our “string” theories, the notion that physical forces such as gravity may be described in terms of a vibrating string, and science and science fiction models about billions of alternate universes and wormholes into alternate universes, time travel becomes possible and we may think of out own cosmos in ten or more dimensions, (some of these unobservable) or we have the fantastic notion unbelievable on its surface that the universe, the entire universe, exploded out from a so-called singularity,   out of a volume smaller than a pinhead.   Why do scientists believe this even though it is contrary to common sense?  They are transfixed by the beauty of mathematics.  Its what the psychoanalysts call cathexis,  attachment, desire.  Once attracted sexually,  you are more than willing to ignore little flaws such as eccentricities or birthmarks.  In fact these obstacles make you further cathect the object of your desire. For mathematics this beauty resides in simplicity and conception of design and everything in our current environment appears to act in conformance with its basic principles.

 

THE BEAUTIFUL:

      But we’ve meandered far from the track.  Conceptions of beauty range from the purely biological which has something to do with human releasers,  well beyond this to the more abstract artistic conceptions which are both natural and unnatural in design, way beyond, to the purely abstract and way out (or at least  this way to me) conceptions of pure mathematics.  The point is that conceptions of beauty (and thus perhaps of truth) go well beyond any biological parameters.  Or do they?  Psychoanalytical ideas, regardless of whether or not you agree with them, have gone a long way in finding the meaning and motivation in art.  Works of art are made to express some inner motivation or desire and psychoanalysis largely based on the analysis of works of literature and art, has helped in this conception.   When we seek to understand a work of art, one of our goals is to understand the motivation that brought the artist to create the work. Much of this motivation is biological.   In writing, sculpting, painting, dancing,  the motivation comes initially from passion. A famous example is the Symphonie Fantastique of Hector Berlioz. This spectacular work was energized by an attraction Berlioz  for an actress who at first, ignored him.  But then when someone excites you sexually, it’s not uncommon to hear music.  Maybe this is a form of visual to auditory synesthesia some of the sensory experience perceived, the rest of it in our imaginations, the entire experience drawn from widely separated regions of the brain.  Each separate brain area takes care of its own modality whether this be visual, auditory,tactile etc. To be able, not only to hear, but then relate the experience to other senses, increases the emotive impact of a work.  Gustav Mahler would write extensive programmatic notes for his symphonies, but then deny reject the basic programmatic nature of the music. He didn’t wish to limit the meaning of the work, yet he would cut it off from a combined sensory experience that could only intensify its effect.  This intensity is later brought together by some as yet to be described coordinating principle or executive. 

 

     The only reasonable formula to be arrived at here is that in music and in art, biology lays the basis for primitive forms that serve a legitimate biological function. Esthetics, what is attractive, and repellent, is directly related to biological function.   We’re programmed to like what will be good for us, the mates that are most likely to successfully transmit our genetic endowment, supposedly with foods that will be most nourishing for us, and to be repelled by what is dangerous or harmful, from predators and waste.  What is harder to explain is what makes us go on to create whole paintings, tapestries, plays, dances.  How are these pure biological functions? Biology is the basis, but the brain is exuberant in its creative power. 

 

     Basic biology of the beautiful is what is sexually appealing and includes the releasers of ethology and all efforts to increase fitness, the passing on of genetic traits to one’s offspring.   Conceptions of beauty range well beyond the biological imperative, into the realm of the artistic (art for art’s sake) and then to the abstract even getting confused at times with what is true (epistemology),  not just  in the sense of the naked realism found in works like the painting above of the sugar dispenser in a restaurant, but all the way into alternate conceptions of beauty deriving from imagination and creativity,  a beauty that need not resemble tangible reality.  What about this abstract notion of beauty??

 

     Realism and the bio-ethological useful aspects of beauty are part of man-in-nature.  On the other hand more advanced conception of beauty, the artistic and abstract ideas and going even further the nexus of beauty and truth,  place us above nature to an extent.  Advances of civilization that allow us to take part in pursuits not directly connected with survival and procreation allow us to see our selves as being above nature.   There are the contrary arguments: even super-natural man and all his conceptions are basic expressions of instinct and thus are a part of man-in-nature scenario  but at the same time, he is to some degree above it. His conception of truth and beauty today ranges far beyond an accurate and useful picture of his physical world.  The question will always be asked about whether man is in nature or above it. The basis of his perception is natural but his imaginative capacities go far beyond nature and adapt to civilization as a thing in itself rising above nature.

 

     In summary our visual apparatus may be taken as a metaphor for all sensory experience.  We see much more than by rights we should be able to see given this apparatus.  We are well equipped to make our living in this world from the biological perspective.  We are good predators and are proficient in avoiding our enemies as well. We even have built in protections from such harming influences as the damaging rays of the sun.

 

     What our peripheral sensory equipment picks up falls far short of what we are capable of appreciating which is far beyond our immediate and even remote biological needs. For example the biological imperative has little to do with understanding the atom, composing a symphony or erecting great art museums.  Seeing infra-red waves or receiving radio-frequency energy from distant stars is far from what our eyes and visual apparatus was designed for. Our vision is far more encephalized than in any other species.  More than that, the brain invents new perspectives,  new visions, even new worlds.

    

    

TOTALITY OF EXPERIENCE, E:

This is a far cry from other animals and plants.  For example, there are raging debates about plants and little worms that “respond to light”. For plants there is a tropism that makes them grow automatically toward light and some flowers bloom with daylight and close at night, for the worms a few small light sensitive cells that help them to distinguish darkness inside the earth from daylight found on the earth’s surface. Do these plants and animals see by virtue of their response to light stimuli? They may have a behavioral response to sensory stimuli without having a specific receptive organ. A certain response may be linked to a specific percept. They have afferent and efferent limbs here that make a rudimentary connection between a stimulus and response, but no appreciation of the visual stimulus, no associative element.  By contrast consider the relative perceptual deficit that we humans have a  gap between what is perceived and our innate perceptual abilities that is  taken care of by our associative or cognitive brain, not the primary sensory cortices for vision, hearing, touch and so forth.  Added to this is our invention of capacities outside of the brain such as books and  computers. These catapult human capacities far beyond anything expected given our biological endowment.    Yet data and algorithms for manipulating information still remain accessible to our intellect creating a new role for the brain as a springboard for human capacities.  If the totality of sensory experience is E (for experience), the primary sensory data received by afferent regions of brain designated as P, (for simple perception) and the rest of experience contributed by associative and cognitive areas of the brain and other instruments controlled by the brain as A  (for associative capacities inside and outside the nervous system including books, computers and other instuments) then:

 

E=P+A.

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     Alternatively stated to accentuate the fact that what is experienced is far more than what can be received by our peripheral sensory organs which pick up far less than our understanding of the world:

 

E-P=A

 

      While there may be no very good way to quantitate any of the letters in this expression,  one certainly gets the impression that what is actually known and experienced by us at this late phase of the Twentieth century is by now only given to us in small part by P and that A plays much greater role in our total experience, in other words:

 

A>>P

 

     Also much of A is non-biological in that it lies outside the brain and is dependent on the brain’s invention of instruments of recording and is accessible by interactions between humans.  Whereas one could picture in primitive societies or earlier in human history P may have been closer to or even much surpassed A. For most plants and animals A apparently = 0.  The invention of writing and mathematics most certainly increased A enormously as has the high-speed computer, the physical understanding of light and magnetism, and countless other inventions.

 

     Unlike other animals, we have radiated into far-flung biological habitats world wide not on account of heritable biological characters but because our brain allows us to invent and adapt to different environments from sealskin coat of the Innuit to the African loincloth, from the igloo to the jungle hut, under water and on the land, our inventions allow us to make a life in widely different environments.  This is a far different strategy for radiation into other habitats than all other animals.  There is some interaction between biological adaptation and habitat radiation.  Animals must take steps to evolve through variation, then can radiate. A cat who is a little different than his fellows and has more fur, may be able to survive in a slightly colder climate, one that can survive for a few more days without food from a kill, may take his family into a zone with fewer wildebeest.  Thus ordinarily heritable physical change occurs first, fueled by variation.  This allows the animal to radiate into different environments and to make a living there. The raw material of physical differences that allows variation and species radiation into different environments is genetic variation which is increased by gene mixing from sexual reproduction, the origin of sex in animals, or at least this is part of the accepted explanation.    Human adaptation is different.  Men are able to live in virtually all habits because of invention that is an endowment of the brain, his intellect.  He changes his clothes rather than fur. He can get rid of his own hair if he wishes.

 

     Beyond the adaptation of invention is imagination and our vision into outer space.  Sooner or later we will radiate into our line of sight, to the moon or to Mars and inhabit other worlds.  This will be the biggest biological event since the Devonian period, some 300 million years ago in which the Crossopterigian fish# grew fins resembling feet and developed air breathing lungs so that they could survive for the first time out of the water. Only rarely in evolution have living things made adaptations of such magnitude taking animals life from the sea to mud to dry land which was becoming abundant at that time. We will experience a similar revolution in our conquest of gravity that confines us to our earthly habitat. Even today man is the only species with a worldwide habitat.  But the day will surely come for us to transport our food and our atmosphere or find a way to create a habitable place in distant regions of our solar system and there is nothing to stop us from radiating into the seas which were home to our progenitors. 

 

     We only rarely remark about the miraculous extent our vision and how it outstrips  biological capacities.  The whole notion has sort of crept up on us over the centuries, but this vision widens every day.  During the short period of our growth in vision and radiation into wider and wider habitats our biology has remained remarkably stagnant.  And without it’s changing any more our minds, not alteration in any physical characteristic, has launched us into incredibly variable habitats far wider than any other individual type of organism has been able to adapt to.   The brain is what initiates continued growth and the success or our species.

 

MORE THAN THE EYE CAN SEE:

     Not too many people are aware how our gaze has increased only very recently.   It is true on some levels things have changed for the worse.  Few of us go out into the dark night anymore to apprehend the wonders of the heavens.   If we do, ubiquitous incandescent lights light adapt our eyes since all of us spend most of our time indoors.  When we do get out, most of us live in populated cities with abundant light and industrial pollution that obscures all but the brightest first magnitude stars.  For most of us only very rarely, if ever, do we view the true splendor of the night sky, a lot people never do.   Our ancestors, by contrast, had long hours almost every night to marvel the sky and to watch it, noting the changing vista over seasons and the wandering planets and cycles of the moon.  Primitive men constructed legendary models of this motion of which only few survive such as Stonehenge and Chichenitzta which seem wondrous to us but are actually not so surprising considering how closely men and women were tied to the sky.  Monuments and written works have taught us that humans even our  “primitive” and prehistoric ancestors looked up at the sky at night and wondered about the repetition of the seasons, movements of the planets to speculate about forces larger than themselves. Yet until 70 or so years ago, no one knew how vast the universe really is# .  In 1923 Edwin Hubble utilizing the 2.54 meter telescope high on Mt. Wilson was able to pick out individual stars of our neighboring Andromeda galaxy, now estimated to be 2.2 million light-years away.  Before then Andromeda was only another smudge, a spiral shaped nebula.  But this relatively recent discovery had all kinds of implications of cosmic proportions.  It meant that Andromeda was an entire galaxy of stars similar to our own Milky Way, containing tens of billions of stars.  Many of these stars undoubtedly have planetary systems of their own much like our sun, too small and dark to be seen with our earth-bound telescopes. The greatest likelihood is that some of these planets are home to intelligent life forms.  More strikingly, we now know there are hundreds of billions of even more far-flung galaxies each containing billions of stars.  Current reckonings indicate that there is an almost infinite number of unseen and unseeable galaxies beyond our visual horizon.  These galaxies are simply too far away for their radiant energy in the form of visible or non-visible electromagnetic waves, to reach the earth within the timeframe of the age of the cosmos.#   It’s also hard to fathom that only since 1838 has man had an idea how far were even the nearest stars.  In that year Bessel was able to estimate the distance of a close star within the Milky way, 61 Cigni, at about 11 light years. He did so utilizing parallax a method of triangulation used by surveyors, only in this case the bottom of a right triangle is the distance from the earth to the sun, 93 million miles.  The very closest stars, alpha and Proxima centauri among them, about 4 million light years away, may be estimated from this method of triangulation.  The size of the earth can be estimated by this method utilizing the sun as a fixed distant point that it is on earth scales keeping time and season constant.  On that basis one can figure how much the sun angle changes when one walks a known very far distance and so figure the curvature of the earth.  The earth’s distance to the sun may be calculated on geometric principles as soon as the earth’s diameter is known but this was accomplished only in the 1672 by Cassini, relatively recently in modern history.   So distances can be estimated from triangulation by a certain bootstrap method. But for most stars that are much more distant and for galaxies, this method fails because on astronomical scales the distance from earth to the sun is extremely insignificant. The distance from earth to other stars in our galaxy may be obtained from an estimate of their absolute brightness and then calculated from their apparent brightness from earth.  Distances of galaxies may be figured from their velocity of recession calculated by a Doppler red shift.  Utilizing simple formulas astronomers take advantage of a train whistle phenomenon.  As the train travels away, the pitch of the whistle appears lower and the speed of the train can be calculated from the drop in pitch.  In the same way, the speed of recession of a star can be gotten from a red shift in its color.    We now have a universe of star containing galaxies.  We know that these galaxies have been flying away from each other ever since the origin of this universe some 15 billion years ago in the Big Bang.  Our line of sight has expanded more than exponentially since the first yeas or our momentous century, and we have an idea that there may be many more galaxies of stars than we will ever be capable of seeing the visible horizon. . 

 

[ix]

Figure 31:Andromeda: The discovery of Andromeda as a galaxy was so momentous since it greatly expanded our notion of the scale of the universe.  Two large spots are other galaxies.

 

“Do you sense a creator, World?

Seek him beyond the canopy of the Stars!

beyond the canopy of the stars, he must live...”

-Schiller and Beetoven, “Ode to Joy”,  Ninth Symphony

 

 

Who is the God of such an enormous universe?  The concept of a God who split the Red Sea, hovered over the tabernacle protectingly, who would send his only son to a small insignificant planet, such a limited God is as anachronistic for us as idolatry was for Abraham 4000 years ago.  A lot of people maintain that science is irrelevant for religion. Science, knowledge, must fundamentally alter our point of view. Otherwise we are like some pig-headed person who refuses to be swayed by the facts.  Here is just one example.

 

     Given our new appreciation of the vastness of space and time how do we see God?

In the biblical account of the Golden Calf Moses is absent for a while receiving the Law and Aaron is left in charge.  The people, feeling insecure, and unready to accept completely an abstract immaterial God, pool all their resources, throw in all their gold, to create the Golden Calf, a rather generic material deity.  Moses returns, shocked at the events, smashes the tablets of the Law, and not surprisingly, the idolaters are eliminated.  In a fascinating direct encounter, the Deity argues directly with the mere mortal, Moses.  He wishes to annihilate every one of this “stiff-necked people”.  But Moses pleads for the Israelites.  How would it look, Moses asks, to the Egyptians who have only just been taught a lesson, and to posterity if the very  people whom God had protected had been destroyed?  It wouldn’t seem that God was very powerful at all,  and by implication, people should think of worshipping other Gods, who might bring them better fortune.  So goes the logic of religion of that ancient time.  And besides, Moses offers to erase his own name from Holy books. As a mere human person cannot be expected to prevail upon God and alter God’s opinion, it is not reasonable to accept here that Moses’ arguments actually prevailed against God’s.  We have to accept this story as more of a commentary about Moses’ inestimable character as the greatest prophet.   In fact, God ups the ante,  offering to make Moses the father of a totally new people, quite possibly testing Moses’ resolve at this point.   But Moses will have none of it.  No, when we read this account today, we have no choice but to accept all that happens including the Golden Calf and the destruction of the first set of commandments as being part of a grand pre-ordained design which Moses, even in his greatness, does not alter, yet the story is testimony to the greatness of Moses as well as God..   We also see that at that critical time, with Moses away in the desert, the people need to have a deity, especially at that time some kind of a solid material entity.  The people were not entirely ready to accept a spiritual essence,  choosing in stead to have something tangible, a God that could be seen, a God closer to that of the Egyptians and other surrounding peoples.

 

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Figure 32: Michaelangelo's Moses:  On his second descent from Sinai, Moses is transformed with miraculous beams of light.

 

     Then a most disturbing thing occurs. Quite in the middle of all this betrayal, anger, retribution, noting that he is still favored, Moses asks to look upon God’s essence himself.  Moses requests to look upon God!  Hannah Arendt makes the interesting point that according to tradition God is heard and not seen[xi]. This is no accident. Firstly the visual sense is a lot more precise than hearing.  Auditory cortex is much closer to the emotion laden areas of the brain, the limbic system deep to the temporal lobe,  than visual areas.  As a rule visual information is more analytical, hearing more emotional and mystical, hallucinatory experiences far more often are auditory rather than visual, all perfectly fitting for religious experience.   Moses wants reassurance that God’s essence will still be with his people but Moses was asking for even more a greater degree of perception than anyone had ever achieved as he says, “Show me now your Glory.”  Incredibly God acquiesces, but Moses must be shielded from seeing the face or front of God.  To protect him from the awful vision God puts him in a cleft in a rock, Moses’ eyes shielded by God, lest he die.  The material calf God is here contrasted with the infinite mysterious spirit God of Abraham.  Moses, his greatest prophet, will see only the back or perceive God passing, not the Divine Countenance. Even more remarkably, Moses  himself is transformed by this vision so that his own appearance is frightening.  His skin of his face became radiant, his hair wizened.  People feared to approach Moses so much that he had to wear a mask on his face with horns or more rightly beams of light.  Moses had been powerfully transformed by his vision.

 

     Ancient biblical descriptions seem to be divided between God’s immanence and His Greatness.  Some would use this as evidence of multiple authors throughout Jewish history.  Others would be content to point to both qualities.  It’s a little like complementary but contradictory descriptions of particles and waves in physics.  God vied with Egyptian deities as a sort of national God and protector, hovered over the tabernacle, and yet was a sort of huge, ferocious and terrible being unknowable even to the greatest of the prophets.  The Bible blends percepts, immanence and transcendence, and appeals to primitive as well as advanced ideas, ancient and modern about what God is. 

 

     In our own time our vision of God has to be influenced by new discoveries.  It is not true that science does not as some argue, influence religion or as others would have it, that science obliterates religion. The God of our Twenty-First Century universe, even if He exists only in the minds of some people, needs to be unprecedentedly more vast and abstract than previous conceptions, more intangible. Science, knowledge, has direct bearing on modern concepts of God.  Science is a tool for the apprehension of The Deity.

 

     Copernicus and Galileo may have expelled us from the center of our cosmos. In those days our field of view was only a tiny fraction of what it is today. In our own Century we have discovered ourselves to be at the center of something infinitely more vast.  As we gaze out to the stars and galaxies what we see looking in any one direction is what exists in any other, the universe is homogeneous and to us symmetrical.  When we look to the left we see about as many galaxies flying away at about the same speed as when we look to the right.  And the background radiation from the original Big Bang explosion is everywhere the same, no matter in which direction we turn our antenna to pick this radiation up. Our gaze into the very large is supplemented by our appreciation of the infinitely small, both realms limitless. We can see now a great deal farther into billions of years of time that come before us and which will be here after we are gone.  The thing is we’re again right in the center again of a maelstrom, vaster than ever imagined 100 years ago. Where are we in this vast sea?  We can construct Cartesian axes of space and time and put our physical spatial dimensions on this graph and the length of a human life in time.  Compared with the largeness and smallness of everything else our extent in space-time is but a dot.  What about our line of sight?  What we can see and apprehend that is a great deal for some of us more extensive.  This graph gives us a new notion of life and death.  Where we begin and end in time, physically, is insignificant as you begin to appreciate that it matters little about the length of time we are on the earth just as our physical size is insignificant.  What really matters is how far we can see what we apprehend in our short life.  Who can peer into the ends of the cosmos past the realms of life and death?  Who will know that come before and what will be in the hereafter?  Vision.

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